Me and Orson Welles (and Nog)

Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles traces the few days leading up to the Mercury Theater's 1937 opening of Julius Caesar, under the direction/dictatorship of the young Orson Welles. Christian McKay's take on Welles is wonderful fun to watch, fully deserving of a Best Supporting Actor nod. McKay's Welles, despite his egocentricity, is also capable of being a great leader, somewhat akin to a military commander. In fact, he seems to see theater as a battle, where the audiences are "sons of bitches" (a favorite term of his) who must be made to pay attention and where the productions must be "lean and mean," shorn of all unecessary extravagance (he brags of his radio production of Hamlet, in which he cut the "To be or not to be" soliloquy because it didn't tell audiences anything they didn't already know). McKay is such a commanding presence here that the rest of this (arguably somewhat slight) film tends to evaporate around him. Essentially its the well-worn underdog formula, similar to a sports film only here it's a scrappy theater group overcoming the odds to achieve a wildly succesful opening night. One can easily enough imagine a mainstream audience being quite entertained by the film without any real knowledge of Welles whatsoever. And a few younger viewers had indeed wandered down to the arthouse to check it out, no doubt lured by the presence of "tween-dream" Zac Efron who is, in fact, the film's lead. He neither ruins nor enhances things much, but he does come off as a bit dull, though almost anyone would, I suppose, when crossing paths with Welles.

Nog Revisits Spike Lee's 25th Hour!

After spotting it on several "Best of the Decade" lists and at the urging of friends and former students, I decided to take another look at Spike Lee's 25th Hour, which I had not seen since its release early in 2002 and remembered very little. I liked it more this time.

Set in New York, just after 9/11, we watch the last day and night of Monty Brogan (Edward Norton, great performance) before he's sentenced to prison for drug dealing. Perhaps meant to parallel (somewhat) the city after the tragedy of 9/11 as it faces an unknown future, Monty's toughness slips a bit as he prepares to enter the new world of prison. In the film's most discussed scene, early on, we watch Monty deliver a furious monologue into a mirror, telling virtually every racial and ethnic group in the city to fuck themselves before turning his hatred inward, saving the worst for himself ("Fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all, and you threw it away, you dumb fuck!). But as the film ends, Lee shows us a panorama of the city's various types slipping by as Monty's father drives him to prison, and Monty's anger has dissolved by this point, along with his lengthy protracted fantasy of escaping his fate by starting a new life out West and reinventing himself in the classic American fashion. Instead, he'll go to prison in the city, and hope that it's still there when he gets out.

Lee isn't working from his own screenplay here (it's written by David Benioff), but 25th Hour feels like a Lee film, perhaps most especially in Monty's monologue, which recalls a similar sequence in Lee's masterpiece, Do the Right Thing, where various characters vent their racial frustrations to the camera. Like that film, 25th Hour is also, in some ways, a slice-of-life picture that speculates on the future of the city. In Do the Right Thing, the destruction comes from within (the racial unrest between the various groups living in close quarters), but in 25th Hour it has come from without, in the unexpected form of 9/11, leaving everyone, if not united, at least perhaps moving toward some temporary hopefulness or, failing that, at least choosing to believe in one, as we see in the following bitterly funny exchange. Looking down on Ground Zero from a high-rise penthouse, Monty's friends discuss the air quality in the city:

"Yeah, The New York Times says the air's bad down here."

"Oh, yeah? Well, fuck The Times.I read the Post."

Nog Deduces the Major Problems of Sherlock Holmes!

I'm not a fan of Guy Ritchie. I found things to like in both Lock, Stock and Snatch (Pitt's hilariously accented performance), but fail to understand the people who watch and rewatch them. The style is too hyperactive for me. I'll take Tarantino any day, who allows his characters room to breathe (and talk and talk and talk) even beneath his grab-bag of stylistic devices. So I was immediately leery of Ritchie as the choice to turn Sherlock Holmes into a very ass-kicking/James Bond-y kind of sleuth, and the film is about what I expected: hyperkinetic action sequences and mildly diverting banter between Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law). The two good actors do work well together (the film seems to be striving to evoke some sort of 80's action-buddy comedy nostalgia), and, in Ritchie's defense, he does occasionally employ his barrage of quick cuts and slo-mo to purposes that actually suit the characters (for instance, we often see Downey's Holmes mentally walk himself through the steps of a fight before we see the actual fight itself,: it's interesting the first two or three times). As mainstream entertainment, one could certainly do worse, but I won't be first in line for the inevitable sequel that the film spends the last five minutes setting up (unless, of course, they hire a new director and get somebody really fucking cool to play Moriarty!).

Nog Sees Up in the Air

If we are to believe most critics, Up in the Air is like some long-lost Billy Wilder classic, an old-fashioned star vehicle (Clooney!) that perfectly combines seemingly light comic banter and romance with real substance. Well, it isn't that good (you can't put it right beside The Apartment on your DVD shelves and consider them interchangeable), but...it does succeed in many ways. The premise is interesting: Ryan Bingham spends his life largely "up in the air", (the title!!), flying around and firing people for large corporations, and he's come to prefer the limbo-like world of airports and hotel rooms to a world that requires real human connection. The scenes of various people speaking to the camera about losing their jobs work very well, fluidly moving through various tones. This being a Hollywood film, however, the narrative must largely concern Bingham's realization that he truly desires a world with more stability (meaning he must realize that what he really wants is to settle down with Vera Farmiga, who is very good in this role). Bingham's change is probably a bit abrupt, but the film does reveal that the one-to-one connection of firing someone face to face is essential to him (he finds video firing intolerable), so presumably his essential loneliness is meant to be a part of his character from the beginning. Yet the Bingham we see in the film's first half seems to be having a hell of a lot of fun flying around and casually banging Farmiga and eating big meals on the company dime, which seems to weaken the emotional impact of the film's final scenes a bit. Still, the film does a nice job of reminding us that romantic comedies don't neccesarily have to be completely empty-headed. It will be nominated for Best Picture (likely winning) and, in a weak year, I won't quibble with the choice.

Nog Sees Avatar!

Well, the first question one must answer about Avatar is this: Did it fuck your eyeballs? (as the fanboys have been saying for about a year regarding its visual majesty). Well, yes, it's amazing to look at. There's a lot of detail in every frame, from the spacecraft interiors to the landscapes of Pandora to the many creatures, and the 3D-depth enhances these aspects without calling undue attention to itself (rarely does shit fly out of the screen at you). Still, amazing as it all looks, visual majesty alone only takes you so far, and you're ultimately left with a none-too-subtle tale of American imperialism with a none-too-subtle environmental message. The film's primary visual and philosophical cues seem to come from Native-American culture (you can't watch the Na'Vis on their horse-creatures with their bow and arrows and not think of Native-Americans), and Cameron combines this with contemporary military lingo from the "war on terror" (shock and awe, pre-emptive strikes), which I guess is meant to suggest a sort of cyclical view of history with the oppressors constantly seeking to displace/eliminate other cultures to get what they desire (in this case, something called "unobtanium," which sounds ridiculous as all hell but is apparently an actual scientific term). Silly as it sounds, this could work, maybe, if one truly cares about the characters, feels the love story, gets caught up in the action scenes. But I was only sporadically involved, enjoying the look of the film but caring very little about what was actually going on and looking forward to Piranha 3D, whose pre-Avatar trailer promises good old-fashioned sex-and-gore 3D exploitation in which a school of piranhas will fly directly into your face!

Nog Sees Precious!

The old white folks in the matinee screening I attended of Precious booed and hissed at Mo'Nique, playing Precious's mother Mary, as if she were an old-fashioned mustache-twirling villain. And she is certainly a terrifying, even despicable person who physically abuses her pregnant (by the husband/father, for the second time), overweight, illiterate, 16 year old daughter Precious. But I suspect a different kind of (less white) audience would understand that Mary, as much as Precious, is also a victim in the sense that she's absorbed the dominant society's messages for so long that she's practically become the thing she's always been told she was: basically a savage who thinks of nothing but the basic pleasures of food and sex (and television). Precious too has absorbed these messages, but she deals with them differently: basically by retreating into her mind and escaping the worst of her abuses through a fantasy world in which she takes center stage (literally). This is a world that her environment and the media has never revealed to her (watch for the scene where she watches an old film on television: though she's able to superimpose her and her mother's faces on the white actors, what she sees is simply a more civilized version of the same cycle of abuse she's locked into).

Yet the film, bleak as it, is ultimately about Precious's attempts to escape her circumstances, through the help of a few good teachers and counselors. We see, in several scenes early on, that she's always had a spark of defiance. In one of these moments (which has sparked some controversy) Precious orders and steals and eats an entire bucket of chicken. Now director Lee Daniels certainly knows he's treading on thin ice here with the old "black folks eating chicken" stereotype, but the point seems to be that Precious, even in her despair, is already finding ways to empower herself by, in a sense, both consciously playing--and even enjoying--the role she's expected to play. I suppose the film follows a somewhat traditional, learning-equals-power, formula as it progresses, but it rarely feels overly manipulative and never sugar-coated (the confrontations between Precious and Mary are intense and brutal). In a strangely meta moment late in the film, we see one of Precious's fellow students trying to interpret what it means when a protagonist's environment in a novel is described as "unrelenting." The student, not at all sure and not offering the expected answer, says something along the lines of this meaning that the protagonist keeps on moving along and moving along. We're not sure where Precious is headed, exactly, in the final moments of the film, but she is in motion, and we're meant to see that as both hope and progress.

Nog Watches Eastwood's Invictus! (That Sounds Weird)

Reliable as Santa Claus, Eastwood these days can be counted on to pop up around Oscar-time with a new film (or sometimes two, as in the case of last year's The Changeling/Gran Torino combo or a few years back with Flags of Our Fathers/Letters From Iwo Jima). It's comfort food for grown-ups who have no interest in sexy teenage monsters or Jim Cameron's tall blue 3-D aliens.

I can see how some will immediately reject Invictus's seeming embrace of every sports and racial-harmony cliche (I rolled my eyes a few times), but there's still intelligence at work in Eastwood's study of forgiveness (a new topic for him, as the NY-Times points out, after a career focused almost entirely on the notion of revenge). The first half of the film, dealing primarily with the recently freed and newly elected Mandela (Morgan Freeman, who else?) is particularly interesting. We watch the man's machinations as he figures out how to use South Africa's run to World Cup rugby victory as a shrewd attempt to heal the country's still-festering racial divide. Was this run to glory really as important to the country as the film posits? I don't know. I doubt it. But it works cinematically as an interesting focal point, although the film's last half, a more traditional underdog-sports film, is less interesting. Matt Damon's captain of the rugby team is not a particularly compelling fellow as a character, and I'm not sure Eastwood has any particular facility for shooting rugby matches or even a full understanding of the sport (I know I still don't know what the fuck was going on on the field!). But of course the point is ultimately not what's going on on the field but rather the effect it has on the country. Mandela explains early on that he doesn't see his maneuverings as "political" calculations but rather as "human" ones, and we're left with an appreciation of a leader who always truly has the best interests of his country at heart.