I'm Not There

The movie itself might seem somewhat inexplicable, at least insofar as there's nothing really within the movie that ties any of the pretty much discrete narratives together, so it's interesting that the movie lets itself be propped up by the reality of Dylan's already gigantic mythology. It's not a biopic in the sense that it really tries to explain it's subject to the audience, or even present any kind of new insight into him. It seems like ultimately what Haynes tried to do--or at least all he accomplished doing--was to make a movie out of Dylan's mythology. And he even tied it less the actual Bob Dylan, or the actual Robert Zimmerman, than it already was.

I especially liked how each of the different narratives was really a completely different kind of film. Julianne Moore pretty much existed in a flat-out parody of Joan Baez from the Scorcese doc; Heat Ledger was in some kind of contemporary character-driven drama about a relationship and it's disintegration; Cate Blanchett wandered around in a Fellini homage; Richard Gere in an even more psychedelic version of the Billy the Kid story than Peckinpah's original, but that was obviously the reference. Christian Bale was also in some kind of movie, but I'm not sure exactly what. The only one who seemed to really exist in just this movie was the Franklin kid, but maybe there was another type of movie he was supposed to living through. I also liked the ways some of the stories bled into each occasionally without ever really trying to account for each other in any especially satisfactory or clear way.

Ultimately, though, like Control, I don't think the movie ever managed to explain why the subject was interesting. If you weren't already interested in Dylan, I doubt you'd walk away from the movie wanting to go out and get any of his albums. I wonder, is there a music biopic that makes its subject interesting to someone who might watch it with not interest in him/her beforehand?

Southland Tales

It kind of makes me feel a little sad that most of the things I thought were so great about Southland Tales are exactly the reasons that most people will hate it. It probably goes out of its way to explain the whole "thing" behind everything than Donnie Darko did, but there's no character in the movie who's anywhere even close to as relatable-to as Donnie was--there aren't any characters who are even supposed to be as relatable-to as Donnie was. And most people need that in a movie, I guess. I don't, for whatever reason.

Wherever I read it was right: Kelly's better when his cosmology is hidden or obscured. I liked that there were many aspects of the movie that weren't explained completely, but I also imagine that Kelly has it all packed away somewhere the exact explanation for everything, and I just wouldn't really be interested in all of that. The reason is something like this:

By ignoring conventional questions of explicability and coherence, Kelly isolates the fundamental building blocks of film and lets them work together on their own without the scaffolding beneath of them of plot and character. I mean, I guess there's plenty of plot in here, but the best parts are, for instance, Timberlake lip-synching to The Killers in some kind of arcade while hot chicks in vinyl nurse outfits dance around him, and he pours beer over his head, and that scene is mentioned in virtually every review as being a part that its worth seeing the movie for, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the movie. Or: the whole thing with the Star Spangled banner being sung first in Spanish and then English over a discordant quartet (was it the Kronos Quartet?) while the Zeppelin went all shiny and new into the LA skyline and fireworks went off everywhere. These scenes are absolutely perfect and are pure film, and for whatever reason I like that they're allowed to exist in relative isolation because of the general incoherence around everything.

Also, what I think Kelly is especially good at, maybe as good as anyone aside from Lynch, is presenting to form of something, such as the climax of this movie that is only really a climax because it has the feel of a climax. I mean, it is the climax, but because the overall story has been relatively shapeless before that, it's not exactly a climax that exists because of the story. Or something.

But what bothers me ultimately about Kelly is that he does have a very clear idea some ridiculously complex sci-fi/supernatural/spiritual plot behind everything and he wants you to spend a lot of time decoding everything until you unpack it all and understand everything. Which just seems kind of lame to me: story as puzzle. So in the end, Kelly's just as stuck under the tyranny of narrative as virtually every other filmmaker in America.

Kiss Me Deadly

Holy shit!

I cannot believe I didn't know about this movie. I can't believe I sat on it for so long, either (I got it in the mail from Netflix several weeks ago, maybe over a month ago, and just didn't get around to watching it...) The Netflix description on their little sleeve says:

"Shortly after sleazy detective Mike Hammer picks up a scantily clad hitchhiker, his car is forced over a cliff. He awakens from unconsciousness to find his passenger dead -- but it wasn't the fall that killed her. As Hammer sets out to uncover the woman's deadly secret and find her unknown assassins, he ignores explicit signs that he should mind his own business. This classic film noir was adapted from Mickey Spillane's novel by the same name."

Well, I guess that's not technically wrong in any way, but wow does it undersell the movie. In a way I suppose I'm kind of glad that I didn't really know what to expect when I went into it, because I probably wouldn't have been quite as floored by it, but how is it that I've never seen superlatives being thrown around w/r/t to this movie before?

Anyway, even before the ending it's amazing. Hammer is such a total sleazeball, and the way every woman just throws herself at him is almost surreal, especially with his complete lack of interest it. And there was actually a lot of really well-written dialogue throughout, mostly being spoken by women. And. And. And.

Okay, I don't really have a lot to say about this right now, except that I think that lots of parts of this movie must have been the source for various scenes in Lost Highway, and there were shots from this movie being watched in the background throughout Southland Tales, so apparently the movies known in certain circles.

I want to buy it.

Control

Yeah, really very beautifully shot, no doubt. But ultimately it runs into the same problem that almost all musician bio-pics tend to run into, or troubled genius bio-pics run into, which is that it focuses too much on the turmoil in his life to the exclusion of his artistic life. Not that there should be less of a focus on his life. In fact, I do think that specifically for this movie at least, one of the things that it does right is that it doesn't really forgive Ian Curtis for being an asshole. (Even better, it also never really condemns him for it. It does really a pretty good job of letting us see how much of an asshole he ultimately is being while also allowing us to see how from his perspective he's just in an impossible situation and he doesn't know what to do about it.) Further along those lines, it does manage, mostly, to not add a whole bunch of extra symbolic meaning to Curtis's suicide. It kind of just seems like a particularly jack-assed thing for him to have done, in the end, and you don't really get a sense that he thought he was accomplishing much of anything by it. So, anyway, it does those things right. But it also falls into this very common trap of not portraying the creative process at all. Which I could forgive the movie for if it had at least tried, but it doesn't even care to look especially like it's tried. We see at the beginning that Curtis is a kid with exceptional musical tastes and capable of quoting Wordsworth and stuff, but he doesn't really ever talk about music with anyone and he doesn't really do a lot of writing throughout the movie. It's just like, he goes to a Sex Pistols show, then he tells the New Order guys that he should be their singer, and the next thing he's singing these amazing songs, and we're left to wonder where they've come from. It's like he just decided to be the singer in a band and all of a sudden he's singing songs. We don't even see him figuring out how he wants to sing or anything. (Also, the staged performances are really pretty spectacular. They almost make the movie worth it. Or they almost make up for the movie's giant gaping flaw.) And the fact that they didn't even try to put any of that creative process into the movie ultimately makes me assume that the director just must not have been very interested in it, which makes me not like him a lot, and made me spend a lot of the movie griping to myself that it was kind of a waste of time.

INLAND EMPIRE

The ending of this movie, and I mean actually the closing credits of this movie, are one of the weirdest things Lynch has ever done in a movie. It's unclear at the end if Laura Dern is supposed to be Laura Dern or one or all of the characters she played in the movie, and then there's that chick from Mulholland Drive, the dark-haired chick, who wasn't even in this movie, blowing a kiss to Dern, who returns it. And then a bunch of girls who at first seem like they're the prostitutes from the movie because they're dressed like them but then you realize they're not all come out and dance and lipsink to a Nina Simone song. And it feels genuinely joyful and alive in a way that I don't think anything ever has in any Lynch movie before, even Straight Story. That is, it's obviously a staged moment, but it's also a staged real moment; it doesn't even pretend to have some symbolic referent that you might be able to get at to understand why it's there. It's just a bunch of women dancing to Nina Simone, plus Laura Dern and a few other people who are all pretending to or all actually are and probably a little bit of both enjoying it. I mean, the movie closed with a music video pretty much the way TMNT II did. That's fucking weird.

No Country for Old Men

First Coen brothers movie in how long? I'd look it up, but I don't really care to. Definitely a return to an older style for them, having more in common with Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing than The Big Lebowski or The Man Who Wasn't There. And maybe more in common with Blood Simple than any other movie they've made due to the fact that it didn't seem like a rehearsal of a type of movie the way almost all of their other films do.

I actually did think a few more scenes could've used incidental music, but that's probably because I think the score from Fargo is so good and they use music so well in a lot of their other movies. The lack of it through most of the film definitely made the one scene where it finally showed up, when Tommy Lee Jones arrives at the hotel to find Moss dead, way more moving than anything else in the movie. They way Moss's death happens off-camera seems even more jarring in the film than in the book, since you kind of expect even more of a film that it will include you on everything important, and certainly the death of the guy who up until then seemed to be the protagonist is an important thing. But they got that structural move from the book, so they get props I guess mainly for recognizing how important it is for what the book/story is trying to do that there not be some kind of climactic battle scene between Moss and his killers.

I never thought I'd say this about any movie ever, but Tommy Lee Jones might've been the best thing about the movie. He was absolutely note for not perfect.

Watching the movie after having read the book so recently, and noting especially how closely they adhere to the book and to what it has for dialogue, the one glaring change they made really stuck out. The conversation between Tommy Lee Jones and his old uncle, the statement his uncle makes to him about thinking that the world has gotten so much worse on his watch being just vanity, seemed like the Coen brothers responding in kind to McCarthy, as if the movie was both an adaptation of the novel and a way for the Coens to respond to the book--I'd say engage the book in dialogue, but it's hard for me to imagine a way that McCarthy would then respond to the movie, so they kind of automatically get the last word in, which isn't really a dialogue.

*****

(11/14 10:30 PM)

I was also wondering a little bit about the female characters in the movie. The Sheriff in the book goes on at length a few times about how great his wife is, and how Llewelyn's wife is really the better half of that pair, and how he's sure Llewelyn knows it and whatever, and I'd say what you get of the female characters in the book kind of backs that up. The female characters are certainly not violent at all, and seem mostly unaffected by that whole violent world of drugs and money, up until Chigurh goes to visit Llewelyn's wife at the end. But her demise is described as Llewelyn's fault by Chigurh, and it either is or it's Chigurh's fault. In any case, the women are truly innocents. But they seem like real characters just as much as any of the men are real characters. In the movie, I'm not sure quite that that came across at all. I don't think the Coens were really interested in that aspect of the story much at all. Llewelyn's wife mostly seemed kind of hapless, and like just the type who sits and stares at the television and that's all she's good for. Of course, her mom was comic relief, and I think she mostly was in the book, as well, but it's weird that the only female character from the book that really got fully translated in the movie, and even got sort of amplified, is the elderly woman for comic relief. The Sheriff's wife was in the movie, and I can't remember if she actually appeared in the book or if she was always only discussed by the Sheriff. But she was very genuinely important to the Sheriff in the book, very genuinely important as a person, as his wife, as sort of his moral compass or something. I think she just kind of seemed like a benevolent non-entity in the movie. It would be hard to convey the importance of someone who's even more beside the story than anyone else in a movie, I guess. But they included the Sheriff voiceover stuff, and none of his discussion of how important his wife was made it into the movie. I think there was a subtle point being made by McCarthy in the book, and I think the Coens just ignored it or didn't notice it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the point he was trying to make, but it did add a level of nuance to the novel that I think would've not been a bad addition to the movie. This isn't really all that much of a criticism, I'd say, but I did come up with it pretty quickly when I was thinking of something more to discuss about the movie to add the dialogue of the dying Mexican in my cover of the first chapter of No Country for Old Men for my National Novel Writing Month novel.

There Will Be Blood

There were so many amazing things about this film that it's kind of a shame the final fifteen minutes had to happen. I guess there needed to be some kind of final confrontation between DDL and preacher-guy, at least from the standpoint of narrative and story arc and everything, I mean that it "needed" a "climax" to properly follow the rules of movie-story, but the scene kind of fell victim to that old Great Acting = screaming idea, and the only redeeming thing about the final scene was that there was, indeed, blood.

I suppose, since PTA aspires so much to be Robert Altman, that, like his hero, you just have to take the good with the bad. There was even some of that in Punch Drunk Love, when PTA let Phillip Seymour Hoffman go nuts with his little scream/acting bug.

Enough complaining, though; this movie was incredible right from the start. It was at least ten minutes in before there was any dialogue, and it would be pretty hard to convince me that the opening wasn't a pretty direct reference to 2001, with all the origins-of-man symbolism that might entail. The pan up to the hills with Jonny's score climaxing in a long martian-chord drone, and the score's subsequent descent as the camera pans back down, that whole little shot was easily one of the best bits of film I've ever seen. Worth the price of admission alone.

And it might even have been out done by the well explosion sequence: the way it comes out of nowhere, the totally arrhythmic beating and hammering that gradually finds its way into an insistent pounding not unlike a heartbeat, with the long takes of so many men running around frantically, and the oil geyser burning bright orange against a deep blue sky. I wish I could watch that scene over and over again. It was incredible.

Jonny Greenwood's score is incredible, and PTA is proving with this movie and PDL that he knows how to use scores better than almost anyone else out there, with the possible exception of that guy who made Huckabees, whatever his name is, which I should be able to remember but I can't.

No discussion of this movie should exclude a mention of Paul Dano. DDL was great, of course, but he kind of always is, and he's kind of always great in the exact same way. Paul Dano, though; wow. He might be the best American actor to hit the scene since Johnny Depp. His performance in Little Miss Sunshine was probably the most overlooked thing about the movie, and probably because of the fact that he wasn't speaking for most of the movie. Here he has no shortage of lines, and he should get some kind of Oscar recognition just for completely holding his own in every scene he shares with DDL. I'm really looking forward to watching this kid's career.