True Stories

For about ten or so years there, David Byrne was pretty amazing. He still manages to pull off some pretty great stuff (see "Empire" from Grown Backwards) although he never has and never will match the consistency of his output from then. True Stories is almost like "The Big Country" from More Songs about Buildings and Food turned hilarious and stretched out into a feature length movie. It pulls off the same feat of being trenchantly of "the blandness of middle America" while at the same time being just as critical of the reflexive nature that criticism has for coastal people (he pulls this off, I think, by having the song/movie be from the perspective of a narrator who is obviously not from the place he's describing (and I think, though I may be projecting my actual knowledge of Byrne onto this, just as obviously from one of the coasts) and having that narrator adopt a faux-naive tone--or he seems to at once know more than he's letting on and not to know nearly as much as a he thinks he knows), but the movie/song isn't just critical. Both manage to also be kind of celebratory of the very differences they exploit to lay their criticisms. Also, they're very funny and moving. Byrne was just kind of brilliant.

Vertigo

It was pretty awesome to get to see this at the Castro. I should've known, I think, that this was filmed in San Francisco, but I didn't. I guess that made me enjoy it even more, since I was watching it at my favorite place in the whole city.

Hitchcock fuckin' knew how to make movies. It's as simple as that. And this one is probably about as perfect as they get.

My five favorite things:

1. The opening shot, with the extreme closeup of the ladder rung, the city all blurry behind it, and then the fairly quick pull out until it's just a small part of the overall shot, and then the criminal guy, the least important person in the whole movie, is the first guy we see.

2. The animation in the dream sequence. It surprised me, but it was beautiful.

3. The opening credits. I didn't get to watch the whole of 'em, but what I did see was astonishing. Possibly the best title sequence ever. No joke.

4. Midge literally painting herself into the position of object of desire, since no way would James Stewart ever actually do that himself. This was all really transparent Freudian stuff, but done so well that all you can do is just applaud it.

5. The whole introductory sequence of Madeline/Carlotta. That should be studied in school the way they make you study the Odyssey.

Days of Heaven

I love Malick. So much that I was kind of shocked after watching this to realize that he's only made four films, and that this is the last film of his that I hadn't watched yet. I mean, I kind of already knew that, but somehow the fact just didn't feel right. Anyway, I wish I could see this in a theater someday. Everything anyone says about the cinematography being amazing is true. It is.

It occurs to me as I'm writing this that part of why I felt like I'd watched a lot more Malick than actually exists is because I was forgetting that I've watched a lot of David Gordon Green's films, and his approach to film-making is to try to make more Malick films. I really can't distinguish between their films, I think, except by being aware of who made what. I feel like I should probably back off my Malick worship until I can tell the difference between his stuff and the stuff of his followers (followers? worshippers? acolytes? copiers?).

As I explained to Elliot, I really don't understand why so many people find Malick boring. I mean, I understand that it's because there's not a lot of dialogue and little plot and stuff, but I get kind of exhilarated watching his films cuz they're just wall-to-wall gorgeous. So I don't really understand how people don't respond to that.

More than "The New World," which is the other most recent Malick film I've seen, the plot seemed really tight in this movie, actually. It was really skeletal, but the scenes that advanced the plot did so incredibly efficiently, often with just a half a line of dialogue. In the end, though, I think kind of because of that swiftly moving plot, I felt like it was kind of short. I definitely wanted it to be longer, with more room to breathe. Which probably makes me very weird, I guess.

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.

The Darjeeling Limited

This was certainly better than I thought it'd be, I guess because for some reason I was thinking Wes Anderson was bound to descend into a mid-career slump of crap for a while here... Not sure exactly where I got that idea. But I would say he hasn't exactly entered that phase of his career. Though he has got the point that I don't think he's really trying to figure out anything new; he's just working on perfecting what he's getting at. I'm worried he's getting close to arriving there, and I hope he knows where to go from there.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a filmmaker aside from Kubrick who can actually control everything that you see in the frame to the extent that Anderson has managed to do at this point in his career. Even things you notice going on in the background have probably been consciously put there by Anderson, or at least taken into account. He goes about as far as it would be possible to go toward separating what he's shooting from reality. It's certainly a feat.

What does it mean that the main characters in this movie are probably the most mature main characters in any of his movies? And is that even true? I think it might be, except for maybe Anjelica Huston in Tenenbaums. It was great to see her pull off her character in this movie, too. There was no way she should have been able to make her character seem even remotely believable, but she ends storming into her scene like she's the only one with anything real going on. Wes Anderson should make a movie with Anjelica Huston as the main character. He owes it to the world. What he manages to get out of her is on a whole other level from everything else he's doing--even his resurrection of Bill Murray. Actually, I think that's a really good idea. Maybe it would allow him to escape from his little world of arrested development that, while certainly unique and interesting and entertaining, gets further and further from seeming like there's actually anything at stake in every film. I probably wouldn't even feel that way about it if it weren't for Anjelica Huston in this movie. But she really did seem more actually compelling than the three brothers during her brief intrusion into the movie.

***
(10/18)

The thing that bothered me the most about this movie, and it's something I tried to articulate to Elliot but that I also admitted to being uncomfortable with (it's a criticism I'm a little uncomfortable having) is the way the movie used the death of the Indian boy to trigger whatever "real" spiritual awakening the three brothers are supposed to have. First of all, it's just such an obvious move: the death of the Indian boy brings them out of themselves so they have to experience something beyond their own self-centered world; except that it's obviously the function of the death of the Indian boy to be that for them, so, for the movie, the death of the boy is just as much about them as everything else. I kept waiting for some moment when the audience would be forced to see the death as something outside of the symbolic world of the three brothers, but the movie never takes that step. I don't think it's just the fact that it's an Indian death triggering a spiritual experience for three white Americans: it's the fact that the narrative is so focused on the three brothers that really nothing outside of them can exist in and of itself, and this fact gives the audience permission to experience the boy's death as something purely functional and symbolic (along with everything else in the movie, of course...) And if a narrative is really nothing more than a creative presentation of thought or thinking, which it is, then this form of thinking encourages the audience to enclose experiences in symbolic trappings. I'm uncomfortable about this criticism because it's such a moralistic critique.