Colin Marshall

Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)

While far from crap, J.J. Abrams' Star Trek clearly has a lot of problems. What's less clear is if it makes sense to blame this particular film: it's not in any unique way maladroit but succumbs to a series of diseases endemic to modern-day Hollywood, specifically its action and sci-fi sectors. It would be a brave detractor indeed who could deny the fun of simply watching a 2009-based set of filmmakers revamp these 23rd-century characters and settings for the 21st, but it would take an even braver defender to acquit them of doing it within an intricate framework of clichés.

Now would be the time to shamefully admit that I've never seen a single episode of Star Trek the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager or Star Trek: Enterprise. (It didn't occur to me that I could probably watch the old shows on Internet.) My track record with the movies isn't much better: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock on cable when I was eleven, Star Trek: Generations on VHS around the same time and Star Trek: First Contact in the theater. From all that, I seem only to remember a scene where William Shatner chops wood.

So I'm in either a remarkably poor position to talk about a series reboot or a remarkably advantaged one. Because, in one of my many vain childhood efforts to break into nerd-dom, I spent a couple years of childhood poring over Alan Asherman's The Star Trek Compendium, I at least know my Sulus from my Chekhovs. It's just barely enough of a foothold from which to admire the very effort of dragging the concept into 2009, and Abrams and company do indeed make some choice moves, such as strategically tying off the main arteries of canon-related nerd bitching by establishing a timeline isolated from every other Star Trek thing. Alas, this is accomplished with the unfortunate device of time travel, but I'd say such a noble end justifies the ugly means.

This sets the stage for a brave new Star Trek, the opening salvo in a fresh series that boldly goes where no Star Trek has gone before. Disappointingly, it goes where the worn-out boots of a thousand action movies have trod instead. Even the final hero-versus-villain fistfight (yes, really) goes down in a Romulan starship that functions, for all intents and purposes, as the old Vertiginous Flame and Spark Factory. There is also a parachuting sequence — this in the age of beaming, mind — and a classic Corvette — again, 23rd century — that plunges off a cliff but is bailed out of at the last possible moment. Now imagine all this delivered by rapid cuts, motion blurs and the wobbly handheld camera for whose sorry introduction I choose to blame Battlestar Galactica. I don't necessarily blame Star Trek for doing any of this — it's all run-of-the-mill movie junk these days that most productions of a certain genre and budget seem to unthinkingly slide right into — but I do blame it for not not doing it.

I'd be lying if I said the picture wasn't enjoyable — compared to some of the probable dreck trailered before it, I'll bet it's fantastic, and I rode its megadose of goofy humor in spite of myself — but the missteps pile high and rapidly, the most fatal of which being its compression of at least six hours' worth of of material into two, reducing the viewing experience to watching about some stuff happen and then watching about more stuff happening and then watching about other stuff happen still. It's just one damn thing after another, with no contrast or breathing room; this not only kills the pacing, it salts the earth where once pacing grew. Not to mention that it opens with a fever-pitch space battle which ends with a kamikaze Federation craft, piloted by the future Captain Kirk's doomed father, plowing straight into the aforementioned Romulan warship. Explosions and childbirths ensue. Where on Earth — or in space — do you effectively take the tone from there?

Then again, you must remember that I was recently studying Solaris, so my sci-fi standards have been impossibly fluffed and now I'm one cranky S.O.B. Don't listen to me.

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2008)

The knowledge to be gained from watching bad movies is deceptively valuable: the negative example casts into bolder relief what good movies do well. Pictures that jerk their characters around with the machinations and contrivances of a too-strong plot taught me how much is to be gained by going a tad lighter on the events. Pictures burdened with an overzealous score taught me that much redundancy and bluntness can be avoided when scores don't underscore (ironically, by overscoring). Pictures edited all herky-jerky-like taught me to value the rare ones that aren't.

Silent Light, however, is astounding, so it holds none of those lessons. As I expected, it's not a forgettable film, though I daresay that I wasn't prepared for just how tenaciously it's clung to my brain. Vastly more memorable than the average movie, it's also more memorable than the average good movie, which raises the question of what it does to achieve that, or perhaps what all the others fail to do that keeps them from achieving that. Though I always try to figure out what makes an effective work effective, this time I find myself laboring under the highly unusual fear of doing some sort of violence to the film by casting its elements into words. It's not a delicate piece of gossamer ready to disintegrate under the lightest examination — far from it — but it's so well-unified with its medium that approaching it in any other is kind of a ridiculous venture. Undaunted, I press onward.

The most accurate way to put it, and still with maddening vagueness, is that the film's strength lies in its ability to bring its moments into reality. It's about suggesting that things happen versus actually making them happen, or at least coming damn close. Implication has its place, but Reygadas' painstaking casting of the happenings of his Mennonite characters' lives — a predawn breakfast, night becoming sunrise, a harrow grinding through a wheat field — into reality is more profitably examined next to the lazier, more common cinematic tendency to depict in a way that possesses neither the finesse of artful implication nor the boldness of real-time realism, a sludgy middle ground seemingly precision-engineered for dissatisfaction, delivering the gist of it and only the gist of it.

In other words, I've opened a brave new chapter of spoiledness in my life as a filmgoer. Now that I know movies can bring the audience into their world as well as does Silent Light, I'm sure I'm going to get pissed whenever they don't. The story is simple, though told more intimately than most, filled as it is with moments we're allowed the space to experience rather than just audiovisually told about. When protagonist Johan, a once-stolid father of at least six, lingers at the kitchen table after the rest of the family has headed out for the day, we witness the complete breakdown process as he collapses into a sobbing mess. The source of his internal battle is revealed as his competing twin desires for his wife Esther and Mariam, whom he believes to be his "natural woman". (I guess that's a Mennonite thing?) In the aftermath of one less-than-secret assignation &madsh; Esther and, apparently, the wider community are well aware of these dalliances — the camera unflinchingly depicts the weight of postcoital confusion and remorse weighing down on the beleaguered Johan; to cut away would have done injustice to the enormity of his dilemma. When the film fires off its controversial closing instance of divine intervention/imagination/magic realism, we encounter it just as the characters do, and are carried right along by it.

It takes some guts to pile so much filmmaking acumen into a story about Mennonites in Mexico. I mean, do I know from Mennonites in Mexico? Do I know from Mennonites anywhere? Does anybody? One strategy would have been to include a lot of background info explaining the whos, whats, whys and wheres of the Mennonites, but Reygadas wisely takes the exact opposite tack, simply dropping viewers into the middle of the community and trusting them to understand what the tale requires be understood, and learn what it holds to be learned. (One thing I learned is that Mennonites can, and do, wear calculator watches.) This is only one facet of Silent Light's blessedly high regard for its audience: Reygadas takes what has sadly come to be known as a risk by assuming our awareness, our patience and our willingness to enter and appreciate a setting foreign in so many dimensions, which indicts pretty harshly all the filmmakers that don't.

* * *
2008

1. Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park
2. Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light
3. James Marsh's Man on Wire
4. Tarsem's The Fall
5. Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In
6. Gus van Sant's Milk
7. Alex Gibney's Gonzo
8. Doug Pray's Surfwise
9. Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD
10. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind
11. Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona
12. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock

Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961), Sanjuro (Kurosawa, 1962) and A.K. (Marker, 1985)

You may recall that I posted a poll to decide which of the many films closest to my fingertips I should watch. You people plumped for Yojimbo, which hit me at a slightly surprise-y angle — I figured the voted would be more evenly distributed — though Madelaine somehow managed to predict it. (She's always, for whatever reason, been better at predicting other people's choices that I am.) Honoring the vox populi, we popped in Yojimbo and followed it up with its sequel, Sanjuro.

Both are well described with the phrase "Kurosawa western", which gets at the genre-ness, which is there, but also the Kurosawa-ness, which almost as there. In 1960s Japan, a western was, of course, a samurai movie, but I'm told they're pretty much the same deal. In Yojimbo's case, they're very much the same deal: it's the eastern equivalent of Sergio Leone's later A Fistful of Dollars. I know this not because I am a master of the western but because I am very good at piecing together information from sugar packets. My knowledge of the western genre may indeed may be limited to the preceding datum, although I'm almost positive that I've also seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Point being, I've seen a lot more samurai films, though I can't exactly hang with that breed's connoisseurs either. While I am indeed the guy who named (the admittedly non-genre) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as the best picture of 2007, I arguably prefer samurai films to their dustier counterparts, if preference can be established on such scant evidence. Like most choices in my life, it's perhaps an aesthetically motivated one: I prefer the machiya architectural style to the Lincoln Log architectural style, the shimada to the bonnet. Also, samurais didn't have spitoons.

United by Kurosawa in the director's chair and Toshiro Mifune (who was only ever admirable with Kurosawa in the director's chair) as the central badass ronin who strategically plays criminal rubes and petty rivalries off one another in small-town 19th-century Japan. It comes as no surprise, because Kurosawa is Kurosawa, that these are known as two of the best examples of this concept, simple as it may be. Combine the technical skill with the score that screams "60s Japanese jazz", and I'm in.

I'm more in, though, to the rest of Kurosawa's filmography. Ran, for instance, the great filmmaker's 1985 retelling of King Lear, has long held pride of place in my favorite-movies-of-all-time canon. How overjoyed I was upon managing to locate a copy of A.K., which hits my cinematic sweet spot in the following ways all at once:

• Is a documentary
• Is about Kurosawa
• Is about Kurosawa on the set of Ran
• Is scored by (and features, appearance pictured above) Toru Takemitsu
• Is by Chris Marker, who we know from the astounding-enough-to-be-a-3QD-column Sans Soleil

Choice. And A.K. does not disappoint; Marker's wandering eye observes the master and his crew at work in much the same sedate, saturated, mediated manner as Sans Soleil's Sandor Krasna. (No surprise, since the films came only two years apart.) My appreciation of film has drifted more and more to the textural with time, and Marker seems to be just about as textural a filmmaker as they come. It's a quality that, even 24 years later (and 44 years after similar Marker projects like Le Mystère Koumiko), has made fewer inroads into cinema culture than I'd like. Even the best documentaries, while supremely enjoyable and all, tend to remain aesthetically utilitarian. By my count, modern well-textured documentary filmmaking has, like, Errol Morris and Zoo. Let's bring that up, people.