Breaking the Line

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Micmacs": Winsome, Lose Some

 
Movie critics rarely get the chance to be surprised. Even at top-tier festivals, where we're among the first in the world to lay eyes on a given film, the experience is almost always subject expectations: I hope this is better than so-and-so's last movie; X programmer says it's this year's big discovery. Once I've decided I'm going to see a movie, whether by choice or because of an assignment, I generally stop reading about it, to the extent that I've sat down in a theater not knowing what language I'm about to hear. But the true virgin viewing is a regrettable casualty of the profession.

One of the purest and most delightful surprises of my moviegoing life took place when I was a college freshman. My (then-)girlfriend and I took the train into Philadelphia on a Sunday afternoon. The area we chose to explore is now is full of hip restaurants and nightclubs spilling over with the mid-Atlantic equivalent of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, but back then, it was a ghost town; we couldn't even find an open place to eat. Since there was nothing else to do, we thought we'd see a movie, but in those pre-internet days (ow, my back!) the titles on the Ritz at the Bourse marquee were entirely unfamiliar. This, however, seemed intriguing:

 
It was love, enhanced by the feeling that we'd discovered this joyous contrivance all on our own, the movie-theater equivalent of stepping into a dingy wardrobe and emerging in Narnia. Delicatessen remains a personal favorite,  with City of Lost Children close behind. (The paper for which I reviewed the latter has long since vanished from the web, but I'll dig it out and post it if it's not too great an embarrassment.) With Amélie, of course, I had to share, but only a true curmudgeon (not a dabbler comme moi) would begrudge the spreading of so much mirth.

All of which brings us, via the scenic route, to Micmacs, Jeunet's latest film, and a pointed return to the whimsical style of the earlier films after the melodramatic detour of and A Very Long Engagement. It's a delightful movie at times, a sentiment that predominated when I first saw it last fall. But months later and a second time through, I found the sugar high wearing thin, particularly with regard to the immodest charisma of star Dany Boon. The film's French title, Micmacs à tire-larigot, translates as something like "non-stop shenanigans," which about covers it, for good or for ill. (Side note: The title is a colloquial mashup, and thus mildly untranslatable, but I ran my version past a longtime friend with a PhD in French Lit., and she checked it with a native speaker in Paris. Vive le journalisme!) Micmacs is charming, but relentlessly so, and it starts to wear on you after a while. We can only thank the stars that Jeunet wasn't able to follow through on his desire to film in 3D. More along those lines via the good folks at Salon.

"Stagecoach" Rides Again (and "The Quiet Man" Makes Some Noise)

 
There are people, or so I gather, who don't rate John Ford's Stagecoach along with commonly held masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Those people are, how you say, wrong. Ford's 1939 movie may not have the upfront autocritique of later movies, but he's still plenty conscious of the downside of the myth of the West, as well as its necessity. Criterion's new Blu-ray makes the movie look right purty, as I write in the Los Angeles Times. Another formerly canonized Ford whose reputation has wrongly dropped in recent years is The Quiet Man, which I wrote up for FIPRESCI's online mag Undercurrent a while back. I'd love to see Criterion take a whack at that one as well, since the existing DVDs are just this side of dreadful. Hop to it, fellows.

 

This Is the Way the World Ends, Maybe: Evaluating Cinematic Apocalypses

 
Anyone who had the misfortune to ask me about Sundance 2009 knows that there was one movie I couldn't shut up about: Irena Salina's devastating documentary Flow. Although I tend to meet informational docs with a heavy dose of skepticism — if you just want to put facts across, you're better off writing a nice long New Yorker article, or getting Elizabeth Kolbert to do it for you — the information in Flow was alarming enough to overwhelm my habitual antipathy towards Sundance's traditionally po-faced issue films. In essence, the movie argues that the most endangered natural resource of the 21st century is not oil but fresh drinking water, which a combination of environmental degradation and exploding population makes scarcer and more precious by the day. Apart from the obvious humanitarian implications — the U.N. says that waterborne illnesses are the leading cause of death in developing countries — the political pressure generated by the increasingly valuable commodity has already begun to express itself in terms of military conflict. Former Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has predicted that "the next war will be fought over water, not politics."

In the A.V. Club, my colleagues and I poll a wide variety of expert observers on the feasibility of a wide variety of cinematic disaster scenarios, from the likely (the variably catastrophic climate change of An Inconvenient Truth) to the less so (Pontypool's language-borne virus). I think it's pretty clear what movie I chose. My entry is fairly straightforward, but the more far-out examples draw some pretty fascinating results.

Dear "24": Thoughts on the End of a Show

 
TV shows become part of our lives in a way like no other form of entertainment. No matter how much people may love Tom Hanks, they don't corner him at the mall and talk to him like he's Forrest Gump. Even if they don't change over the years, we do, and when they end a chapter of our lives, perhaps a small and insignificant one, closes. 24 is, or was, the rare show that I watched from the first episode to the last — in real time, as it were. Lord knows it wasn't always worth the commitment, but I'm glad I stuck it out, as my farewell to the show at Salon makes clear. For obvious reasons, it was written quickly, and late into the night, but I think I conveyed something of what it feels like to stay with a show for the long haul, through good and (very) bad. I loved the show, and I'm glad it's over.

"Cocksucker Blues" Comes Out of Exile

 

Well, a little piece of it does, at least. The great majority of Cocksucker Blues, Robert Frank's chronicle of the 1972 tour following the release of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., remains strictly verboten, the result of an injunction barring public screenings unless Frank himself is present. But 11 minutes of the long-suppressed film turns up on a DVD included with the ultra-super-mega-deluxe version of the Exile reissue, and the quality is striking enough to raise (almost certainly futile) hopes that there's a pristine transfer of the entire film lurking somewhere in the Stones' digital vaults.

In a piece for Salon, I offer a brief recap of Cocksucker's sordid history, and contrast Frank's dolorous portrait of the wages of fame with the antic snapshot offered by Peter Whitehead's Charlie Is My Darling, a vérité chronicle of the Stones' 1965 Irish tour which has likewise been kept underground, if perhaps for more prosaic reasons. As with any band of their stature and long-running tenure, the Stones' history is their greatest and most marketable asset, so it's not surprising that they carefully manage access to their archives. But their history isn't just theirs, and it's worth seeking out the two films if only to take a step away from the official record and reclaim a little piece piece of the past.

Favorite Scenes: M, Blow-Out and Toy Story 2

 
And on a slightly more edifying note, my A.V. Club compadres and I take a whack at picking three scenes we love from a potentially infinite array of sources. My selections — all scenes I dearly love, but also the first three that came to me, because how else would you pick — are the magnificent opening of Fritz Lang's M (which, for those who like to break things down thusly, I might call the most perfect opening of any movie, ever), the loss-of-childhood montage from Toy Story 2 (sob!), and the devastating climax of Brian De Palma's Blow-Out. Skip to page 5 of the comments to see me at my most productive.

"Macgruber" Runs Out the Clock

 
Hey, even we fancy critic types gotta eat, right? And so I tromped off last night to MacGruber, the (nominally) big-screen expansion of the Saturday Night Live bit too brief to qualify as a sketch. Further thoughts, such as they are, over at Salon.

"Looking For Eric": Ken Loach Raises His Game

 

Ken Loach has been erring on the side of dull virtue of late, at least when his movies have managed to cross the pond (for the last decade, he's been batting about .500). But it's a pleasure to relate that Looking for Eric returns Loach to the character-driven charm of his heyday, recalling breakthrough films like Raining Stones and Riff-Raff. In my review, I sing the praises of the movie's gentle fantasy, while knocking off a few points for its last-reel turn to melodrama.  Still, if you've got any weakness for winsome but reality-based stories of working-class life, this one will hit you where you live.

Harmony Korine on Trash Humpers: "They are kind of artists of mayhem."

 
It hasn't been long since I last wrote about Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers, but here we go again. My interview with Korine is now up at the A.V. Club, and already the "genius or fraud" debate is raging on. I'm a noncombatant as far as that particular fray is concerned, but I'll go to the mat for Korine as an artist worth taking seriously, if also with a grain of salt. He's not always his own best advocate, and our talk turns up a few pieces of evidence that will come in handy to those on the fraud side of the fence, including the image of Korine working out the film's daisy-chained VCR aesthetic with the help of a professional editor (albeit one that, he claims, was 3/4 blind in both eyes). Whether you hate him or love him, I think it's a good read.

In (Guarded) Praise of 2012

 
I pride myself on not slowing down to look at traffic accidents, since I regard gaper delays as one of the more compelling pieces of evidence that someone should just drop the bomb and get it over with. But as more of my friends registered their reaction to Roland Emmerich's Earth-go-boom actioner 2012, I started to feel a strange urge to see it. Luckily, at least for me, there's the A.V. Club's I Watched This on Purpose, which gave me a place to detail the experience. 

A lot of it, needless to say, is played for laughs, but there's a gratifying discussion developing in the comments section with regard to the one area where I single Emmerich out for praise. Unlike many big-ticket directors, from the blithering Michael Bay to the overpraised Christopher Nolan, Emmerich knows how to stage a spatially coherent action sequence, which is another way of saying that when John Cusack yells out "We've got to get to the other side of the freeway!" you know where the freeway is and can chart his progress toward that goal. Compare that to the vertiginous swirl of The Dark Knight's set pieces, or the incoherent blur of Transformers 1 and 2. It ain't rocket science, or at least it shouldn't be, but there's an elementary level of craft that's missing from even some highly successful movies, a worrying indication that audiences don't mind having their buttons jabbed at the expense of knowing what the hell is going on from shot to shot. I realize I'm in danger of praising Emmerich for being a hack, and I'm not placing him on the level of Cameron or Spielberg, but his core competence at the very least made 2012 a substantially less painful watch than the majority of summer blockbusters.