Colin Marshall

Extremes

Though it would be difficult to envision a cinematic sensibility further from mine than James Cameron's, Dana Goodyear's New Yorker profile of the man reveals higher-order qualities to be admired:

“This film integrates my life’s achievements,” he told me. “It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Another time, he said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

[ ... ]

“The words ‘No’ and ‘That’s impossible’ and phrases like ‘That can’t be done’ — that’s the stuff that gives him an erection,” the actor Bill Paxton, who has worked with Cameron since the early eighties, says. Cameron reserves a special quotient of his anger for suits who get in his way. “Tell your friend he’s getting fucked in the ass, and if he would stop squirming it wouldn’t hurt so much” was the message he once told a Fox producer to deliver to an executive at the studio.

[ ... ]

There is a chivalric aspect to Cameron’s antagonism; he figures his struggles in heroic terms. “I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time,” he says. “It’s very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy — a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they’re required to keep an agreement with you only if you’re successful, or they need you. I’ve tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don’t like it when people are deferential to me because I’m an established filmmaker. It’s a blue-collar sensibility.”

We happened to watch Xenogenesis, Cameron's very first short, in film class the other day. Here it is, fr yr viewing pleasure:

Rough, sure, but it probably ranks among my top three James Cameron movies. Avatar may be ridiculously ambitious, but man, does it ever look like a death march.

On a very related note, here is (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) David L. Ulin on William T. Vollmann. Or if you prefer, DLU on WTV. Or if you prefer, D-Ul on W-Voll:

Vollmann's abilities tend to be overshadowed by the sensational aspects of his career. Partly, it's the length of his books, but even more, it's the fixation on prostitutes and street life, and his tendency to put himself in the line of fire.

In 1982, fresh out of college, he went to Afghanistan to help the mujahedinagainst the Soviets; his account, "An Afghanistan Picture Show," was published in 1992. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the early 1990s, he survived a sniper attack that left his translator dead. While researching his 1994 novel "The Rifles" -- part of a seven-volume "Symbolic History" of America called "Seven Dreams" -- he spent two weeks at the Arctic Circle and nearly died of hypothermia.

These were death-defying stunts even for a young man; a decade and a half later, the father of a young daughter, his balance impaired, the hair at his temples graying, he seems heavier, slower, if not exactly the worse for wear.

For Vollmann, the issue is not just writing but also how he wants to live. "Last year," he recalls, "I was in Kurdistan in an area that had just been bombed. . . . We were going up a narrow canyon, right before twilight. It was getting dark, and I was looking down at the path and my glasses were all misted up with sweat. I was having a little trouble seeing my feet and there was a bit of a drop. And I thought, 'How much longer can I keep doing this?' And you never know. You either stop too soon or too late."

This is on purpose

Ted, my film production teacher, makes really solid selections of shorts to screen for us to discuss. Chris Marker's La jetée, for instance; one could hardly do better. He played Maya Deren's immortal Meshes of the Afternoon not long ago, and if you don't happen to be in the same film production class as me, you can watch it in the embedded player below instead. Now that it's on the net, I'm pretty sure it will go viral:



Some questionable responses led the post-screening discussion. "I hate the soundtrack!" Waaah. Give the baby his bottle. The most memorable came from some guy in the absolute back of the classroom — I'm an inveterate frontrow sitta, myself — who offered, "They probably just made that up as they went along, right?"

Ted helpfully explained that (a) improvising the entire thing would've been an utter impossibility, especially at the time and (b) the apparent investment strongly hints that there's more to it than dickings-around. "Film's expensive and hard to work with, and it was even more expensive and hard to work with in 1943," he said. "It's not like she just slapped it onto VHS. Given that, how likely is it that she would've committed to so much time and effort spent in the name of making things up as she went along?" I can't remember how things went afterward, but chances are the conversation devolved into a discussion of whether Kevin Smith can make movies.

This line of thought struck me as useful. Want to know how seriously you should take a work of art? Look at the investment. But taken too literally, this rule quickly becomes absurd: Michael Bay's Armageddon required a $140 million investment with countless cast, crew members and executives involved, so naturally you should watch it instead of, say, Shane Carruth's $7,000 Primer, right? But think about it like this: was it more of a sacrifice for Bay (and Jerry Bruckheimer) to drum up that 140 grand, or for Carruth to scrape together his seven? It's all about relative investment, not absolute investment.

I came across the same idea expressed differently in a 2006 New York Times profile of young "mumblecore" filmmaker Andrew Bujalski. Critic Dennis Lim writes:

In today's independent film landscape, Mr. Bujalski is at once an anomaly and a stubborn idealist. While digital video is the default medium for low-cost moviemaking, he insists on grainy 16 millimeter. "There's a deliberateness to film," he said. "If these films were on video they would feel a lot more frivolous. Film allows you to make the statement that this is on purpose."

As an audience member, look for the components that say, "This is on purpose." Thus, a creator, you'd better make damn sure to include those components yourself.

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

Two-thirds of the way through Danny Boyle's non-parodic Slumdog Millionaire, we're treated to this exchange between Jamal, the teenage hero who rises from impoverished orphanhood to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's hot seat, and Latika, the girl he's repeatedly sought out since leaving her behind in childhood:

“Come away with me.”
“And live on what?”
“Love.”

This appears not to be intended as a joke, nor as a "character error," the error being an unwitting stumble into the merciless warzone of melodrama. The entire film, I fear, is actually pitched like this. A kaleidoscopic, poundingly scored piece of near-magical-realism where the unlucky get lucky and just the right people find themselves in rare self-sacrificing moods at just the right time, it's an unapologetic fable. This is fine so far as it goes, except that, to our long-suffering friends subtlety, nuance and plausibility, it does indeed owe a few apologies.

But Boyle is, for better or worse, a die-hard filmmaker of conviction. When you've got as much cinematic energy as he does, hustling the ridiculous past an audience's critical sensors sometimes works, as it did in 2004's near-morality play Millions. But there's a limit to this, and sometimes hubris gets the better of him, as it did when the countless ludicrousnesses, small and large, of 1997's A Life Less Ordinary ganged up and smothered him. The fantasy of Slumdog Millionaire demands an astonishing credulity of its audience, not just in its details and execution but in the very core of its being. We're perhaps better off treating it as a light show.

The premise, though, generates a potentially effective form. Knowing that his lost Latika watches Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Indian edition, Jamal jockeys his way onto the program, climbing to the penultimate trivia question before the show takes a lucrative tension-maintaining overnight break. Cuffed and hauled off by the police as he exits the studio, he spends the interim between the first and second broadcast in grueling interrogation, alligator clips, car battery and all. Jamal, we learn, grew up a "slumdog," one of the many millions who populate Mumbai's sprawling shantytowns. Without education or social standing, one of the cops reasons, how else but cheating could he have answered all those questions correctly, knowing of such exotic things as the location of Cambridge Circle, the weapon held by the Hindu god Rama and the face on the American hundred-dollar bill?

Jamal responds to the grilling in flashbacks, explaining just how he happened to come across all this information. Each learning experience, distributed evenly over his life, paints a portrait of the modern young low-class Indian who, despite admirable vigor and perseverance, nevertheless can't catch much of a break without going on a hit game show. He knows where Cambridge Circle is because of his time as a tea boy, or "chai-wallah," at the local — yes — call center. He knows what Rama holds because, running away from a Hindu-led massacre of Muslims in which is mother is killed, he caught the unsettling eyes of a blue-painted little kid in Rama costume. He knows Ben Franklin's face is printed on the hundred-dollar bill because he was handed one by a visiting American couple during his days as an impostor Taj Mahal tour guide.

Dropping the false dime on Jamal was none other than Prem, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's impossibly pompadoured Indian host. Despite his on-air enthusiasm and restroom encouragement, he keeps too firm a grasp on both the show and his own accomplishment as a slumdog-made-good to refrain from undermining his upstart contestant. This conflict, one of the various indentifiable seeds of excellent films in Slumdog Millionaire that whiz past as Boyle feverishly rushes toward the deliriously happy ending and end-credits Bollywood Dance number, could have supported a fascinating two-hour character study by itself. Instead, Prem's futile efforts represent nothing more than a couple of pathetic obstacles easily swept aside by the hand of fate — or, in this case, the hand of Boyle. Either way, the screen gives the same explanation after Jamal guesses — simply guesses — the final answer to the final question: "It is written."

For all its lack of self-awareness, though, the film is alive and passionate where most major pictures prefer to unconvincingly simulate both qualities. But that doesn't mean it's not frustrating — the "what could've been" laments, mourning the loss of much richer explorations of similar setups, aren't easily ignored — and surprisingly underestimating of audience intelligence. It's odd that the product of India's poorer, more perilous sectors and the director of Trainspotting should come out as pure Old Hollywood, but here it is.

The night goblins

I have intensely, ritualistically ogled the following light-capturing devices over approximately the last three days:




The Red One high-definition digital video camera. Price: $17,500 for the bare-bones body. The base production pack costs $1,250. The lenses set you back $19,000.




The Aaton A-Minima Super 16mm camera. Price: $15,000. And film, even Super 16, ain't exactly cheap, 'neither.




The Canon Canosound 514XL-S Super 8mm camera. Price: about $180 on eBay. I still can't afford it, but at least the night goblins allow me to dream about it. They can be cruel.

Zombieland (Reuben Fleischer, 2009)

"Zombieland" is, in Ruben Fleischer's film of the same name, what the remaining living citizens of the United States of America have rechristened their country. One can't help but assume that it was also written on the scrap of paper that, in the tradition of Brandon Tartikoff's scrawled "MTV cops" note that launched Miami Vice, got the project rolling. While the first two acts of this dispiritingly three-acted story turn up present and accounted for, they pretend to no nobler a role than as the spindly superstructure straining to support a single elaborate set piece: "Hey, have we seen zombies swarm around an amusement park yet?" someone must surely have asked. "You know, like Disneyland? That'd be a real zombie... land."

And indeed, nobody looking for the shambling, cannibalistic dead swarming around ferris wheels, concession stands and swinging pirate ships will bemoan a bill of false goods. As a zombie delivery system, the picture is a well-oiled machine that whirrs to its maximum operating speed almost immediately. Eschewing a build, it commences its salvo of blood-vomiting, sinew-scarfing animated corpses without hesitation, as the protagonist, a virginal collegiate weenie called Columbus — the untrusting denizens of this newly barren, rough-and-tumble continent go by the names of their destinations, except when they don't — rattles off his personal list of rules for Zombieland survival.

These guidelines are simple and numerous, though we're only privy to a few. "Cardio." (Because it's surprisingly difficult to outrun a zombie.) "Double tap." (Because zombies often fail to expire after absorbing only one shotgun blast.) "Always check the back seat." (Because zombies hide there.) Columbus' most useful rule from the audience's standpoint, "Don't be a hero," signals, of course, his fatedness to be the hero. Slowly making his way to his semi-estranged Ohioan parents by whatever means of conveyance he happens upon — the streets are strewn, Rapture-style, with unmanned vehicles — he cautiously joins forces with Tallahassee, a middle-aged roughneck whose only remaining desire compels him to consume as many Twinkies as possible before their last expiration date passes.

Columbus and Tallahasse soon wind up in a pas de quatre with the sisters Wichita and Little Rock. After getting swindled by the girls a time or two, the boys elect joining over beating, and together they close in on Pacific Playland, the amusement part that Wichita has promised the 12-year-old Little Rock will deliver a zombie-free return to childhood innocence. Bearing west, the gang of four continue to dispatch zombie after zombie by whatever means seems funniest — I recall garden shears — and take a breather to cathartically trash a chintzy Indian reservation gift shop.

That the male leads band together with what happen to be their sassier, wilier, more sketchily-drawn female mirror images suggests that some or all of the imaginations at work may be unequal to the film's task. Much else in Zombieland's first half, an oddly dutiful march of dry highway landscapes, broad one-liners and endless exploding squib packs, provides supporting evidence. A shaft of hope breaks through when the foursome find their way into Bill Murray's mansion and encounter the man himself, made up in protective zombie drag. Tallahassee, who loves himself a viewing of Caddyshack nearly as much as he loves himself a twinkie, goes into incoherent raptures. Little Rock, presumably younger than The Man Who Knew Too Little, claims ignorance, which prompts Columbus to screen Ghostbusters for her in Murray's lavish private theater. "You're about to find out who you're gonna call!" he excitedly exclaims, directly over the theme song's reveal.

What in a bolder film would be the opening swerve of a sharp left turn into unexpected, radically unformulaic territory turns out here to be mere tonal interlude. Putting this anomaly behind it, Zombieland promptly resumes its trajectory toward the inevitable. Well-scuffed but alive in the aftermath of the obligatory Pacific Playland showdown of which you'll be spared the details, Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita and Little Rock pile into their Hummer and blast down the road toward the end credits, in an equally risk-free wrap.

As refreshing as it is not to have to endure the formation of serious intragroup romantic pairings or watch these plucky survivors rise as the brave green shoots of Earth's repopulation, these absences are cold comfort in a film so deliberately disposable. Every frame of Zombieland's fleetingly brief runtime — and especially its every reference to both the particular pop culture of the moment and the particular pop culture about which the moment is lazily nostalgic — carries the discomfiting feeling that nobody involved in its production cared enough to channel their $23 million into anything that might still resonate with the far-flung audiences of, oh, 2015. Anaconda jokes do not, it seems, a timeless classic make.

What's ultimately satiated is the filmmakers' apparently overwhelming fear that the public, appalled by a lack of zombies, might well storm the box office demanding refunds. We thus get it all, and then some: zombies running, zombies jumping, zombies staggering, zombies chasing, zombies chowing down on flesh, zombies spewing ichor, zombies smacked upside the head, zombies losing their heads, zombies run over, zombies smacked by doors, zombies shot. Especially zombies shot. The effect is of a light-gun arcade game in attract mode, humanized half by genuine wit and half by leaden wisecrack. But hey, you want amusement park zombies? You got 'em.

Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (Wayne Wang, 1985)

"What went wrong?" Such is the standard cinéaste's lament about Wayne Wang, which has reverberated through the halls of cinema for at least a decade. Watching 1985's Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, just like watching its 1982 predecessor Chan is Missing and even 1995's Smoke, turns out to be an impressive and disheartening experience in equal parts: impressive because of the bold, formidable filmmaking skill on display; disheartening because this skill has, in recent years, been squandered on the schlocky likes of Anywhere But Here, Maid in Manhattan, and Because of Winn-Dixie.

We may never know the cause of Wang's wrong turn. Certainly the man himself isn't talking, assuming he knows. But even in his strong sophomore feature, we see signs of a struggle. Here, the angel on the director's shoulder offers him the chance to become the next Ozu. The devil on his other shoulder makes a pitch for the dark side, filled as it is with by-the-numbers heartwarmers who've cashed in their early promise. While the forces of cinematic good win this round, the victory doesn't come effortlessly, and Wang's angel walks away with a few nasty bruises. If only it knew what lay in store.

Indeed, Dim Sum — whose clunky subtitle, in hindsight, probably foreshadowed trouble down the line — a study in benign familial dissolution, reads like an application for Ozu's vacant seat in the cinematic pantheon. Even the requisite kiss-up is there: Tam, the family's substitute patriarch, a bar-owning former business partner of the deceased father, sees fit at one point to analogize the situation of he and his to a certain "old Japanese movie," obviously Late Spring. Geraldine, the 30-year-old daughter still living in the parental home, increasingly unable to remain but lacking the wherewithal to hitch up to her long-distance boyfriend, must therefore rise to the forbidding Setsuko Hara role.

This film, in contrast, features a mother not dead but immersed in semi-unreasonable preparations to become so. Convinced of her imminent death by a fortune teller's prediction — her often-revised means of assigning jewlery inheritance has become a family joke — the mah-jongg-loving 62-year-old dreams only of marrying off Geraldine, attaining United States citizenship and paying one final visit to the motherland — in that order. That all this comes to pass will not, presumably, constitute a spoiler, nor will the revelation that nobody sees their way to their choices with absolute clarity. Geraldine kind of wants to marry Robert, her L.A.-based squeeze, and kind of doesn't. Her mom wants her off and on her own, but kind of doesn't. Tam professes his own desire to marry the woman of the house, though perhaps he kind of doesn't have one.

The newer film lacks the impact of its referent, to put it mildly, but not the pleasure of its aesthetics. Legend has it that Wang found the seed of the picture in an array of western-style shoes he saw laid out, Chinese-style, in the hallway of a home to which he paid a visit. Dim Sum gives the sight of such a tableau, and many other such striking moments, its proper due, framing it to perfection and observing with impeccable stillness. The visual and temporal sensibilities resemble the Japanese master's almost uncannily. Late-afternoon sunlight streaming onto a momentarily abandoned sewing machine; two women sweeping their adjacent, almost mirrored back porches; the waves as seen from the family's San Francisco Chinatown home: some of this sort of thing even Ozu himself didn't do as well.

But despite the visual points Wang scores, Ozu keeps the upper hand in the subtlety game. Though admirably restrained about eighty percent of the time, the film occasionally, if briefly, wallows in moments of swelling string instruments and immediately melancholy yet cosmically optimistic smiles backed by pre-weep eyes. Even when this happens, it's orders of magnitude less false or maudlin than in a hundred thousand other similar films one could name, but it still strips the picture of some of the immediacy and joie de cinéma possessed in force by, say, Chan is Missing. Endearingly, for the most part artfully and with quiet but substantial comedy, this family muddles its way to the end. But it's more of a standard happy ending than one would like, and the happiness itself falls uncomfortably far into the unambiguous side. We're a long a way from Chishu Ryu peeling the apple, that much is certain.

Choice thoughts: Peter Greenaway

This passage, from a 1988 Zoom interview, demonstrates more clearly than I ever could why Peter Greenaway is a genius:

In an interview, you said that cinema is too important to hand over to the storytellers.

That statement has brought me grief, especially in England. It appears that English and, even more so, American films are perfect in recounting a straight line narrative. They achieve it through the use of suspense and asking the viewers to identify with the main characters. That accounts for all those psychological dramas.

I think that the greatest art works — and I exclude those found in film — have had far greater means at their disposal. Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure. Artistically, film is a very rich medium; it has so many indescribable possibilities, and hardly anyone uses them. It seems to me that the majority of directors make their films with only one eye open and their arms tied behind them. The capability of film to become an extraordinary and astonishing medium is completely ignored. One should not tell stories as straight line narratives. There are so many other possibilities, and film would only enrich them. Most of the time, I am utterly bored in the cinema; I think that most films are poorly made.

But your films also tell stories.

That's true. But for me the stories are only the hook on which to hang one's hat. After a very short time, one understands the plot of my films; it isn't that important to me what happens, only how it happens. Most films insult the viewers whereas I believe the public is far smarter and receptive than many producers and directors give them credit for.

BRB, going to get all this tattooed on my back now. (I don't suppose Precious Slut will be able to handle it?)

Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999)

Suppose you entered a screening of Topsy-Turvy with no knowledge of its director. (Pretend also that you spent the director-revealing opening credits in the bathroom.) You might expect a whirlwind cinematic tour of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, its surface lavishly period, the productions themselves separated by banter between the two icons, perhaps a dash of romance, a false crisis, a false dawn, a real crisis, a real dawn, so on, so forth, done in time for dinner. You might thus expect a garish, unsubtle mess, but your expectations would, happily, be disappointed. Everything would fall into place when you learned the name of the man so flagrantly defying your assumptions: none other than Mike Leigh.

In his very selection of the project, Mike Leigh defies assumptions about Mike Leigh. Opting to focus closely on the difficulties of being a chatty socialist in modern-day urban England's seedy underbelly, his typical films have little energy remaining to examine the creative struggles of famed Victorian composers and librettists. The ostensible clash between creator and material works here to the good, however, as Leigh's keen eye for social dynamics and contempt for triviality lock in no less steely a fashion onto Gilbert, Sullivan and milieu they have has anyone else. Though it remains unclear, exactly, in how much cultural esteem Leigh holds the likes of H.M.S. Pinafore, his respect for and interest in the long, uncertain gestation of theater itself, now vividly committed to celluloid, lies well beyond question.

As cinematic experiments go, few sound more fascinating than the effective re-creation of the work of 1884's Mike Leigh equivalent. If any movie could be expected to deliver that, here it is. Unfortunately, the burden of constructing Gilbert and Sullivan's London — or at least, given the picture's relative thrift, a couple dozen of its interiors — seems to have necessitated a substantial, though not totally enervating, alteration of the filmmaker's method. Where the relatively low rate of budget percentage spent per minute in a film like Naked accommodates extended, no-depth-off-limits character plumbing, Topsy-Turvy's visual and historical complication forces Leigh's hand to keep the crank turning. Scene after scene stops just short of achieving the satisfying fullness that is Leigh's standard. None are ruined, but it's hard to banish the mental image of a glowering producer tapping away at his wristwatch's face.

The choice to cover only a brief cut of Gilbert and Sullivan's collective career ameliorates this haste somewhat. Rather than performing the workman's trudge from Thespis to The Grand Duke, Leigh concentrates on the final, floundering days of Princess Ida and the conception and execution of its much more successful follow up, The Mikado. I feared a falsely drama'd-up rendition of the facts — a backstage fistfight here, an inconvenient love triangle there, and bam, boffo B.O. — but no such misfortune. The story hews reasonably close to the history, eschewing theatrical roil for the roil of the theater: the pain, craftsmanship and unlikely intellectual point-counterpoint involved in bringing an elaborate (if now slightly embarrassing) show to life.

But it's what goes on in front of the scenes rather than behind them that lifts Topsy-Turvy into the rarefied ranks of pictures about theater that also manage to contain theater. Films about the creation of any internal work of art tend to disappoint when it comes to the work of art itself: most of the time, when the big painting or monument or tapestry or, indeed, stage production is finally revealed, we furrow our brows, wondering what all the fuss could possibly have been about; not this flimsy, unreal construction, certainly. No such skimpy artificiality for Topsy-Turvy, which presents its selections of The Mikado as the real deal, a piece of theater with all its material detritus, logistical heft and seemingly Sisyphean reiterative sculpting. And the substance of the developmental material matches that of the performative: One scene, quite possibly the picture's best, has Gilbert looping three actors through a mere scrap of the script, wittily but sternly correcting, prompting, adjusting and perfecting.

For all Leigh's deft handling of the subject, he doesn't reach far below the surface of its large cast of characters. Would that another 30 minutes — at the least — could have been spent on the working relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan, whose onscreen interactions feel like the tip of the iceberg's tip. The film also falls victim to an infatuation with the illustration of its own period technology: a dentist works crudely with pliers, a pen that contains its own ink isn't quite believed, telephones are shouted into. (We're at least spared "ahoy hoy.")

But the picture skillfully executes maneuvers that most others of its kind find unmanageable, which mostly bleaches out any misplaced priorities. As a cinematic examination of theater, it both manages to operate with a genuine interest in it and treat it with a respect not often afforded one medium by its successor. And while Leigh seriously observes the human core of a Gilbert and Sullivan production, he avoids treating the men themselves with a fanboy's dour over-regard. Perhaps he errs too far in the opposite direction, but every showman knows you've got to make 'em laugh.

Nightwatching (Peter Greenaway, 2007)

The first frame of Nightwatching’s striking chiaroscuro cinematography signals a film about and infused by the spirit of Rembrandt van Rijn. That we need not wait five minutes for the first doughy male nude — here, the Dutch master himself — to tumble into the obsessively theatrical setting signals a film by, and infused with the sensibility of, Peter Greenaway. His first release of the decade outside the baroque multimedia Tulse Luper’s Suitcases project, the movie, an eerily gleaming surface of hyper-articulate dialogue, 17th-century accoutrements and obscurantist vulgarity, would seem to mark a return to the Greenaway style of yore.

You may know this style for its having produced 1982’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, of which some of Greenaway’s followers have ever since bemoaned the lack of a precise duplicate. Not that Nightwatching bears many of the older picture’s qualities: gone are the anachronistic mobile phones and pop-art wall hangings; gone is composer Michael Nyman, a single (though admittedly appropriate) string piece repeated ad nauseam expanding to fill most of his acclaimed score’s stead. But the statues portrayed by live human actors remain. In fact, they’ve multiplied, eventually lining the background of an entire tail-end party scene.

This relative reining-in of Greenaway’s vaunted avant-garde impulses may come as a nod to the story’s roots in historical facts: specifically, the facts of Rembrandt’s life, and more specifically still, the circumstances of the creation of his best-known canvas, the enormous Night Watch, in 1642. The tale, as Greenaway tells it, has a reluctant Rembrandt considering a commission from Amsterdam Militia Captain Frans Banning Cocq to paint a portrait of he and his comrades in arms. Pressured by his wife to take the money and bear it, he finds the Militia, during his preparation, to be a veritable overturned log of slimy power struggles and ugly microfeuds. When one of its men falls victim to friendly musket fire, Rembrandt suspects murder, availing himself of his only forum to air his accusation: the painting itself.

Sound as this may like an art history lecture delivered by Oliver Stone, the presiding mindset is less paranoid than speculatively scholarly, and aggressively so. The substantiatable history undergirding the drama comes to a fairly thin gruel, to be sure, but as kookiness goes, this all keeps a safe distance from, say, second gunmen and living Elvises. Besides, it would take a bold defender indeed to number pure veracity as one of Greenaway’s strengths, or even as one of his interests. Here, he’s clearly into Night Watch to the extent that the stories surrounding it build the framework for a character study. (He saves the study of the painting itself for the associated documentary Rembrandt’s J’Accuse, which occupies the two-DVD package’s second disc.)

And what a character, this Rembrandt. One is tempted to call Greenaway’s selection of young Martin Freeman an act of stunt casting, given how strongly the actor has come to be identified with a certain stripe of the wearily wisecracking modern damned. His past roles include the agency-stripped Arthur Dent, “protagonist” of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and despondent 30-year-old paper salesman Tim Canterbury of The Office. Neither character suggests Freeman’s aptitude for portraying the lusty Dutchman, a displaced hackle-raiser bumped from his low social class by dint of his astounding skill with a brush. Fortunately, their subject about 300 years outside living memory, Greenaway and Freeman are free to create their own Rembrandt. The result is a figure who lacks the outward (and outward-only) refinement of Greenaway’s most memorable leads but compensates with sincerity, sheer generalized ardor and a whole lot of cursing.

Jutting outward at dozens of odd angles, the film in which he finds himself could hardly be called a standard biopic. It’s not a piece of theater, though with its often spare, expressionistic settings, it’s not exactly a regulation-lush period piece either. It’s not an art history lecture, though nor is it not an art history lecture. Perhaps it’s best described as series of intellectual and aesthetic Greenaway riffs on subjects surrounding the man, his place, his work of art and his women. Emphasis, by the way, on the latter: Rembrandt’s three loves of the period — the arranged but surprisingly suitable Saskia van Uylenburg; the bottom-caste Geertje Dircx, possessed of almost negative amounts refinement or inhibition; and the demure, youthful, barely-featured servant Hendrickje Stoffels — each come introduced, chapter-like, with a fourth-wall-breaking monologue from the artist. (”This is me with Saskia…”, “This is me with Geertje…”, “This is me with Hendrickje…”)

Such a flourish, to Greenaway’s detractors, no doubt emblematizes what they consider to be the director’s flamboyant indiscipline, and maybe it does, but those looking for the absolute finest in flamboyant indiscipline need search no further than the Greenaway oeuvre. Despite — maybe because of — its excesses and confusions, this film is something, and it doesn’t go down with tasteless smoothness, nor does it fade from memory immediately upon digestion. Never will Nightwatching be mistaken for the product of a Robert McKee workshop. Admittedly, with seven years passed since his brilliant (and unfairly sneered-at) Fellini homage 8½ Women, Greenaway seems a touch rusty, but he still, as a long-standing member of the “if you want a story, read a storybook” camp, understands the power of film better than do most working directors. Here is a chapter, if not a major one, in his ongoing j’accuse against cinematic uncreativity.

Hail Anthony Lane

I think many thoughts about film criticism, and have single working critics defined as my "go-to" for each particular sub-purpose in my reading of film reviews. Roger Ebert is an evergreen all-rounder, never failing to pen a solid short essay on whatever comes down the pike while almost unfailingly championing films that are actually, like, interesting. (He missed the boat on Kiarostami, though.) Manohla Dargis, quite possibly the smartest active critic today, possesses an astonishingly acute eye for the very cream of the crop. Wesley Morris does much the same, though with a lower profile. J. Hoberman wields a refreshing appreciation for experiment — no surprise, given his background as an experimental filmmaker. If Jonathan Rosenbaum hadn't retired, he'd easily make the list (despite having missed the boat on Herzog).

Anthony Lane, though, sweeps all the style points. Never have I come away from one of his New Yorker pieces not fired up to write myself; his reviews merit reading, re-reading, re-re-reading and possibly even re-re-re-rereading. He's also supremely hilarious, repeatedly firing off casually brilliant turns of phrase within each of his articles that would be the witty centerpiece of other critics'. It must be said that, cinematically, I see eye-to-eye with him far less often than I do with my other favorites. But then again, I don't worship their sentencecraft.

On Adrian Lyne's Indecent Proposal:

The film bundles together all its desires and smelts them into one gleaming character: a billionaire named John Gage, played by Robert Redford. Gage thinks that money can buy you love — or, at any rate, the kind of sex that might, you know, sprout into love. So when he sees Diana in a Vegas boutique the wheels of lust start to grind, and before you can say junk bond he's asking her to kiss his dice and throw a seven. She wins, of course, whereupon he installs her and David — who have just lost all their cash — in an expensive suite. They look awed and pleased, although it's probably the nastiest hotel room ever seen on film: a steel-blue mess, rounded off with a delightful touch, at least in the print I saw — a microphone nodding from its boom at the top of the frame. Gage then makes his big offer: a million bucks for a night with Diana-no aftermath, no strings. "It's just my body," Diana explains. "It's not my mind." I was glad to have that cleared up, though it does raise an interesting question: How much would you pay for an evening with Demi Moore's mind?

I would happily give away the rest of the plot, except that you can guess it anyway. Indecent Proposal induces a strange power in the viewer, a glow of prophecy: you can see every kink in the plot minutes, even hours, before it happens. Looking back at my notes, I found a scribbled menu of predictions — "He'll buy the dress," "They're going to lose," and the eerily specific "He'll find the copter taking off as he arrives" — each of them followed by a gratified "Yup."

On Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind:

This is a charming conceit, designed as a paean to the ramshackle; sadly, every minute of Gondry’s film is irrefutable proof that charm is not enough. The rule seems to be that whenever he directs other people’s scripts — as he did with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” written by Charlie Kaufman — he is able to negotiate a truce, or even a merger, between the logical and the fantastic, whereas when he writes his own material, as in “The Science of Sleep” and “Be Kind Rewind,” anything that smacks of common sense is rejected as a gross inconvenience. To take the most basic of objections: how many video-only stores do you know? It would hardly have stretched the budget to set the action in the late nineteen-eighties, when video was rampant; in fact, the new movie has the flimsiness of a comedy from that era (remember the robot in “Short Circuit,” touched off by a lightning strike?), and half of the films that Mike and Jerry seek to revitalize are of similar vintage. If you can think of nothing more hilarious than Jack Black strapping on used auto parts and pretending to be Robocop, then here is the movie you want.

On Zack Snyder's Watchmen:

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear — deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation — is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along.

On Sangsoo Hong's Woman is the Future of Man:

Munho (Yoo Jitae) is a college lecturer in art, and a living, chunky rebuttal of the notion that art refines the soul. Whether his moral conduct is less or more offensive than his choice of knitwear is something I have yet to resolve, and even his longtime friendship with Hunjoon (Kim Taewoo), a struggling filmmaker, seems pitted by tetchiness and tantrum. Yet they continue to meet for meals, and I guess that any kinship that can survive raw squid and four bottles of rice wine deserves to last.

(I also like this line: "Sunhwa, in particular, is a disconcerting blend of the pliable and the numb, and her query, mid-intercourse, to Munho — “Can I moan?” — may be the saddest indictment of another culture that I have ever heard.")


On McG's Terminator: Salvation:

If you arrived late for “Terminator Salvation” and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize that you were not watching a Mike Leigh film? I would nominate the scene in which a rusty tow truck, armed with a wrecking ball, is pursued by a riderless robot motorbike, armed with automatic machine guns. A wrecked car falls into the bike’s path, at which point we are given privileged access to the display screen inside the robot’s brain. We get a blood-red projection of the obstacle ahead, and with it, for a second or two, the words “Analyzing alternatives.” Slide under the wreck, crash through it, or skirt around the side? I felt sorry for this anxious bike, which may have been having trouble at home, and it certainly delivers a more measured performance than some of the leading actors. Nonetheless, that brief digital readout gives the game away. The business of the film is not to tell a cogent story or earn the devotion of our sympathies but to analyze alternatives, and, when in doubt, pick whichever is louder.

On J.J. Abrams' Star Trek:

Here is a long-range backstory — a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. I lost patience with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” once we learned of Willy Wonka’s primal trauma (his father was a dentist, and forbade him candies, so guess how he reversed that deprivation?), and, likewise, with “Batman Begins,” from the moment that mini-Bruce tumbled into a well full of bats. What’s wrong with “Batman Is” ? In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained.