(Hong Sangsoo, South Korea, 2010)
This might be the film that finally cinched my esteem for Hong's work, which I had long viewed with a quiet, bemused, and somewhat reluctant admiration. Hong is one of the most widely celebrated international directors, the kind of filmmaker that a certain kind of cineasté knows he's supposed to like. But my experience was one of resistance; it took patience to find an entryway into Hong's cinematic world.
Some art house films suggest their sophistication through forbidding starkness, complexity, or emotional severity. Their difficulty serves, in part, to advertise their seriousness, the urgency of their claim upon our attention. But Hong's work is a different, rarer case: his films present themselves not as exalted, dense, or thorny; they lack any discernible grit, formal exuberance, or commanding bleakness. Instead, his movies appear slight, sketch-like, gnomic. About the most you can say is that they do require careful attention, if you're going to keep track of the characters and the chronology, which are never straightforward. And they are clearly works of formal innovation, however playful.
It's perhaps for this reason that so much of the appreciation of Hong contains a whiff of apologia, the mark of an artist who fascinates intuitively but resists exegesis. Critics seem to sort themselves either into frothy encomiums or somewhat reserved, cool-headed appraisal, with the usual caveat that his work's greatness isn't immediately apparent. Perhaps this polarity is of my own making, as I try to locate my own impressions somewhere in this range. If so, it would mirror my experience thus far: periods of languor as my mind drifts during another drunken, shambling conversation, interrupted almost violently by bursts of wonder as an unexpected action, a canny re-framing, or a juxtaposition flashes brilliantly onscreen, only to fade moments later, like an afterimage.
The key is to stick with it. Hong's work appears to be brisk and breezy, even when things get sodden with Soju. But there is a mercurial and even a febrile imagination behind his apparently reserved camera. Hong is a fundamentally dialectical filmmaker, perhaps the ne plus ultra of such an approach, at least among living directors. In his work, opposites are constantly changing places with each other, the tone bounces between wildly different registers, surface becomes depth and then switches back. The placid, apparently sturdy frame will pan gently or abruptly, and rarely with obvious cause, or will suddenly reconfigure the space with a zoom.
Hong's space isn't psychological, but emotional and existential. Emotion, for him, precedes thought, and the human comedy is essentially that of irrationality; reason, propriety and good taste exist to be interrupted. Chance and contingency rule his outlook, which both exults in the staggeringly many possibilities of imagination, and floats with a piercing melancholy over the randomness of life's events. Hong's brilliance lies in his fusion of art and life, a simple and often unrealized concept. His art is an organic extension of his feeling for life, rendered in a formal vocabulary that is wholly new.
The apparent poverty of his means - a few actors, a cafe or a restaurant with (usually drunken) table talk, a camera on a tripod - is in fact an apposite mechanism of both expressing and containing the overwhelming complexity of life, a Proustian attention to detail that reveals great depths in glances, hesitations, and misunderstandings.
In HaHaHa, I picked up on notes of melancholy and sudden joy that had eluded my attention in earlier screenings of his films, as well as surprisingly many compositions that were easily called beautiful. What Hong is discovering and expressing is the volume of life that goes unnoticed; the strange profusion of overlapping circumstances that nonetheless conceals so much detail. A casual get-together among friends (this being Hong, the encounter is ruled by an almost ritualistic emphasis on drinking), where a past weekend is recounted, reveals, in its cinematic depiction, unutterable volumes of longing, regret, and frustrated desire.
The depiction is Hong's testimonial to cinematic power. In his view, life is teeming with significance that can only be captured in retrospect or imagination - crucially, active processes, which in some sense can compensate for the in-the-moment confusion and helplessness with which we're all bitterly familiar. We are always dancing with our own fate; no awkward conversation is insignificant. This may be the positive image of what so often feels a negative perspective in Hong's work, focusing to an obsessive degree on his male protagonists haplessness.
Because finally, beneath the bitterness and the self-excoriation, Hong is an inveterate romantic. Desperate, perhaps, and anguished, but never entirely absent of the hope in the possibility of love to offer something beyond the shambolic day-to-day disarray of our lives. In the last scene, we see evidence of this: one of the couples, who previously had evinced very little indication of being long-term material for love, enjoys a fleeting moment of bliss. Whether or not this will stick is another matter, but for the moment (and Hong's world is nothing if not moment-by-moment) it would seem to suffice.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Are You Here
(Matthew Weiner, USA, 2013)
While we've seen some accomplished dabbling by feature filmmakers in the world of TV, the opposite doesn't seem to hold. Weiner's feature debut isn't a disaster, but it teeters on the edge of disaster for much of its running time, and while it has some notable virtues, it's also exemplary of the stark differences that remain between the two mediums.
Weiner the writer, a giant of contemporary prestige television, is on display here, but his work as a director is sorely deficient. He knows how to sketch characters efficiently, to balance character and incident, and can write zingers - funny and poignant both - with the best of them. But despite these facilities, the film lumbers along, stiff and flat-footed.
It's an easy shot, and maybe a cheap one, to claim that this is the TV influence bleeding through, but I think it's basically accurate. Lacking the time that TV affords to create a richly textured world, the production design and cinematography of Are You Here seem hasty and undercooked. Everything is even and flat, as if to highlight the words and the actors - itself not a wise creative choice - but there, too, things go awry. Weiner seems unable to hit upon an appropriate comedic tone - how broad, how subtle, does he want to play this? By the middle of the film, as the drama emerges from the frothy comedy of earlier, things have started to coalesce, finally, but not enough to rescue the experience completely.
Best then to think of this film, formally at least, as an exercise. I would've preferred more audacity from the justly celebrated Weiner, but he does at least have a few things on his mind. The ideas are the core of the film, even if they don't flower into a living experience: the nature and limits of friendship, the search for authenticity among the many false promises of modern living, and the necessity of awareness in a world rife with distractions. Very often these ideas are presented blatantly, edging towards the homiletic, but Weiner is canny and skeptical enough to avoid the worst effects.
The cast is strong, but again, Weiner fumbles the potential of his material. His plodding approach forecloses on Galifianakis's wildness, and he doesn't have the visual panache to match the micro-gradations of Owen Wilson's comic genius. They're two very different types of performers, but thrown together in these scenes, they have trouble stretching out and letting loose.
While we've seen some accomplished dabbling by feature filmmakers in the world of TV, the opposite doesn't seem to hold. Weiner's feature debut isn't a disaster, but it teeters on the edge of disaster for much of its running time, and while it has some notable virtues, it's also exemplary of the stark differences that remain between the two mediums.
Weiner the writer, a giant of contemporary prestige television, is on display here, but his work as a director is sorely deficient. He knows how to sketch characters efficiently, to balance character and incident, and can write zingers - funny and poignant both - with the best of them. But despite these facilities, the film lumbers along, stiff and flat-footed.
It's an easy shot, and maybe a cheap one, to claim that this is the TV influence bleeding through, but I think it's basically accurate. Lacking the time that TV affords to create a richly textured world, the production design and cinematography of Are You Here seem hasty and undercooked. Everything is even and flat, as if to highlight the words and the actors - itself not a wise creative choice - but there, too, things go awry. Weiner seems unable to hit upon an appropriate comedic tone - how broad, how subtle, does he want to play this? By the middle of the film, as the drama emerges from the frothy comedy of earlier, things have started to coalesce, finally, but not enough to rescue the experience completely.
Best then to think of this film, formally at least, as an exercise. I would've preferred more audacity from the justly celebrated Weiner, but he does at least have a few things on his mind. The ideas are the core of the film, even if they don't flower into a living experience: the nature and limits of friendship, the search for authenticity among the many false promises of modern living, and the necessity of awareness in a world rife with distractions. Very often these ideas are presented blatantly, edging towards the homiletic, but Weiner is canny and skeptical enough to avoid the worst effects.
The cast is strong, but again, Weiner fumbles the potential of his material. His plodding approach forecloses on Galifianakis's wildness, and he doesn't have the visual panache to match the micro-gradations of Owen Wilson's comic genius. They're two very different types of performers, but thrown together in these scenes, they have trouble stretching out and letting loose.
Monday, June 6, 2016
Knuckleball!
(Ricki Stern & Anne Sundberg, USA, 2012)
An enjoyable entry in what might be called the docu-curio subgenre. Stern and Sundberg play things strictly by the book, delivering two parallel stories involving the remaining practitioners of the titular pitch, which if correctly thrown is nearly impossible to hit. We get the requisite details and explainers: a knuckleball is thrown with the fingernails, in order to neutralize the spin that is the decisive component of virtually ever other kind of pitch, from a slider to a fastball. Without any gyroscopic spin to guide the trajectory of the pitch, the ball is subject to whatever eddies or currents of air might exist between the mound and the catcher's glove, thus rendering it completely unpredictable, to pitcher, batter, and catcher alike.
When it works, the pitch works spectacularly well, but it can easily go wrong, leading to chronic walks or barrages of easy hits. Thus the knuckleballer is an odd duck, unreliable and seldom utilized, a case which has only been aggravated by the contemporary game's emphasis on the supposed reliability of statistics as a guiding principle. The directors parlay this into a tale of individual pluck and stoicism, following the two remaining pro-ball knuckleballers, R.A. Dickey and Tim Wakefield, as they experience professional and personal triumphs and reversals. It's the kind of human interest story that is impossible not to find at least somewhat captivating, even if it follows along a very familiar path. It doesn't hurt that Dickey and Wakefield both appear to be exceedingly decent and determined individuals, ambitious and humble in equal measure, conforming with striking fidelity to certain mythic American archetypes.
Besides its mythical role as "the National Sport," baseball has long been a curious attraction for folk philosophers, a relationship fruitfully explored in Chad Harbach's 2011 novel The Art of Fielding. While I won't run through the nature of these affinities, it can be said that some nexus of cultural and metaphysical poetics exists in the sport, a game as potentially beautiful as soccer, if fundamentally different. The directors of Knuckleball! don't really stray into these more remote expanses of the philosophical outfield, but they are aware of the heady frisson that seems to surround the sport, force field-like. What they do explore is the role of tradition in baseball, which despite the modern innovations of a numbers-based approach, with every last attribute of play subject to statistical analysis and comparison, is still living. Wakefield by the end of the film has retired, leaving Dickey as the sole torch-bearer, casting the future of this somewhat mad pitch into question. Thus Dickey is possibly at the end of a long tradition of athletes, oddballs all, who have parlayed their relative lack of excellence as traditionally defined into a distinction. The stories are strikingly similar: in nearly every case, a desire to play professional baseball at any cost led them to experiment with this iconoclastic and fickle technique.
As a celebration of the outsider, and a chronicle of determination in pursuit of an ideal, Knuckleball! is a delight, emotionally satisfying if not formally or philosophically ambitious.
An enjoyable entry in what might be called the docu-curio subgenre. Stern and Sundberg play things strictly by the book, delivering two parallel stories involving the remaining practitioners of the titular pitch, which if correctly thrown is nearly impossible to hit. We get the requisite details and explainers: a knuckleball is thrown with the fingernails, in order to neutralize the spin that is the decisive component of virtually ever other kind of pitch, from a slider to a fastball. Without any gyroscopic spin to guide the trajectory of the pitch, the ball is subject to whatever eddies or currents of air might exist between the mound and the catcher's glove, thus rendering it completely unpredictable, to pitcher, batter, and catcher alike.
When it works, the pitch works spectacularly well, but it can easily go wrong, leading to chronic walks or barrages of easy hits. Thus the knuckleballer is an odd duck, unreliable and seldom utilized, a case which has only been aggravated by the contemporary game's emphasis on the supposed reliability of statistics as a guiding principle. The directors parlay this into a tale of individual pluck and stoicism, following the two remaining pro-ball knuckleballers, R.A. Dickey and Tim Wakefield, as they experience professional and personal triumphs and reversals. It's the kind of human interest story that is impossible not to find at least somewhat captivating, even if it follows along a very familiar path. It doesn't hurt that Dickey and Wakefield both appear to be exceedingly decent and determined individuals, ambitious and humble in equal measure, conforming with striking fidelity to certain mythic American archetypes.
Besides its mythical role as "the National Sport," baseball has long been a curious attraction for folk philosophers, a relationship fruitfully explored in Chad Harbach's 2011 novel The Art of Fielding. While I won't run through the nature of these affinities, it can be said that some nexus of cultural and metaphysical poetics exists in the sport, a game as potentially beautiful as soccer, if fundamentally different. The directors of Knuckleball! don't really stray into these more remote expanses of the philosophical outfield, but they are aware of the heady frisson that seems to surround the sport, force field-like. What they do explore is the role of tradition in baseball, which despite the modern innovations of a numbers-based approach, with every last attribute of play subject to statistical analysis and comparison, is still living. Wakefield by the end of the film has retired, leaving Dickey as the sole torch-bearer, casting the future of this somewhat mad pitch into question. Thus Dickey is possibly at the end of a long tradition of athletes, oddballs all, who have parlayed their relative lack of excellence as traditionally defined into a distinction. The stories are strikingly similar: in nearly every case, a desire to play professional baseball at any cost led them to experiment with this iconoclastic and fickle technique.
As a celebration of the outsider, and a chronicle of determination in pursuit of an ideal, Knuckleball! is a delight, emotionally satisfying if not formally or philosophically ambitious.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Under the Skin
(Jonathan Glazer, USA/UK/Switzerland, 2013)
Glazer's slow-burn sci-fi creepfest is a worthwhile if underwhelming effort. Skin's sleek, fluid surfaces and grimy black depths produce atmosphere to spare, but the film is visceral to a fault. It's achievement is primarily technical, designed with impeccable taste and a diabolical sense of the uncanny, but lacking the ideas that would deepen and solidify the experience.
Glazer's principal tool, beyond his thrilling technical imagination and considerable skills at mood-setting, is ellipsis. As audience members, we're perpetually on the outside, piecing together the story and the questions that must arise; about the nature of the aliens, their mission, their interactions with humans and each other, and the events that take place between certain scenes. The overall effect that Glazer was trying to create seems to have been what it would be like to experience the world through the eyes of an alien - the making of the familiar into something strange. This is a great concept, as far as it goes, and it produces some moments of eerie bewilderment, not least because the whole thing is set in Scotland, which through Glazer's cold eye becomes an almost alien land of forbidding mountains and seascapes, sparsely populated with pale, unintelligible humanoids.
And yet all of this effect alone isn't enough; the feints towards ideas about human sexuality, with a special emphasis placed on gender roles, are undercooked. Such are Glazer's skills as a conjurer of images that it almost skates by as a structuralist avant-garde piece, but there's not enough abstract rigor to qualify for that designation. This is too bad, considering the enormous (if familiar) ideas that are skirted: the proximity of death and sex, the precarious edifice of gender norms, and the final inscrutability of nature. Under the Skin doesn't lack for craftsmanship or audacity, but it doesn't cohere into a fully lived experience, either.
Glazer's slow-burn sci-fi creepfest is a worthwhile if underwhelming effort. Skin's sleek, fluid surfaces and grimy black depths produce atmosphere to spare, but the film is visceral to a fault. It's achievement is primarily technical, designed with impeccable taste and a diabolical sense of the uncanny, but lacking the ideas that would deepen and solidify the experience.
Glazer's principal tool, beyond his thrilling technical imagination and considerable skills at mood-setting, is ellipsis. As audience members, we're perpetually on the outside, piecing together the story and the questions that must arise; about the nature of the aliens, their mission, their interactions with humans and each other, and the events that take place between certain scenes. The overall effect that Glazer was trying to create seems to have been what it would be like to experience the world through the eyes of an alien - the making of the familiar into something strange. This is a great concept, as far as it goes, and it produces some moments of eerie bewilderment, not least because the whole thing is set in Scotland, which through Glazer's cold eye becomes an almost alien land of forbidding mountains and seascapes, sparsely populated with pale, unintelligible humanoids.
And yet all of this effect alone isn't enough; the feints towards ideas about human sexuality, with a special emphasis placed on gender roles, are undercooked. Such are Glazer's skills as a conjurer of images that it almost skates by as a structuralist avant-garde piece, but there's not enough abstract rigor to qualify for that designation. This is too bad, considering the enormous (if familiar) ideas that are skirted: the proximity of death and sex, the precarious edifice of gender norms, and the final inscrutability of nature. Under the Skin doesn't lack for craftsmanship or audacity, but it doesn't cohere into a fully lived experience, either.
Monday, May 23, 2016
Sunset Song
(Terence Davies, UK, 2016)
Somewhat baffling, given the high praise that many have heaped upon this film - there are moments of rapturous beauty, as I expected, but also a great deal that feels stiff, oddly lifeless. Never completely lifeless, but slack, overly static. Davies often seems every bit the Classicist, keeping the flame of rigorous, dramatic, minimally-inflected cinema burning. And yet at other times the lyricist comes to the fore, moving the camera with agonizing severity and sudden, ethereal weightlessness. But these two sides of Davies, the charming throwback and the canny Modernist, don't fruitfully interact in Sunset Song. At times, the film feels to be purely an exercise, sturdy and handsome, but without any deeper fire or spark of invention. It's bathed in reverence, in a kind of careful, kid-gloved treatment of its source material, like the parchment being brought out of its glass case and set before the collector at auction.
The actors are able and willing, and in certain moments they burst into life, as though Davies were seeing them in their spiritual form. It would be a shame to realize that much of my discomfort had to do with built-in limitations of the production: a slight budget and the compression and ablation that it entailed. The exteriors are stupendous, yes, and so are some of the digitally-shot interiors. But too many others are dry, flat, with the dead crispness of digital, lit schematically, causing a hollow theatricality that is only worsened by the extreme stillness and silence that Davies bathes many of the sequences in. At moments it becomes unnerving, not in the way of High Romance, which is Davies' métier, but in the cold, oddly vacant way of a Becket play.
Davies is a great artist, and his strange mishandling of the project - even its very conception, with unfortunate overtones of nostalgia and nationalistic preciousness - shouldn't diminish his great achievements elsewhere. But it does highlight the pitfalls of his sparse, hushed, reverent approach to cinema. There are painterly interiors and sudden flashes of emotion, but they are small throbs of beauty in an otherwise staid, puzzling film.
Somewhat baffling, given the high praise that many have heaped upon this film - there are moments of rapturous beauty, as I expected, but also a great deal that feels stiff, oddly lifeless. Never completely lifeless, but slack, overly static. Davies often seems every bit the Classicist, keeping the flame of rigorous, dramatic, minimally-inflected cinema burning. And yet at other times the lyricist comes to the fore, moving the camera with agonizing severity and sudden, ethereal weightlessness. But these two sides of Davies, the charming throwback and the canny Modernist, don't fruitfully interact in Sunset Song. At times, the film feels to be purely an exercise, sturdy and handsome, but without any deeper fire or spark of invention. It's bathed in reverence, in a kind of careful, kid-gloved treatment of its source material, like the parchment being brought out of its glass case and set before the collector at auction.
The actors are able and willing, and in certain moments they burst into life, as though Davies were seeing them in their spiritual form. It would be a shame to realize that much of my discomfort had to do with built-in limitations of the production: a slight budget and the compression and ablation that it entailed. The exteriors are stupendous, yes, and so are some of the digitally-shot interiors. But too many others are dry, flat, with the dead crispness of digital, lit schematically, causing a hollow theatricality that is only worsened by the extreme stillness and silence that Davies bathes many of the sequences in. At moments it becomes unnerving, not in the way of High Romance, which is Davies' métier, but in the cold, oddly vacant way of a Becket play.
Davies is a great artist, and his strange mishandling of the project - even its very conception, with unfortunate overtones of nostalgia and nationalistic preciousness - shouldn't diminish his great achievements elsewhere. But it does highlight the pitfalls of his sparse, hushed, reverent approach to cinema. There are painterly interiors and sudden flashes of emotion, but they are small throbs of beauty in an otherwise staid, puzzling film.
Friday, May 13, 2016
Everybody Wants Some!!
(Richard Linklater, USA, 2016)
The "spiritual sequel" thing is partly a marketing ploy, but there is still a strong, authentic affinity between Linklater's latest and his earlier masterpiece, Dazed and Confused. Like Dazed, Everybody is told from the perspective of a semi-outsider, on the cusp of a new stage in life, and takes place over a short period of time - one day in Dazed and about three days in Everybody. Both films deal with with the rites and rituals of youth, as enacted via music, drugs, sex, play, and even violence; with the encroachment of adulthood, and with the vagaries of seeking identity. The differences are important too, particularly thematically, as Linklater himself has noted: Dazed, for all of its celebration of youthful abandon and curiosity, is, true to its title, as much about confusion as it is about the intoxication of new experiences. High School is a place to be escaped, the antipode to the nighttime adventures and self-discovery that the film makes so vivid. College, on the other hand, holds a degree of promise: no parents, fellowship among like-minded (and differently-minded) peers, independence, abandon, etc. Whereas Dazed had the subtle weight of regret over the incipient pull of adulthood's responsibilities and the squandered days of youth, Everybody looks with fonder eyes on a period of relative freedom and joy, although even here, darker shadings can be detected amidst the splendor.
There are at least two formal modes in which Richard Linklater works: the anthropological and the philosophical. His best films combine both; the passionate curiosity of an outsider seeking to understand a culture from the inside, and the passionate desire to seek coherence, and even truth, through a union of one's inner and outer worlds. Slacker, the incandescent oddity that launched Linklater's career, seems to echo his later films with a growing volume. You can find it all there, in various stages of development: the intimate relationship to time, the relative lack of gravity given to incident, the omnivorous curiosity, the delight in everyday absurdity, and the rough-hewn poetry of human interaction. The emotional range is there, too: Slacker, viewed recently, impressed me as dark in a way that I didn't remember. For all of its goofiness and lackadaisical fun, it doesn't shy away from death, from mayhem, and from the threat of disaster. Linklater is as critical of his slackers as he is affectionate. From the comedic pleasure of School of Rock to the desperate paranoia of A Scanner Darkly - it's all there in his vision of sweaty, ever-weird Austin.
Thus, the apparent variety of Linklater's career - working with micro-to-sizeable budgets, experimentalism and breezy conventionality, is more united than meets the eye. And Everybody Wants Some!! is very nearly the exemplary Linklater film, a career high, not least in its deceptive sophistication and richness. It's a film about pleasure, about joy, and it's also a forceful philosophical statement, delivered in the drawling, even self-effacing manner we should by now recognize as Linklater's signature.
The casual confidence of his main characters - ostensibly jocks, although, as Linklater quickly establishes, this cliché is as false as any other - is mirrored in Linklater's own style: forthright, libidinous, but with a crucial detachment that allows for perspective and analysis. Linklater is one of our most adroit chroniclers of the artistic dilemma: a desire to experience things directly, to come into touch with an almost transcendent, instinctual feeling for reality, but unable to ever completely step outside oneself, bound to comment, to analyze, to pick apart. Linklater's surrogate - the strong-jawed and broad-shouldered Jake (a skillful Blake Jenner), is a jock who thinks, who hasn't sacrificed his aesthetic sensibilities and cool-headed detachment to the cult of competition and extreme focus that is college baseball. When he meets Beverly, played with wit and sensitivity by Zoey Deutch, it's clear that their connection is a deep one. Her passion and her drive are traits they have in common, but more importantly they are curious, open souls who take the question of identity seriously.
Although it crystallizes the film's theme of the philosophical search for one's self, the romance between Jake and Beverly isn't treated with the narrative centrality that any number of lesser filmmakers would have opted for. It can be easy to miss the audacity of Linklater's approach to structure, considering how much fun the experience of the film is. There's no three-act narrative, rising and falling action, or discernible "stakes." The film is propelled by time, with the crowded, giddy mentality of the characters serving as fuel. The point is to get in as much revelry as possible before the more onerous structures of college life take effect, and we're along for the ride.
By the end, we can see this as part and parcel of Linklater's philosophical stance: gather ye rosebuds while ye may, with a dash of hard-headed commitment to individual autonomy and inquiry. Linklater has drawn criticism, in this film and in others, for being too easy on the world, and on his characters. This misses the point, and much that actually occurs in the movies. There is a strain of the utopian in Linklater's films, a desire - easily mistaken for nostalgia - for a world in which carnality, aesthetic pleasure, intellectual excellence, and amity can all stand on equal footing. We can count Whitman as among his artistic ancestors, noting the love of the demotic, the pleasure of bodies in motion, the unabashed joy of existence and in the eternally-returning hope for new experiences and ways of being. This isn't the mark of a Pollyanna, but of a far rarer type of artist: optimistic and analytical in equal measure.
And the optimism is not without restraint, or awareness of the darker elements of human nature. Everybody has glimpses we can recognize: the potential fanaticism of a rigid emphasis on winning, the mind-narrowing ways of a singular pursuit, even if it results in the beauty of athletic excellence, and the latent violence that lurks in even the most harmless-seeming displays of male bonding. Linklater's view of Texas college life, circa 1980, is strikingly free of the tensions we now recognize with depressing regularity: racial, sexual, class-based. This seems to skirt omission, but only if you don't see that he depicts violence and chauvinism as being in alarming proximity to affinity, hospitality, and play.
And this doesn't yet bring us to the political dimension, which Linklater never ignores. Just beyond the Arcadian life as an admired college athlete reside the merciless dictates of the marketplace: the very slim chance, vied for by every team member, of playing in the Big Leagues. This means that for all of the familiar, there's-no-I-in-team homilies of organized athletics, the cold truth of professionalism is undeniable. It's a zero-sum game for recognition and fortune - as the ruthless and potentially Pro-bound McReynolds notes "you're on your own." Jake and the intellectually preening Finnegan notice this, and plan accordingly: given their slim chances of graduating into the big time, the best course of action is to enjoy the ride while it lasts, and not define themselves in the narrow straits of their status as college athletes.
Jake, for all of his callowness, shows himself to be wise beyond his years. In his confidence - intellectually and physically - he approaches the idealized, but Linklater's incisive writing and directing keeps him fully human. Crucially, he is unformed, and not at all troubled by this. As a celebration of incompleteness, and the latent possibility of such a state, Linklater has crafted a movie of hilarity and humanity, of great depth and pleasure. Even the Aristotlian unity of time and place has a deeper thematic resonance: the vital importance of grasping the moment, even as it is always slipping away from us. Everybody Wants Some!! is about bodies in (mostly joyful) motion, and the hard work and pleasure of a life lived in the present.
Friday, April 29, 2016
Princess Mononoke
(Hayao Miyazaki, Japan, 1997)
Seeing this film - well, completing it - last night, I quickly realized I would have trouble describing the experience. Faced with such a work, the brain, reeling from sensory overload, grasps desperately and wildly, landing on clichés. Eye-popping, mind-boggling, that kind of thing. But what can you do? Rarely do we find a storyteller, and a creator of images, as resistant to description and as impervious to hyperbole as Miyazaki.
Seeing Miyazaki's films out of order has made charting his career a particular challenge, but it is clear right away that Mononoke is a deepening of his previous efforts, and a departure from the whimsical spirit of works like Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. This film is an epic, full stop. It springs not just from Miyazaki's imagination but from history, from Japanese mythology, and from an awareness of human nature, compassionate and troubled, that has been annealed by experience.
Bazin and his band of merry Frenchmen agitated for the director as author, and more or less, the idea stuck. Film is a collaborative effort, yes, but we generally accept the fact that the director's is the biggest imagination on the set and in the editing room, the foreman on the floor, the architect at his drafting table, and the person (still usually a man, alas) with whom the buck stops. But how many directors can claim the level of authorship that Miyazaki has shown, in film after film? We Romantic Westerners imagine filmmaking as a defensive battle, waged on the director by time, money, recalcitrant crew members, temperamental actors, and her own stamina, concentration, and patience. Miyzaki works the other way, with the gale force of his imagination barely contained by the images that he personally draws or oversees. His world, inspired by ours - and nature, the Mother of Mothers - seems to strain at the attempts to make it solid, so bountiful and exuberant is his vision.
To catalogue the richness of Mononoke would take too long, and would only be a meager description of the whole movie, scene by scene. Ten minutes into the film, he has mastered the action genre. Before the credits roll, he will have also shown formidable chops in the historical drama, fantasy, war, melodrama, picaresque, and romance. Even horror, I would say (Japanese children must be made of stern stuff. If I'd seen this too young I'd still be haunted by it). By the end, we may be forgiven for not knowing what it was we just saw.
Monoke's first appearance in the movie, her face blood-soaked and fierce, has to be one of the great cinematic images, on par with Chaplin or Welles. Miyazaki, an admirer of Kurosawa, has in some ways surpassed him. Kurosawa spent his entire career trying to orchestrate the grandeur (and emotional intensity) that Miyazaki seems to accomplish effortlessly. Billions of American dollars and untold gigabits of processing have been spent trying to generate visions half as beautiful and wondrous as Miyazaki's Nightwalker, striding above the nocturnal forest like a shining, translucent man-raindeer-coral-reef. To what can we compare the Kodama, both adorable and cryptic? For sheer variety and inventiveness, Miyazaki is up there with Blake and Tolkein.
Astute minds have observed that Mononoke's treatment of good and evil is strikingly nuanced. Lady Eboshi, the ostensible antagonist - in a Disney film, she would have a sinister laugh and sharpened fingernails - is what we might call a pragmatist. She is destroying nature out a sense of necessity, viewing it as both inevitable and just; it's either the spirit of the forest, or human progress. In short, she is an avatar of Modernity, in all of its tragedy and paradox. She is also a savior to the dispossessed, putting whores and lepers to work. But Miyazaki doesn't stop there; the theme he develops is metaphysical, braided through every image, inseparable from the substance of the film's world. Morality, he sees, is a human dimension, but it arises from natural facts, and our frequent confusion is reflected in the duality of life and death in the world.. When we first encounter the Spirit of the Forest, otherworldly and yet welcoming, on its way to a (incomplete) act of healing, it also wilts a nearby sapling.
As human beings, we can learn from nature, and we can live in some sense of balance with it - but this is a hard-won truth, and the condition of balance is profoundly fragile. Princess Mononoke ends without an easy resolution, and with an acknowledgement that things can never revert back to a state of purity. There are irreconcilable facts of our own natures, and of history. But there is cause for hope, and Miyazaki shows that imagination is a necessary component of this hope - learning to see beyond the binaries, and looking towards some as-yet undiscovered sense of equilibrium. His wisdom, no less than the beauty of his vision, is a gift.
Seeing this film - well, completing it - last night, I quickly realized I would have trouble describing the experience. Faced with such a work, the brain, reeling from sensory overload, grasps desperately and wildly, landing on clichés. Eye-popping, mind-boggling, that kind of thing. But what can you do? Rarely do we find a storyteller, and a creator of images, as resistant to description and as impervious to hyperbole as Miyazaki.
Seeing Miyazaki's films out of order has made charting his career a particular challenge, but it is clear right away that Mononoke is a deepening of his previous efforts, and a departure from the whimsical spirit of works like Kiki's Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro. This film is an epic, full stop. It springs not just from Miyazaki's imagination but from history, from Japanese mythology, and from an awareness of human nature, compassionate and troubled, that has been annealed by experience.
Bazin and his band of merry Frenchmen agitated for the director as author, and more or less, the idea stuck. Film is a collaborative effort, yes, but we generally accept the fact that the director's is the biggest imagination on the set and in the editing room, the foreman on the floor, the architect at his drafting table, and the person (still usually a man, alas) with whom the buck stops. But how many directors can claim the level of authorship that Miyazaki has shown, in film after film? We Romantic Westerners imagine filmmaking as a defensive battle, waged on the director by time, money, recalcitrant crew members, temperamental actors, and her own stamina, concentration, and patience. Miyzaki works the other way, with the gale force of his imagination barely contained by the images that he personally draws or oversees. His world, inspired by ours - and nature, the Mother of Mothers - seems to strain at the attempts to make it solid, so bountiful and exuberant is his vision.
To catalogue the richness of Mononoke would take too long, and would only be a meager description of the whole movie, scene by scene. Ten minutes into the film, he has mastered the action genre. Before the credits roll, he will have also shown formidable chops in the historical drama, fantasy, war, melodrama, picaresque, and romance. Even horror, I would say (Japanese children must be made of stern stuff. If I'd seen this too young I'd still be haunted by it). By the end, we may be forgiven for not knowing what it was we just saw.
Monoke's first appearance in the movie, her face blood-soaked and fierce, has to be one of the great cinematic images, on par with Chaplin or Welles. Miyazaki, an admirer of Kurosawa, has in some ways surpassed him. Kurosawa spent his entire career trying to orchestrate the grandeur (and emotional intensity) that Miyazaki seems to accomplish effortlessly. Billions of American dollars and untold gigabits of processing have been spent trying to generate visions half as beautiful and wondrous as Miyazaki's Nightwalker, striding above the nocturnal forest like a shining, translucent man-raindeer-coral-reef. To what can we compare the Kodama, both adorable and cryptic? For sheer variety and inventiveness, Miyazaki is up there with Blake and Tolkein.
Astute minds have observed that Mononoke's treatment of good and evil is strikingly nuanced. Lady Eboshi, the ostensible antagonist - in a Disney film, she would have a sinister laugh and sharpened fingernails - is what we might call a pragmatist. She is destroying nature out a sense of necessity, viewing it as both inevitable and just; it's either the spirit of the forest, or human progress. In short, she is an avatar of Modernity, in all of its tragedy and paradox. She is also a savior to the dispossessed, putting whores and lepers to work. But Miyazaki doesn't stop there; the theme he develops is metaphysical, braided through every image, inseparable from the substance of the film's world. Morality, he sees, is a human dimension, but it arises from natural facts, and our frequent confusion is reflected in the duality of life and death in the world.. When we first encounter the Spirit of the Forest, otherworldly and yet welcoming, on its way to a (incomplete) act of healing, it also wilts a nearby sapling.
As human beings, we can learn from nature, and we can live in some sense of balance with it - but this is a hard-won truth, and the condition of balance is profoundly fragile. Princess Mononoke ends without an easy resolution, and with an acknowledgement that things can never revert back to a state of purity. There are irreconcilable facts of our own natures, and of history. But there is cause for hope, and Miyazaki shows that imagination is a necessary component of this hope - learning to see beyond the binaries, and looking towards some as-yet undiscovered sense of equilibrium. His wisdom, no less than the beauty of his vision, is a gift.
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