Movies

In three acts:

1. Sarah Vowell was interviewed as part of the City Arts & Lectures series last Monday night. She was interviewed by David Kipen (the San Francisco Chronicle's book editor), who was OK, I suppose, but lobbed some really lame questions her way. Vowell didn't do him any favors, responding to the dumb questions with one word answers. Vowell was pretty funny, in her extremely dry manner, but didn't reveal too much of herself. Which is not too surprising considering her proclaimed love of being left alone.

2. After Sarah Vowell, we went to Bimbo's to see Pinback, a band made up of people I imagine must have liked legos, math, and modern art growing up. The show was pretty good, although we arrived a little late due to my brain misfiring, causing us to catch a cab to the Bottom of the Hill on the other side of the city. Luckily the taxi was still around after I realized I got the venue wrong. Stupidity should be expensive, and it was.

3. I read an interview from a few years ago with the novelist Alan Furst, who writes about Europe between the world wars. He had an interesting take on every patriotic American's favorite historical anecdote, the German conquest of France in WWII. He thinks the slow response by France to German expansion was because France still hadn't recovered, physically and psychologically, from the devastation of the Great War. So they allowed Czechoslavakia to be annexed and thought that Nazi Germany could be appeased. I hadn't thought of that angle before. It's so much simpler to just believe that the childish, cowardly French surrendered because it's in their nature to surrender, and need the Americans to bail them whenever things get too tough for their delicate constitutions.

He also makes the interesting point that French collaboration (and more than a little luck, plus the German belief that the French had culture) more or less saved the country from complete devastation, such as was visited on Poland.

The Oscar nominees were announced today, and it's always interesting and sad to see how the movie industry sees itself. Johnny Depp nominated for Best Actor for Pirates of the Carribean? Were they trying to make it easier to give it to Bill Murray? You can be sure my Murray-signed deer antler will be pointed south during the ceremonies. Chiwetel Ejiofor deserved Depp's place here.

Sofia Coppola got nominated for Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation, and I hope she gets one of them.

American Splendor was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, and while it's pretty much assured that it won't win, good for Harvey Pekar and congratulations to Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman.

In the Documentary category, Errol Morris finally got nominated for The Fog of War, which is an about-face for the Academy, who previously thought his use of re-enactments somehow made his movies into something other than a documentary film. Morris himself uses the term "non-fiction" to describe his movies. Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedman's, the best film I saw at last year's Sundance, was also nominated, and it's certainly worthy of winning.

It's amazing to me that a movie like Something's Gotta Give was nominated for anything, but at least it wasn't another damn nomination for Jack Nicholson. Diane Keaton is his surrogate here for Best Actress.

The Oscars remind me a bit of high school elections, where the pretty and likeable usually win over the more deserving and less connected.

...is not The Return of the King, although I'm looking forward to seeing it, but rather Errol Morris's The Fog of War, a new documentary about Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, whose name is synonymous with Vietnam.

Morris appears to be continuing his exploration of the nature of evil he began with Mr. Death. McNamara, unlike Fred Leuchter, Jr. in Mr. Death, has self-awareness and expresses regret for his past actions.

In 1995 McNamara released In Retrospect, a memoir in which he admits that the Vietnam War was misguided, and the policies he oversaw were disasterous and unnecessary. This opinion is held by nearly everybody but the extreme hawkish right, but McNamara was viciously criticized after In Retropsect was released, which I find illuminating.

The U.S. has a schizoid attitude toward Vietnam. We all pretty much agree our involvement was wrong, but we also don't really want to face the full consequences of that. Witness the Democratic presidential candidates and the press's questions regarding their actions during the Vietnam War. The public admires Wesley Clark and John Kerry for fighting in a wrong-headed and unpopular war that, in retrospect, we think should not have occured.

Similarly, the public dislikes hearing McNamara volunteer the opinion he, and by extension the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, was wrong about Vietnam. Would we prefer a defiant figure, a la Henry Kissinger, who doesn't apologize for a conflict that killed tens of thousands of Americans, and more importantly 3.5 million Vietnamese (not to mention the resulting chaos, war, and killing in Laos and Cambodia)? I don't know. Maybe we just wish that whole era would fade into the abstract world of history, like a bad choice made when we were young and foolish.

I saw two movies this weekend: Dirty Pretty Things by Stephen Frears and Lost in Translation by Sophia Coppola.

Dirty Pretty Things is about a group of immigrants in the demi-monde of London hotels, garment factories, and taxis. They exist to make the dirty things pretty again, as one character says, but Frears is too sharp to ever let things become spotless after being spoiled. Audrey Tatou, the actress from Amelie, plays Senay, a Turkish asylum seeker and muslim, who must work clandestinely to maintain her immigrant status. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Okwe, a Nigerian illegal immigrant who had to flee Lagos after running afoul of the government. The characters stoop constantly in the film, both literally and figuratively, whether it's cleaning a toilet, giving a coerced blow-job to avoid being turned in to the immigration service, or examining a venereal disease of a coworker (Okwe used to be a doctor in Nigeria, but now works as a driver and hotel desk clerk while doing the occasional one-off medical examination for fellow immigrants). There were many nice details in this film, and it's easy to believe that Okwe cannot sleep after seeing the stress and powerlessness of being at the absolute bottom of the social strata. Even the ostensibly happy ending comes at a price for Okwe and Senay.

Translation is a visual poem, a meditation on the intimacies that could only be shared by fellow foreigners in a bewildering culture. Bill Murray is Bob Harris, a Harrison Ford-like American movie star who's in Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial for a boatload of money. Scarlett Johansson is Charlotte, a newlywed and recent college grad who's tagged along with her photographer husband for an assignment. Charlotte is left on her own due to her husband's job and his general cluelessness, and spends her time wandering Tokyo and its environs before heading back to the isolated solace of the hotel. Murray plays Harris with a marvelously understated sense of humor and self-loathing, a man who is ambivalent about his position in life as a star, a husband, a father, a human being. Eventually Charlotte and Bob meet after countless hours in the hotel bar, a ridiculous, calm harbor in the equally ridiculous sense-data typhoon of urban Tokyo. As good as Murray was in Rushmore, and he was excellent, he outdoes himself in this role.

Coppola directs the movie with a quiet grace that's as impressive as the visual craftsmanship. You could easily imagine a director turning Translation into a farce, with Murray winking and nudging the camera as he observes the wacky Japanese and their wacky ways of life before putting the moves on the Pretty Young Thing. Instead, she captures the thrill and alienation of being a stranger in a foreign land, and focuses on the nuances of two people who share a bond that defies easy categorization. My favorite moment in the movie is at the very end, when Bob says the most important line in the movie to Charlotte, but it's whispered in her ear, and we the audience can't hear the words.

Leni Riefenstahl, the director of Nazi propaganda films "The Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia," died today. She was 101.

She was a complicated character who, in many ways, was emblematic of many non-party Germans who nonetheless benefitted from the Nazi regime. Her insistence that her films were not propaganda but pure art is all but impossible to defend. Nonetheless, her movie's style was imitated by many subsequent directors, including some near shot-for-shot scenes in Star Wars.

After World War II, she spent most of her time travelling and scuba diving, and made one final film, "Impressionen unter Wasser" last year.

Last Wednesday, Jay and I saw the documentary Willful Infringement at the Roxie in San Francisco. Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and author, spoke before and after the movie.

Both the documentary and Lessig advocated a retreat from the stifling intellectual property laws in which our culture is currently in the grip. Both made the case that creativity and free speech are impossible when the threat of lawsuits by content creators and copyright holders hangs over the heads of artists and writers.

As Lessig pointed out, he would be perfectly happy with the restrictions on the use of copyrighted materials in place when Nixon was president. In the intervening years, thanks to the DMCA and similar legislation, media companies have seen their effective rights greatly enhanced.

I'm personally waiting for an outrage index, a measurement of when the average person gets sick and tired of having her behavior monitored and controlled by large corporations.

I noticed that the Andrew Jarecki documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" is playing at the Nickelodeon here in Santa Cruz. I saw this movie at Sundance last January, and it was intense, difficult to watch, and the best movie I saw there.

It's about a family in a posh Long Island city that disintegrates after Arnold Friedman, a computer teacher, and eventually his youngest son Jesse, are accused of child molestation in 1987. David Friedman, the eldest son, captured most of this period on home video, and the documentary uses this footage to give the viewer a first hand look at what was going on in the family.

The result is devastating. Arnold and Jesse Friedman were probably innocent of the charges, and the documentary very clearly makes the case that the police investigation was biased due to the hysteria involved whenever the spectre of child sexual abuse is encountered. Much of the testimony was suspect, including major witnesses who only remembered incidents with prompting from the police, or through hypnosis and recovered memory sessions. However, Arnold was a child molestor, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that he molested Jesse.

The documentary does a very good job of making the facts clear, and letting the audience draw their own conclusions. Arnold eventually died in prison, and Jesse was released a few years ago after spending 13 years in prison.

John Conroy, the author of "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture", says that in every society there's a torturable class, a group that most people have no compassion for, and are not bothered if that group's rights are trampelled on. In the book, he details instances of torture as told to him by the torturers themselves in Israel, Northern Ireland, and a Chicago police precinct. I think that child molestors are a torturable class here in the United States, and they are by no means the only one. In a depressing bit of irony, Conroy's book was published in September, 2001. The 9/11 attacks, of course, set the stage for the broadened use of torture and the creation of a new torturable class, Arabs and muslims, in our society.

Ghetto masterpiece is a dish of macaroni and cheese covered with tater tots and topped with grated cheese, and baked. I learned it from my friend Jacob, who learned it from another friend Chia-hua. To put a dent in the massive amount of Pabst that we bought for my housemate Greg in Portland, we decided to live the low life and make ghetto masterpiece and drink Pabst, and then watch a couple of movies: Victory (a horrible movie about a WWII P.O.W. camp and--no joke--soccer, staring Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, and...Pele, the Brazilian soccer hero of the '70s), and Caddyshack. There's a few pictures from the festivities.

"I made, for a London television company a programme called 26 Bathrooms ... which was about the ways in which people behaved in their bathrooms. It was about where people put the soap on one level, or the colour of the bathroom curtains, the acoustics, about whether you sang in the bath, and it was structured very simply on the alphabet. We had a man and a woman who arrived one by bus, one by bike, to come and demonstrate for me, in front of the camera, how a jacuzzi operated. I asked both of them to take their clothes off because obviously you don't get into a bath with your clothes on. They hesitate, but eventually their dressing gowns came off and they got into the bath. They had never met one another before. Six weeks later I got an invitation from these people that I had brought together so peculiarly in this jacuzzi -- they were planning to get married! I understand that now they have three children."
-Peter Greenaway, from an interview in Art and Design, No. 49.

I watched Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers last night, a great little film firstly about games, and secondarily about male impotence, and death.

Three women, all named Cissie Colpitts, drown their husbands, and get away with it thanks to the coroner, Madgett, who hopes to gain sexual and romantic favors by not blowing the whistle. Madgett and his son, Smut, are constantly playing odd and complicated games made up by Madgett. Flights of Fancy, or Reverse Strip Jump, for instance, is a game where you jump out of a high place naked, and after each successful jump are allowed to put on one article of clothing.

The Great Death game, the fourth game, is the most important one to the narrative and the imagery. Smut says that Tuesday is the day most conducive to violent death, and marks each death on a Tuesday with yellow paint, after which he shoots off a bottle rocket. Saturday is the second-best day for violent death, and are marked with red paint and a bottle rocket. In the Great Death Game, it's a competition between yellow and red-paint days.

The games extend from the movie, however, as Greenaway creates a game with the audience by hiding numbers, 1 to 100, sequentially through the movie. Sometimes the numbers are obvious, other times you must look carefully. Sometimes this meta-game uses dialogue, as when one character talks about 5 card stud

Smut's friend, the Skipping-Girl, skips rope under a lighthouse while counting and naming 100 stars. Smut loves the Skipping-Girl, but she hardly notices. Smut's reaction to this rebuff, like his father's games, is to concoct stories and collect insects.

The Cissies also count, by threes, at various points in the film.

In Drowning by Numbers games and hobbies are a form of masturbation for powerless males. Smut is impotent because he (and the Skipping-Girl, whose elaborate dresses accentuate womanly hips that aren't there, and whose make-up comes accross as grotesque on a pre-pubescent) is too young. Madgett is similarly impotent against the three Cissies, who each reject Madgett's romantic and sexual propositions, and do so knowing that Madgett won't turn them in to the police.

When Madgett attempts to force the Cissies hands, he states, wrongly, that he's not playing games any longer. All human interactions are games, and Madgett (correctly) says that all games are dangerous.

Yesterday I found this site, which has some galleries of Krzisztof Kieslowski, the Polish director of the Trois Colours triology (Bleu, Blanc, Rouge), Le Double Vie de Veronique, and the Decalogue. The site is by Piotr Jaxa, a friend of Kieslowski's and one of his cinematographers on Trois Colours. He also has an interesting gallery of portraits of cinematographers and directors of photography.

I was brought there by a Salon article praising Trois Colours.