The Screengrab : alfonso cuaron

Screengrab Review: "Rudo y Cursi"

Nick Schager — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A flagrantly contrived piece of Hollywood-style hokum masquerading as serious drama, Rudo y Cursi gets the producing careers of the “three amigos” – Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñarritu and Guillermo del Toro, working under the banner “Cha Cha Cha” – off to a very inauspicious start. Written and directed by Cuarón’s younger brother Carlos, who co-wrote Y Tu Mamá También and who reunites that hit’s two headliners, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, for his behind-the-camera debut, the film attempts to mask its story’s creakiness with local flavor, exhibiting a comfortable, intimate familiarity with both its rural Mexico and Mexico City settings. Anyone who’s seen a cautionary tale about the dangers of fame and fortune, however, will likely groan their way through this saga about two banana-harvesting brothers, Luna’s hard-headed Beto, nicknamed “Rudo” (i.e. “tough), and Bernal’s wannabe singer Tato, aka “Cursi ” (i.e. “corny”), who both discover the pleasures and perils of having their superstardom dreams come true after they fortuitously meet, and then are signed to athletic contracts by, soccer agent Batuta (Guillermo Francella).

Cuarón’s relaxed, unhurried direction creates a convivial atmosphere, even if his conspicuous avoidance of showing actual game footage (instead, only depicting on-field incidents during stoppages in play) seems curious given the material’s passionate interest in the sport. And boy oh boy, is it ever interested, as evidenced by the clog-your-ears-incessant narration by Batuta, which is so rife with soccer metaphors (sample: “Loving a woman and a ball is the same”) that one comes to think Cuarón must be subtly mocking the entire notion of narration. Alas, he’s not, since when Batuta isn’t comparing his beloved pastime to life, he’s simply offering up overcooked stand-alone platitudes (“Pity, nowadays games are mistaken for wars and wars for games”) in an effort to spell out every single obvious point Rudo y Cursi has already, or is about to, make. Batuto’s verbal diarrhea epitomizes tell-don’t-show storytelling and Cuarón never lets up, piling on endless third-person blather in an apparent effort to give his storybook parable some profundity. Instead, however, it merely serves as insult to injury, rubbing in our faces the fact that, for all its attention to crafting a realistic sense of time and place, the film is the type of formulaic careful-what-you-wish-for jibber-jabber that domestic cinema has been churning out, to generally awful results, for decades.

Bernal and Luna’s collaborative history lends a modicum of weight to their depiction of squabbling, yet devoted, brothers. Still, although they attempt to downplay their characters’ schematic relationship, Cuarón’s script puts them through such hackneyed paces that any glimmers of authenticity found in their performances are overwhelmed by the narrative’s excessively melodramatic developments. Cursi becomes a soccer superstar but squanders his potential by pursuing a misguided music career and shacking up with a stunning gold-digger TV celeb. Rudo chases a soccer-goalie record but puts his life in jeopardy by gambling himself into deep debt. The two, having first embarked on their pro athlete paths thanks to a single penalty kick in which Rudo’s instructions to Cursi were misinterpreted, eventually wend their way to another monumental penalty kick at film’s conclusion, their personal and professional futures once again hinging on their ability to effectively communicate. They’re plot developments straight out of an Afterschool Special, yet treated by Cuarón with an undeserved level of self-satisfied import, the director oblivious to the fact that just as his protagonists don’t quite know “right” from “left,” his film doesn’t know novelty from banal clichés.

Trailer Review: Rudo y Cursi

Paul Clark — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Having collaborated on several films with his brother Carlos, the talented Alfonso Cuaron has returned the favor by producing (with his fellow filmmakers Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu) Carlos’ debut feature. In fact, Rudo y Cursi represents something of a reunion, as the brothers Cuaron have once again cast their Y Tu Mama Tambien leading men, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, as the title characters in this film. While Rudo y Cursi looks decidedly lighter than Y Tu Mama, the easy chemistry the actors had in that movie is just as apparent here, enough to make them perfectly convincing as brothers, especially when they’re fighting. And while I’m not quite sure about the more fanciful touches in the trailer, I’m hoping some of Alfonso’s prodigious filmmaking skills will rub off on his brother. And if nothing else, this should tide me over until Alfonso decides to make a new film.

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

METROPOLIS (1927)

The granddaddy of cinematic dystopias, Fritz Lang’s science fiction masterpiece will probably get a re-release in the not too distant future, now that long-lost footage from the original 1927 cut has turned up in a film museum in Argentina (at least according to the German paper Die Zeit). The film’s Art Deco production design has influenced everything from Star Wars, Blade Runner and Tim Burton’s Gotham City to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video, but the story is even more universal, with its (sadly) timeless depiction of a society where the rich are supported by the suffering of the unseen, overworked poor and power is maintained through divisive lies spread by sexy robots.

CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

Utopia is about a singular view of perfection. Dystopia is when that view does not include everyone. As literature has shown over and over again, Utopia (which means, literally "no place") cannot exist because people cannot get along. How can any one idea of perfection work for everyone? Democracy is the closest form of government to perfection yet created. The most people can work for the best outcome. The rights of those in the minority are protected by law. Simple and beautiful. But even here in the good old U.S. of A., we've done our level best to fuck it up. In the last eight years, we've stripped civil liberties to the bone and bought into a viewpoint of fear so foul that we have allowed our leaders to demonize everyone who subscribes to the world's second-largest religion. We've gone into an unwinnable war for reasons that seemed spurious at the time and have since proved absurd. We allow representatives of our media to smear citizens who would dare to question our leaders' judgment. And the outgoing guy (two more months!), the guy responsible for the bulk of these travesties, received more votes in the last election from citizens in this democracy than any prior candidate. But it's a brave new world. Even more people voted for the new guy. He's promising "change," which isn't a hard thing to live up to, but he says that he believes in hope and believes that he can make things better for more people...but if not, we may end up with something akin to the 2006 adaptation of P.D. James’ novel Children of Men, set in the last days of humanity, when the world has fallen into chaos. There are no children; there is no future for the human race. The only surviving government that we see is Great Britain's, and it has clamped down on immigration with a vengeance that can only be described as Lou-Dobbsian. Terrorist bombings are common. So are death camps and torture. The rich hide themselves away behind gates and armed guards and think about the death of culture, while their police and policies ensure that everyone else just thinks about death. Alfonso Cuaron's film looks on the works of man and does not flinch.

THE NEW WORLD (2005)

In Terrence Malick's version of the Pocahontas story, the Jamestown settlers are criminals and layabouts pretending to be pioneers and soldiers. The new world has given them a chance to begin again, to make everything right even though they've previously made a mess of their lives. There's two problems right off the bat: a) they want to force the new world into their own image of it, despite the people already occupying it, and b) they don't know how. Force is the usual answer, but understanding is the extraordinary one. The settlers opt for Plan A, but one of the native new worlders grasps at Plan B. Understanding has its own set of problems, not least that it cannot last. Humanity is about strife and force; one person alone cannot elide the genetic imperative that leads to violence over property and ways of life. She pushes herself, though. Assimilates. Knows love. Knows wisdom. Knows the impossibility of her task. But she continues to push understanding, onward to the next new world, from which no messages return.

LA JETEE (1962)

The future is all used up. Those in power among the survivors of World War III need help from other time periods. They have developed an idea of time travel based on memory and send a man back to a fixed image in his head. They visit a fallen tree, echoing Vertigo, and he points out beyond its rings to show her where he's from. Later, he goes to the future, where he secures the power source his society needs to continue to survive. His own time has no use for him anymore, but they fear his happiness. And he may be dreaming, but it's a dream that propels him towards death.

WEEK END (1967)

Ordinary dispute erupts into shocking violence. In one of cinema’s greatest tracking shots, as our oblivious protagonists weave through a traffic jam that seems to stretch out to infinity, the framework of society falls to shambles. They are on the way to murder one's father for the insurance money. Godard’s children of Marx and Coca-Cola (I know, that’s from a different movie) start out with every luxury available and end with pigs slaughtered by know-nothing revolutionaries in the woods. Violence is so commonplace that they can't even see it. I'm fairly certain this is what would have happened within a week of a John McCain victory.

FITZCARRALDO (1982)

This movie is built around one man’s mad and obsessive utopian scheme to bring an opera house to the jungle. He fails - everyone fails at perfection - but he fails spectacularly. Herculean feats, madness, and the looming specter of death all haunt this movie. Be sure to watch it with the documentary Burden of Dreams, in which you can see how close Werner Herzog gets to his vision.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Great Expectations (1998, Alfonso Cuaron)

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Since making his feature debut with 1991’s Solo con tu pareja, Alfonso Cuaron has become one of the world’s most acclaimed and distinctive filmmakers. That he has managed to do this is a credit not only to his talent but also his versatility. With a scant six features under his belt, he has managed to makes films both large and small, both light and dark, and in both English and Spanish. His breakthrough film A Little Princess is a lovely and underseen family film, and his instinctive feel for family-friendly entertainment helped him immeasurably on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, seen by many as the best big-screen Potter adventure to date. In between, he’s also managed to transcend the teenage sex film into transcendent cinema in Y Tu Mama Tambien, and crafted one of the most unique dystopian visions of the cinema in Children of Men.

But in the evaluation of Cuaron’s career to date, one film has gotten lost in the shuffle- 1998’s Great Expectations. A loose, lushly-mounted update of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, the film was released in 1998 in the dog days of February, in the wake of the Titanic juggernaut. Reviews were middling, and audience response was unenthusiastic. In the eyes of many Hollywood insiders, the project that should have been a stepping stone to Cuaron’s future as a big-name Hollywood filmmaker became a stumbling block that sent him tumbling back to Mexico to make his subsequent film. But while there’s no denying that the perception of Great Expectations didn’t help Cuaron’s career, the real question is here more simple- is the movie any good?

Having watched the film recently, I would maintain that it is, and certainly better than its reputation would suggest. That said, it’s hardly perfect. A number of critics took the film to task for being insufficiently faithful to Dickens, and certainly, Great Expectations didn’t benefit from being one of a rash of loose “re-imaginings” of classic novels that were in vogue during the mid- to late-nineties. But I found that the contemporary trappings suited the original story pretty well. More distracting was the way the screenplay, written by Mitch Glazer, pared down Dickens’ story to focus almost entirely on the relationship between Pip (now named Finn and played by Ethan Hawke) and Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow). In doing so, Glazer sketches over much of what makes the book really interesting, that story of a man who is carried along by destiny from one fascinating situation to another guided by two benefactors, one known to him (Miss Havisham), the other unseen. As a result, Great Expectations lacks much of the narrative interest that the novel had.

But if Cuaron’s film largely fails as Dickens, there’s plenty of other aspects to the film to enjoy. The majority of Dickens adaptations for film and television have emphasized the squalor and hardscrabble lifestyle of the period in which he wrote, but Cuaron’s style infuses the story with liberal amounts of magic realism, and the two are a surprisingly good fit. It helps that the film is set in two locations in the U.S. that are best suited for magic realism- the Gulf Coast of Florida (with its swamps and vegetation and distinctly Hispanic influence) and New York City. Look at the decaying manse of the film’s Miss Havisham character, here called Ms. Dinsmoor and played by Anne Bancroft. The home itself is based on the Alhambra in Spain, but everything is falling apart and overgrown, and the wedding party, still set out after three decades, is made all the more eerie by the Spanish moss that’s hanging from the trees. And the film’s version of New York is a city full of mysterious settings and endless possibilities, and Cuaron and regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki make good use of the weather to reflect the tone of the film, with the sun shining warmly when Finn is content, and rain pouring or leaves falling when his emotional state has become tumultuous.

Likewise, the film is ideally cast to suit Cuaron’s style. At first glance, Ethan Hawke seems too lightweight to work in the lead role, and certainly to intone the wholly gratuitous narration. But consider that Dickens’ main characters usually tended to be observers through whom the reader could experience the adventures of the story, so in this way the casting makes perfect sense. Gwyneth Paltrow makes a perfectly fine Estella, pulling off both the coldness that results from her upbringing by Ms. Dinsmoor and the sadness that she’s ill-equipped to love Finn because of this. Anne Bancroft, always a marvelous ham, digs into the role of Ms. Dinsmoor with plenty of relish, and no small amount of wit (listen to her response when young Finn asks about her cat). Chris Cooper is affecting as Finn’s Uncle Joe, who for the boy only to be cast aside when Finn became a famous artist. And Robert DeNiro gives perhaps his last great performance in the small role of the prisoner Joe (Magwitch in the book), successfully playing the frightening prisoner early on, only to turn up again years later as a shadowy, eccentric figure in the hero’s life.

On balance, Great Expectations is fairly flawed but ultimately a worthwhile film. As narrative, it’s sometimes less than compelling, and it certainly isn’t successful as an adaptation. But it’s so visually enchanting and full of vivid supporting characters that it hardly matters. The film’s failings are those of the script and of the studio who tried to make the film more palatable to mainstream sensibilities (which explains the narration), while the stuff that works is almost entirely Cuaron’s. Despite its reputation, Great Expectations is an interesting entry on Cuaron’s filmography, and one that bears a second look in light of his more recent work. I suspect time will be kind to it.

Trailer Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:17:00 GMT

Here you go, Potter fans. Warner Bros. has been sort of dragging its feet in getting a Half-Blood Prince trailer out there, but then, they could more or less throw together something with the title and date and that’d be enough to guarantee $250 million at the box office. Hell, they more or less did that with the teaser that played before The Dark Knight on IMAX screens. As for this one, I like the audacity of it, taking the focus away from Harry and throwing it on the film’s backstory, the relationship between a younger Dumbledore and former student Tom Riddle, who was destined to become He Who Must Not Be Named. Anyway, I dug the last installment in the series (it’s my #2 Potter film behind Cuaron’s installment), and I’m intrigued for this one as well. Enjoy.

Yesterday's Hits: Summer of '42 (1971, Robert Mulligan)

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One of the many cool regular columns that we’re running right now on Screengrab is Leonard Pierce’s weekly feature Summerfest 2008. All summer long, Leonard has tasked himself to write about one movie a week with the word “summer” in the title. Personally, I’m hoping he gets around to one of Eric Rohmer’s seasonal classics- either Summer/The Green Ray or A Summer’s Tale- but I realize that at one movie a week, the series will be far from comprehensive. Happily, Leonard has given me permission to help him out on that front, to write up a Yesterday’s Hits that neatly dovetailed with his goal. So to that end, I’ve decided to review a summer-y hit of yesteryear, Robert Mulligan’s 1971 film Summer of ‘42.

What made Summer of ‘42 a hit? After the fall of the Production Code, the newfound permissiveness changed the face of Hollywood filmmaking. But while many filmmakers tried to push the envelope of what was acceptable, Summer of ‘42 took a different approach, injecting sexuality into the framework of what was essentially a nostalgia piece for a more innocent time- the 1940s. It was this period setting- and the tastefulness of the storytelling- that appealed to older audience members who otherwise might not have been interested in an R-rated movie about the sexual stirrings of teenagers. At the same time, it was this same nostalgia which appealed to the children of a more permissive era, who marveled at how naïve the children of the period were, learning about sex from books and hemming and hawing at the idea of buying birth control at the local pharmacy.

But one also shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of the film’s most prominent storyline, the deflowering of the film’s teenaged protagonist “Hermie” (Gary Grimes) by the recent war widow Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill). The older-woman fantasy has long been a popular one among young men, and Summer of ‘42 was one of the first Hollywood films to portray it in any detail. Unlike The Graduate, which pretty much turned its older woman into a predator all the better to hammer home its youth-friendly message, Summer of ‘42 told its older-woman/younger-man story with a tenderness befitting those fantasies held by generations of teenagers. Combine all of these factors with a fresh-faced cast of unknowns and the film became a surprise hit, one of the top grossers of 1971 and an Academy Award winner for Michel Legrand’s bittersweet score.

What happened? Compared to most hits of the day, Summer of ‘42 was fairly small-scale and unassuming, so it didn’t linger in the zeitgeist in quite the same way as, say, contemporaneous fellow Yesterday’s Hits selections The Way We Were and Love Story. For one thing, the nostalgia Mulligan’s film offered paled in comparison to the melodramatic pull of Love Story, and its low-wattage cast couldn’t compare with the pairing of Streisand and Redford. Finally, while the sincerity of the film’s portrayal of 1940s sexual innocence originally appealed the audiences, it became less relatable as the years passed, to the point where the famous condom-buying scene was parodied in an English television commercial. Like so many films, both in the past and today, Summer of ‘42 just wasn’t made to withstand the passage of time.

Does Summer of ‘42 still work? Kind of. One of the most charming aspects of the movie is its time-capsule quality, both of the 1940s and the 1970s’ concept of 1940s life. In our more sexually-frank age, it’s hard to remember a time when sex wasn’t just a mouse-click away, but Mulligan and writer Herman Rauscher portray this time with warmth. At the same time, the movie gets a lot of more universal details right, especially the way young men always try just a little too hard to impress women, to say nothing of those tentative grope session in the back row of the local movie house- a detail that rings just as true when the movie is Now, Voyager as when it’s Iron Man.

But there’s always something that has stuck in my craw about the older-woman fantasy, both in the film and in general. Namely, what does the older woman think? In Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien- currently the benchmark for onscreen portrayals of this premise- the question was answered by making the older woman the central player in the story. By contrast, in Summer of ‘42, Dorothy exists almost entirely to be admired by Hermie- first from a distance, then up close, then closer still. After Dorothy’s husband ships off to war, she befriends the kid, and the same day she finds out her husband has been killed, she responds by sleeping with him. After that, she disappears forever. To quote the Church Lady, “how conveeeeeeeeeenient!”

In the end, Summer of ‘42’s nostalgia is too rose-colored by half. The film was based on the real-life experiences of screenwriter Herman Rauscher (note the protagonist’s name), whose memories of the actual events were surely smoothed out from almost three decades’ distance. But the reality of one’s teenaged sexual awakening- not only Rauscher’s but practically everyone’s- is almost never this tidy. Most of the time, it’s fraught with anxiety and more than a little shame, two factors that can’t be dealt with simply by staring meaningfully into the distance as Hermie does in the film. By downplaying this emotional prickliness, Summer of ‘42 became a favorite date movie for 1971 audiences, but had the film kept more of this, it could very well have become a true-blue classic.

Video of the Day: The Shock Doctrine

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Naomi Klein's trenchant, brilliant, and sometimes alarmist book about the use of 'shock and awe' tactics to push through free-market economic reforms during times of national trauma was released late last year, but it's just now seeing wide publication in paperback. At the time of its release, Klein released a short film via YouTube to serve as both a teaser for and audiovisual explication of the book.

The film is directed by Jonás Cuarón, and produced and co-written (with Klein) by his father, Alfonso Cuarón. The elder Cuarón met Klein when she was researching her first book on globalism, No Logo, and sought out his advice as a leading Mexican anti-globalism advocate. Although The Shock Doctrine was heavily downloaded at the time of its release, now seems like a good time to revisit it, both for its highly vital poltical message and its disturbing yet elegiaic cinematic qualities.

Cannes 2008: Meet the Jury!

Paul Clark — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, The Screengrab was the 152nd blog on the web to post the Competition slate for next month's Cannes Film Festival. But before you start predicting the winners sight unseen, we suggest you get to know the members of the Competition jury. That way you'll know whose names to curse when your favorite filmmaker gets smoked by some little-known furriner whose name you can't pronounce.

This year's Cannes Competition Jury:

Sean Penn (Jury President) is a filmmaker of some note, directing four films since his 1990 debut, The Indian Runner. His most recent film is the memorably Oscar-snubbed Into the Wild. When not behind the camera, Penn is also known for his political and charitable work, which has taken him to Iran and to the post-Katrina New Orleans. Penn has also been known to act on occasion.

Sergio Castellitto has appeared in several films in Competition, including 2001's Va Savoir and 2002's The Religion Hour (My Mother's Smile). Once referred to by Screengrab favorite Mike D'Angelo as "maybe the most underrated thesp alive," he also starred in the popular Mostly Martha, better known as No Reservations, Except Good. Castellitto has also directed two features, including the 2004 film Don't Move, in which he exercised his director's clout in order to give himself several love scenes with Penelope Cruz.

Natalie Hershlag, alternately known as Natalie Portman, made her big-screen debut at age 13 in Luc Besson's The Professional, sometimes referred to as Léon by various talkbackers on Ain't It Cool News. Since that time, she has become one of the most sought-after actresses of her generation, particularly among horny fanboys who despair that she will never get completely naked onscreen. Hershlag is set to make her directorial debut in this year's omnibus film New York, I Love You, where her short film will appear alongside new works by such acclaimed filmmakers as Brett Ratner and Scarlett Johansson. She also wants you to know that the Shins will totally change your life.

Alfonso Cuaron first gained international critical attention with his 1995 film A Little Princess, and subsequent films like Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men have proven him a formidable talent (he also allegedly made a low-budget adaptation of a little-known English fantasy novel, but no one knows what became of this). In 2006, his high-profile friendship with fellow Mexican filmmakers Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu let to the trio briefly becoming known as "The Three Amigos" for several months before they were sued by Chevy Chase, Martin Short and Steve Martin.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has such a long name that I run the risk of hitting my character limit simply by typing it. Luckily for me, he prefers to simply be called "Joe." Joe has garnered widespread critical acclaim for his whimsical, magical-realist films, which include Mysterious Object at Noon, Blissfully Yours, and Syndromes and a Century. His 2004 film Tropical Malady won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and Roger Ebert called the film "a meditation on portentous but incoherent themes." By which we're guessing he meant "awesome."

Alexandra Maria Lara, a ravishing Romanian who moved to Germany at age 4, made her movie debut at 16. However, the role that brought her international acclaim came in 2004's Downfall, in which she portrayed Hitler's personal secretary Traudl Junge. Since then, she costarred in Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth and in last year's Ian Curtis biopic Control, where she met current boyfriend Sam Riley (isn't that cute?). Lara will next appear in Stephen Daldry's The Reader, as well as taking a supporting role in Spike Lee's WWII drama Miracle at St. Anna, a role you won't find out about by looking her up on IMDb.

Rachid Bouchareb is a French director-producer who last appeared at Cannes with his 2006 drama Days of Glory. In addition to his own films, he has also produced the work of numerous other filmmakers, including all four features to date by Bruno Dumont. Sorry, I have nothing humorous to say about this guy.

So there you have it. Seven jury members, down from nine last year. How will they vote? Will Penn insist on a political bent, or at least something appeals to his artier side? Will Cuaron stump for his fellow Latin Americans? Which Bouchareb will show up- the one who directed the rousing WW2 or the guy who produces Bruno Dumont movies? Will Joe gravitate to fellow talking-primate lover Charlie Kaufman? Will the paparazzi devote most of their attention to Portman and Lara (yes, they will)? Let the blind prognosticating commence in 5, 4, 3...

Trailer Review: Blindness

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This is a first-rate teaser in the classic sense, in that it gives audiences a taste of the film's premise and little else. I'd venture a guess that all of the footage we see here is taken from the opening twenty minutes of the film- we meet the characters, the plot (taken from a novel by Jose Saramago) is introduced, and the titular malady escalates to epidemic proportions. It's tantalizing and highly effective. Like Children of Men's Alfonso Cuaron before him, director Fernando Meirelles appears to bring a certain level of deep-seated spirituality to the film's science-fiction roots, something that's apparent even in this relatively short teaser, which is nonetheless full of ethereal fades to white and Gods'-eye-few camera shots. Also, it's nice to see Julianne Moore working in a project worthy of her talent again, after too many ill-fitting comedies and cookie-cutter melodramas, and costars like Gael Garcia Bernal and the always-compelling Mark Ruffalo should make a good match for her.

"The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema" in The Believer

Phil Nugent — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Slavoj Zizek may not exactly be overexposed in movies, but he's come closer to it than any other Slovenian film theorist, Lacanian philosopher, and sometime presidential candidate I can think of. (The Guardian once called him "the Elvis of philosophy", ignoring Elvis's famous statement that he thought that Lacan was "about as funny as a turd in a punchbowl.") A couple of fall festival seasons back, the bearded, bearish Zizek could be seen pontificating about such subjects as Hitchcock and David Lynch, The Exorcist and The Matrix, in Sophie Fiennes's two-and-a-half-hour The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, which was at least the third film documentary built around his gruff-accented rumblings, and which was widely acclaimed as his definitive star turn. The movie has yet to be distributed here in theaters or on DVD, but you can watch a fifty-minute chunk of it on a DVD that comes with "The 2008 Film Issue" of The Believer. In a brief accompanying tribute, Jason McBride describes Zizek's approach in this film essay as "dialectical materialism for the multiplex." I don't know what that means, but it sure is catchy.

Earlier film directors (including Alfonso Cuaron, who included Zizek among the list of all-star bigbrains who appeared in The Possibility of Hope, the documentary short that was included as a bonus on the Children of Men DVD, which also included a Zizek commentary track) have been content to stick a camera in front of Zizek and watch him spout. Finnes, trying to supply some cinematic fireworks to match the stream of words pouring out of her star, provides him with settings drawn from the film clips that are intercut with his monologue; we see him sitting in a chair in Norman Bates's basement, sitting across from Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus and demanding, "I vant a third pill!", steering the boat taking Tippi Hedren to Rod Taylor's island home in The Birds (the title of which Zizek pronounces as "The Burks"), and in Dorothy Vallens's apartment in Blue Velvet, passively observing her mating ritual with Frank Booth. (Disappointingly, he and Frank don't pass the inhaler back and forth.) At first it seems like a cute gimmick, but it begins to feel like the logical next step in Zizek's approach. He loves movies, but he also has mixed feelings about their hold on them, the way they invade and impose themselves on his dream life. Spinning theories about where these images come from and how they work is his way of fighting back and reclaiming some territory within his own inner space; Fiennes makes it possible for him to escape the lecture room and take the fight to his subject's home turf. In addition to the DVD (and the already-notorious Werner Herzog-Errol Morris conversation), there are a few other things in the magazine that aim to get at the movies' assaults on our dreams, and our conscious minds' efforts to stand their ground, that might do Zizek proud. Notable among them are the tribute to the late Leonard Schrader's vast collection of lobby cards,, and Devin McKinney's persuasive argument, which bows to neither purists nor James Stewart partisans, that Henry Fonda should have played Scottie in Vertigo.

Face/Off: Children of Men

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, permit me to bore you with one of my very earliest movie memories. My mom took me to the 1973 animated Disney version of Robin Hood, in which the title character was played, if memory serves, by a small red fox. And when this fox was asked to express his feelings towards Maid Marian, he sang out, "I love her more than life itself!" The line was, I now suspect, not wholly original, but at the time it was new to me, and it stirred me deeply. I think that from that moment on, I have lived my life in hopes of finding someone, or something, I loved more than life itself. So far, the results have been mixed, but I can truly say of Children of Men that I love it more than life itself and that the movie has in turn accepted my love gracefully and never punishing me for it by using it to make me feel stupid, small, or unworthy, which is more than I can say for certain redheads of my acquaintance.

Since there are no bad scenes in the picture, and in fact precious few that could not be pointed to as jaw-dropping evidence of its stature, it is not easy to single out one, but I will settle on the chase scene from around the middle of the movie, with Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey and Pam Ferris fleeing the farmhouse in a car that won't start, with the goonish "revolutionaries" in hot pursuit. Coming after the much-remarked earlier car-chase-shootout that the director, Alfonso Cuaron, and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, labored so hard to capture in a single shot, it's hard not to see this scene as a statement on Cuaron's part: "Technology is great that I could do that, huh? Oh by the way, I can do this, too!" The terrible suspense of the scene, accomplished over what ought to be the handicap of our knowing that Owen isn't going to check out this early in the story (but wait — didn't we know that about Julianne Moore, too? For Christ's sake, push harder, Clive!), is nerve-racking testimony both to Cuaron's sheer skill and the effortless way that Owen, with his unforced audience rapport, has quietly laid claim to the viewer's emotions. It just goes on and on, a moment of horror stuck in the mire, like a nightmare that you start hating yourself for not waking up from. It's so simple it's dumbfounding that it should be so powerful — but then not everybody who ever got his hands on a camera, a car, and a half-dozen actors is in Cuaron's league. Most of them don't deserve to be regarded as being in the same profession.

Leonard, since I know you are an intelligent and honest man, I imagine that about this point you'll want to just chime in, "Yup, he's right, no way to argue with any of that," and then we can both sign off for the day.

LEONARD PIERCE: As tempting as it is to just type "you're right" and collect my fee for two-words'-worth of effort, I feel that would be a disservice to our readers, as well as to my reputation as a combative jerk. I am glad that, in Children of Men, you have found the unconditional love that is the object of all human striving. Perhaps I am a cynic, but I have given up hope of ever discovering such purity of feeling in any human endeavor outside of a bottle of gin; it is, I fear, beyond the capacity of any woman, stuffed animal or movie — and, I say with some regret, especially beyond the capacity of Children of Men. Like the cliché about political outrage, I fear that if you can't find anything to dislike in Cuarón's crowning achievement — and particularly in the car-chase-that-isn't — you just aren't looking hard enough.

On a certain level, I almost want to agree with you; there are hardly any bad scenes in the picture, provided you define 'scenes' as the big, impressive set pieces that stick in the mind after viewing it, and not the tedious and often eye-roll-inducing moments that hold those scenes together. My initial reaction on seeing the film was that it was a dozen or so individual scenes ranging from very good to absolutely brilliant, but all held together by a rickety, nonsensical plot that was amounted to little more than a series of hokey chase scenes. Six set pieces in search of a movie, you might say. And nothing seemed, on subsequent viewings, to affirm that first reaction than the farmhouse chase scene. There were scenes in Children of Men that left me breathless with their virtuosity and emotional power, but so sorely did the chase scene test the sacred principle of suspension of disbelief that if I was out of breath, it was only from heavy sighing. Having already established the later-to-be-beaten-into-the-muddy-earth point that people are often so blinded by their own interests that they will behave selfishly under the worst of circumstances, Cuarón's script now asks us to believe that the revolutionaries (I certainly can't dispute your characterization of them as goonish, though I mean it more in a Peter Sellers way than a Benito Mussolini way) are not only asinine, but supremely incompetent. The director even seems to anticipate the objection to this outlandish chase scene, establishing by a clunky bit of exposition that the armed rebels can't just open fire on the car lest they injure the pregnant Kee, a.k.a. the most important MacGuffin in the world. We're not made privy to what the disastrous consequences would be if they just shot Clive Owen, or the car tires, or just found someone who could run faster than an aging, out-of-shape reporter pushing a car through the mud, but one assumes they would be equally intolerable.

This isn't just a case of not being able to accept a film's internal logic. I'm perfectly willing to go along with the entire scenario of the movie, nebulous as it might be. But this scene is purely a case of a filmmaker having a neat idea and pushing ahead with it no matter how nonsensical it plays out on screen, just to show that he can do it. It's called shredding, and it can surely be impressive, but it's rarely noble.

At this point, my friend, there is no shame in a one-word surrender, though I sense it might take the form of "Nuts."

PHIL NUGENT: I could say that Children of Men is, like many great movies, a dream, a nightmare vision of how bad things could be based on where we are now, then leap aboard that "internal logic" qualifier and ride the sucker like Seabiscuit. But as it is, the scene in question is one that I think makes perfect sense in human terms. If it looks a little odd at first glance, I would submit that this is because even sophisticated filmgoers are so used to action scenes that derive their full measure of believable human behavior based on what happens in other movies' action scenes that they may at first be confused by seeing one in which the characters onscreen act like people. Three of them are scared out of their wits and the rest of them just discovered, at an ungodly hour, that their world is collapsing. It makes sense that the atmosphere would be a little different than in the planned murder that precedes it or confused in a different way than in the full-blown firefight that will come, when a killing fever that spreads across several city blocks inflames and emboldens the people caught up in it. Nor do I find it unlikely that the guys with the guns might not want to just blow Clive Owen's head off in front of the little mother. None of them want to do anything that might jeopardize that pregnancy, and since none of them has been on hand for one before — and had already concluded that they'd never get the chance — why is improbable or contrived that they'd choose to err on the side of caution and not subject her to a bloody trauma? It's not as if Owens's escape isn't on the order of a miracle. (Am I conceding that the happy conclusion of the scene, if not the elements that go into it, counts as an implausibility? I suppose I might be. Certain implausibilities one learns to accept, as a filmgoer, as the price of getting the movie on to the next scene.)

And I must object to your referring to Kee as a MacGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated definition of a MacGuffin is "what the spies are after but the audience don't care." Love it or hate it, surely we can at least agree that Children of Men would not be the same movie, in either its intentions or its actual achievement, if it had been possible for the casting director to have ever said to Cuaron, "We're having trouble finding the right person to play the only pregnant woman in the world; how about we just change her to a roll of microfilm?" On the other hand, I applaud your description of the revolutionaries as being more of the Peter Sellers than the Baader-Meinhof variety. But then, I have a sneaking hunch that this might be true of most "real" self-styled revolutionary terrorists, maybe even including the real Baader-Meinhof gang.

LEONARD PIERCE: One of the reasons the chase-scene revolutionaries in Children of Men don't make sense in human terms, to me, is precisely because they (like many real-world terrorists, which is presumably a big reason why they're terrorists instead of, say, accountants) don't tend to err on the side of caution. Of course their world is collapsing — and faced with a world on the verge of collapse, people don't often react with thoughtfulness and circumspection. With the most important thing on the face of the planet slipping with painful slowness through their grasp, it's very hard to believe that the revolutionaries, especially the furious dreadlocked blond who's been looking for an excuse to blow Clive Owen's head off for half the movie, would suddenly get all overwhelmed with softness lest they upset the little mother. If they let Kee escape, the baby is as gone as if she lost it from trauma, so why take the chance? (Incidentally, the point you raise about the goons being unfamiliar with the mysteries of childbirth, to me, exacerbates the unreality of the scene rather than mitigates it; if they don't know how pregnancy works, why would they know they'd be endangering it by taking Clive out at the kneecaps?)

Beyond that, the scene seems to contradict the film's own message: it is a lamentable aspect of selfish human nature that people will behave in harmful and destructive ways even when everything around them is falling apart. This is certainly the message conveyed by the mass social unrest depicted in the rest of the film — faced with a world that may cease to exist in fifty years, people behave in the most appallingly short-sighted ways. And yet in the farm chase, shown in microcosm, the revolutionaries behave in just the opposite way. It's not the first or the last time these mixed messages appear (the presence of the baby in the movie's final quarter has a magical pacifying effect on the violent mind of man, except when it doesn't), but it's one of the most egregious, and it's frustrating — almost maddening — for those in the audience who desperately want the movie not to screw up the good will it creates with its often stunning and brilliant set pieces.

I suppose that, in the end, we have to resort back to the old cliche about the suspension of disbelief — if you really buy into the premise of a film and find yourself enjoying it, you're much more likely to forgive or even embrace the implausibilities it may throw at you. From your perspective — from the perspective of someone who loves Children of Men more than life itself — the scene is a perfect example of the sort of miracle its director can pull off, a moment that in lesser hands could have been an embarrassment, but instead works perfectly and serves to reveal some of the movie's greatest strengths and deepest truths. From my perspective — from that of someone for whom Children of Men is an ambitious failure, a collection of great scenes that never quite manage to cohere — it's just something that stays with you as a reminder of why the movie wasn't all that it should have been.