Film – Page 10 – Rock Salted

Children of Men

Children of Men (2006)

Universal Pictures

Main Cast: Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julianne Moore, Pam Ferris

An adaptation of the P.D. James novel The Children of Men (1992), deals with a dystopian near future period in which humans as a species have become infertile. The film makes heavy use of symbolism, metaphor, and incorporates references to broadly contemporary political situations. Theo (Clive Owen), an unassuming nobody, is pulled into a conflict by a “terrorist” group “The Fishes”, who are fighting against a fascistic government in England. The youngest person in the world has just died. But Theo’s former wife/girlfriend Julian (Julianne Moore), who is a leader of sorts in The Fishes, has come to the know Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), the first woman to become pregnant in 18 years. The goal is to get Kee (like “Key”, get it?) and her child to “The Human Project,” a mysterious group supposedly starting a remote colony away from fascistic England. Theo is a broke hack, grudgingly helping the “terrorists” in exchange for payment. But as he interacts with these terrorists, he is revealed as an apostate activist, tormented by the death of his child years ago, who can’t help but to do the right thing no matter what danger that puts him in.

In an sort of thematic archtype, The Fishes betray their revolutionary intent to internal power struggles of the individuals involved. Theo and Kee, plus a midwife (Pam Ferris), narrowly escape The Fishes with the assistance of Theo’s elderly hippie friend Jasper (Michael Caine). The plan is to rendezvous with The Human Project on their hospital boat via a refugee camp — what looks like a concentration camp for all intents and purposes. Entering the refugee camp, full of “fugees”, the film depicts immanently contemporary horrors, with hooded prisoners subjected to torture, humiliation and execution. The scenes recall Abu Ghraib. On the way there, scenery of belching pollution coming out of drain pipes and foul gasses emanating from smokestacks implies total environmental collapse as a possible cause for the infertility problem. Inside the camp, Kee has her baby — will she name it Frolle or Bazooka? — and an insurrection breaks out between The Fishes and government troops. Brutally realistic scenes of urban combat follow. Theo and Kee try to reach a rowboat hidden in the camp. They have the assistance of a surprisingly benevolent ersatz hotel operator who doesn’t speak their language.

No doubt, the film has leftist leanings. The struggle for power in “civil society” creates conflict, while in the primitive setting of the refugee camp, there are benevolent humans. This could almost come from something Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote during the Enlightenment. But the quest to reach The Human Project seems like a step towards something else, something not quite of the Enlightenment. Going to a colony somewhere out in the sea seems like a rootless new beginning. The centrality of “fugees” — Kee is one — seems like a rejection of “identity politics” and an assertion that the future–the Human Project’s boat is called “Tomorrow” — must reject a retrenchment of uniformity, exemplified by the fascist English government’s use of concentration camps, and float about on something much looser, something that permits radically disparate elements to coexist. The common denominators are care for others, generosity, self-sacrifice. The film is a curiously uplifting message in a world that seems hopelessly and intractably locked into a downward spiral. What superficially seems like a dumb sci-fi thriller is actually quite an excellent movie, made all the better by uniformly superb acting and the highest technical proficiency. Hollywood is capable of something good now and again.

Green Zone

Green Zone (2010)

Universal Pictures

Director: Paul Greengrass

Main Cast: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear

Some movies about the Unites States’ second war against former ally Iraq focus exclusively on the bravery, hardships, misfortunes, valor, and other personal experiences of the soldiers. Examples are The Hurt Locker (2008) and Stop-Loss (2008). These sorts of films make no attempt whatsoever to contextualize the war. In The Hurt Locker, the main characters diffuse improvised explosive devices throughout the entire movie. Why are those bombs being made and planted in the first place? The movie doesn’t even entertain that question.

Green Zone falls into another category of films that try to explain what the war was about. Another example in this category is Redacted (2007). Green Zone is loosely inspired by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (2006), which provided an account of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that the U.S. government installed in a heavily fortified city-within-a-city in Baghdad during the war (until June 2004, when the Green Zone was handed over to the U.S. State Department). The script for Green Zone, however, is fictional. Paul Bremer, the incompetent neo-con and Henry Kissinger protégé in charge of the CPA (after Lieutenant General Jay Garner was abruptly fired) is fictionalized as Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear). Chief Warrant Office Roy Miller (Matt Damon) is an outrageously superhero-like soldier who seeks the truth about the war, when his missions to secure materials for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) turn up nothing and he suspects bad intelligence.

The plot is far-fetched, and the timeline historically inaccurate. Still, the movie has somewhat decent intentions. Drawing from Chandrasekaran’s book are the major points that Bremer & Co.’s decisions to implement #1 De-Ba’athification (removal of all government officials from Saddam Hussein’s socialist party) and #2 dissolution of the Iraqi Army were monumentally bad decisions, and the idea that the folks in the Green Zone calling the shots lived in a bubble divorced entirely from the facts on the ground outside the well-protected green zone perimeter. Even in 2014, a decade later, Bremer continues to defend what he did, going so far as to call dissolution of the Iraqi army the best decision he made with the CPA (Losing Iraq). The movie positions the CIA agent Martin “Marty” Brown (Brendan Gleeson) as a counterpoint figure. There, the script admirably tries to portray the U.S. government not as a monolithic entity, but subject to competing factions within it, complete with individuals vying for personal advancement and inter-agency turf battles. There are also heavy-handed attempts to provide an Iraqi perspective, mostly by way of a former Iraqi soldier nicknamed “Freddy” (Khalid Abdalla). But in spite of those attempts, the plot lurches from one action movie cliché to the next.

Director Paul Greengrass also directed Damon in two Bourne movies, and there are a few too many parallels here for comfort. There are extended chase scenes filmed with shaky portable cameras and Damon’s character always seems to be a step ahead in ways that strain credibility. Also, Kinnear has a lackey in the army who unflinchingly carries out orders, even when those include taking out fellow U.S. soldiers. That is possible, but these soldiers are portrayed as one-dimensional robots, as if Damon’s character is the only soldier in the army with a conscience. These features create plot situations that clearly lack authenticity. The tone is frequently of Damon’s character as a truth-machine, pitted against a monster in Kinnear. This is a little too simple. Chandrasekaran portrayed the CPA as a corrupt organization that placed loyalty to George W. Bush and his GOP party above actual qualifications or good decision-making. The later book by Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well (2011), which focused on the U.S. State Department’s bungled, ridiculous efforts at “reconstruction” of Iraq in 2009-10, demonstrates how that same mindset also took hold in the State Department. It wasn’t a “few bad apples”, it was a spectacle of an immensely and widely corrupt U.S. government trying to “liberate” Iraq from its corrupt government that hardly seemed any different!

This film deserves credit for trying to imbue a Hollywood movie with a realistic perspective of what happened to cause the Iraq war to proceed as it did. But it also deserves derision for being contrived and implausible, a failure of technique and writing mostly, which directly undermines all attempts to paint an accurate picture of the war.

Two Biographies of Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema’s Theoretical Analyst

Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux 2004)

Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books 2008)

Two biographers have written substantial books on filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Despite a common focus on the same biographical subject, and a shared belief that Godard is one of the most important filmmakers of his time or maybe ever, the two writers take markedly different approaches with equally different levels of success.

Godard, of course, was a Swiss-French filmmaker who transitioned from a circle of post World War II cinephiles to a leading director in the French nouvelle vague [new wave] movement in the late 1950s. His cinematic style was revolutionary. His ideas about the nature of cinema were inscribed into his works. He broke all the rules of cinema, from editing to framing, in a kind of ongoing scientific analysis of the form itself that restated classic cinema with streaks of modernism. Like many of his nouvelle vague compatriots he worked largely with low budgets, to preserve a degree of artistic freedom from producers. He shot mostly on location and with scripts often devised during shooting. After a series of critically lauded films through the mid-1960s, many starring his first wife Anna Karina and filmed by cameraman Raoul Coutard, Godard entered a militant period in which he rejected commercial cinema. He made collaborative films with French Maoists, then turned to television and video projects in the mid 1970s. He “returned” to commercial film in the late 1970s, and has remained a critically lauded outsider as he became an octogenarian. His audiences had dwindled. Yet he continued to provoke and expand the possibilities of his chosen medium with new projects. Among his notable later works was a massive and sui generis video project on the history of cinema and the history of the 20th Century released in the late 1990s. An irascible and sometimes misunderstood person, the recent biographies offer impossibly different accounts of the man behind the films. Only one ultimately proves reliable though.

MacCabe brings a comprehensive classical education to bear on Godard’s work. He places Godard in a deep fabric of artistic and political endeavors stretching back centuries. Most fundamentally he provides an explicit analysis of the ideologies Godard adopted in his work, and relates them to his influences and the times and places in which he lived. Personal details are provided only to an extent minimally necessary for an understanding of Godard’s attitudes and ideals. Though perhaps a few possibly unflattering details are omitted. MacCabe also proves an eloquent writer. Take his statement on the motivations of directors like the young Godard:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that the history of the cinema is the history of a plot by shy unprepossessing and sex-obsessed men to surround themselves with heartrendingly beautiful women.” (p. 123)

MacCabe elucidates the way Godard the film critic established the framework of his cinematic vision, one that is fundamentally an analysis of the nature of cinema. He highlights Godard’s writing while at the journal Cahiers du Cinema that, in hindsight, posits the truth of Godard’s personality (TiNe) and worldview (gauchiste). Discussing one such article, MacCabe probe’s Godard’s conception of cinema in relation to reality:

“What Godard emphasizes — a point that [André] Bazin makes in his almost exactly contemporaneous article on Stalin — is that the cinema is not just a representation of reality, but becomes part of the reality itself.” (p. 72)

This point tends to attract people like Godard. It is a restatement of a point elaborated at length by Alfred Korzybski, who formulated the issue thusly:

“The map is not the territory; the map doesn’t cover all of the territory; and the map is self-reflexive (it becomes part of the territory).” Science and Sanity (1933)

Portions of the book on Godard’s formative experiences establishing new grounds for film criticism with staff of the journal Cahiers du Cinema and his engagement with Henri Langlois’s famous contextual juxtapositions through screenings by the film archive Cinémathèque Française simply crackle with energy. One feels Godard’s excitement. But this reveals also the concepts that his cohorts imparted to him and his work. Crucial is a new view of authorship in cinema, which separated Godard not only from other filmmakers and critics but also made a unique contribution by cinema to the arts as a whole. In it, the audience’s perspective steps forward.

“One locates one’s author not by ignoring the specificity of his artistic medium, but by emphasizing it. . . . Cahiers’s author theory is the only theory of the author which is formulated from the point of view of the audience, and indeed explicitly formulated as a method to move from the position of the audience to that of the artist.” (p. 75)

This concept returns later in the book, transitioning to the legal and political sphere where audience rights are not recognized.

“Godard precisely understands copyright as a crucial artistic and political issue. Most legal discussions turn around differences between the French and the Anglo-Saxon systems, with the French being held to favour the author, while the Anglo-Saxon favours the owner of the copyright. What differences there are pale into insignificance beside the fact that neither system allows the audience any rights whatsoever.” (p. 301)

Brody, writing with MacCabe’s book already published, focuses on factual detail. While Brody did interview Godard (* read on), most of the contents of Everything Is Cinema come from archival research and a few new interviews, mostly of those who lived and worked around Godard. His book therefore functions most effectively in cataloging existing materials on Godard, organized chronologically around Godard’s various professional projects. There are chapters addressing each of Godard’s films. Readers can locate relevant sections in relation to particular works, as they are viewed, and review the citations to find relevant materials. This is quite unlike MacCabe’s approach, which unabashedly favors certain films with longer, more in-depth treatments, and mentions others only in passing. Footnotes are minimal. Another thing that Brody does is draw out (and embellish?) the more lurid details of Godard’s personal life, which MacCabe largely passes over. There is something of a prudish tabloid quality to Brody’s treatment that MacCabe explicitly tried to avoid. And Brody’s tone is like much other writing in The New Yorker magazine (where he is a film critic and editor), burdened with the same arrogant, self-satisfied, self-important conservatism masquerading as mildly left-of-center liberalism that is taken entirely for granted.

Brody’s presentation tries to extrapolate the larger meaning of Godard’s work from very selective factual detail of Godard’s private life. In this way, Brody attempts to remove Godard’s own perspective from the analysis of Godard’s work. MacCabe, in complete contrast, tends to see Godard’s private life as offering little directly useful information about his professional work (with a few notable exceptions for his pre-professional youth, at a high level, and certain later incidents where his public and private life merge), and instead directly engages the public side of Godard’s work on its own. To the extent that Brody draws conclusions, he draws them from the catalogued facts as filtered through his own ideological position. He seems to make his case by drawing a conclusion first, picking only the facts that support that conclusion, and then drawing a “connection” from that subset of facts to the predetermined conclusions. The reasons he draws his initial conclusions are not probed in any meaningful way. Brody’s approach is overarchingly to try to associate Godard with disfavored groups. Critic Adrian Martin wrote that Brody seems to have an axe to grind, and his research focuses only on supporting certain accusations (namely, alleged anti-semitism and misogyny) but not testing them against potentially contradictory facts (or recognizing a lack of factual support). This is the central basis for the (many) claims by critics that Brody tries to smear Godard.

On the substantive analysis of Godard’s work, many have complained that Brody overextends himself in viewing all of Godard’s work as an expression of autobiographical fiction. A damning review by Bill Crohn dismisses Brody’s biography as “cultural journalism”, and cites a New York Times letter to the editor that castigates Brody’s “ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism”. Crohn also details a host of factual errors and blatant factual distortions, along the lines of Martin’s critique. But the complaint about reductionism is at the heart of the matter. Brody returns endlessly to his thesis that Godard’s films should be viewed as strictly autobiographical:

“King Lear gathers in one film all of Godard’s preoccupations from this period, and does so in an extremely original, albeit elusive, form. It . . . was centered on Godard’s self-mythologizing in and through cinema and his recuperation and redefinition of the grand tradition of art by way of the cinema. As such, King Lear is something of a personal manifesto . . . .” (p. 491-92)

This very much recalls the work of lesser biographers, like Terry Teachout with Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (2009), which can be viewed as writing a biography as a book-length argument that jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s anachronistic later recordings like “Hello, Dolly!” are important, or Joseph Dofman’s Thorstein Veblen and His America (1934), which has been, somewhat belatedly, criticized for projecting the biographer’s own insecurities onto his biographical subject by extrapolating from dubiously selected facts from Veblen’s private personal life. No one will doubt that there is an autobiographical element to Godard’s work. Yet Brody’s one-dimensional, reductionist approach takes it as just about the only element that matters. It seems like an excuse to justify Brody’s own taste amongst Godard’s works — a bit like Teachout with Armstrong, he seems to want to build up a reason why his personal favorite works are “really” Godard at his best. Brody is entitled to his opinions, but opinions are like assholes, everyone has one. Brody’s views fizzle on their own. Alongside other views, the self-interested moralizing of Everything Is Cinema becomes much more clear. The claims of anti-semitism are one such area. Brody seems to have a difficult time separating anti-zionism (which is not anti-semitic) from anti-semitism. This is Brody’s failing, not Godard’s (who has explicitly drawn this distinction). People with personalities like Godard love to mock those they consider intellectual inferiors by forcing them to read between the lines with veiled insults. To that end, when Brody visited Godard in Europe to interview him, Godard snubbed him, and sarcastically mocked his poor interviewing skills. Reviewer Bill Crohn went so far as to say that Brody’s mean-spirited and distorted bio may have been framed as revenge against Godard for that incident.

MacCabe instead tries to convey Godard’s ideological position, and to contextualize it, and through that filter restricts the raw volume of historical facts presented. There is never any feeling that more facts would alter MacCabe’s conclusions, because his perspective aligns with the basic course of Godard’s work and career. This is what is most strikingly different in Brody’s account as compared to MacCabe’s. Brody does not engage his own ideology explicitly. In his relentless provision of “facts”, usually relating to the private sphere of his subject, he rarely if ever explains the nature of his own frame of reference. In attempting to adopt a neutral and “objective” journalistic stance, he makes a play to impose his subjective position on the reader through an emphasis on lurid gossip of doubtful reliability. This does not sit well.

MacCabe is prone to sweeping statements to elaborate ideological positions, conflicts, and milestones, in cinema and other arts. For instance, his take on modernism as an element in Godard’s work and a factor that shapes the disposition of Godard and his place within the fabric of the artistic world, provides a unquestionably succinct summary:

“Modernism is most familiarly known as the turning of the focus on to the form and medium of art itself. *** The paradox of modernism is thus that it offers a totally democratic view of art — the determination to turn every aspect of both world and self into matter for art — in forms which require a level of attention and commitment which limits the audience to a mere handful.” (pp. 278-79).

But statements like these are explicit in MacCabe’s writing. And they dazzle and delight with their wit and cutting insight. He presents them in the context of ongoing debates. The reader can agree or disagree, complete with some sense of where to look for contrasting viewpoints.

MacCabe is direct in stating that he is an unabashed Godard partisan. He writes in the first person to explain his favorite films and to recount periodic interactions with Godard. He thinks Godard’s best works are Passion (1982), Le Mépris [Contempt] (1963) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998), with a sentimental attachment to Made in U.S.A. (1966). Brody states that he thinks Godard is among the best film directors, but clearly despises the man himself and spends most of his biography dredging up (if not fabricating outright) tabloid “dirt”. He favors King Lear (1987) (having identified it as the very best in his list of the ten greatest films ever, while MacCabe says it fails to integrate some excellent constituent parts) and Eloge de l’amour [In Praise of Love] (2001) (which he rates as the best film of its decade). Notice how MacCabe separates out his own views and sentimental attachments from an independent context of critical significance, while Brody posits that his personal views are what defines critical importance? This is why MacCabe’s writing is superior. In all, Brody’s book may serve as a useful chronological bibliography, but as an overview of Godard’s career it is unreliable and biased. MacCabe has offered a very impressive biography, one that captures Godard’s life and work as well as any might. Skip Brody’s tedious tome (I couldn’t even get through it cover to cover) and seek out MacCabe’s wonderful book. Of course, among other writing on Godard, another crucial reference remains the collection Godard on Godard (1985). Godard started as a film critic, and there is a tremendous amount of the filmmaker’s own writings available that shed much light on his manner of thinking and his cinematic work as such.

The Golden Age of Movie Musicals: The MGM Years

Various Artists – The Golden Age of Movie Musicals: The MGM Years MGM P6S 5878 (1973)

While showtunes and soundtrack music might not be things that I personally enjoy all that much, you can’t go wrong with this set if you want an introduction to those genres. I really respect what was done here. From a historical perspective this collection of recordings is amazing. It features some of the most well-known music of the 20th Century. People who wouldn’t consider themselves music listeners in the slightest probably still know the melody to “Over the Rainbow” and “Singin’ in the Rain”, or could recognize “Theme from ‘A Summer Place'”. The common denominator of this music is its simplicity. In terms of rhythm, nothing here is beyond a remedial level. The melodies are all straightforward and uncomplicated. The vocals often lack much subtlety, but instead focus on brute force vibrato. The instrumental film music on the final two “bonus” discs deals only in broad strokes, with lots of syrupy string arrangements and melodramatic surges. Despite the enormous popular recognition of this music, it would seem that already most of it is nothing more than an anachronism. The theatrical and vaudevillian aspects of this stuff — cartoonish, larger-than-life emoting that doesn’t leave any room for a reaction other than the one intended — isn’t all that common outside of Bollywood just a few decades on. It’s a wonder how tastes change so fast. I guess that Bollywood comment might make for an interesting comparison: is this music something that is borne out of socioeconomic conditions to fill a gap between the general public’s cultural sophistication and its more rapidly rising disposable income? At its worst, that is probably exactly what it does. But here we get some of the best and brightest moments, where there’s something more at work. “Over the Rainbow” and “Singin’ in the Rain” are so well known because they simply are great songs. And there are plenty more great songs here. There was also a book of the same name by Lawrence B. Thomas released just before this LP box set, which might be of interest. There are no liner notes to speak of with this set, so perhaps the book has more information about the music (I haven’t read it).

Zombies, Zombies, Zombies! And Those Who Deal With Them

For decades, “zombies” have preoccupied the makers of films, television shows, comics, and more. What does this genre have to offer? As we’ll see, there is some excellent filmmaking hidden in this genre, though many attempts to extend it are terrifyingly bad.

The earliest zombie films–White Zombie (1932), etc.–were basically typical monster movies, not terribly unlike Frankenstein (1931), or maybe thrillers–like I Walked With a Zombie (1943) that draws on myths of Hatian voodoo. Some of those movies are well regarded, but the “zombie” element was generally confined to a single character with some makeup that converted him into a monstrous “other” that the protagonist has to confront and cope with.

A book, I Am Legend (1954) by Robert Matheson, had a significant impact on the future use of zombies in film. As of this writing, three film adaptations have been made: The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007) starring Will Smith. While the book and the first movie adaptation relied on vampires rather than zombies, the story structure of having a revolutionary actor (searching for a cure) within an apocalypse of monsters would influence an unknown, independent filmmaker named George A. Romero to run with the idea in a slightly different direction. The latter two film version tended more toward the use of “zombies” than “vampires”, to some degree at least. Omega Man is probably the one to watch among them.

This idea of substituting zombies for vampires even shows up in the spirits industry, with the brewery Clown Shoes changing the name of its American Imperial Stout beer from “Vampire Slayer” to “Undead Party Crasher” after a patent and trademark attorney who co-owned a competing business distributing an imported “Vampire Pale Ale” brought a trademark infringement lawsuit. The new label for the Clown Shoes brew asks if we need the undead and trademark attorneys too. A werewolf-looking trademark attorney is having a stake driven through his heart in a cartoon in the background.

Let’s get back to cinema though. The identifiable genre of zombie films–that of the “zombie apocalypse” movie if you will–came into being with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Romero established himself as the undisputed master to the genre. He made B-movies like director Samuel Fuller or even John Cassavetes, making due with smaller budgets, unadorned camera and editing technique, and minimal technical features like special effects, but packing quite a punch in terms of substantive content. He delivered “soft” science fiction, in which the suspension of disbelief in re-animated corpses is a tool to explore human relations and the human condition. But unlike sci-fi films that may have explored similar human issues, zombies presented a rather simple premise that required only a minimal (if central) suspension of disbelief. There may be zombies, but all else is “normal” in the world. Romero’s films laid out the basic elements of most zombie films to follow: the “undead” (ghouls) coming back to life for unexplained reasons, slow and staggering movement, the need to destroy the head to incapacitate them, herds or swarms of them moving together, and a taste for human flesh. Where the early “monster movie” zombie pictures tended to deal with a main character’s terror of the unknown, or perhaps to suggest that monsters may just want to be like “us”, Romero flipped the relationship and suggested instead that maybe “we” are like zombies. Night of the Living Dead had an existential edge like Sartre’s play No Exit (1944), with its famous assertion that “hell is – other people.” In all of Romero’s later zombie films, though, existentialism was replaced or augmented by questions of consumerism, class consciousness, political (in)equality, and similar social commentary.

Night of the Living Dead established the frequent zombie moving setting of a sudden onset of people turning into zombies, and a group barricading themselves into a house to survive. The threat of zombies infecting others in amass outbreak explains itself easily, lending an air of credibility to an otherwise incredible plot device. Like almost all of Romero’s zombie films, the actors are basically unknown to screen audiences. He also casts the lead as an African-American, at a time when Hollywood did not do so. Most characteristic is that Romero portrays U.S.-Soviet Cold War militarism and social authority as the “real monster”. This placed Romero among the 1960s counterculture, and vaguely attached him to the so-called New Left. Though he remained an independent force, both literally in the sense of existing outside the Hollywood system, but also symbolically int he ideas presented on film.

There were many subsequent films Romero made in the same milieu as the original Night of the Living Dead. The first was Dawn of the Dead (1978). To many, and despite rather poor acting, Dawn is the greatest of Romero’s zombie films. Rather than retreating to an isolated home, in this instalment the main characters barricade themselves inside a large shopping mall. The film addresses a legitimate question of realism: what if the government or other people cannot (or simply do not) suppress the rise of the zombies? What happens over a longer time period? Of course, people need food and other supplies. A shopping mall as a mecca of consumerism in the late 1970s is a metanym of consumer culture of the day. Romero’s biggest achievement is to show the zombies taking on “human” qualities, like trying to go to the mall and mindlessly “shop”. Unlike the early zombie films, this did not posit that zombies wanted to be like us but that consumerism has become so ingrained in Western culture that not even death and reanimation as zombies diminishes those impulses. In the 2013 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes the 2011 riots in Great Britain in terms of the inability of the rioters to transcend the predominant ideology of their society, and therefore they act out within that paradigm. Romero’s mall-bound zombies are a very cynical illustration of the same point. What also becomes a trend here is the question of collective action. The onslaught of zombies seems to force the survivors to work together, overcoming whatever objections they have to doing so. In that, a subtle point is made. Working together is more effective that working alone (or against each other). The question is how this can be achieved, and maintained. King Vidor had already made Our Daily Bread (1934), about people founding a collective subsistence farm during the Great Depression, but a zombie apocalypse provides the basis to illustrate the concept more obliquely.

Day of the Dead (1985) seemed, for at time at least, to be Romero’s conclusion of a zombie trilogy. Compared to the first two films, it balances somewhat more refined and modern film technique with more nuanced social commentary. In this version the zombie apocalypse is well underway. A band of survivors holds up in a military installation whilst a resident scientist conducts research on zombies that are (with great effort and risk to humans handling them) corralled into a pen prior to the experiments. The film’s greatest strength lies in the characters. The conflict between the humans and the zombies is merely the setting to explore the tensions between the humans, with class and almost tribal characteristics dividing many of them. Soldiers resent the educated scientist’s pursuits. The civilians and pilots fear the raw aggression and violence of the soldiers. Men despise powerful women. Those in a hierarchy abhor democracy. Another key plot point must be mentioned: Bub. The scientist at the military facility is experimenting to see if the zombies can be controlled and peaceably integrated into human society. Bub (Sherman Howard) is his most promising zombie research subject. While many deride the Bub character (as something like a precursor to Jar Jar Binks of the Star Wars franchise), he represents something completely new for the genre. This is Romero’s lionization of attempts to normalize the most monstrous. It encapsulates the utopian heart of his films. Bub symbolizes a hope and belief that social transformations are possible. He presents an ideology that comes from the zombies. But there is another strikingly radical aspect to Bub as well. He also represents, just oh so slightly, a kind of core goodness of the ordinary man. While most human survivors (especially the soldiers) want the zombies exterminated, Bub is a test case for overcoming the urge to destroy what is different. The interpersonal relations of the characters who are trying in varying degrees to come to terms with these ideas is the axis on which the film turns. Bub may not be a particularly subtle device, but the reactions of the humans around him certainly are. For these reasons, Day of the Dead may be Romero’s very best.

After a two decade hiatus, Romero came back with three more zombie films: Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). All three exhibit more self-awareness of their place in the pantheon of zombie films and use humor more liberally than the earlier Romero efforts. They also update the context by many years, in that like all of Romero’s zombie films they have a contemporary setting.

Diary of the Dead revolves around a group of college students trying to escape and survive from the time that the zombie apocalypse just begins. One of them is an aspiring filmmaker, and he is making a documentary “Diary of the Dead” to document the apocalypse to counter the false information spread by the mass media, who, on the zombie question, are trying to conceal the nature, extent and origins of the zombie outbreak. Diary‘s use of first person camera and the importance it places on alternative media are somewhat forced. The script never convincingly explains how Internet distribution of a guerrilla documentary film would really work, given that it depends on enough of humanity surviving to maintain not just internet communication lines but also electricity. The use of first person camera to draw in viewers and elicit sympathetic reactions can at times feel like a con job. Frankly, The Blair Witch Project (1999) beat Romero to the idea, which is better suited to zombies as mysterious monsters lurking in the shadows, used for fright (like an old Jacques Tourneur film) but nothing more.

Survival of the Dead picks up from a minor plot point in Diary in which a small band of soldiers rob the students. The film revolves around the questions of allegiances and trust, and the interactions not just of individuals but between small groups. The soldiers from Diary seemed like self-interested rogues in that earlier film, but in the latter are redeemed as altruistic and simply in search of survival. They eventually encounter bands of other survivors engaged in the vestiges of a kind of family feud on an island. People who seem trustworthy turn out to be con artists, and others show compassion when it counts. Intended, perhaps, as the most humane of the Romero films, the sometimes low-rent acting, not to mention the less-developed script, doesn’t always allow the surprise twists in the behavior of the characters to seem convincing. Survival seems like the least original of all of Romero’s zombie films because the major themes and interactions between characters are fairly familiar ones. No new perspectives are really made possible by their use in a zombie film. You can find much of this stuff in plenty of old westerns, for instance, and the westerns are better.

This leaves us with Land of the Dead. It is the only of Romero’s zombie films to feature A-list Hollywood actors (Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo, Simon Baker, Asia Argento, and even Simon Pegg in a cameo). Of the “comeback” Romero films, this is easily the best. The zombie apocalypse has been underway for some extended period of time when the film opens. A group of people use a train-like armored vehicle called “Dead Reckoning” to go out into zombie-infested areas and collect supplies for a gated island city where humans have gathered. The city was a luxury condo/apartment highrise complex, and Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) is a man who has set himself up as the sort of CEO dictator of the facility. He provides amenities such that the rich who live in the highrise maintain their posh standard of living as if there was no zombie apocalypse outside. The rest of the residents of the island are either servants for Kaufman’s city-state empire, or are confined to make due in a ghetto on the streets of the island outside the main building. The main characters have varying degrees of awareness–for some, there are awakenings that play out onscreen–of what Kaufman is up to and the cruel mechanisms he employs to maintain the very divided and unequal society on the island. Many of the main characters take personal risks in order to act with altruism. And there is constant talk of how to topple Kaufman’s empire to foster equality and fairness, balanced against concern for the collateral effects that a revolution presents. In a sort of echo of the Bub character from Day of the Dead, Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is a zombie who somehow intuitively knows how to use the remnants of human society for his own purposes. He does not need a scientists to teach him how to do these things. He appears initially at a gas station, and clumsily finds a way to use the gas pumps. He teaches other zombies, in a way, how to use other tools from the human world. As the movie progresses, Big Daddy seems to be on a mission to avenge wrongs committed by the humans against zombies. Much like Yertle, the turtle on the bottom of a king turtle’s tower built of his own turtle subjects in the Dr. Seuss story “Yertle the Turtle” (1958), who says, “we too should have rights,” Big Daddy seems to be presenting the question of whether zombies have rights too. One of the main human characters ceases fire around Big Daddy, as if to entertain the notion. The class warfare and inequality of the island city give Land of the Dead much of the same spirit as the earlier Romero movies, even if it also makes overtures to more conventionally polished Hollywood filmmaking technique. It has the hallmarks of the early Romero zombie classics, and almost like the Nineteenth Century French novelist Balzac, it uses the genre to paint a picture of human society through an assortment of specific interactions of individuals. The zombies merely provide a shock to the social structure, and empower (or force) the characters to make their own moral decisions in a relative vacuum of social ritual. Do they recreate what was before or try something else? Rather than expounding pure theory, Romero provides little set pieces for the characters to make discrete choices. What makes Romero so unique is that he uses zombie films to show character interactions that place radical options on the table–the sorts of options that are normally omitted through all sorts of ploys like concision, viability, naivety, and the like. An interesting issue not really addressed by the film is why so many of the characters seem so interested in U.S. currency. Would people really still honor it? That’s probably a question for the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory. Anyway, the only quibble with the film is that Simon Baker seems miscast in the lead role. He’s a bit too affable.

What about zombie movies outside the Romero universe? There have been many. Some are actually comedies. Return of the Living Dead (1985) (and its many sequels) fit the description as comedies. These films popularized the now-ubiquitous concept of zombies eating people’s brains, not just other parts of them. And because they were made with assistance from John A. Russo (the co-writer of Night of the Living Dead), they follow much of the basic Romero template for zombie behavior. Another comedic portrayal of the standard zombie apocalypse theme was Zombieland (2009). Unlike most zombie films, this was a big-budget Hollywood film. It manages to have some good gags, while trying hard to appeal to a sort of cynical nerd audience, though also dragging in a romantic subplot that could be borrowed from almost any other genre (which should be happy to be rid of it). But Shaun of the Dead (2004) is the reigning champ of zombie comedies. It is a satire of all the zombie apocalypse movies. Much of the cast of the British sitcom Spaced (1999-2001) appears in one form or another–those actors would go on to make a series of satires of different film genres together. The gags hit the right notes. They capture much of what the original Romero movies were about, with witty dialog and excellent performances. The characters make all the dumb mistakes characters always make in these movies. The send-up is self-aware and well-informed.

The most significant film to break from the Romero mold while still presenting a classic “zombie apocalypse” theme was 28 Days Later (2002). In this format, the cause of the zombie outbreak is known and explained from the very beginning of the film. Scientists are conducting biotech experiments that produce uncontrollable rage in test chimps. Animal rights activists trying to liberate the caged animals inadvertently release the disease into the human population. The infected are not the slow, lumping zombies of the Romero movies. The disease causes violent, uncontrolled imperatives to attack living humans. These zombies move quickly, always at a full run. They are almost rabid. The main character somehow survived the onset of the zombie apocalypse while in a coma in a hospital. He awakens 28 days after the outbreak, hence the title (though inexplicably he awakens in an empty hospital on clean sheets). He meets up with some other survivors who know how to navigate the apocalypse, as best as they can, and who understand–and explain and illustrate–that any contact with fluids from the zombies or any bites mean infection. The rest of the film deals with the group of survivors trying to find a military outpost that will protect them from the zombies, and the valor of individuals in the group protecting the others from both zombies and predatory humans alike. The action is taut–this is as much a pure action film as a thriller. The characters are believable and compelling. There is a clear line drawn between good and evil. Above all, though, this film set out a new set of rules for the zombies in zombie films. A sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007) was dreadful. Following the I Am Legend format there is a search for a cure, together with the now typical device of a quarantined city. Filled with main characters who are (contrary to intent) manifestly unsympathetic, the film basically imploded onto itself and can’t end soon enough.

The Walking Dead (2010- ) was a surprise hit zombie apocalypse TV show, based on a graphic novel series of the same name launched in 2004 by Robert Kirkman. It is a signature cable channel show. As broadcast networks focused on cheap-to-produce reality shows, cable networks began to finance lavish dramas with production values approaching Hollywood theatrically-released movies more than standard broadcast TV fare. This won large audiences. The Walking Dead is extremely derivative of what came before it. The premise, as the series begins, is that the main character awakens from a coma to find himself in a zombie apocalypse. Sound familiar from 28 Days Later? The zombies are dubbed “walkers” (like in Romero films) and exhibit much the same lumbering movements as all the Romero films. But rather than have anything good or new to say, the show is mostly a melodrama, that is to say a soap opera. The setups are implausible. Many of the characters are inconsistent–constantly changing their personalities just to facilitate a plot twist. This show is terrible.

Hollywood has tried to catch up (and cash in) on the zombie buzz generated by the success of The Walking Dead, much like they did with a “vampire” fad a few years earlier (yet again, zombies are kind of a second wave after vampires). Among those efforts is World War Z (2013). This is a formulaic Hollywood movie through and through. The main character (Brad Pitt) searches for a cause of the epidemic, and also for a cure. Every part of the plot follows the “Chekhov’s gun” principle; foreshadowing is absolute and rigid. The zombies follow the 28 Days Later pattern of being wild and frenzied. Framing of the action borrows heavily from the disaster movie genre. The audience is expected to sympathize with the exceptionalism of the family at the center of the story, and multiple deus ex machina plot twists are needed to keep the story moving. While lavishly produced, with every technical detail nearly impeccable, the story is stupid, derivative and implausible. At least Hollywood’s last big (non-comedy) zombie movie, the Will Smith version of I Am Legend, required you to suspend disbelief only as to the presence of zombies but not with regard to the actions and emotions of the uninfected human characters. No such luck here. No, here we get a character on UN-coordinated missions who brings a satellite phone for personal communication only, making no attempt to communicate with the UN regarding his progress other than to fly around the world trying to reach their base and maybe fill them in at that point. Too bad he did not put the UN on speed dial before he left!

Wholly aside from the movies, “zombie walks,” “zombie pub crawls,” and other such events have arisen with participants donning zombie costumes and makeup. Some of these are just middle class past times. But some take up the spirit of the Romero movies by being used a protests against consumer culture, or other things. In Minneapolis on July 22, 2006 a group dressed up as zombies and lurched through a public festival, with portable audio equipment playing announcements like “get your brains here” and “brain cleanup in Aisle 5.” The police arrested them, claiming at first that it was for “disorderly conduct” but then later saying that use of the audio equipment constituted the illegal display of simulated weapons of mass destruction (“WMDs”) (yes, the police, and later city attorneys, actually asserted this). The “zombies” later won a lawsuit against the police, the court saying there was no probable cause to arrest them.

There is certainly more to the zombie phenomenon than meets the eye. For one, there are more zombie films than can be mentioned here. I didn’t even mention Bruce Campbell movies! But the pervasiveness of zombies in popular culture makes them worthy of note. Hopefully, this little primer offers a head start.

Made in U.S.A.

Made in U.S.A. (1966)

Lux Compagnie Cinématographique de France (DVD: Criterion Collection)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Main Cast: Anna Karina, László Szabó, Jean-Pierre Léaud

As the 1960s moved onward, Jean-Luc Godard’s early style gave way to something new and different. Made in U.S.A. epitomizes a transitional phase. It is one of the most visually stunning of his films. Yet the plot, so much as there is a plot, evidences mostly a set of reflections on politics, society and, of course, cinema itself. Outlines of the script were adapted (without authorization) from Donald Westlake’s crime thriller pulp novel The Jugger (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark). Ostensibly, Paula Nelson (Anna Karina) is a reporter investigation the death of Richard P____ (last name always obscured or not given, but a reference to a communist figure). She maneuvers through a fictional French public housing project on the outskirts of Paris taking its name from the American East-coast casino town Atlantic City. Really, much of the content of the film makes allusions to the political scandal involving the French secret service allegedly abducting Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barka — a leader in the Third World Movement (for general context, read Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World), an associate of Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and someone compared to Frantz Fanon — and then torturing and murdering him. Godard drew explicit comparisons to Howard Hawks’ iconic film noir The Big Sleep as an influence on this film. Though Godard adds a sort of comic book feel, reminiscent ever so slightly of Frank Tashlin, another Godard favorite.

The tone of the film is really its most striking feature. It never settles into anything comfortable. The characters drift in a state of confused inquiry. They look for clues, for answers, but they find nothing concrete. It is a very Hegelian sort of approach that requires engagement with reality, only to determine “truth”, as it were, in hindsight. Along the way, just some wonderful set pieces, like the main characters presenting overlapping monologues, Marianne Faithfull singing “As Tears Go By” a cappella in a bar, a tour through a warehouse of Hollywood movie advertising materials, Beethoven blasted out suddenly, a portable tape recorder replaying communist lessons spoken by Godard himself. And there is color everywhere. This is a magnificent film for color, commanded as immaculately as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso [The Red Desert]. The only constant is a feeling expressed through a search for closure. But the search is purposeful. There are constant reminders of the crassness of Americanized consumerism in France, but before that can be overcome a sort of resolution of the old ways is entertained. That quality builds a bridge between Godard’s earlier works, with their explicit engagement with commercial Hollywood cinema, and his revolutionary filmmaking of the coming years. For instance, this effort can be said to come closer to embracing feminist elements than Godard’s early, somewhat more sexist work.

Filmed in parallel with 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle [2 or 3 Things I Know About Her] this is usually forgotten or considered the inferior of the two. Yet, it may actually be the better of them. 2 or 3 Things is explicit, almost didactic. To a tiring degree. Made in U.S.A. is allusory. It is a Godard fan’s film.

A DVD edition, the first widespread distribution of the film in the United States some four decades after its French release, offers some valuable extras, including a short documentary (On the Cusp) with interviews of two Godard biographers, Richard Brody (Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard) and Colin MacCabe (Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy), who add a wealth of information about the structure, content and context for the film. They advance theories about how certain plot elements Godard introduced were vaguely autobiographical. There is also another short documentary (A Made in U.S.A. Concordance) that attempts to catalog many of the the esoteric references to political and social events and persons in the film. The subtitle translations are described as “new and improved” but they do play somewhat loose with the dialogue, making it a bit more informal and casual than the original French at times.

In Time

In Time (2011)

20th Century Fox

Director: Andrew Niccol

Main Cast: Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy

Yeah, so the name Justin Timberlake may be more synonymous with a “dick in a box” than cinematic acting prowess, but he proves an adequate choice for the lead in Andrew Niccol’s dystopian sci-fi thriller In Time. Will Salas (Timberlake) is a lowly nobody working in some factory in a futuristic ghetto. There is no “money” as such, but “time” instead. People have a “clock” in their arm that counts backward. When it reaches zero, they die. But so long as they have time, they stay the same age indefinitely. All adults are about 25 years old. Buying coffee or taking the bus? Time is taken away. Payment for a day’s work? Time is added. You simply hold your arm to an electronic reader, or grip another person’s arm in what appears like a slightly aggressive secret handshake. Residents of the ghetto in which Salas lives seem to all have no more than a few days or hours of time, always in a state of desperation. And this is definitely a ghetto. Well, a “time zone” the characters call it. Increasingly steep tolls are required to pass from the ghetto into other time zones.

It isn’t much of a plot spoiler to say that the movie hinges on Salas’ personal awakening, after coming into possession a large amount of time, in which he realizes that there is nothing “wrong” with the economy that has nothing for the residents of the ghettos. Rather, the rich have devised a system to separate themselves from the others based on the unequal distribution of time. Police called “timekeepers,” among them Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy), are the hard-boiled enforcers of the order. Yes, there has to be a romantic sub-plot, so Salas meets up with Sylvia Weiss (Amanda Seyfried), whose father runs the largest “time lending” chain–an outfit much like a payday loan business making loans at extortionate rates. One then wonders if there will be a happy ending or not.

The plot captures bits of the German childrens’ book Momo oder Die seltsame Geschichte von den Zeit-Dieben und von dem Kind, das den Menschen die gestohlene Zeit zurückbrachte (1973) by Michael Ende (better known to American audiences as the author of Die Unendliche Geschichte [The Never-Ending Story] (1981)), which dealt with Men in Grey from a Timesaving Bank, and the short film The Price of Life (1987), in which characters die when a time account runs to zero and the rich are practically immortal. The modern telling, though, also takes cues from the sort of high-finance intrigue that propelled The International (2009) and anticipates the grim and heartless social class conflict central to Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013). The central conceit of using “time” in place of “money” serves a useful role in highlighting how money is really a representation of social power, a unit of measure that expresses the holder’s claim on social wealth, or, society’s quasi-moral indebtedness to its holder. This is normally the sort of stuff that one gets from reading rather dry, academic non-fiction books–and there indeed are quite a few that provide copious theoretical support for the film’s conceit.

Niccol made a name for himself with Gattaca (1997), another sci-fi thriller with comparable ambitions to portray a quest for justice in a repressive class-based society. He’s a skilled practitioner, able to manage the pacing of a movie that draws most of its audience in with action sequences while still managing to hold together a coherent plot. Viewers are asked to suspend disbelief that humans can have their mortality regulated entirely by technology, but not in the small parts of the movie. You must accept that a person can drop dead if the clock in his or her arm runs out of time, but you are not forced to accept violations of the laws of physics for the sake of “action” when the fists and bullets start to fly nor to accept characters whose behavior shifts erratically. Like a high school science teacher clamoring to “make science fun” enough that a little learning might happen, the objective is to do the action and romance stuff well enough to find a few moments in which to present the moral and economic premise of the film . Quite unlike, say Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012) Batman movie, which delivers a reactionary and anti-democratic message that “the system” must be preserved despite its flaws (necessary or simply inevitable and unavoidable), In Time suggests that piecemeal tokens don’t work (like when Salas gifts an alcoholic friend too much time) but that large scale mass mobilization of the poor can correct the inequities of a system established by the rich for their differential advantage. It’s an old message. Leo Tolstoy makes the same argument in the final chapter of his The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life (1894), for instance, and Gandhi put the idea into practice. But if you miss the final moments of this film you might miss that message somewhat, and think instead that a kind of James Bond figure can dash in and make the difference by himself.

Matt Damon has made something of a career making movies like this. Timberlake and Seyfried less so. Cillian Murphy makes a good choice for his role as the anguished and vaguely morally troubled cop. One can’t forget the casting difficulties for a script that calls for a society of people who appear to be about 25-30 years old but have lived decades (or more) longer!

This one is a good bit of entertainment. It has a more solid sense of purpose than most hollywood sci-fi. But in the mold with so much current cinema, the dystopian element predominates over the utopian. Audiences are mostly in a mood today to relate to a story about recognizing a corrupt system and bringing it down. It might take more time before the happy stories of what comes next can be told effectively.

Muriel’s Wedding

Muriel’s Wedding (1994)

Film Victoria

Director: P.J. Hogan

Main Cast: Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter

Although billed as the story of small town girl Muriel’s (Toni Collette’s) attempts to “make her own way” in the world, what is most striking about this Australian comedy is that it is catalogues the typically conflicting attempts by various characters to advance their social status. It is also well cast, well acted and well written. Oh, and, unlike so many Aussie comedies, it’s actually funny. Muriel is the daughter of an aging, insignificant local politician (Bill Hunter) with desperate, pathetic and cliched delusions of grandeur. He considers all of his family members failures, more or less, holding him back from his ambitions. Muriel leaves for the big city, Sydney, and her path there triggers events that put her family in a downward spiral. Initially desperate for the approval of the popular girls from her high school, she meets another former classmate (Rachel Griffiths) on a holiday. The two become fast friends, and share an apartment in Sydney. Muriel feigns having a fiancee, and dreams of getting married. These are the external validations she sees as crucial to her standing in the eyes of those around her. She does achieve marriage eventually, in the most demeaning way possible. Toni Collette is perfect in the title role–her big breakthrough. Her performance at the big wedding (for a change, not the end of the movie) is wonderful, and just the expression on her face walking down the aisle–giddy, silly, unjustified, embarrassingly inappropriate, gloating, uncontained joy–encapsulates much of the movie. The film always lands on its feet portraying the more-juvenile-than-they-realize aspirations of young adults in the 1990s. There is no shortage of smaller gags, and the dramatic elements are well paced, seamlessly integrated with the humorous content, and and asset to the overall work. All of the main characters seek social status, and many commit injustices against those around them to do so. The “heart-warming” ending finds at least Muriel (she changes her name at one point to Mariel–to be a different person) changing her outlook on life. Rather than seek a mild form of greatness (success in the big things of life–her version of the larger social stage) she chooses happiness (success in the small things in life–for her, friendship). What makes this treatment so successful is that the ending makes no explicit statement as to whether Muriel’s “mature” choice of the path of “happiness” is borne of her own free will or merely through a zen-like acceptance of her social position. Her father explicitly concedes to something like the latter. Her mother (Jeanie Drynan) makes a tragic, but altruistic choice of neither. Of all the characters in the film, the most selfless acts are by Muriel’s mother. Muriel, despite her supposed growth as a person, has merely evolved from pure self-interest to a kind of ambivalent “two against the world” friend pairing that has the feel of a willing compromise among those closest to her. This is the moral center of the film. It holds that you should not harm others. But in relegating the mother to a peripheral role, it puts little emphasis on selfless altruism.

Elvis on Tour

Elvis on Tour (1972)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Directors: Pierre Adidge and Robert Abel

Main Cast: Elvis Presley

An unusual and innovative documentary that chronicles part of Elvis’ 1975 U.S. tour. It features a “multi-screen” format, with multiple moving images presented simultaneously. The crew filmed Elvis performing with multiple cameras, and the film frequently presents a given performance from multiple camera angles shown side-by-side, shots of Elvis interspersed with shots of the audience, and clips of similar performances from different shows presented together. A similar approach was used a few years later in The Longest Yard. This finds Elvis around the time he was just starting to decline. He had a successful show in Las Vegas, and had started to take that tour on the road. He did two shows a night, and the grind of doing a similar show for years on end was taking its toll. The performances in the film aren’t all great, but there are some good ones — particularly further in. The filmmakers demanded special access to Elvis, and that results in scenes that show him shuttled to and from shows, harangued by fans, and excerpts from a pre-tour interview. The filmmakers clearly have no real interest in Elvis’ music, but are looking in on the culture of his fans with a mixture of amusement and condescension. That’s fine, as far as it goes, because there is no narration or even titles throughout the movie. Mostly you just see a series of documentary footage clips, though the non-concert footage gravitates toward the craziest fans caught up in a vague cult of personality, without any reference to any discussion of the merits of the music. What’s interesting is that some of the rehearsal footage shows how much Elvis liked gospel music and how some of the stripped-down rehearsals sounded a bit more interesting that the grandiose treatments on this studio albums and in the live shows. By 1972, Elvis’ show had settled into a formula, doing mostly the same songs over and over. He and his band still play them remarkably well, considering. Yet the more intimate rehearsal performances sometimes reveal something that always seemed obscured on the albums and concerts of the era.

Oz: The Great and Powerful

Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013)

Walt Disney Pictures

Director: Sam Raimi

Main Cast: James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams, Zach Braff

L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series is often credited as being one of the most important fictional universes to emerge from America, or at least the first important one to break from European traditions of “fairy tales”. There were many, many books written about Oz, various theatrical productions, and many movies too. The success of the original printing of the book had as much to do with the format as the actual content. It was a full color book with text set in a stylized arrangement that interspersed it with illustrations by W.W. Denslow. Children’s books were not customarily printed so lavishly at the time, but the success of the first Oz book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) turned it into more or less an industry standard. Critics debated whether Baum’s or Denslow’s contributions were the basis for the book’s success–though most tend to unfairly overlook the publisher George M. Hill Company’s role in arranging the lavish printing. The credit given to Denslow caused a rift with Baum and the two ceased working together. Denslow even published separate illustrations related to Oz without Baum’s involvement. Following the smash success of the first book, Baum teamed up with a theater group and developed a Broadway show that deviated from his writings and played up the latest in theatrical special effects. He tried later theatrical shows, but without the input of the Broadway team those fizzed. The earliest movies were silent, and Baum himself made some. He even developed a touring multi-media show that incorporated some silent films. Then the 1939 film version starring Judy Garland, though not considered a commercial success at the time, went on to become one of the most iconic and beloved American movies of all time. Other movies and shows followed, from The Wiz to Return to Oz. Spinoffs and related books continued to be made. Baum tried to pursue other work, but the financial rewards of the Oz series always proved too attractive, and he continued to write Oz books even after clear statements that the series was finished.

If you notice a trend in the history of the Oz works it’s that they have been manipulated, contorted and exploited in every possible way, by Baum and others. There is nothing sacred about the Oz universe. But an interesting detail is that the biggest successes have be borne out of collaboration, first between Baum, Denslow and the George M. Hill Company, but later with the Broadway show, then with the Victor Fleming, Judy Garland movie with songs by Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen. So there’s a feeling that the entire enterprise is one that sort of invites reinterpretation and tinkering.

Oz: The Great and Powerful is a big-budget “prequel” by Sam Raimi for the Disney company, which recently gave Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland similar digital-effects-laden treatment. While the Alice movie was a disaster, Oz: The Great and Powerful is actually quite good.

My interpretation of the film Continue reading “Oz: The Great and Powerful”