From Word To Word

I have been watching far too many films lately, and I have far too much that I want to write about them, so I have not been able to write anything at all, and my list only gets longer.  This post is a an attempt to catch myself up, though at the expense of doing some of these films justice.  I have written similar posts before about my reading, and I may just make a habit of posting something like this every few months, just to keep myself on top of things.

Avatar by James Cameron (2009) – The best thing that I can say about this script is that it remains mostly inconspicuous.  If I was to say more, I would be forced to call the plot cliche and the story racially stereotypical and the character development both shallow and predictable.  The acting is generally of a similar caliber:  good enough not to distract but otherwise uninspired and uninspiring, even from some of the more established names from whom something more might have been expected.

Even so,  despite all of these criticisms, I would not hesitate to list Avatar among the most impressive film experiences of my life.  Too much has been written already about the 3D and the special effects and the visual scope of the film, so I will not go over these things again, but the greatest testament to the power of these elements is probably the fact that they are able to make a mediocre script and barely passable acting into the highest grossing film of all time.

Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (1954) – This was my second Kurosawa film, but it may as well have been my first, since I saw Yojimbo so long ago that it is only a very hazy memory for me now.  I will not make the vain attempt to describe the film or the director for those who are unfamiliar with them, but I do want to discuss two scenes that I liked particularly.  They both centre around a peasant girl and the youngest of the seven samurai who have have been hired by her village to protect it from bandits.  The two fall in love, as might be expected, but they are separated both by class and by the ambiguous relationship that the peasants have with the samurai, both relying on their strength to maintain the social order and also fearing that their strength might be used to undermined that social order, to take the peasants’ food and daughters by force.

In one scene, the two lovers are sitting in a meadow of flowers, a place that has already been visually associated with the young samurai.  The peasant girl basically offers herself to the samurai, but he hesitates, and she becomes angry, questioning his manhood and his status as a samurai.  During this scene, there is a shot of the two lovers sitting, turned toward each other, face to face, and the camera pans behind the samurai, so that the girl’s face is increasingly occluded and eventually eclipsed by his head. It is as if the girl’s beauty is being obscured by the many questions that the samurai has to consider or as if the girl herself is being eclipsed by her lover.

In a later scene, the two face each other once again, but now across a huge bonfire in the village square.  The girl is  at the door of a hut, and her invitation is clear to the samurai, but he hesitates again, and the camera alternates between their two gazes as they look at each other across the fire, the symbol both of their passion but also of the considerations that separate them.  The scene culminates with the samurai crossing to the other side of the fire to consummate their perhaps ill considered love.

These two sequences are fabulous.  They are so tightly blocked and filmed, so symbolically suggestive on various levels, that they almost stand as stories unto themselves.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog  (2009) – If I was forced to describe this film in a single sentence, I would say that it is a colossal practical joke being played by the director and the principal actor on the audience and the rest of the cast.  It is as though Herzog took the script of a completely conventional cop film and told most of the cast to take it ever so seriously.  Then, letting only Nicholas Cage and maybe Val Kilmer in on his intentions, he set about shooting the film as a systematic mockery of both the Hollywood cop flick and the culture that produces it.  There are three highlights for me.

First, there is the scene where Nicholas Cage, high on cocaine, enters the apartment where his team is staking out a suspect.  He sees two lizards on the table and asks why they are there.  Of course, nobody else sees the lizards, so Cage turns and looks out the window for what seems like two minutes, all the while, in the foreground, the two lizards are climbing over each other.  The scene closes with Cage, at long last, turning back to glance at the lizards once again.

Second, there is the scene where a car has crashed after hitting an alligator.  The shot that closes the scene is filmed from the perspective of another alligator and looks very much like handicam footage.  The shot lasts for perhaps a minute, and there are some indications that the alligator is being prodded with a stick so that it will move.

Third, there is the scene where one set of gangsters is gunned down by another.  Cage, high once again, tells a gunman to shoot one of the corpses again.  “Why?” the gunman asks.  “Because his soul’s still dancing,” Cage replies, and the camera shows the corpse’s doppelganger breakdancing in the middle of the floor until the body is indeed shot again and the soul drops awkwardly to the floor.

This film is a must see, I think, but only if you are prepared to watch it from the same ironic perspective that it was directed.

Watchmen by Zack Snyder (2009) – I did not love this film.  I did not even like it as much as the graphic novel, which I liked less than many others told me I would.  The narrative of the pirates, which is my favourite part of the book, is cut entirely from the film, though there are for obvious filmic reasons for this.  The music, which seems appropriate where it is mentioned in the book, seems often jarring and awkward when it is actually played in the film.  The narrative, which is pleasantly complex in the book, appears only hurried and shallow in the film.  I am thankful, in short, that I paid nothing to see it.

Sanjuro by Akira Kurosawa (1962) – This film is a sequel of sorts to Yojimbo, and it might be summarized by the phrase, repeated several times in the course of the story, that the best sword remains sheathed.  The hero, a grizzled samurai, is told this first by the noblewoman whom he rescues near the beginning of the film, and he repeats the phrase to himself in the final scene, but much of the film reinforces this idea less obviously, showing how most violence is unnecessary, and how it is the stupidity of some that makes violence necessary for others.

The final scene recapitulates this theme succinctly.  Sanjuro is confronted by a samurai whom he has tricked and defeated throughout the course of the film.  Sanjuru has removed his hands from his sleaves and has tucked them against his body under his kimono, and though I am not certain whether there are the cultural connotations for this stance, it is certainly a passive one, with his hands far from his sword and encumbered by his clothing.  He remains in this position even once confronted, telling his opponent that he does not want to fight, that enough blood has been spilled already.  He is, visually and symbolically, sheathed, but his opponent is persistent, as movie villains so often are, and he is forced to unsheathe himself and slay his enemy.  He is, as he says himself a moment later, a sword that cannot remain sheathed.

This blend of symbolism and reflection with what remains essentially an action film, all very beautifully shot, is what makes Kurosawa’s films so appealing.

49th Parallel by Michael Powell (1941) – As a Canadian, I find 49th Parallel often amusing, since it portrays Canada as a nation of trappers and natives and Hutterites and dillettant democrats, which most Canadians would have recognized only as a stereotype even at the time the film was made.  The propgandist elements of the film are also enetrtaining at a remove of some seventy years, sounding mostly forced and mostly unnatural.  The story, however, still remains compelling, and the pacing is superb, creating a thriller that builds in intensity without having to resort to cliche plot techniques.  The score, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is also very good.  I would recommned it very highly for a February evening with a glass of scotch.

On January 2nd, I wrote my usual preliminary post for the Dinner and a Doc that was upcoming on the 9th of the month.  I indicated that we would be watching The Price of Sugar by Bill Haney, a film that explores the working conditions of Haitians who have illegally immigrated to cut sugar cane on plantations in the Dominican Republic.  It focuses specifically on the work of Father Christopher Hartley to improve the conditions on the plantations in what is now his former parish, plantations that are largely owned by the Vicini family.

On January 4th, several days before the screening, I received an email from the Washington legal firm of Patton Boggs, which is representing the Vicini family.  The email expressed dismay at my decision to show the film and included a forty-five page copy of the legal injunction that the firm has submitted to the courts, outlining the various respects in which the Vicini family feels that the film has misrepresented them and their interests.

On January 9th, I showed the film anyway.

Today, on January 14th, I am now posting the email that was sent to me by Patton Boggs along with the message that I do not intend to be bullied, now or ever, about the films that I decide to screen in the privacy of my own home, and let us be clear: the act of sending forty-odd pages of legal injunction is nothing more than mere bullying.

It has no legal function, since a defamation suit against the filmmaker has no bearing whatsoever on my right to watch the film in my own home.

Neither does it serve to correct misinformation.  Forty-odd pages of legal injunction will never be read by anyone, and any real intent to be corrective would have been much better served by a two or three page summary of the Vicinis’ objections.

It certainly does not provide proof of anything.  That the Vicinis object to their portrayal in the film and have filed a defamation suit proves absolutely nothing, in either direction, and even should the judge rule in their favour, I would still have some reservations about the ability of The District Court of Massachusetts to arrive at an informed judgment on a case whose material evidence lies mostly in a foreign state under the control of one of the interested parties.

The only thing that sending this legal document does  is attempt to intimidate people out of watching and showing and addressing the film for themselves.  The only thing it does is try to convince people that they should censure themselves at the discretion of those with the money to retain large legal firms that will send impressive looking swathes of legal material to anyone who shows up on a google alert.

I will not be so intimidated, and neither should you.  Inform yourself of both perspectives on the question, by all means.  Just do not let yourself be intimidated into letting the question drop.  In fact, I suggest that you go and rent the film this weekend, or even better, you can always borrow it from me.

For those who are interested in further persepctives on this dispute, there have been some interesting articles posted by  The World Socialist Web Site, by The Boston Globe, and by the National Catholic Reporter.

Having spent the better part of four years now immersing myself in documentary film, I am starting to find a kind of comfort with the medium, a familiarity with its tendencies and its habits, with its movements and its processes.  I am discovering by contrast, however, how little familiarity I still have with the feature film, and I am realizing also that the process of making myself familiar with feature films will need to be much different than the process I used to familiarize myself with documentaries.  The difference is primarily this: I had almost no experience with documentary prior to approaching the medium seriously, so I had few preconceptions that needed to be overturned, while I have had a fairly extensive experience of the feature film, just by existing in my culture, but most of this experience has been with the lowest common denominator of Hollywood film.  So, while my approach to documentary film was to watch everything I could find, regardless of its quality, my approach to feature film, begun only a few weeks ago, has been to watch what are generally considered to be the best films.  So, I have been going into the public library, which is just down the street, and I have been browsing the shelves until I come to a Criterion Collection film, any Criterion Collection film, and I have been letting it be my film for the week.

For those who are unfamiliar with The Criterion Collection, it is, according to its own mission statement, “a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films” that is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements.”  It is, in other words, the creator and defender of a certain filmic canonicity that I hope will be the counterbalance to the popular film that has largely formed my experience to date.  Thus far, I have seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972); Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1952).  During this time I have also seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood (2007), which will likely be a Criterion Collection film itself at some point or another.

Though these films are all very different from each other, they are similar in possessing what I will call a patient camera, one of the characteristics that I am coming to see as a distinction between strong films from weak ones.  A patient camera takes its time with its subjects.  It is not afraid of being still, of holding a shot, of showing silence and inaction, of including repetition.  It is interested in images of slowness and silence and stillness and duration as much as it is interested in images of speed and loudness and movement and transition.  Let me give several examples.

The  opening section of Solaris is a series of very long shots, either entirely still or moving slowly, of nature and of the protagonist, who remains mostly still and entirely speechless. There is only a very small amount of ambient sound, and the images are mostly of still objects, though some of them do move organically, slowly, almost hypnotically.  These images serve to parallel the movement of the great alien sea that the protagonist will later encounter, but they also create a tone of silence and stillness and aloneness and reflection that will be paralleled by the protagonists’ journey into space.

There Will Be Blood opens with another such speechless scene, though one that contains much more activity, and this forms a pattern for many of the film’s dialogue scenes, which are static or broken or inclusive of long silences but interrupted or ended by bursts of anger and action and violence and even murder.  Each of these scenes seems to underwrite how difficult it is for the protagonist to interact with the rest of humanity that he finds so repulsive.

Two-Lane Backtop has so little dialogue in it that the voices seem like intrusions when the characters finally do speak, and the film is full of long steady shots of the occupants of the vehicles as they drive through the landscape.  The dialogue is most often represented with a medium-range shot that does not require cutting from face to face to get the reactions of the characters, so the conversations are largely uncut, even when the lapse into silence, as the film itself finally does also, as the last scene eschews any audio at all.

In The Wages of Fear, the scenes of the nitroglycerin-loaded truck are shot in this patient way also.  There are stationary shots of the truck moving slowly across the screen.  There are fixed shots that track with the truck along its slow journey.  There are seemingly endless shots of the truck’s wheels moving inch by inch through potholes and ruts in the road.  These shots are intercut with one another, and no single shot is terribly long, but the sense is of slowness and tension and apprehension.

In all of these ways, and in many others also, the cameras of these films are patient.  They do not cut or shoot for speed simply because speed is possible.  They take their time in order to create a filmic time and space in which the images and the characters and the dialogue can find a pace and a movement that is proper and that is visually effective.  They are not tempted into the illusion that only speed and activity are able to create interest.  They recognize that interest can also be found in stillness and silence, and that even greater interest can be created in the contrast between the two.  I am discovering, I think, that this kind of patience is the mark of a film worth seeing.

I read an interview with Werner Herzog in the Globe and Mail this morning.  I love Herzog, not just his films, of which I have seen too few, but his persona as a director, and the interview provides some fabulous examples of this persona at work.  For example, how many Hollywood directors are capable of an observation this articulate and this profound:  “I see a rigorous correlation between the explosion of instruments of communication, cellphones, the Internet, virtual reality, and the amount of human solitude, existential solitude. I can’t fully explain it, I can only observe it. More people are withdrawn, and they are incapable of real dialogue. The 21st-century will be the century of solitude.”  If more of our directors were capable of this kind of thoughtful reflection, if more of them were capable of articulating themselves half so well, perhaps we would have more films worth watching.

The Guelph Festival of Moving Media is upcoming on the first weekend of November, from Thursday the 5th to Sunday the 8th.  The festival focuses on cinema and social justice and usually includes an eclectic mixture of documentaries, and this year’s program includes several that interest me very much.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto by Brett Gaylor, is a film that Dave Humphrey brought to my attention a while ago, but I have not yet had a chance to see it.  It focuses on the music of Girl Talk, which is created using samples and mash-ups, and which therefore raises some questions about copyright and free culture.  I will try to make this screening if at all possible.

I would also like to see Alanis Obomsawin’s Professor Norman Cornett, which explores the pedagogy of the former McGill University Professor.  Not only is his story an interesting one, but the issues that it raises about teaching and education are ones that concern me particularly.

I will also make a point of seeing Anders Ostergaard’s Burma VJ, because of how closely it relates to the themes of the documentary course that I will be teaching in January.  The film looks at high risk journalism, focusing on citizen journalists in Burma, and I am hopeful that it might be a film that I can use in my course in order to explore just this subject of journalism in areas of social upheaval.

Taking up a slightly lighter topic, Nollywood Babylon by Ben Addelman and Samir Malla also piques my curiosity.   It looks at the rapidly growing film industry in Nigeria, where the making of the films seems to be every bit as entertaining as the films themselves.  I have the premonition that I will like this one very much.

My biggest disappointment will be having to miss Murray Siple’s Carts of Darkness, which happens to be playing at the same time as Professor Norman Corbett.  It explores the lives of people who survive by collecting bottles in Vancouver, and is just the sort of quirky documentary that appeals to me.  If only it were playing at another time.

The whole of the lineup actually looks quite good, and the tickets are cheap, so do check the GFOMM website, and make some time in your calendar this first weekend in November.  Better yet, email me, and we can go see something together.

It was my wife who introduced me to the genre of the food movie.  We were still in highschool, and the film she showed me was Babette’s Feast by Gabriel Axel.  I have now seen this film seven or eight times, and I am always moved by the final scene where the people of the village begin to recognize each other again as they eat the food Babette is serving them.  Before I had even begun to articulate the philosophical and theological importance of the table to me, I intuitively recognized something significant in this scene, and I would recommend the film without reservation to anyone who loves food and to anyone who loves a good and simple story.

Last night, my wife and I discovered a similar film in Ali Raffi’s The Fish Fall in Love.  It is set in Iran, and it relates the story of a woman who runs a restaurant in the house of her former fiance, who had disappeared many years earlier but has now returned.  Frightened that he will evict her from the house and from her means of providing for herself, she and the other women who work with her decide to cook for him as a way of convincing him to allow them to stay.  The film is beautifully simple.  The story does not try to say too much.  The acting is understated and intimate.  The music does not overwhelm, as it too often does now in Hollywood films.   The film is content, and rightly so, to be what it is.

The scenes that take place in the kitchen and around the table are accomplished beautifully.  There is a real sense of the unique combination of labour and community that characterizes the kitchen, and an attention to the interactions that take place around the table.  There are also several places where food is offered from one person to another, and these scenes are marked with a similar degree of significance.  In every case, the food takes on a symbolic role, a ritual role, becomes a carrier of meaning and value.  Because of this role, the food itself is also the subject of the film’s gaze on many occasions, as the camera follows the food from the market and the garden, to the cutting board and the simmering pot, and finally to the plate.  These images produce an almost physical pleasure in me.  They are beautiful aesthetically, and even more so, because they are also beautiful symbolically.

I am not sure how readily available the film is wherever you might happen to be, but it is well worth the effort to go and find it.

Let me say, right from the beginning, that I have never been one of Quentin Tarantino’s biggest fans.  I enjoy his films, mostly.  I think his dialogue is often very good.  I love the way that he frames and moves through his shots.  I am not, however, able to respond to his films in the ways that other people do.  On the one hand, I cannot wallow in the popular culture references, in the violence, in the genre mashing that attracts the greater part of his audience.  On the other hand, neither can I find much profundity in the irony and social commentary that attracts his more intellectual admirers.  I find his work far more interesting than the generic Hollywood films that are generally found in theatres, of course, but this is not exactly a grand achievement.

On Tuesday night, however, I went with Don Moore and John Jantunen to see Inglourious Basterds, and I think my opinion of the film might very well be summed up in the words that close it.  They are spoken by Aldo, an American officer in charge of a Jewish special forces unit that has been dropped into Nazi France to wreak havoc on the occupying forces.  Throughout the film, he has allowed only a very few of his Nazi prisoners to survive, and he has carved a swastika into the foreheads of each of these men as a way of marking them as Nazis even after they have removed their uniforms.  He takes a certain pride in this operation, remarking at one point that he is getting quite good at it, and suggests that you only get to be the best with practice.

In the final scene, Aldo is taking charge of a German SS officer who has made a deal with the Allies.  He knows that he cannot kill his prisoner, but he is also unwilling to let the man escape his crimes, so he resorts again to carving a swastika on his prisoner’s forehead.  The closing shot is of Aldo’s face from below, from the perspective of the newly branded officer, as Aldo says, “I think this may be my masterpiece.”

All of which is to say that Tarantino, at least in my opinion, could have put these same words in his own mouth, and perhaps, in a way, he even does, since there are more than a few similarities between how Aldo and Tarantino use violence as a medium.  In any case, whether or nor he had the audacity to say so himself, I think Inglourious Basterds is indeed Tarantino’s masterpiece, at least to date.  What distinguishes it from his previous films, at least in my opinion, is the structural complexity of the story, the many layers of parallelism that engage the audience itself in the film’s social and ethical critique.  I could give many examples of this, but one will have to suffice.

In the climactic sequence, a Jewish theatre owner is hosting the première of a Goebbles film.  The entirety of the Nazi high command is in attendance, so the owner and her black lover have decided to lock the doors and burn the theatre down around the audience.  The film being premièred is about a young German soldier who single-handedly defends a tower against 300 Allied soldiers, and the footage is mostly of these Allied soldiers being gunned down in various ways.  Hitler and the other Nazi luminaries are shown laughing at this carnage, and Hitler even mentions to Goebbles that the film is his best work.

This moment produces an interesting irony, however, considering that the audience of Tarantino’s film has been similarly laughing at depictions of German soldiers being shot, scalped, smothered, strangled, and beaten with baseball bats.  Suddenly, the audience of Tarantino’s film is being paralleled with the audience of Goebbles’ film,  and our laughter begins to appear disturbingly akin to Hitler’s laughter, a laughter that comes from seeing the death of those we have always assumed to be deserving of nothing other than death.

Film logic has always told us that Nazis are the one unambiguous evil.  Nazis appear on screen only to be killed.  They can be killed without conscience.  In fact, they can even be killed with a certain humour, and we will laugh along.  Yet, this laughter, Tarantino implies, is very much Hitler’s laughter also.  The only difference is in the kinds of people that we are amused to see dying.

This is not say that Tarantino is in any way excusing the Nazis.  Quite the opposite: without offering them any excuse whatsoever, he is implicating his own audience in their behaviour and implying that we are also guilty of the same unambiguous evil that the Nazis have come to represent, and when the theatre burns down around Hitler and his staff, there is the uncomfortable implication that we, as an audience of Tarantino’s film, might expect a similar fate.

We are left to wonder whether there might not be those who would indeed happily burn us in our seats because we have been all too content to watch them dying, because we have always assumed that they exist only to die.  There may not be an orphaned Jewish girl behind the projector or her persecuted black lover behind the screen, but there are any number of candidates to take their places, some who have already taken their places, the oppressed and forgotten people of the world for whom violence and torture and terrorism appear to be the only choices available.

Which brings me back to that final scene, where Aldo is etching a Swastika in his prisoner’s forehead.  Perhaps Tarantino’s film puts us in the place of that prisoner.  After all, it is in that moment, for the first time, that the camera takes the point of view of one of its characters, and we are made to look, through the SS officer’s eyes, at the face of the one who has just marked us forever.  Perhaps we are meant to recognize that we too have committed the same kinds atrocities through the very ways that we live, that we too have cut a deal that lets us escape responsibility for the violence that our lives inflict on others, and that we too, through the film, are now being marked as a permanent reminder of our culpability, though we have no uniform that others might recognize.  Perhaps, Tarantino’s film is his way of sitting on our chests, taking a knife in his hand, and marking us as those who are content to have certain kinds of people die so that we can live the way we do.  Perhaps this is his masterpiece.  Perhaps.

I have not had the time to write about many of the films that I have been watching lately, and I will not try to write about each of them separately now, but a few do deserve mention for one reason or another, so I will just list them here and offer a paragraph or two about why they interested me.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Benton Bailey
I was either too young or too sheltered to remember the scandal around Jim and Tammy Baker, so Tammy Faye had never been more than a caricature for me. Her name evoked only hair and mascara, and I never had any reason to wonder if she was anything more than her cosmetics.  Bailey’s film is concerned to address precisely this stereotype, so it is unabashedly sympathetic to her, but Tammy Faye herself is such an immense personality that the viewer, even one as cynical as I am, discovers some sympathy for her as well.  To this degree, at least, the documentary accomplishes its aim.

O Brother, Where Art Thou, directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
This film may seem at first to contradict my tendency to watch mostly documentary on the one hand or fantasy on the other, but I would in fact include this film in the category of the fantastical and recommend it as an admittedly flawed attempt at the sort of film that I think should be made more often.  I am constantly frustrated by our culture’s relation to its mythological and literary past.  We either regard it as being irrelevant and ignore it, or we regard it as being sacred and idolize it.  O Brother, Where Art Thou, however, does neither, choosing instead to take the themes of Homer’s Odyssey and to reinterpret them.  The result is a very good film in many respects, and one that provides a commentary on American culture on several levels, even if it is also one that too often falls prey to the cliches of Hollywood.

Sita Sings the Blues, directed by Nina Paley
This animated film does what O Brother, Where Art Thou could have done if it had not been limited by the need to sell theatre tickets . Sita Sings the Blues mixes South Asian mythology with a contemporary love story and with classic blues and jazz music to create a whimsical but moving story.  The music is used superbly.  The art is wonderful.  I can hardly recommend this film highly enough, and it has even been released free through a Creative Commons license, so you have no excuse not to watch it tonight.

Ballet Russes, directed by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine
I have seen only a single ballet in my life, and it was the ballet that everyone will have seen if they have seen only one: The Nutcracker.  I was young, and my only real memory of the performance is of my even younger brother asking my mother, “When are they were going to start talking in this movie.” Even so, I found Ballet Russes a very interesting documentary.  Though many of its interviews drag, and though the accounts of the interminable politics of the ballet become a little tedious, the story is remarkable, and it made the film well worth the evening I gave to it.

Outlander, directed by Howard McCain
I have an obsession with Beowulf. I confess it.  This means that I end up having to see every new adaptation of the story, even when it is horrible, and many of them are.  McCain’s version begins well, despite the obligatory Hollywoodisms, but the more that it tries to explain itself and the more that it tries to develop its characters, the worse it becomes.  The lengthy flashback sequence, which tries to explain and humanize the outlander, is a case in point.  It is mostly pointless and entirely tedious, and it destroys the pacing of the film besides.  The romantic element of the film is poorly acted and trite in the extreme.  The final action sequence is predictable and unconvincing.  In short, though it may not be the worst adaptation of Beowulf, I will stop well short of recommending it.

District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp
I was very pleasantly surprised by District 9.  When I heard that it was an alien film, my expectations were low.  When I heard that it was the director’s debut film, they sunk even lower.  When the reviews were mostly favourable, they sunk so low that I almost decided to see something else.  I was, however, as I said, very pleasantly surprised.  Now, make no mistake, it is a Hollywood action film produced by Peter Jackson, and it has all the violence and special effects that you would expect, but it also has a complexity of storyline and character that is entirely surprising in a film of this kind, particularly from a rookie writer and director.  It may even be worth your ten bucks to see it in the theatre.

I have been distracted these last few days, so I am only just getting around to writing about this past Saturday night’s Dinner and a Doc, which is a bit unfortunate, because it was a memorable evening, even if partly for the wrong reasons.

The first of these wrong reasons was a slew of cancellations. Some people were away because of March Break, others were ill, others had commitments, and so the only visitors who were added to the not inconsiderable population of our own home was a couple who had not been able to join us for Dinner and a Doc in almost a year. I was not too distraught. My intention has always been to show films that I would like to see anyway, and to watch them whether anyone joins me or not, and besides, I have often found that fewer people mean better conversation, especially when I have not had a chance to really converse with these people in some time, and especially when they have brought a nice bottle of wine.

The second of the unfortunate reasons was that, about halfway through the screening of the film, Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club, the couple who had come were called away by a minor family emergency, leaving just my wife, my mother, my mother-in-law, and me. Though we enjoy each other’s company, it was not exactly how we had expected the evening to unfold.

Fortunately, there were also many good reasons that the night was memorable, not least among them being the Smoked Beer and Cheddar Cheese Soup that I made, and the homemade bread and cinnamon buns that my mother baked to accompany it. The soup was not universally acclaimed, some finding the smoky taste a little overwhelming, but I enjoyed it very much, perhaps as much as any soup I have ever made. The opinion on the baking, however, was undivided. Loaves of whole grain bread and cinnamon buns filled with cranberries, both fresh from the oven, almost always produce a consensus of opinion, at least in my experience.

The film itself was also memorable, of course. Having heard so much about it, I was worried that it might not match my expectations, but I was not disappointed. The music is what it is: vital and marvellous, even for me, though Latin music is not at all a part of my regular listening. It is the musicians, however, who make the film compelling. Wenders arranges them in the homes and the streets and the buildings of their city and allows them to reminisce about their lives, causing their stories and their personalities to carry the narrative weight of the film, and creating the sense that the music is merely symbolic of the people who have spent their lives creating it.

I think that Wenders reinforces this idea that it is the musicians rather than the music who are the focus of the film by portraying the Amsterdam concert in black and white. Wenders had used black and white footage symbolically in at least one earlier film, Wings of Desire, a drama in which an angel decides to give up immortality and become human so that he can be with the woman he has come to love. Scenes from the angelic perspective are all shot in black and white in this film, while scenes from the human perspective are all in colour, representing the lack of feeling and emotion that is the cost of the angels’ immortality.

Considering this earlier usage of black and white film, I think that Wenders might be making a similar symbolic gesture in Buena Vista Social Club, keeping the footage of the concert in black and white to represent how it lacks the human life and vitality of the footage that is taken of the musicians in their own city and in their own homes. That the final Carnegie Hall concert is shown in colour might argue against this thesis, and while it might be that the black and white footage is merely intended to visually remind us of the fifties, the period when the Buena Vista Social Club was alive and active, I would argue that the effect of this footage is to mark a difference between when the musicians are on the stage and when they are in their homes. In the light of Wings of Desire, the black and white scenes seem to say, yes, you can have these wonderful musicians come and perform for you, but only at the price of removing them from the lives, and the emotions, and the contexts that make them who they are.

In this way, the film calls into question the act of going to the concert, at least insofar as this act is understood as a way to see musicians “live and in person”. In other words, it raises the problems of performance and identity, and it seems to argue that a meeting in the home is more live and in person than a concert in a hall. The film itself, however, is obviously as much a performance as a concert, and it is perhaps illusory to think that it offers any greater degree of intimacy than a music hall, but the subjects of the film make it difficult to maintain this kind of scepticism. However much they may be performing for the camera, however much Wenders may be arranging and prompting and editing their performances, there are moments when they seem to somehow emerge from the film and approach the audience.

Perhaps this is the reason that the final concert is shown in colour. Perhaps this is Wenders’ own concession that, however much media might distort their subjects, there are moments when the people themselves transcend the medium and come forth to us. Whatever the case, it is in this coming forth that the film finds itself. It is in the lives and persons of the musicians that it becomes what it is.

Sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes, I read a book that should be made into a film, a book that would be as good or even better in a visual medium.  The first such book that I remember, though there may have been others that I have now forgotten, was Matthew Lewis’ Gothic romance, The Monk, a tale about a perfect Priest who descends into everything from murder to incest to pacts with the devil.  There have been several other books that I have since imagined on the screen, most notably Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which Harold Pinter, I later discovered, had already made into a film that starred Anthony Hopkins as the priest, precisely as I had always imagined.

I bought another such book for a quarter yesterday: Kingsley Amis’ The Green Man.  I have long claimed to dislike Amis, though this opinion was based solely on my reading of The Biographer’s Moustache, a novel that lacks the substance even to justify the time it would take me to critique it.  The Green Man, however, is something different and, to my taste, something better.  It is not great literature, certainly, and it has many of the elements that I disliked in my first reading of Amis, but it is at least good fantasy, much better than most of the offal that the genre usually affords, and it is, I think, the perfect sort of story to adapt into film.  It is essentially a ghost story, though it also has some elements of a mystery story and of the satirical comedy story that Amis writes most often.  It is effective because the ghost story is engaging enough that it does not ever permit the narrative to stagnate too long in the satirical elements, which, in turn, never permit the ghost story to become a mere genre horror.

The story centres around a middle-aged, egotistical, vaguely alcoholic innkeeper named Maurice, whose life circulates around keeping his hotel running smoothly, on finding his next drink, and on convincing his mistress and his wife to join him for a threesome.  None of this should be surprising in an Amis novel.  Maurice’s more or less average life becomes interrupted, however, when the inn’s storied ghosts and monsters, which have been quiet for a hundred years or more, return to haunt him.  The resulting events contain enough mystery, suspense, horror, comedy, and eroticism to make any and all movie producers drool into their martinis.

So, what I need is for somebody to write the screenplay of The Green Man, and of The Monk as well if it can be managed.  I am most definitely not the person for the task.  Assuming that I had the interest, I lack even a basic knowledge of the form, and my writing style is not exactly conducive to writing popular entertainment.  Someone else will have to do it, and that someone may as well be you, so consider yourself commissioned.