Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
23.3.10
Akira Kurosawa
Today would have been Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's 100th birthday. Though I haven't the time to write some lenghty and deserving of Kurosawa, here's the trailer for Ran, and a scene from Stray Dog, two of Kurosawa's best films.
4.3.10
Thoughts on Things - Movies
The Thing About the Oscars
The Oscars are just around the corner. This year, the Academy has extended the Best Picture field from five to ten nominees, opening Oscars not only to long shot contenders, but also the very real possibility that the 2010 awards can change the landscape of film.
Let’s look at the nominees. The British Academy recently gave its high awards to The Hurt Locker, as did the Director’s and Producer’s Guilds of America. Avatar has made over $700,000,000 in the US alone. Precious has made history as being the first Best Picture nomination to be directed by an African American (in this case Lee Daniels). Why The Blind Side was nominated is anyone’s guess. I’m assuming it’s the same race and class guilt syndrome that won Crash Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain. Up in the Air is apparently fantastic, but an existential comedy doesn’t really stand much chance against the first great Iraq War film. An Education is there to appease the critics who fell head-over-heals for it, and A Serious Man is….well, they needed a tenth nominee. But really, if the whole hoo-hah of the Academy Awards has anything to do with intelligent, progressive filmmaking, the genuine competition would be between three of the films with the least chance of winning: Inglourious Basterds, UP, and District 9.
First things first and don’t get me wrong here: The Hurt Locker and Avatar are both fantastic films. The Hurt Locker is the first Iraq War film to give an honest, unpretentious view of the conflict, in a completely unpartisan way, focusing exclusively on the experiences of the soldiers. It’s tense and intelligent, with great performances and taught direction. But ultimately, it’s a war film, and while it’s a great war film, it’s something we’ve seen before.
Avatar, on the other hand, is like nothing we’ve seen before: giant blue aliens running about fighting with wild jungle moon creatures and men in various types of flying, walking, and driving machines. The technological advances James Cameron developed for the film open a world of limitless possibility. The technology allowed him to create a wholly original and completely imagined world. The plot of the film, on the other hand, from the jaded soldier finding peace with indigenous peoples to evil military and corporate personnel trying to muck things up, are staples not only of Hollywood past, but integral components of an endless parade of archetypal myth.
But though it can be perceived as (and has been criticized for) being largely generic, Avatar is the exact kind of film we need in the public consciousness. It is a movie that teaches us to think beyond our own confines, to believe in the potency of the spirits of the Earth, and to behave decently towards others. Through concrete example, it shows us why tolerance is important and that being a decent person is ultimately a worthwhile pursuit. Avatar is a great, even classic film, that children of countless generations (probably mostly boys, I’m guessing) will watch again and again on their TVs and computers the way I used to wear out my Star Wars VHS, but the reason for that is its adherence to tradition.
Ultimately, neither Avatar nor The Hurt Locker need an Oscar to attain classic status; they’ve already won that through their excellence. Rewarding either film would not only be unimaginative, it would redundant and pointless.
Precious is an interesting film. The ensemble works magic with its characters, and Lee Daniels’ direction brings an unpretentious realism to the film. What in less capable hands could have been very generic is a harrowing, intense drama. The film is also very important for its bravery. It is a film by African Americans, about the African American experience, which casts overweight and otherwise very normal looking actors (even Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz manage to look average), and puts them into realistic settings. There is nothing Hollywood about the look and feel of Precious.
Unfortunately, for the film, its plot errs to the familiar. There are too many inspirational classroom scenes, which are reminiscent of dozens of films, from Lean on Me to Dangerous Minds, and though Precious manages to avoid many of the painful trappings of similar films (white teachers educating the ignorant colored folk being the most heinous of these), it is, ultimately, something we’ve seen before. Thankfully, it also happens to be a hell of a lot better than nearly every other film in its class.
Let’s talk Quentin Tarantino, who has been a household name for over fifteen years. With Inglourious Basterds, he’s managed to do something near impossible for celebrities of his stature: subvert his image with his talent.
Tarantino virtually defined the cinema of the 1990’s. The graphic violence, profane dialogue, pop-culture references, self-consciously stylish gangster flicks, long tracking shots, and influence of the French New Wave – all of our 90’s film staples – can be attributed to Tarantino.
Yet post Jackie Brown, Tarantino began to parody himself. He made pictures that, though touched with his previous prodigious talent, were solely referential. They failed to push the envelope. Tarantino had failed to be Tarantino by becoming Tarantino.
With Inglourious Basterds, he’s back in top form. The World War II fantasia is original, bizarre, and unexpected. The film is broken into chapters, with a ludicrous Hitler parody, Brad Pitt scalping Nazis, SS film premiers, and a re-imagining of the war’s ending that’s as stupid as it is genius. With Basterds, Tarantino has proven that, though he hit the zeitgeist with Pulp Fiction, it wasn’t lucky; he is as talented, strange, and original as we have always expected.
Though Basterds doesn’t stand much of a chance, Tarantino has done something nearly impossible in Hollywood: he has reinvented a genre that’s been dead for ten years. While genre reminaginings come along every generation or so, from Se7en’s recapitulation of noir to 28 Days Later’s revelatory zombie apocalypse, Tarantino has taken one of the most rote, bloated genres of Hollywood history – the World War Two Film – and completely reinvented it. There are no concentration camps, no great battles, no real heroes. The morality of the characters is subjective: the violence of the Americans is no different from the violence of the Nazis (of course, leaving out any blatant Holocaust references makes this a lot easier); a group of young German soldiers are some of the most sympathetic characters in the film. The futility of violence met with violence is strongly reiterated (except of course for the gleefully ultra violent ending). Nearly everyone involved directly in the war is either sadistic, or weighing their chances in a menagerie of violence beyond their control. The only truly defensible characters in the film are a Jewish theater owner and her black lover: the victims of prejudice and discrimination. Yet Tarantino wraps all of these things in ridiculous comedy and prodigious dialogue, so that much of the social value of the film is between the lines.
The critical reaction to Tarantino’s film, though largely positive, shows a very disturbing lack of imagination on the part of some self-important critics. Manohla Dargis, of the New York Times, condemned one character’s comparison of Jews to rats (“The invocation of Jews as rats is ghastly” – NY Times, 8/21/09). But the character doing to comparing is a Nazi, who as we know didn’t think terribly fondly of the Jewish population. Ms. Dargis also criticizes the film for having such a charming fellow (Oscar nominated Christoph Waltz) play the lead Nazi. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Hitler himself was an incredibly charismatic leader. This charisma played a large part in the Nazi propaganda machine. If Tarantino’s film were melodramatic Oscar-bait like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List, I doubt anyone would bat an eyelid. But because Tarantino can be both facetious and insightful at the same time, he confounds most journalists, and will probably turn the Academy off to his film.
On to floating houses. UP is Pixar’s latest creation, and though it’s not quite as good as animation high water mark Wall-E, it is a phenomenal work none-the-less. Now, of course, UP will be thrown the Best Animated Feature bone and all will be well in the world. But UP is much more than that.
Pixar has been working vigorously, and against many cultural biases, to realize animation’s full potential. Mostly we look at animation as a medium for kid’s movies, cutesy stuff with talking animals and the like. But really animation is film’s greatest liberator, the visual equivalent of the novel. Anything that can be thought can be done. Gleefully subverting type, Pixar creates characters as sympathetic as any human actor, and emotionally potent stories of joy, despair, loss, and redemption. The initial sequence, of principal couple Carl and Ellie growing old together, is heartbreaking, and would have been completely ham-fisted and unbelievable if it hadn’t been rendered in animation. The sweetness and sorrow of the scene braid perfectly in director Pete Docter’s parallel world.
Though the elements of UP are familiar – it’s got the talking dogs, the curmudgeon, the lonely kid – the film puts a distinct spin on everything. First, the setting of the Venezuelan tepuis is gorgeous and ethereal. A flying house lifted by thousands of balloons is a brilliant hook, but doesn’t dominate the film. The talking dogs can only talk because they have collars that allow them to. At the end of the day, UP is a brilliant and heartfelt film that is familiar enough to draw us in but new enough to wow us, and is something for everyone, which is one of cinema’s great promises. Though it doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, it perfectly illustrates Pixar’s ability to think outside the box: they make films using animation, not animations that are films.
And last but certainly not least, those pesky South Africans. District 9 is brilliant in so many ways it’s gonna take a minute here to break them down. Let’s start off with what’s most mentioned: the allegory. An alien ship stalls over Johannesburg, and its inhabitants, known colloquially as Prawns (and they do look a great deal like shrimp) end up in a refugee camp. So what we’re talking here is commentary on racial situations of times past, and the sordid history of South Africa?
Well, yes. But part of the genius of District 9 is that, while it can very easily be read as commentary on apartheid, the notion is abstracted, and as such can be applied to any struggle, past, present, or future. In a demented way, District 9 is the most educational, moralistic, and important film of the year because it uses a phenomenally entertaining yarn to show us the absurdity of our own prejudices. Despite this, the movie steers clear of the didactic.
As with Inglourious Basterds, District 9 completely redefines an established genre, and as such is, like Basterds, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It puts aliens in the real world, as the victims of humanity. While most films that have beings from outer space use the aggression of aliens as an excuse to unify humanity, District 9 paints a much more realistic portrait of reactionary, insecure human cruelty, one which is born of fear and ignorance. By taking the action away from world centers like Washington DC or London and putting it in a former colony, the film shows us the world the way most of its citizens see it, rather than the glorified, anti-racist pap of The Blindside.
District 9’s final stroke of genius is in the class structure of alien society. The leadership aboard their craft has died, and the Prawns who become trapped on Earth are the working classes. They are not the brilliant scientist aliens who create brain probes and seek out leadership in an effort to destroy or bargain with them; rather, they are the tired, hungry masses. They are huddled, terrified, and very alone. The literal aliens are also figurative aliens the world over, refugees cast aside as victims of circumstance, who dream of nothing more than a homeland.
Director Neil Blomkamp, only 29 years old when he made the film, tells an entertaining, quickly paced action tale in District 9. He has stated many times in interviews that his aim was to draw the audience to the story, and let the rest of the film’s elements work their magic subtly. Unlike many Hollywood movies, which choose to hammer us repeatedly over the head with their message, District 9 wants to have a hell of a good time, and if we have the chance to notice the film’s allegories, or bold new definition of the sci-fi, alien picture, well, that’s just fine too.
UP and District 9 are the year’s best films because they give us hope, not just in the human condition (we all know that there are more than enough films in the world which do this, or at least try), but in the future of mainstream films. Pixar’s latest heartfelt fairytale, coming on the heals of the seminal Ratatouille and Wall-E, shows that the studio will continue to push boundaries of animation and challenge cultural biases that it is solely a medium for childish films. District 9 belongs to a new school of cinema, begun with a bang by Alfonso Cuarón’s unparalleled Children of Men, and is the most promising addition to the genre since Cuarón’s original appeared in 2006. These are films that create allegorical, distopian societies, which are deeply rooted in our day-to-day reality. They do not present fascistic states or sci-fi futurescapes, but give us a distorted version our own world, with its bureaucratic and capitalist structures pushed to the point at which they become impassable labyrinths. The enemies of these films are not the other humans, with malice in their hearts, but the creations of all human beings, the systems and ideas we prescribe to grown beyond our control so that they control us.
Now, all of this said and done, and where does it leave us? It’s easy to be cynical and dismissive about the Academy Awards, to label them a popularity contest and irrelevant to important, intelligent film. In a lot of ways, this is true, but the Academy has the opportunity to make not just its audience, but also studios and filmmakers think seriously about what makes a great film. If The Hurt Locker wins the top prize, which it probably will, a rash of Iraq War films will be green lit (admittedly, I look forward to Paul Greengrass’s The Green Zone with great anticipation). But, more likely than not, we’d get those films anyway. If Avatar wins, we’d get more fantasy films in space, most of which would probably be crap. In 1977, Star Wars basically insured the future of all sci-fi filmmakers, so we don’t really need Avatar to win. If Precious wins, it probably won’t be any easier for visionary African Americans to make films, and we’d most likely be deluged with message-based anti-racism films directed by well meaning wealthy, sheltered people. Yikes.
Nominations for film such as Basterds, UP, and District 9 are surprising and essential. Certainly it will be easier for forward-thinking film to gain its due time in the spotlight with the field doubled. One of our great living indie filmmakers, Danny Boyle, helped a good deal with this when he and his latest, Slumdog Millionaire, took home top prizes in 2009.
A win for Inglourious Basterds would have no repercussions, because Tarantino is such a singular figure that it would be either his token Oscar or an anomaly of some kind.
But. What if UP wins? We can only hope that a win for UP in the Best Picture category would help validate animation as an art form, and also encourage more animators and animation studios to think outside the box. Or, maybe encourage a greater influx of progressive global animation into the cultural mainstream. And if District 9 wins? The studios may look to young filmmakers with original visions and nurture them, thus allowing the future of film to come to fruition, rather than marginalizing it to specialty divisions and eventually absorbing its stylistic tendencies, while leaving the substance to “art” films.
By rewarding UP or District 9, Hollywood will create a unique possibility, that to create new markets (it is all about business, after all), which in turn could lead to a more insightful, provocative pop culture, not unlike that of the late 60’s/early 70’s and early-to-mid 90’s. The relative success of 9 and Basterds, and the huge take of UP, show that the public is indeed ready for something new, and much more intelligent, than what we’ve been having. With the right decisions, the Academy could influence big business, which could have a profound and profoundly positive affect on our global mainstream culture. With directors like Guillermo del Toro and Paul Thomas Anderson working with major studio approval (and even, in del Toro’s case, a huge budget), the bomb is in place, the fuse just need be lit for a mainstream progressive film explosion.
So really it’s just the Oscars, and really it’ll be the same old films again. But by expanding their nominees for Best Picture from five to ten, the Academy has given us a glimmer of hope.
The Oscars are just around the corner. This year, the Academy has extended the Best Picture field from five to ten nominees, opening Oscars not only to long shot contenders, but also the very real possibility that the 2010 awards can change the landscape of film.
Let’s look at the nominees. The British Academy recently gave its high awards to The Hurt Locker, as did the Director’s and Producer’s Guilds of America. Avatar has made over $700,000,000 in the US alone. Precious has made history as being the first Best Picture nomination to be directed by an African American (in this case Lee Daniels). Why The Blind Side was nominated is anyone’s guess. I’m assuming it’s the same race and class guilt syndrome that won Crash Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain. Up in the Air is apparently fantastic, but an existential comedy doesn’t really stand much chance against the first great Iraq War film. An Education is there to appease the critics who fell head-over-heals for it, and A Serious Man is….well, they needed a tenth nominee. But really, if the whole hoo-hah of the Academy Awards has anything to do with intelligent, progressive filmmaking, the genuine competition would be between three of the films with the least chance of winning: Inglourious Basterds, UP, and District 9.
First things first and don’t get me wrong here: The Hurt Locker and Avatar are both fantastic films. The Hurt Locker is the first Iraq War film to give an honest, unpretentious view of the conflict, in a completely unpartisan way, focusing exclusively on the experiences of the soldiers. It’s tense and intelligent, with great performances and taught direction. But ultimately, it’s a war film, and while it’s a great war film, it’s something we’ve seen before.
Avatar, on the other hand, is like nothing we’ve seen before: giant blue aliens running about fighting with wild jungle moon creatures and men in various types of flying, walking, and driving machines. The technological advances James Cameron developed for the film open a world of limitless possibility. The technology allowed him to create a wholly original and completely imagined world. The plot of the film, on the other hand, from the jaded soldier finding peace with indigenous peoples to evil military and corporate personnel trying to muck things up, are staples not only of Hollywood past, but integral components of an endless parade of archetypal myth.
But though it can be perceived as (and has been criticized for) being largely generic, Avatar is the exact kind of film we need in the public consciousness. It is a movie that teaches us to think beyond our own confines, to believe in the potency of the spirits of the Earth, and to behave decently towards others. Through concrete example, it shows us why tolerance is important and that being a decent person is ultimately a worthwhile pursuit. Avatar is a great, even classic film, that children of countless generations (probably mostly boys, I’m guessing) will watch again and again on their TVs and computers the way I used to wear out my Star Wars VHS, but the reason for that is its adherence to tradition.
Ultimately, neither Avatar nor The Hurt Locker need an Oscar to attain classic status; they’ve already won that through their excellence. Rewarding either film would not only be unimaginative, it would redundant and pointless.
Precious is an interesting film. The ensemble works magic with its characters, and Lee Daniels’ direction brings an unpretentious realism to the film. What in less capable hands could have been very generic is a harrowing, intense drama. The film is also very important for its bravery. It is a film by African Americans, about the African American experience, which casts overweight and otherwise very normal looking actors (even Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz manage to look average), and puts them into realistic settings. There is nothing Hollywood about the look and feel of Precious.
Unfortunately, for the film, its plot errs to the familiar. There are too many inspirational classroom scenes, which are reminiscent of dozens of films, from Lean on Me to Dangerous Minds, and though Precious manages to avoid many of the painful trappings of similar films (white teachers educating the ignorant colored folk being the most heinous of these), it is, ultimately, something we’ve seen before. Thankfully, it also happens to be a hell of a lot better than nearly every other film in its class.
Let’s talk Quentin Tarantino, who has been a household name for over fifteen years. With Inglourious Basterds, he’s managed to do something near impossible for celebrities of his stature: subvert his image with his talent.
Tarantino virtually defined the cinema of the 1990’s. The graphic violence, profane dialogue, pop-culture references, self-consciously stylish gangster flicks, long tracking shots, and influence of the French New Wave – all of our 90’s film staples – can be attributed to Tarantino.
Yet post Jackie Brown, Tarantino began to parody himself. He made pictures that, though touched with his previous prodigious talent, were solely referential. They failed to push the envelope. Tarantino had failed to be Tarantino by becoming Tarantino.
With Inglourious Basterds, he’s back in top form. The World War II fantasia is original, bizarre, and unexpected. The film is broken into chapters, with a ludicrous Hitler parody, Brad Pitt scalping Nazis, SS film premiers, and a re-imagining of the war’s ending that’s as stupid as it is genius. With Basterds, Tarantino has proven that, though he hit the zeitgeist with Pulp Fiction, it wasn’t lucky; he is as talented, strange, and original as we have always expected.
Though Basterds doesn’t stand much of a chance, Tarantino has done something nearly impossible in Hollywood: he has reinvented a genre that’s been dead for ten years. While genre reminaginings come along every generation or so, from Se7en’s recapitulation of noir to 28 Days Later’s revelatory zombie apocalypse, Tarantino has taken one of the most rote, bloated genres of Hollywood history – the World War Two Film – and completely reinvented it. There are no concentration camps, no great battles, no real heroes. The morality of the characters is subjective: the violence of the Americans is no different from the violence of the Nazis (of course, leaving out any blatant Holocaust references makes this a lot easier); a group of young German soldiers are some of the most sympathetic characters in the film. The futility of violence met with violence is strongly reiterated (except of course for the gleefully ultra violent ending). Nearly everyone involved directly in the war is either sadistic, or weighing their chances in a menagerie of violence beyond their control. The only truly defensible characters in the film are a Jewish theater owner and her black lover: the victims of prejudice and discrimination. Yet Tarantino wraps all of these things in ridiculous comedy and prodigious dialogue, so that much of the social value of the film is between the lines.
The critical reaction to Tarantino’s film, though largely positive, shows a very disturbing lack of imagination on the part of some self-important critics. Manohla Dargis, of the New York Times, condemned one character’s comparison of Jews to rats (“The invocation of Jews as rats is ghastly” – NY Times, 8/21/09). But the character doing to comparing is a Nazi, who as we know didn’t think terribly fondly of the Jewish population. Ms. Dargis also criticizes the film for having such a charming fellow (Oscar nominated Christoph Waltz) play the lead Nazi. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Hitler himself was an incredibly charismatic leader. This charisma played a large part in the Nazi propaganda machine. If Tarantino’s film were melodramatic Oscar-bait like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List, I doubt anyone would bat an eyelid. But because Tarantino can be both facetious and insightful at the same time, he confounds most journalists, and will probably turn the Academy off to his film.
On to floating houses. UP is Pixar’s latest creation, and though it’s not quite as good as animation high water mark Wall-E, it is a phenomenal work none-the-less. Now, of course, UP will be thrown the Best Animated Feature bone and all will be well in the world. But UP is much more than that.
Pixar has been working vigorously, and against many cultural biases, to realize animation’s full potential. Mostly we look at animation as a medium for kid’s movies, cutesy stuff with talking animals and the like. But really animation is film’s greatest liberator, the visual equivalent of the novel. Anything that can be thought can be done. Gleefully subverting type, Pixar creates characters as sympathetic as any human actor, and emotionally potent stories of joy, despair, loss, and redemption. The initial sequence, of principal couple Carl and Ellie growing old together, is heartbreaking, and would have been completely ham-fisted and unbelievable if it hadn’t been rendered in animation. The sweetness and sorrow of the scene braid perfectly in director Pete Docter’s parallel world.
Though the elements of UP are familiar – it’s got the talking dogs, the curmudgeon, the lonely kid – the film puts a distinct spin on everything. First, the setting of the Venezuelan tepuis is gorgeous and ethereal. A flying house lifted by thousands of balloons is a brilliant hook, but doesn’t dominate the film. The talking dogs can only talk because they have collars that allow them to. At the end of the day, UP is a brilliant and heartfelt film that is familiar enough to draw us in but new enough to wow us, and is something for everyone, which is one of cinema’s great promises. Though it doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, it perfectly illustrates Pixar’s ability to think outside the box: they make films using animation, not animations that are films.
And last but certainly not least, those pesky South Africans. District 9 is brilliant in so many ways it’s gonna take a minute here to break them down. Let’s start off with what’s most mentioned: the allegory. An alien ship stalls over Johannesburg, and its inhabitants, known colloquially as Prawns (and they do look a great deal like shrimp) end up in a refugee camp. So what we’re talking here is commentary on racial situations of times past, and the sordid history of South Africa?
Well, yes. But part of the genius of District 9 is that, while it can very easily be read as commentary on apartheid, the notion is abstracted, and as such can be applied to any struggle, past, present, or future. In a demented way, District 9 is the most educational, moralistic, and important film of the year because it uses a phenomenally entertaining yarn to show us the absurdity of our own prejudices. Despite this, the movie steers clear of the didactic.
As with Inglourious Basterds, District 9 completely redefines an established genre, and as such is, like Basterds, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It puts aliens in the real world, as the victims of humanity. While most films that have beings from outer space use the aggression of aliens as an excuse to unify humanity, District 9 paints a much more realistic portrait of reactionary, insecure human cruelty, one which is born of fear and ignorance. By taking the action away from world centers like Washington DC or London and putting it in a former colony, the film shows us the world the way most of its citizens see it, rather than the glorified, anti-racist pap of The Blindside.
District 9’s final stroke of genius is in the class structure of alien society. The leadership aboard their craft has died, and the Prawns who become trapped on Earth are the working classes. They are not the brilliant scientist aliens who create brain probes and seek out leadership in an effort to destroy or bargain with them; rather, they are the tired, hungry masses. They are huddled, terrified, and very alone. The literal aliens are also figurative aliens the world over, refugees cast aside as victims of circumstance, who dream of nothing more than a homeland.
Director Neil Blomkamp, only 29 years old when he made the film, tells an entertaining, quickly paced action tale in District 9. He has stated many times in interviews that his aim was to draw the audience to the story, and let the rest of the film’s elements work their magic subtly. Unlike many Hollywood movies, which choose to hammer us repeatedly over the head with their message, District 9 wants to have a hell of a good time, and if we have the chance to notice the film’s allegories, or bold new definition of the sci-fi, alien picture, well, that’s just fine too.
UP and District 9 are the year’s best films because they give us hope, not just in the human condition (we all know that there are more than enough films in the world which do this, or at least try), but in the future of mainstream films. Pixar’s latest heartfelt fairytale, coming on the heals of the seminal Ratatouille and Wall-E, shows that the studio will continue to push boundaries of animation and challenge cultural biases that it is solely a medium for childish films. District 9 belongs to a new school of cinema, begun with a bang by Alfonso Cuarón’s unparalleled Children of Men, and is the most promising addition to the genre since Cuarón’s original appeared in 2006. These are films that create allegorical, distopian societies, which are deeply rooted in our day-to-day reality. They do not present fascistic states or sci-fi futurescapes, but give us a distorted version our own world, with its bureaucratic and capitalist structures pushed to the point at which they become impassable labyrinths. The enemies of these films are not the other humans, with malice in their hearts, but the creations of all human beings, the systems and ideas we prescribe to grown beyond our control so that they control us.
Now, all of this said and done, and where does it leave us? It’s easy to be cynical and dismissive about the Academy Awards, to label them a popularity contest and irrelevant to important, intelligent film. In a lot of ways, this is true, but the Academy has the opportunity to make not just its audience, but also studios and filmmakers think seriously about what makes a great film. If The Hurt Locker wins the top prize, which it probably will, a rash of Iraq War films will be green lit (admittedly, I look forward to Paul Greengrass’s The Green Zone with great anticipation). But, more likely than not, we’d get those films anyway. If Avatar wins, we’d get more fantasy films in space, most of which would probably be crap. In 1977, Star Wars basically insured the future of all sci-fi filmmakers, so we don’t really need Avatar to win. If Precious wins, it probably won’t be any easier for visionary African Americans to make films, and we’d most likely be deluged with message-based anti-racism films directed by well meaning wealthy, sheltered people. Yikes.
Nominations for film such as Basterds, UP, and District 9 are surprising and essential. Certainly it will be easier for forward-thinking film to gain its due time in the spotlight with the field doubled. One of our great living indie filmmakers, Danny Boyle, helped a good deal with this when he and his latest, Slumdog Millionaire, took home top prizes in 2009.
A win for Inglourious Basterds would have no repercussions, because Tarantino is such a singular figure that it would be either his token Oscar or an anomaly of some kind.
But. What if UP wins? We can only hope that a win for UP in the Best Picture category would help validate animation as an art form, and also encourage more animators and animation studios to think outside the box. Or, maybe encourage a greater influx of progressive global animation into the cultural mainstream. And if District 9 wins? The studios may look to young filmmakers with original visions and nurture them, thus allowing the future of film to come to fruition, rather than marginalizing it to specialty divisions and eventually absorbing its stylistic tendencies, while leaving the substance to “art” films.
By rewarding UP or District 9, Hollywood will create a unique possibility, that to create new markets (it is all about business, after all), which in turn could lead to a more insightful, provocative pop culture, not unlike that of the late 60’s/early 70’s and early-to-mid 90’s. The relative success of 9 and Basterds, and the huge take of UP, show that the public is indeed ready for something new, and much more intelligent, than what we’ve been having. With the right decisions, the Academy could influence big business, which could have a profound and profoundly positive affect on our global mainstream culture. With directors like Guillermo del Toro and Paul Thomas Anderson working with major studio approval (and even, in del Toro’s case, a huge budget), the bomb is in place, the fuse just need be lit for a mainstream progressive film explosion.
So really it’s just the Oscars, and really it’ll be the same old films again. But by expanding their nominees for Best Picture from five to ten, the Academy has given us a glimmer of hope.
13.2.10
Thoughts on Things - Movies
Culture and Die Hard.
Watching Die Harder (Die Hard 2) and Die Hard: With A Vengeance (that’s DH3 for the uninitiated) back to back, its easy to see the many differences between 80’s and 90’s mainstream cinema, and the way those differences reflect shifting cultural trends at large (endnote 1).
The Hero
The first film deals in absolutes: John McClain is a hero. The villains are evil. The captain of Dulles police is a jackass and a bureaucrat, placed firmly in opposition to McClain, who’s a go-getter, an every man, the guy who knows best. He is a proactive American who does the right thing, much like an upstanding white man would as per the Bush (first Bush in this case) administration’s representation of America.
McClain is introduced to us in the film’s first shot, rushing out into snow and traffic, a man on a mission. That mission: stop his car from being towed. This shot introduces the setting, the time of year, and McClain’s restless, aggressive personality. These things remain staples of the film as it progresses, all of the action taking place between two locations; the airport, and a church, which is set up by the second scene. This is clean, precise, mainstream filmmaking.
Having a coffee in one of the airport’s cafés, McClain notices some very suspicious men decked out in portentously dark coats with very slickly jelled hair passing suspect packages to one another beneath at table. Though off-duty, he takes note none-the-less. McClain approaches two airport cops. As it turns out, one of them is the fellow that had his car towed just ten minutes earlier. John the knows he can’t trust these guys to believe him, because he knows they are uniformed bureaucrats; the men won’t investigate his claim to nefarious activity because he rubbed them the wrong way earlier. They are the inept authorities, and he is the man with a plan. The cowboy. McClain ends up following the suspected n’er-do-weller, and thus begins the action – incited by McClain and his instinct. In DH2, the hero creates the story.
(A) DH2's heroic McClain, poised (B) The massive 80's movie star (C) A svelte Keanu Reeves in Speed (D) Exhausted, alcoholic McClain, not really ready for action
DH3 introduces us to a very different John McClain and a much more ambiguous world. He is absent the first few minutes of the film, which give us introductory shots of New York. Real locations are introduced, in opposition to DH2, which, though taking place in DC, never gives us anything beyond sets, apart from a few establishing shots. The camera panning along the Upper West Side, a building explodes, sending cars and people flying into the street amidst the debris.
We cut to the inside of a police station, and the captain, who, unlike the snippy, uniform wearing, mustachioed prick of the first film is a tired, weary guy in a suit overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation. By and large what we find of the police in this film is that they are sarcastic guys (and their female secretaries – some things never change) in disheveled, cheap suits who just want to do the right thing (endnote 2) , evocative of the noir heroes of yesteryear.
The bossman receives a phone call from the villain who, speaking in riddles, demands John McClain. The captain informs him McClain is on suspension. Already our hero is a man with some demons. The villain retorts that he doesn’t care where McClain is, it’s him he wants, and no one else.
Our first shot of McClain points downward, diminishing our previous, heroic notions of him. He’s sprawled on the floor of a van, dirty, hung over, and barely with us. His wife’s left him. He’s a directionless drunk on the verge of being tossed off the force. McClain is very clearly an anti-hero, much more Bogart to DH2’s Clark Gable-styled hero. He doesn’t burst into the action or incite the plot; he’s off drunk somewhere while the world is falling to shit and is reluctantly called into battle. The film’s plot unfolds accordingly, the villain sending McClain here and there as he pleases, until McClain finally souses his number and changes the rules.
To extrapolate this, we need look no further than the Soviet influence on the American perception of the world. While we had the Soviet’s, we had a duality, a binary relationship in which there was an “us” and a “them”, with the world’s various states pretty much split accordingly. This duality directly informed DH2. As the wall came down, so did the duality; the world very quickly became a plurality, most of its compositional elements being undeveloped nations ravaged by the shady dealings of the cold war, shaking their fists for justice.
During the Regan administration, Iran-Contra, the fighting in Afghanistan, the intermittent violence between Israel & Palestine and Somalia & Ethiopia were all just repercussions of the big fight: America vs. the Evil Empire. The Clinton administration, however, faced real, sectarian violence that had nothing to do with America and its battles directly, though was of course a repercussion of colonialism and the cold war era – Rwanda, Serbia & Croatia, Mogadishu – all of it a direct cause of American or European intervention, weapons manufacturing, and the unfortunate practice of grouping peoples with great enmity toward one another into singular nation-states. As the media grabbed onto these conflicts to highlight a world of intense brutality that had been hidden behind the Soviet veil, American awakened to reality of the global situation, much like John McClain is pulled into a situation of terrorism far beyond his control in DH3.
The Villain
What’s a film without a bad guy? And yet what different bad guys they are. In the first picture, there are two villains, one working with a crew of military mercenaries to free the other, who is a despotic general being ferried to the US to be held accountable for his crimes. This generalissimo looks a good deal like Fidel Castro, smokes cigars, and smiles pleasantly as he strangles and shoots his captors. He is introduced via a news bulletin shown on a television in the airport.
The man in charge of the team working to free him is introduced nude, doing tai chi in his hotel room. He is muscular, angular, and a mean-looking motherfucker. He dons his clothes and joins his party, all of whom are dour and similarly angular (endnote 3).
The motives and aesthetics of the villains in DH2 are very much of a different era. Their look is very simply fascist: they wear military boots, long coats, and tucked-in button ups, mostly in shades of black and gray. They are terse, remorseless, humorless, and all, save the lone black man (whom I guess at this point we can call token), have slicked-back hair (the black fellow sporting a fashionable flat top).
The men are, like McClain, absolutes. They are bad. Rather than their character stemming from their motives, their motives stem from their characters. These men are the baddies, and that’s why they’re doing bad things. They crash loaded civilian planes into the tarmac, smiling wryly, killing hundreds of people, to make a point. They saunter around with automatic weapons blowing people away, because they’re bad and they don’t care. They are archetypal 80’s nemeses, fitting nicely in the mold carved from Dolph Lundgren’s evil Soviet in Rocky down to the badass invisible alien in Predator. What theses villains want is simple, and, apart from third act twist that wasn’t too hard to see coming, so it the plot. From the get-go, we know pretty much what’s going on, who’s going to stop it, and how. The pleasure comes from watching it all unfold.
(A) Proud Soviet Dolph Lundgren, kicking ass in the mid 80's (B) DH2's villain, naked and well muscled (C) Kevin Spacey's cerebral Se7en villain John Doe (D) Ironic intellectual Jeremy Irons in DH3
The villain of DH3 is a very different man. We don’t even see him until about 20 minutes into the film. He comes to us primarily on the phone, presenting himself as enigmatic and intellectual, throwing out riddles and games for the weary police to scratch their heads over. The police bring in a psychologist to look at his motives. This is a very 90’s trend; we can look to Silence of the Lambs, released in ’91, as the harbinger of the “motives” game played in 90’s cinema (endnote 4). The psychologist called in to understand the motives of a criminal and use this to track him down. Like Denis Hopper’s absent criminal mastermind in Speed and Kevin Spacey’s phoned-in malevolence of Se7en (endnote 5), Irons’ character is a sort of omniscient cat playing games with the good guy mice. Indeed, the entire concept of explaining the motives and a villain is very 90’s, and very post-communist, as in aforementioned world of pluralities, one can never be quite sure why anybody is doing anything, without looking to extensive psychoanalysis or extenuating historical circumstance.
This trend of understanding the psychology of character and person, and the way it dictates personality and motive, extends throughout 90’s cultures. To paraphrase Billy Corgan: our generation was the first to publicly tackle child abuse. Herein we will attempt to neither assert nor deny that, but it makes a very interesting point: one of the dominating trends of 90’s pop-culture was the explanation, the uncovering, the “digging deep”. Nirvana brought drug-abuse and the disturbing effects of the broken home to light. Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam spoke openly of childhood trauma and abortion. Irvine Welsh exposed the exploitation and desperate violence of the working class Scottish situation, and the way in which the bleakness of that reality was a direct conduit to drug abuse, alcoholism, and the perpetuation of working class violence. The list could easily go on; suffice to say, this was a driving force in the culture of the 90’s, and its presence in DH3 highlights perfectly the break in the previous trend of looking at the world as black and white (again, a duality, as with the Soviet/US duality, because, as we’ll see, the world of DH2 is predominantly white). The post-Soviet-world point is doubly reinforced by the DH3’s villain, who happens to be a former East German intelligence expert, and is now a man adrift in plural world (endnote 6).
Jeremy Irons is a flippant, ironic, intellectual villain in DH3. He speaks in riddle, has frosted hair, and isn’t in the least physically imposing. Rather, he dominates with his intellect. Here we see the rise, in the 1990s, of the haughty power-of-intellect movement. As undergraduate degrees became much less valuable currency, and the coffee shop culture began to take hold, we saw in the US 90’s what we saw in France in the 30’s: a bunch of fancy-pants intellectuals sitting around in bay-windowed cafes trying to outsmart each other, pursuing higher degrees and spouting irrelevant minutia in effort to obscure insecurities and the need for acceptance (endnote 7). Tarantino, the great filmic even of the 90’s, was an obnoxious know-it-all. Kurt Cobain was sardonic and guarded, displaying a hidden but intense intelligence. David Foster Wallace wrote an 1100-page tome about what it means to be American, full of footnotes, tangential historical asides, vernacular Canadian French, and reams of anally precise grammar (endnote 8) . Where as the baddies in DH2 shoot, stab, and explode airplanes, the nefarious intellectuals of DH3 play games with their nemeses, and out smart them.
Race, Religion, and Body Image
DH3 is very glaringly a product of the post-L.A. riots cinematic, and more broadly cultural, race dialogue that exploded into the American consciousness in the infant years of the 1990’s. Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing led the charge, coming a few years before the issue stepped onto a much larger, nationally accepted stage of criticism. DH3 is populated with a multiracial tableau, from the black police secretary to the Native American detective, and the very realistic NYC school scene filled with children of all the world’s races. Samuel L. Jackson’s character, introduced through a quick monologue that sounds like Lawrence Fishbourne’s entire Boyz N the Hood creation, Furious Styles, crammed into thirty seconds' worth of dialogue (endnote 9), becomes the mouthpiece of racial tensions throughout the film.
The movie’s first proper set piece throws us right into the racial melee. The villain demands that Bruce Willis walk around Harlem wearing a sign reading “I Hate Niggers”, or another bomb goes off. John McClain dons a sandwich board with said message and begins traipsing around north of 125th Street. Suffice to say, this is where he runs into Samuel L. Jackson’s character. This is also where we as the audience begin to see the painful flaws of the film’s “let’s tackle racism” stance. That Mr. Willis’ character dons a sandwich board reading “I Hate Niggers” says less about the film’s desire to take on very serious and deep-seeded racial problems facing contemporary America than it does about their desire to attract attention with a grossly crass and exploitative gimmick; the flippant, ironic, supposedly post-racist use of the n-word by white characters and white filmmakers in the post-Pulp Fiction world of cinema is a very sad trend, and one that DH3, despite its well-intentioned liberalisms, revels in.
As McClain strolls, a group of young black men passing around a basketball (endnote 10), drinking beer from paper bags, chill out on a stoop. Mr. Jackson’s character runs over to John McClain, divines that he is a cop, and recommends he get the fuck outta dodge right quick, or else said group of fellows would attack and possibly kill him. Right on cue, the group walks over, shouting insults, brandishing weapons, and eventually assaulting McClain. While the scene is heavily influenced by the black hoodlumisms of Boyz in the Hood, it very disturbingly lacks that film’s multifacicty. Where as Boyz presents both gun-tooting, 40-swilling thugs who perpetuate the ghetto’s violence and intelligent, straight-laced, academic standouts who are unfortunate victims of circumstance, DH3 seems to think that any group of young black men hanging out on a stoop is going to kill somebody for wearing the n-word (endnote 11) on a sandwich board. What we see here is something very prevalent in 90’s culture at large; a PC attempt to take on serious issues plaguing society that ends up falling victim to it’s own intentions.
Though Mr. Jackson’s character does make a few very good points – the moment when he tells McClain he doesn’t give shit about him as a person, that he saved him because the last things Harlem needs is a murdered white detective, is powerful and poignant, thanks in no small part again to Jackson’s ability to dredge dignity out of basically anything – it becomes the film’s running joke that McClain assumes Jackson can perform various tasks (pick a lock, run quickly, hot-wire a car, shoot a gun, etc) because he’s black. As it turns, he can do all of these things, and very well, apart from the gun shooting. So, despite the filmmaker’s attempt to tackle a very 90’s issue (look to American History X, Dangerous Minds, Law & Order, and any number of anti-racist 90’s punk songs – notably H20’s cover of the Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” (endnote 12) – for proof that white Americans were obsessed with dealing with race in the 90’s), the movie ends up being more racist than not, enforcing stereotypes rather than fighting them.
(A) Typical 80's view of an African American (B) Dennis Franz's chubby police captain (C) Racial demographic sea change via Boyz n the Hood (D) Evil black men with sculpted bodies waiting for white people to cut in DH3
For DH2, race is a non-issue. The color of the character’s skin is never mentioned. Despite the very different, more-naturalistic approach to race, the film is much less realistic in the racial demographics it presents.
DH2 takes place in Washington DC, a city with a large African American population. Nearly every bystander is the airport is white. Nearly every airport employee is white. Most of the cops are white. In fact, nearly everyone in the film is white. Let’s list the non-white characters we noticed: Three black police officers, one black air traffic controller (a sympathetic, central character), one black villain, who we think was John Leguazamo in a very brief cameo, a black baggage handler, a few black guys pushing luggage carts, a Latin American generalissimo who could very well have been a white guy with an affected accent and some make up, and a black army major. Everyone else, white. That’s about eleven non-white people. In the whole film. Give or take some extras, it’s not a very realistic representation of the country. So, while DH2 avoids some of the more painfully racist moments of its successor, it also presents a very skewed view of who Americans are and what they look like (endnote 12) . Not to mention that every black man in the film is either working for the man (moping the floor, pushing a cart, throwing luggage), or is walking around with a gun being very stern and stereotypically angry (note: not righteous indignation, simply misdirected hostility).
On the other side of this, DH2 is not afraid of portly characters. The airport’s police captain is balding and rocking a serious gut. Ditto with some of the airport’s patrolmen. The older male members of the airport staff have let themselves go a bit. DH3, on the other hand, seems very much afraid of any character who wouldn’t be set to run a few miles at a moment’s notice. This highlights a very interesting point: while the filmmakers of the 80’s racially misrepresent America, they present America’s body image in a relatively realistic way. The 90’s filmmakers, on the other hand, give us a racial panoply, but seem to think that everyone in the United States goes to the gym every day. This marks a shift in what the American audience was looking for (or at least, what film producers thought the American audience was looking for): in the 80’s, overweight characters present a realistic view of average America. In the 90’s, multiracial characters assumed that mantle.
DH2 takes place in a very Christian world. It’s December 24th. Characters make constant reference to the holidays. The airport is bedecked with more than one Christmas tree. The villains elect to hide out in a church. In the filmmaker’s presentation of the US, we are a Christian nation. DH3, on the other hand, is a very secular film. It’s action takes place in the religious neutrality of August. The only mention of religion comes flippantly, when Samuel L Jackson asks Bruce Willis how Irish people do the cross (endnote 14) thing. Again we see the very particularly 90’s, PC, Clinton-era interest in avoiding any specific mention of a ritual or categorization that might exclude any particular group of make a person or persons fell uncomfortable; the separation of church and entertainment is powerfully evident (endnote 15) .
The Influence of the 90’s Auteur
Unlike the 80’s, 90’s cinema was very much an age of the auteur. Trends harkened back to the 70’s, when rather than a system of studios pumping out product, a group of young maverick artists was forging culture and “cinema” (endnote 16) . Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Gus Van Sant, and countless others brought a personal and much more artistic touch to cinema (endnote 17) . The influence of these independent titans reverberated through out the mainstream, and is certainly evidenced by DH3.
First, the camera work. Where as the second DH film relies mostly on static shots, fluid editing, and grand action set pieces told from omniscience, the third film seems much more interested in pursuing its characters closely, through long, Scorsese-esque tracking shots and hand-held camera work. The characters of DH3 are followed very closely and at ground level. From the taxi chase through Central Park to the somewhat ridiculous shoot-em-up in Montreal at the film’s end, the cameras are low, jumpy, and shot continuously. This reflects an interest in relating directly to characters, the post-modern belief that the character, not the plot, drives the story. The cameras of DH2 tell us that the plot and circumstances are of paramount importance; the characters are pieces to be manipulated within that system for maximum effect (endnote 18) . This style of camera work can be traced from Godard’s Breathless to Scorsese’s Raging Bull to Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (though the crowning achievement of 90’s tracking shots is the opening of Boogie Nights) and directly into the mainstream (endnote 19).
Film like Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (A) and Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (B) influenced violent realism in the the mainstream such as (C) DH3 and studio-produced black comedies like (D) Very Bad Things
The ironic, post-modern use of music is another staple of 90’s cinema. In the film’s of the 80’s, we have mostly bombastic scores, with pop songs where (usually inappropriately) appropriate or as corporate tie-ins (Cameron Crowe films being a very notable exception to this model). DH2 follows this trend to a T, giving us only tense strings for the action sequences, melancholic symphonies for the tragic, ominous minor-key dirges for the villains, and some Christmas tunes to remind us of the time of year. The films of the 90’s, however, again influenced by Scorsese’s expert use of pop and rock songs, mined a very different shaft (endnote 20) . One need look no further than Reservoir Dogs, and in particular the infamous ear scene, to see the point at which the fuse was lit on the bomb of post-modern application of music in 90’s film.
DH3 gives us a few pop/rock songs, notably during the credit sequence, though its most obvious application of ironic music comes when the villains invade the banks. A facetious, playful military march lilts from the screen as Irons and co. go about shooting bank employees and robbing billions of dollars in gold. Of course, as with any true studio film, the irony works against itself, as later in the film, the music is employed during a proper military scene in complete seriousness, therefore subverting its initial subversiveness.
Tarantino’s influence can be most obviously seen by contrasting the violence of the two films. Make no mistake: both are very violent. DH2’s violence is hoo-rah macho and near ridiculous. You can damn near see the packets of fake blood exploding when characters are shot. Throat slittings (they happen, and the camera does not move, and it’s a Oh hell no! moment) are grotesque, but are very obviously the work of make up artists. In the film’s concluding moments (which, in classic action film form, last for over fifteen minutes), a character takes an icicle through the eye. The after shot of the body and icicle is so painfully fake it’s more laughable than repellent.
DH3’s violence, on the other hand, is much more real. Very much under the influence of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (which, let’s note, also starred both Jackson and Willis, and commercial success of which probably went great lengths to getting DH3 green lit), characters are caked in blood, sliced up, shoot to shit , and otherwise brutalized. The scene in which this is most evidenced comes toward the end of the film. Jackson and Willis are handcuffed to one another, back to back, on the top of a very big bomb. The camera pans and swoops around them, a continuous take, as they rap like Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction. The scene also evokes Reservoir Dogs, and the cop tied to the chair. Both characters are soaked with their own blood and covered in very realistic wounds. The film’s coup d’etat comes when Willis uses his teeth to pull a six-inch sliver of metal from a gash on his arm. The metal comes straight from a gash, very realistically, with a little spurt of blood following it out. It’s disgusting and cringe-worthy and all things post-Tarantino.
Echoes of Tarantino can been seen elsewhere, most obviously in the black/white buddy set up. Elsewhere, there is a scene of McClain beating a character near to death with a huge chain talking about the Adams Family that is pure Tarantino, and a bomb expert whose nerdy enthusiasm for bombs and their inner workings reminds us very much of QT himself, and his overwhelming enthusiasm for the minutia of film trivia.
All of these formal differences echo their times as resoundingly as the radically divorced handling of social and cultural issues. DH2 comes from the era of duality, in which competing monolithic states vied for control of the world. The formal techniques of DH2 echo the Cold War era’s sense of bombast, gianormity, and Wagnerian gravity. The clarity of the film stock, the static nature of the camera work, the traditional film score; all of it inline with a philosophy of good v. bad on an epic scale.
DH3, on the other hand, comes from the plurality, and as such is born of a world with endlessly more possibility. The focus post-Berlin Wall became on the small; the individual’s course through anincoherent, patchwork world, or, the smaller, developing nation’s search for cultural identity and a cohesive societal model. Thus the filmmaking is on a personal level. The director employs techniques that put the viewer into the action, attempting to dismantle the fourth wall, rather than positing the audience’s relationship with the film as it is, one of spectator and event.
Conclusion
So where does all of this leave us? Soviet duality v. post-Soviet plurality. Upstanding heroes who incite action v. drunken anti-heroes who are very grudgingly inserted into the action. A misrepresented racial view of the United States v. a well-intentioned, unfortunately racist attempt to deal with the multiracial tensions of the United States. Fat v. not fat people. The list goes on. What can we draw from all of this? Ultimately, this is nothing more or less than an exercise in extrapolating larger cultural implications from our pop art. In contrasting the presentation of characters, development of plot, formal techniques, and social and cultural depictions of the United States in Die Harder (DH2 – What a fuckin title!) and Die Hard with a Vengeance, we can plainly see the evolution of filmic, and, more broadly, cultural trends from the 1980’s of Reagan, Bush, the Soviets, and brute force to the 1990’s of Clinton, the developing world, and the dominance of intellectual trickery.
(A) A Soviet-era map (B) A more contemporary view of Europe
Endnotes
1. A quick note on the definition of 80’s v. 90’s: essentially what we mean by this is pre v. post Tarantino, the explosion of grunge v. hair metal, etc. More on this later.
2. Spike Lee reference not unintentional, but we’ll come back to that.
3. Two of whom are instantly recognizable as Terminator 2’s T1000 and the African baddie from Casino Royale, who’s actually a fantastic actor and has starred in such films as the stellar The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and the questionable The Limits of Control (which is typically lamentable Jim Jarmusch fare)
4. Though honestly it would’ve been a much more interesting 80’s theme. "Well, it seems as though the Predator is behaving as he is because his similarly dreadlocked, invisible alien parents didn’t love him. He developed, as an approval-seeking behavior, the habit of triangulating mercenaries in Central America’s jungles and severely fucking them up. His resentment of authority, resultant of strained parent-child relations, is particularly evident in his slayings of the governors of both California and Minnesota."
5. A film which went on to define an entire noir/horror crossbreed genre in the 90’s, with an evil criminal mastermind who plays games with his victims and commits decidedly violent crimes. See: The Bone Collector, Suspect Zero, and most especially the Saw films (which are by and large horrible but go great lengths to showing to popularity of this trend. Indeed, from Saw II forward, the villain is the only character of any importance. The “heroes” are a disposable series of torture victims).
6. The film makes a few small references about the Middle East – Jeremy Irons’ character is rumored to be in league with Iranians, and makes a quick comment about the Middle Eastern people he is working for. Interestingly, the Middle Eastern people he is working for have hired him to besiege downtown Manhattan. The film also contains a few shots of the World Trade Center towers, and a reference to the original Trade Center bombing. Watching the film post 9/11, with all of these things going on, is very creepy.
7. All of this very 90’s and psychoanalytical itself.
8. Authors will go on record here stating that DFW was in fact a very humble type of genius, and that he wasn’t following the know-it-all trend as much as becoming incredibly popular by hitting the zeitgeist with is intellectual rigor, all of his readers being snobby post baby boomers who prided their personal libraries and immaculate taste in fine cheeses. Like, really, with all these fucking footnotes, how could we speak ill of Wallace?
Also note that authors came of age during the 90’s and are very much sort of fancy intellectual writers enamored with verbal virtuosity and presenting themselves as clever – ah, how trends infiltrate the minds of the youth. Of course, all of this desperate need for intellectual validation probably comes from feelings of inadequacy, which brings us back to the psychoanalysis.
9. Which dialogue includes the character telling his nephews the need to go to school, to get educated, to stay away from the criminals and off the streets, to avoid eating the shit shoveled by the white people in the future, dialogue being so painfully stereotypical it’s a wonder Mr. Jackson brings so much dignity to his character.
10. Really? Black guys with a basketball? Again? Seriously…
11. And let’s talk a few things here. The scene takes place at 9am. Let’s give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and assume that this group of guys really is a degenerate clumping of drug dealers and gang bangers. Why are they awake at 9am? If they’re actually drunks, why do they have a basketball? Have you ever seen a crack head or alcoholic bright eyed and bushy tailed on the stoop at 9am, ready to give some lane? If anyone’s hanging out on the stoop at 9am its college students without morning classes or guys who work the night shift, and from my own Harlem and Brooklyn experience, these aren’t the guys who chug beer and stab people before noon (or at all, for that matter).
12. I must have missed the Nazi punks of the 90’s…
13. The first Diehard film has two lead, sympathetic African Americans, though the first film is also very progressive, intelligent, and subversive (as action films go), which is why we left it out of this discussion.
14. Interestingly, this is the only point in any Diehard film at which John McClain is overtly referred to as Irish. The third film seems interested, at least in a very small way, in acknowledging McCain’s Irish decent, and the important role that the Irish have played in New York City and especially it’s police history. By fleshing out the character as such, the filmmaker’s have yet again served to highlight American’s cultural and racial diversity.
15. The first two films, on the other hand, seem to want McClain as only the all-American hero, a man with only one nation and one cultural identity: American.
16. This would of course revert during Bush 2’s tenure, when a mass-Christian movement helped Mel Gibson’s “The Explicit Torture of Christ at the Hands of Satanic Jews” make hundreds of millions of dollars.
17. To go back even further, what we see in the 90’s is a reinvigoration of the French New Wave beliefs that film should be a personal, individual, sometimes whimsical, work of artistic expression.
18. Actually, a good deal of these guys – like Jarmusch, Van Sant, etc, rose out of the 80’s underground, much like groups such as Pixies and Dinosaur Jr., who essentially created the blueprint for 90’s rock music. Thus, though the 70’s largely informed the 90’s, it was the underground stalwarts of the 80’s who made much of it possible.
19. This directly parallels the difference between 80’s and 90’s cinema, business-wise. The 80’s films were produced by a very large, very industrial system as product. The indie films of the 90’s, which gave rise to the decade’s very different aesthetics, were independently financed, and the product of a small handful of people’s imaginations.
20. Not to shirk American mainstream experimental formalism, Frank Capra was a top-rate tracking shot guru. We need look no further than It Happened One Night, where, with a long track of Gable and Claudette Colbert, we experience the entirety of the Great Depression.
21. No reference to the brother from another mother who stuck it to Africa intended
Check out the trailers for the films below:
Watching Die Harder (Die Hard 2) and Die Hard: With A Vengeance (that’s DH3 for the uninitiated) back to back, its easy to see the many differences between 80’s and 90’s mainstream cinema, and the way those differences reflect shifting cultural trends at large (endnote 1).
The Hero
The first film deals in absolutes: John McClain is a hero. The villains are evil. The captain of Dulles police is a jackass and a bureaucrat, placed firmly in opposition to McClain, who’s a go-getter, an every man, the guy who knows best. He is a proactive American who does the right thing, much like an upstanding white man would as per the Bush (first Bush in this case) administration’s representation of America.
McClain is introduced to us in the film’s first shot, rushing out into snow and traffic, a man on a mission. That mission: stop his car from being towed. This shot introduces the setting, the time of year, and McClain’s restless, aggressive personality. These things remain staples of the film as it progresses, all of the action taking place between two locations; the airport, and a church, which is set up by the second scene. This is clean, precise, mainstream filmmaking.
Having a coffee in one of the airport’s cafés, McClain notices some very suspicious men decked out in portentously dark coats with very slickly jelled hair passing suspect packages to one another beneath at table. Though off-duty, he takes note none-the-less. McClain approaches two airport cops. As it turns out, one of them is the fellow that had his car towed just ten minutes earlier. John the knows he can’t trust these guys to believe him, because he knows they are uniformed bureaucrats; the men won’t investigate his claim to nefarious activity because he rubbed them the wrong way earlier. They are the inept authorities, and he is the man with a plan. The cowboy. McClain ends up following the suspected n’er-do-weller, and thus begins the action – incited by McClain and his instinct. In DH2, the hero creates the story.
(A) DH2's heroic McClain, poised (B) The massive 80's movie star (C) A svelte Keanu Reeves in Speed (D) Exhausted, alcoholic McClain, not really ready for action
DH3 introduces us to a very different John McClain and a much more ambiguous world. He is absent the first few minutes of the film, which give us introductory shots of New York. Real locations are introduced, in opposition to DH2, which, though taking place in DC, never gives us anything beyond sets, apart from a few establishing shots. The camera panning along the Upper West Side, a building explodes, sending cars and people flying into the street amidst the debris.
We cut to the inside of a police station, and the captain, who, unlike the snippy, uniform wearing, mustachioed prick of the first film is a tired, weary guy in a suit overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation. By and large what we find of the police in this film is that they are sarcastic guys (and their female secretaries – some things never change) in disheveled, cheap suits who just want to do the right thing (endnote 2) , evocative of the noir heroes of yesteryear.
The bossman receives a phone call from the villain who, speaking in riddles, demands John McClain. The captain informs him McClain is on suspension. Already our hero is a man with some demons. The villain retorts that he doesn’t care where McClain is, it’s him he wants, and no one else.
Our first shot of McClain points downward, diminishing our previous, heroic notions of him. He’s sprawled on the floor of a van, dirty, hung over, and barely with us. His wife’s left him. He’s a directionless drunk on the verge of being tossed off the force. McClain is very clearly an anti-hero, much more Bogart to DH2’s Clark Gable-styled hero. He doesn’t burst into the action or incite the plot; he’s off drunk somewhere while the world is falling to shit and is reluctantly called into battle. The film’s plot unfolds accordingly, the villain sending McClain here and there as he pleases, until McClain finally souses his number and changes the rules.
To extrapolate this, we need look no further than the Soviet influence on the American perception of the world. While we had the Soviet’s, we had a duality, a binary relationship in which there was an “us” and a “them”, with the world’s various states pretty much split accordingly. This duality directly informed DH2. As the wall came down, so did the duality; the world very quickly became a plurality, most of its compositional elements being undeveloped nations ravaged by the shady dealings of the cold war, shaking their fists for justice.
During the Regan administration, Iran-Contra, the fighting in Afghanistan, the intermittent violence between Israel & Palestine and Somalia & Ethiopia were all just repercussions of the big fight: America vs. the Evil Empire. The Clinton administration, however, faced real, sectarian violence that had nothing to do with America and its battles directly, though was of course a repercussion of colonialism and the cold war era – Rwanda, Serbia & Croatia, Mogadishu – all of it a direct cause of American or European intervention, weapons manufacturing, and the unfortunate practice of grouping peoples with great enmity toward one another into singular nation-states. As the media grabbed onto these conflicts to highlight a world of intense brutality that had been hidden behind the Soviet veil, American awakened to reality of the global situation, much like John McClain is pulled into a situation of terrorism far beyond his control in DH3.
The Villain
What’s a film without a bad guy? And yet what different bad guys they are. In the first picture, there are two villains, one working with a crew of military mercenaries to free the other, who is a despotic general being ferried to the US to be held accountable for his crimes. This generalissimo looks a good deal like Fidel Castro, smokes cigars, and smiles pleasantly as he strangles and shoots his captors. He is introduced via a news bulletin shown on a television in the airport.
The man in charge of the team working to free him is introduced nude, doing tai chi in his hotel room. He is muscular, angular, and a mean-looking motherfucker. He dons his clothes and joins his party, all of whom are dour and similarly angular (endnote 3).
The motives and aesthetics of the villains in DH2 are very much of a different era. Their look is very simply fascist: they wear military boots, long coats, and tucked-in button ups, mostly in shades of black and gray. They are terse, remorseless, humorless, and all, save the lone black man (whom I guess at this point we can call token), have slicked-back hair (the black fellow sporting a fashionable flat top).
The men are, like McClain, absolutes. They are bad. Rather than their character stemming from their motives, their motives stem from their characters. These men are the baddies, and that’s why they’re doing bad things. They crash loaded civilian planes into the tarmac, smiling wryly, killing hundreds of people, to make a point. They saunter around with automatic weapons blowing people away, because they’re bad and they don’t care. They are archetypal 80’s nemeses, fitting nicely in the mold carved from Dolph Lundgren’s evil Soviet in Rocky down to the badass invisible alien in Predator. What theses villains want is simple, and, apart from third act twist that wasn’t too hard to see coming, so it the plot. From the get-go, we know pretty much what’s going on, who’s going to stop it, and how. The pleasure comes from watching it all unfold.
(A) Proud Soviet Dolph Lundgren, kicking ass in the mid 80's (B) DH2's villain, naked and well muscled (C) Kevin Spacey's cerebral Se7en villain John Doe (D) Ironic intellectual Jeremy Irons in DH3
The villain of DH3 is a very different man. We don’t even see him until about 20 minutes into the film. He comes to us primarily on the phone, presenting himself as enigmatic and intellectual, throwing out riddles and games for the weary police to scratch their heads over. The police bring in a psychologist to look at his motives. This is a very 90’s trend; we can look to Silence of the Lambs, released in ’91, as the harbinger of the “motives” game played in 90’s cinema (endnote 4). The psychologist called in to understand the motives of a criminal and use this to track him down. Like Denis Hopper’s absent criminal mastermind in Speed and Kevin Spacey’s phoned-in malevolence of Se7en (endnote 5), Irons’ character is a sort of omniscient cat playing games with the good guy mice. Indeed, the entire concept of explaining the motives and a villain is very 90’s, and very post-communist, as in aforementioned world of pluralities, one can never be quite sure why anybody is doing anything, without looking to extensive psychoanalysis or extenuating historical circumstance.
This trend of understanding the psychology of character and person, and the way it dictates personality and motive, extends throughout 90’s cultures. To paraphrase Billy Corgan: our generation was the first to publicly tackle child abuse. Herein we will attempt to neither assert nor deny that, but it makes a very interesting point: one of the dominating trends of 90’s pop-culture was the explanation, the uncovering, the “digging deep”. Nirvana brought drug-abuse and the disturbing effects of the broken home to light. Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam spoke openly of childhood trauma and abortion. Irvine Welsh exposed the exploitation and desperate violence of the working class Scottish situation, and the way in which the bleakness of that reality was a direct conduit to drug abuse, alcoholism, and the perpetuation of working class violence. The list could easily go on; suffice to say, this was a driving force in the culture of the 90’s, and its presence in DH3 highlights perfectly the break in the previous trend of looking at the world as black and white (again, a duality, as with the Soviet/US duality, because, as we’ll see, the world of DH2 is predominantly white). The post-Soviet-world point is doubly reinforced by the DH3’s villain, who happens to be a former East German intelligence expert, and is now a man adrift in plural world (endnote 6).
Jeremy Irons is a flippant, ironic, intellectual villain in DH3. He speaks in riddle, has frosted hair, and isn’t in the least physically imposing. Rather, he dominates with his intellect. Here we see the rise, in the 1990s, of the haughty power-of-intellect movement. As undergraduate degrees became much less valuable currency, and the coffee shop culture began to take hold, we saw in the US 90’s what we saw in France in the 30’s: a bunch of fancy-pants intellectuals sitting around in bay-windowed cafes trying to outsmart each other, pursuing higher degrees and spouting irrelevant minutia in effort to obscure insecurities and the need for acceptance (endnote 7). Tarantino, the great filmic even of the 90’s, was an obnoxious know-it-all. Kurt Cobain was sardonic and guarded, displaying a hidden but intense intelligence. David Foster Wallace wrote an 1100-page tome about what it means to be American, full of footnotes, tangential historical asides, vernacular Canadian French, and reams of anally precise grammar (endnote 8) . Where as the baddies in DH2 shoot, stab, and explode airplanes, the nefarious intellectuals of DH3 play games with their nemeses, and out smart them.
Race, Religion, and Body Image
DH3 is very glaringly a product of the post-L.A. riots cinematic, and more broadly cultural, race dialogue that exploded into the American consciousness in the infant years of the 1990’s. Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing led the charge, coming a few years before the issue stepped onto a much larger, nationally accepted stage of criticism. DH3 is populated with a multiracial tableau, from the black police secretary to the Native American detective, and the very realistic NYC school scene filled with children of all the world’s races. Samuel L. Jackson’s character, introduced through a quick monologue that sounds like Lawrence Fishbourne’s entire Boyz N the Hood creation, Furious Styles, crammed into thirty seconds' worth of dialogue (endnote 9), becomes the mouthpiece of racial tensions throughout the film.
The movie’s first proper set piece throws us right into the racial melee. The villain demands that Bruce Willis walk around Harlem wearing a sign reading “I Hate Niggers”, or another bomb goes off. John McClain dons a sandwich board with said message and begins traipsing around north of 125th Street. Suffice to say, this is where he runs into Samuel L. Jackson’s character. This is also where we as the audience begin to see the painful flaws of the film’s “let’s tackle racism” stance. That Mr. Willis’ character dons a sandwich board reading “I Hate Niggers” says less about the film’s desire to take on very serious and deep-seeded racial problems facing contemporary America than it does about their desire to attract attention with a grossly crass and exploitative gimmick; the flippant, ironic, supposedly post-racist use of the n-word by white characters and white filmmakers in the post-Pulp Fiction world of cinema is a very sad trend, and one that DH3, despite its well-intentioned liberalisms, revels in.
As McClain strolls, a group of young black men passing around a basketball (endnote 10), drinking beer from paper bags, chill out on a stoop. Mr. Jackson’s character runs over to John McClain, divines that he is a cop, and recommends he get the fuck outta dodge right quick, or else said group of fellows would attack and possibly kill him. Right on cue, the group walks over, shouting insults, brandishing weapons, and eventually assaulting McClain. While the scene is heavily influenced by the black hoodlumisms of Boyz in the Hood, it very disturbingly lacks that film’s multifacicty. Where as Boyz presents both gun-tooting, 40-swilling thugs who perpetuate the ghetto’s violence and intelligent, straight-laced, academic standouts who are unfortunate victims of circumstance, DH3 seems to think that any group of young black men hanging out on a stoop is going to kill somebody for wearing the n-word (endnote 11) on a sandwich board. What we see here is something very prevalent in 90’s culture at large; a PC attempt to take on serious issues plaguing society that ends up falling victim to it’s own intentions.
Though Mr. Jackson’s character does make a few very good points – the moment when he tells McClain he doesn’t give shit about him as a person, that he saved him because the last things Harlem needs is a murdered white detective, is powerful and poignant, thanks in no small part again to Jackson’s ability to dredge dignity out of basically anything – it becomes the film’s running joke that McClain assumes Jackson can perform various tasks (pick a lock, run quickly, hot-wire a car, shoot a gun, etc) because he’s black. As it turns, he can do all of these things, and very well, apart from the gun shooting. So, despite the filmmaker’s attempt to tackle a very 90’s issue (look to American History X, Dangerous Minds, Law & Order, and any number of anti-racist 90’s punk songs – notably H20’s cover of the Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” (endnote 12) – for proof that white Americans were obsessed with dealing with race in the 90’s), the movie ends up being more racist than not, enforcing stereotypes rather than fighting them.
(A) Typical 80's view of an African American (B) Dennis Franz's chubby police captain (C) Racial demographic sea change via Boyz n the Hood (D) Evil black men with sculpted bodies waiting for white people to cut in DH3
For DH2, race is a non-issue. The color of the character’s skin is never mentioned. Despite the very different, more-naturalistic approach to race, the film is much less realistic in the racial demographics it presents.
DH2 takes place in Washington DC, a city with a large African American population. Nearly every bystander is the airport is white. Nearly every airport employee is white. Most of the cops are white. In fact, nearly everyone in the film is white. Let’s list the non-white characters we noticed: Three black police officers, one black air traffic controller (a sympathetic, central character), one black villain, who we think was John Leguazamo in a very brief cameo, a black baggage handler, a few black guys pushing luggage carts, a Latin American generalissimo who could very well have been a white guy with an affected accent and some make up, and a black army major. Everyone else, white. That’s about eleven non-white people. In the whole film. Give or take some extras, it’s not a very realistic representation of the country. So, while DH2 avoids some of the more painfully racist moments of its successor, it also presents a very skewed view of who Americans are and what they look like (endnote 12) . Not to mention that every black man in the film is either working for the man (moping the floor, pushing a cart, throwing luggage), or is walking around with a gun being very stern and stereotypically angry (note: not righteous indignation, simply misdirected hostility).
On the other side of this, DH2 is not afraid of portly characters. The airport’s police captain is balding and rocking a serious gut. Ditto with some of the airport’s patrolmen. The older male members of the airport staff have let themselves go a bit. DH3, on the other hand, seems very much afraid of any character who wouldn’t be set to run a few miles at a moment’s notice. This highlights a very interesting point: while the filmmakers of the 80’s racially misrepresent America, they present America’s body image in a relatively realistic way. The 90’s filmmakers, on the other hand, give us a racial panoply, but seem to think that everyone in the United States goes to the gym every day. This marks a shift in what the American audience was looking for (or at least, what film producers thought the American audience was looking for): in the 80’s, overweight characters present a realistic view of average America. In the 90’s, multiracial characters assumed that mantle.
DH2 takes place in a very Christian world. It’s December 24th. Characters make constant reference to the holidays. The airport is bedecked with more than one Christmas tree. The villains elect to hide out in a church. In the filmmaker’s presentation of the US, we are a Christian nation. DH3, on the other hand, is a very secular film. It’s action takes place in the religious neutrality of August. The only mention of religion comes flippantly, when Samuel L Jackson asks Bruce Willis how Irish people do the cross (endnote 14) thing. Again we see the very particularly 90’s, PC, Clinton-era interest in avoiding any specific mention of a ritual or categorization that might exclude any particular group of make a person or persons fell uncomfortable; the separation of church and entertainment is powerfully evident (endnote 15) .
The Influence of the 90’s Auteur
Unlike the 80’s, 90’s cinema was very much an age of the auteur. Trends harkened back to the 70’s, when rather than a system of studios pumping out product, a group of young maverick artists was forging culture and “cinema” (endnote 16) . Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Gus Van Sant, and countless others brought a personal and much more artistic touch to cinema (endnote 17) . The influence of these independent titans reverberated through out the mainstream, and is certainly evidenced by DH3.
First, the camera work. Where as the second DH film relies mostly on static shots, fluid editing, and grand action set pieces told from omniscience, the third film seems much more interested in pursuing its characters closely, through long, Scorsese-esque tracking shots and hand-held camera work. The characters of DH3 are followed very closely and at ground level. From the taxi chase through Central Park to the somewhat ridiculous shoot-em-up in Montreal at the film’s end, the cameras are low, jumpy, and shot continuously. This reflects an interest in relating directly to characters, the post-modern belief that the character, not the plot, drives the story. The cameras of DH2 tell us that the plot and circumstances are of paramount importance; the characters are pieces to be manipulated within that system for maximum effect (endnote 18) . This style of camera work can be traced from Godard’s Breathless to Scorsese’s Raging Bull to Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (though the crowning achievement of 90’s tracking shots is the opening of Boogie Nights) and directly into the mainstream (endnote 19).
Film like Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (A) and Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (B) influenced violent realism in the the mainstream such as (C) DH3 and studio-produced black comedies like (D) Very Bad Things
The ironic, post-modern use of music is another staple of 90’s cinema. In the film’s of the 80’s, we have mostly bombastic scores, with pop songs where (usually inappropriately) appropriate or as corporate tie-ins (Cameron Crowe films being a very notable exception to this model). DH2 follows this trend to a T, giving us only tense strings for the action sequences, melancholic symphonies for the tragic, ominous minor-key dirges for the villains, and some Christmas tunes to remind us of the time of year. The films of the 90’s, however, again influenced by Scorsese’s expert use of pop and rock songs, mined a very different shaft (endnote 20) . One need look no further than Reservoir Dogs, and in particular the infamous ear scene, to see the point at which the fuse was lit on the bomb of post-modern application of music in 90’s film.
DH3 gives us a few pop/rock songs, notably during the credit sequence, though its most obvious application of ironic music comes when the villains invade the banks. A facetious, playful military march lilts from the screen as Irons and co. go about shooting bank employees and robbing billions of dollars in gold. Of course, as with any true studio film, the irony works against itself, as later in the film, the music is employed during a proper military scene in complete seriousness, therefore subverting its initial subversiveness.
Tarantino’s influence can be most obviously seen by contrasting the violence of the two films. Make no mistake: both are very violent. DH2’s violence is hoo-rah macho and near ridiculous. You can damn near see the packets of fake blood exploding when characters are shot. Throat slittings (they happen, and the camera does not move, and it’s a Oh hell no! moment) are grotesque, but are very obviously the work of make up artists. In the film’s concluding moments (which, in classic action film form, last for over fifteen minutes), a character takes an icicle through the eye. The after shot of the body and icicle is so painfully fake it’s more laughable than repellent.
DH3’s violence, on the other hand, is much more real. Very much under the influence of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (which, let’s note, also starred both Jackson and Willis, and commercial success of which probably went great lengths to getting DH3 green lit), characters are caked in blood, sliced up, shoot to shit , and otherwise brutalized. The scene in which this is most evidenced comes toward the end of the film. Jackson and Willis are handcuffed to one another, back to back, on the top of a very big bomb. The camera pans and swoops around them, a continuous take, as they rap like Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction. The scene also evokes Reservoir Dogs, and the cop tied to the chair. Both characters are soaked with their own blood and covered in very realistic wounds. The film’s coup d’etat comes when Willis uses his teeth to pull a six-inch sliver of metal from a gash on his arm. The metal comes straight from a gash, very realistically, with a little spurt of blood following it out. It’s disgusting and cringe-worthy and all things post-Tarantino.
Echoes of Tarantino can been seen elsewhere, most obviously in the black/white buddy set up. Elsewhere, there is a scene of McClain beating a character near to death with a huge chain talking about the Adams Family that is pure Tarantino, and a bomb expert whose nerdy enthusiasm for bombs and their inner workings reminds us very much of QT himself, and his overwhelming enthusiasm for the minutia of film trivia.
All of these formal differences echo their times as resoundingly as the radically divorced handling of social and cultural issues. DH2 comes from the era of duality, in which competing monolithic states vied for control of the world. The formal techniques of DH2 echo the Cold War era’s sense of bombast, gianormity, and Wagnerian gravity. The clarity of the film stock, the static nature of the camera work, the traditional film score; all of it inline with a philosophy of good v. bad on an epic scale.
DH3, on the other hand, comes from the plurality, and as such is born of a world with endlessly more possibility. The focus post-Berlin Wall became on the small; the individual’s course through anincoherent, patchwork world, or, the smaller, developing nation’s search for cultural identity and a cohesive societal model. Thus the filmmaking is on a personal level. The director employs techniques that put the viewer into the action, attempting to dismantle the fourth wall, rather than positing the audience’s relationship with the film as it is, one of spectator and event.
Conclusion
So where does all of this leave us? Soviet duality v. post-Soviet plurality. Upstanding heroes who incite action v. drunken anti-heroes who are very grudgingly inserted into the action. A misrepresented racial view of the United States v. a well-intentioned, unfortunately racist attempt to deal with the multiracial tensions of the United States. Fat v. not fat people. The list goes on. What can we draw from all of this? Ultimately, this is nothing more or less than an exercise in extrapolating larger cultural implications from our pop art. In contrasting the presentation of characters, development of plot, formal techniques, and social and cultural depictions of the United States in Die Harder (DH2 – What a fuckin title!) and Die Hard with a Vengeance, we can plainly see the evolution of filmic, and, more broadly, cultural trends from the 1980’s of Reagan, Bush, the Soviets, and brute force to the 1990’s of Clinton, the developing world, and the dominance of intellectual trickery.
(A) A Soviet-era map (B) A more contemporary view of Europe
Endnotes
1. A quick note on the definition of 80’s v. 90’s: essentially what we mean by this is pre v. post Tarantino, the explosion of grunge v. hair metal, etc. More on this later.
2. Spike Lee reference not unintentional, but we’ll come back to that.
3. Two of whom are instantly recognizable as Terminator 2’s T1000 and the African baddie from Casino Royale, who’s actually a fantastic actor and has starred in such films as the stellar The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and the questionable The Limits of Control (which is typically lamentable Jim Jarmusch fare)
4. Though honestly it would’ve been a much more interesting 80’s theme. "Well, it seems as though the Predator is behaving as he is because his similarly dreadlocked, invisible alien parents didn’t love him. He developed, as an approval-seeking behavior, the habit of triangulating mercenaries in Central America’s jungles and severely fucking them up. His resentment of authority, resultant of strained parent-child relations, is particularly evident in his slayings of the governors of both California and Minnesota."
5. A film which went on to define an entire noir/horror crossbreed genre in the 90’s, with an evil criminal mastermind who plays games with his victims and commits decidedly violent crimes. See: The Bone Collector, Suspect Zero, and most especially the Saw films (which are by and large horrible but go great lengths to showing to popularity of this trend. Indeed, from Saw II forward, the villain is the only character of any importance. The “heroes” are a disposable series of torture victims).
6. The film makes a few small references about the Middle East – Jeremy Irons’ character is rumored to be in league with Iranians, and makes a quick comment about the Middle Eastern people he is working for. Interestingly, the Middle Eastern people he is working for have hired him to besiege downtown Manhattan. The film also contains a few shots of the World Trade Center towers, and a reference to the original Trade Center bombing. Watching the film post 9/11, with all of these things going on, is very creepy.
7. All of this very 90’s and psychoanalytical itself.
8. Authors will go on record here stating that DFW was in fact a very humble type of genius, and that he wasn’t following the know-it-all trend as much as becoming incredibly popular by hitting the zeitgeist with is intellectual rigor, all of his readers being snobby post baby boomers who prided their personal libraries and immaculate taste in fine cheeses. Like, really, with all these fucking footnotes, how could we speak ill of Wallace?
Also note that authors came of age during the 90’s and are very much sort of fancy intellectual writers enamored with verbal virtuosity and presenting themselves as clever – ah, how trends infiltrate the minds of the youth. Of course, all of this desperate need for intellectual validation probably comes from feelings of inadequacy, which brings us back to the psychoanalysis.
9. Which dialogue includes the character telling his nephews the need to go to school, to get educated, to stay away from the criminals and off the streets, to avoid eating the shit shoveled by the white people in the future, dialogue being so painfully stereotypical it’s a wonder Mr. Jackson brings so much dignity to his character.
10. Really? Black guys with a basketball? Again? Seriously…
11. And let’s talk a few things here. The scene takes place at 9am. Let’s give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and assume that this group of guys really is a degenerate clumping of drug dealers and gang bangers. Why are they awake at 9am? If they’re actually drunks, why do they have a basketball? Have you ever seen a crack head or alcoholic bright eyed and bushy tailed on the stoop at 9am, ready to give some lane? If anyone’s hanging out on the stoop at 9am its college students without morning classes or guys who work the night shift, and from my own Harlem and Brooklyn experience, these aren’t the guys who chug beer and stab people before noon (or at all, for that matter).
12. I must have missed the Nazi punks of the 90’s…
13. The first Diehard film has two lead, sympathetic African Americans, though the first film is also very progressive, intelligent, and subversive (as action films go), which is why we left it out of this discussion.
14. Interestingly, this is the only point in any Diehard film at which John McClain is overtly referred to as Irish. The third film seems interested, at least in a very small way, in acknowledging McCain’s Irish decent, and the important role that the Irish have played in New York City and especially it’s police history. By fleshing out the character as such, the filmmaker’s have yet again served to highlight American’s cultural and racial diversity.
15. The first two films, on the other hand, seem to want McClain as only the all-American hero, a man with only one nation and one cultural identity: American.
16. This would of course revert during Bush 2’s tenure, when a mass-Christian movement helped Mel Gibson’s “The Explicit Torture of Christ at the Hands of Satanic Jews” make hundreds of millions of dollars.
17. To go back even further, what we see in the 90’s is a reinvigoration of the French New Wave beliefs that film should be a personal, individual, sometimes whimsical, work of artistic expression.
18. Actually, a good deal of these guys – like Jarmusch, Van Sant, etc, rose out of the 80’s underground, much like groups such as Pixies and Dinosaur Jr., who essentially created the blueprint for 90’s rock music. Thus, though the 70’s largely informed the 90’s, it was the underground stalwarts of the 80’s who made much of it possible.
19. This directly parallels the difference between 80’s and 90’s cinema, business-wise. The 80’s films were produced by a very large, very industrial system as product. The indie films of the 90’s, which gave rise to the decade’s very different aesthetics, were independently financed, and the product of a small handful of people’s imaginations.
20. Not to shirk American mainstream experimental formalism, Frank Capra was a top-rate tracking shot guru. We need look no further than It Happened One Night, where, with a long track of Gable and Claudette Colbert, we experience the entirety of the Great Depression.
21. No reference to the brother from another mother who stuck it to Africa intended
Check out the trailers for the films below:
8.1.10
Top 50 Movies of the Decade
A lot of these lists have been going around. It was suggested to me that I do my own, and I was like, yeah, totally I should! So, I did it, agonized over the order, wrote maybe a little bit too much on the top ten, and, voila, here it is for your reading pleasure! I urge any and all disagreements to be posted as virulent disapprovals of my ability to be a human being, either here or on the old facebook.
Enjoy.
Top 50 Movies, 2000-2009
50. Shaun of the Dead
49. Sunshine
48. High Tension
47. Munich
46. The Host
45. Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2
44. The Bourne Trilogy
43. Heaven
42. The Constant Gardener
41. Pirates of the Caribbean
40. Almost Famous
39. Ponyo
38. Avatar
37. No Country For Old Men
36. The Hurt Locker
35. Ocean’s 11
34. March of the Penguins
33. Enchanted
32. Into the Wild
31. Snatch
30. The Dark Knight
29. Amelie
28. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
27. Where the Wild Things Are
26. Inglourious Basterds
25. Up
24. American Gangster
23. Spirited Away
22. Across the Universe
21. Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Lady Vengeance/Old Boy)
20. I Heart Huckabees
19. Quills
18. The New World
17. The Departed
16. Y Tu Mama Tambien
15. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
14. City of God
13. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
12. Ratatouille
11. 2046
10. 28 Days Later – With barely any budget, some digital cameras, a cast of unknowns, and a whole lotta blood, Danny Boyle managed to single-handedly reinvent the zombie genre and the apocalypse picture. From Zach Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake to Will Smith in “I Am Legend”, it was a decade of running cerebrumphagists, the-end-is-extremely-fucking-nigh fantasias, and empty metropolises. And yet, unlike many of his more hedonistic peers, who were looking for brains, bodies, severe dismemberings, and a cheap thrill, Danny Boyle, with the help of writer Alex Garland, found a very poignant story of survival, love, and hope in his end-times desolation. Look no further than the vapor trail scene for proof of the film’s brilliance; it remains one of the decade’s most beautiful cinematic moments.
9. Lord of the Rings Trilogy – There’s not a lot to say about this one that hasn’t already been said. It was a behemoth of a trilogy, a staggeringly huge cinematic milestone that set a daunting high-water mark for 21st century epics. In finding the quiet heart of the story, and focusing on it amidst the carnage, Peter Jackson created myriad new avenues of grand-scale film making, and blew our minds in ways the didn’t know they could be blown. Few, if any, films wowed me the way Fellowship of the Rings did. A true “show ‘em something they ain’t never seen” moment of wonder and charm (hats off especially to Rudy’s performance as Sam Gamgee).
8. Traffic – Lens filters, subtitled swaths, and a disjointed narrative that had a lot of people scratching their heads like “Huh the fuck?”. Sound like a classic? It is. Steven Soderbergh and Stephen Gaghan weave an entrancing web of ambiguous morality peppered with fallible, flailing characters (brilliantly acted by the ensemble cast) that gives us far more questions than answers. This refusal to take sides makes the film that much more striking. Through its disparate plots the filmmakers show us some of the many ways that drugs infiltrate and affect our society, and the hypocritical ways in which we deal with these issues. Unfortunately, this film also inspired many lesser professionals to attempt similarly disjointed, big-idea pictures, most of which ended up like old oatmeal – tepid, mushy, and pointless. Yet despite this, it remains one of the most powerful, intelligent, and original films of the 21st century thus far.
7. Pan’s Labyrinth – All of Guillermo Del Toro’s sensibilities – his penchant for horror, his glee for creatures and myth, his ability to see the world as children do, his understated sense of tragedy – cohered beautifully is this Spanish civil war fable. A young girl has lost her father. Her mother has remarried a remorseless lieutenant. The family is relocated to a mountain town where the fascists are fighting the rebels. In a creaking old farmhouse, the girl is visited by creatures and ordained tasks of incredible significance. In the war, the parallel fantasias, and the familial tensions, Del Toro finds heartbreaking moments of human frailty and strength in a film that is ultimately about belief and the capacity people have to do the right thing, when the time comes.
6. Wall-E – A robot love story? Um…ok. I suppose it’s better than traveling the exhausted avenues of Martians and talking animals (though honestly I’m sure I could ever have enough of talking animals cause, well, animals are really cute, even if the films suck). Dutiful Pixar peon that I am, I found my way to the theater, and an experience of complete joy. A wordless, endlessly inventive first act following a robot in his daily routines on a vacant and trash-strewn earth (his only friend, appropriately, a roach) gives way to a touching, very honest love story (between robots!), which follows an adventurous, let’s-save-the-human-race conclusion evoking the best of the original Star Wars triumvirate. Though there are those who point supposed flaws and an unnecessarily grandiose ending, I find nothing to dislike in this film, which lives up to cinema’s great promise: something that anyone can love.
5. Brokeback Mountain – Master director Ang Lee came up trumps twice in the oughts by giving us both Brokeback and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Though the later is the more rapturous and original film, few movies match Brokeback’s overwhelming depth of emotion, thanks in large part to phenomenal, tender, incredibly vulnerable performances on the part of star-crossed lovers Ennis Del Mar (Heath Leger) and Jack Fuckin’ Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). The nearly infinite scope of the film, from the mountains and valleys of Wyoming to the more treacherous territory of human relationships, societal taboos, and missed chances, elevates what might have been overly-sentimental pap or button-pushing propaganda to the plateau of the timeless love story. The scene in which Leger goes through Gyllenhaal’s shirts is heartbreaking.
4. Lost in Translation – Though living in Tokyo when I saw the film certainly biased me, no other movie this decade so expertly spoke to and of lost souls; people adrift in a global society and web-enabled culture that allows us access to any and everything, at an esoteric but painful price: authenticity of experience. In her story of platonic love, Sofia Coppola expertly locates the sense of both wonder and loss of her character. Caught in a vastly foreign culture, one which is so often fetishiszd by those from the west who look east for some kind of transcendental revelation, Scarlet Johansson and Bill Murray bore into the quiet desperation of their characters. In a place without external reference points, the search for understanding must begin within. Lost in Translation is a lovely, melancholy film with an expertly coherent tone that captures the nooks and crannies of Tokyo and its lost ex-pats. A masterpiece of subtle emotion.
3. Before Night Falls – In his film adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas’ autobiography, Julian Schnabel does the author (one of the most shamefully forgotten literary genius of the 20th century) the greatest favor he could have; he gives Reinaldo the life he would have had if his sense of wonder, mischief, and humor had been allowed equal time in the spotlight as the terrors he faced under Castro’s fascism (let’s call it what it was). Despite wrongful imprisonments, torture, and the destruction of his manuscripts (one of his nine novels was destroyed three times – he wrote the book a total of four times in his life), Arenas managed, through his belief in literature and art, to hold onto some of his boyish, wide-eyed love of the world and its poetry. The film captures all of the writer’s, and the world’s, poetry, in lush, surprising, and incredibly lovely ways. Javier Bardem’s performance is astonishing. Few movies have ever offered sequences as beautiful as those of Cuba’s landscapes set to a voice over of Arenas poetry. More than any other film I have seen, Before Night Falls shows us the interconnectivity of art, humanity, love, and hope.
2. There Will Be Blood – When the credits rolled my first time through There Will Be Blood, I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help myself. People around me in the theater, friends included, thought I was insane. But my laughter wasn’t wow that was ha-ha funny laughter. It was holy-shit-did-I-really-just-see-a-movie-that-good? laughter. The film floored me in so many ways I wasn’t quite sure how to react. I went back to see it the next weekend, and have seen it many times since. Enough has been said about Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance that I needn’t say more; it’s so huge it seems as though the movie is an event horizon around Day-Lewis’ black hole. The film is all film, an epic conceived and executed visually, with towering landscapes, claustrophobic interiors, and a genius eye for its characters. The way genius auteur (of Boogie Nights, another all-time favorite of mine) Paul Thomas Anderson subtly moves the film from the daunting grandiosity of nature to the imposing confinements of human creation speaks volumes of his massive take on greed and its avaricious consumption of men’s souls (not many women in this picture). There We Will Be Blood is a brutally American film, as fully realized and unquestionably brilliant as the Godfather or Citizen Kane. The burning rig, the rain of oil, Johnny Greenwood’s score, the bowling alley (“My straw comes across the room, and I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!”) the allegory for American’s 20th century (corporations and religious enterprises vying for the hearts and minds of the public), all of it, perfect.
1. Children of Men – As I sat down with a six pack, a quill pen, four mugs of coffee, and a stuffed sea otter to write this list, there was no doubt in my mind that There Will Be Blood would claim the top spot. I thought Children of Men would maybe squeeze its way into the top ten. So then what happened? What happened was that, unlike near every other movie on this list, Children of Men accomplishes something profound; it’s sets new paradigms. It is subversive in so many ways that it can only be one thing: the future of film. Much has been written about the ten-minute plus tracking shot, the attack on the car in the woods, and how unifying and terrifyingly realistic Cuarón’s film is. Moving away from Orwellian fascistic paradigms, Cuarón creates a future dystopia not radically divergent from the world we currently live in, making the film all the more uncomfortable and unsettling. Rather than marauding military police and secret societies waxing conspiratorial, Cuarón simply extrapolates current immigration dilemmas (primarily that of 1rst v. 3rd world) and the fear/paranoia of “the other” as terrorist. And yet despite all of these sly, brilliant moves, the films coup d’etat is this: it upends the deeply ingrained and somewhat bizarre notion that serious art/films with big ideas/etc etc must be nihilistic, tragic, self-serious, and relentlessly dark anad/or violent in order to be powerful, realistic, and persuasively philosophical. In creating a world in which the human race is facing its imminent demise, Cuarón (from a politically unstable and notoriously corrupt country – Mexico – yet another subversion; see Iñárritu, Meirelles, Gavin Hood et al for proof that America most often requires its developing-world filmmakers to point out how violent and desperate situations in those locales are, thereby highlighting how good we have while simultaneously provoking deep-seated feelings of inauthenticity and white/wealthy guilt) asserts that belief in perseverance and a brighter future is far more powerful than petulant resignation. The brilliance of Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Syd go great lengths to making the film as thoroughly believable as it is. A cameo from Gossip Girl’s Chuck makes the deal that much sweeter. Though released in 2006, the film ushers us perfectly from the Bush era to the Obama years, and is unlike anything before it, coalescing trends and influences into something wholly original and progressive. The night is darkest just before dawn.
Enjoy.
Top 50 Movies, 2000-2009
50. Shaun of the Dead
49. Sunshine
48. High Tension
47. Munich
46. The Host
45. Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2
44. The Bourne Trilogy
43. Heaven
42. The Constant Gardener
41. Pirates of the Caribbean
40. Almost Famous
39. Ponyo
38. Avatar
37. No Country For Old Men
36. The Hurt Locker
35. Ocean’s 11
34. March of the Penguins
33. Enchanted
32. Into the Wild
31. Snatch
30. The Dark Knight
29. Amelie
28. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
27. Where the Wild Things Are
26. Inglourious Basterds
25. Up
24. American Gangster
23. Spirited Away
22. Across the Universe
21. Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Lady Vengeance/Old Boy)
20. I Heart Huckabees
19. Quills
18. The New World
17. The Departed
16. Y Tu Mama Tambien
15. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
14. City of God
13. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
12. Ratatouille
11. 2046
10. 28 Days Later – With barely any budget, some digital cameras, a cast of unknowns, and a whole lotta blood, Danny Boyle managed to single-handedly reinvent the zombie genre and the apocalypse picture. From Zach Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake to Will Smith in “I Am Legend”, it was a decade of running cerebrumphagists, the-end-is-extremely-fucking-nigh fantasias, and empty metropolises. And yet, unlike many of his more hedonistic peers, who were looking for brains, bodies, severe dismemberings, and a cheap thrill, Danny Boyle, with the help of writer Alex Garland, found a very poignant story of survival, love, and hope in his end-times desolation. Look no further than the vapor trail scene for proof of the film’s brilliance; it remains one of the decade’s most beautiful cinematic moments.
9. Lord of the Rings Trilogy – There’s not a lot to say about this one that hasn’t already been said. It was a behemoth of a trilogy, a staggeringly huge cinematic milestone that set a daunting high-water mark for 21st century epics. In finding the quiet heart of the story, and focusing on it amidst the carnage, Peter Jackson created myriad new avenues of grand-scale film making, and blew our minds in ways the didn’t know they could be blown. Few, if any, films wowed me the way Fellowship of the Rings did. A true “show ‘em something they ain’t never seen” moment of wonder and charm (hats off especially to Rudy’s performance as Sam Gamgee).
8. Traffic – Lens filters, subtitled swaths, and a disjointed narrative that had a lot of people scratching their heads like “Huh the fuck?”. Sound like a classic? It is. Steven Soderbergh and Stephen Gaghan weave an entrancing web of ambiguous morality peppered with fallible, flailing characters (brilliantly acted by the ensemble cast) that gives us far more questions than answers. This refusal to take sides makes the film that much more striking. Through its disparate plots the filmmakers show us some of the many ways that drugs infiltrate and affect our society, and the hypocritical ways in which we deal with these issues. Unfortunately, this film also inspired many lesser professionals to attempt similarly disjointed, big-idea pictures, most of which ended up like old oatmeal – tepid, mushy, and pointless. Yet despite this, it remains one of the most powerful, intelligent, and original films of the 21st century thus far.
7. Pan’s Labyrinth – All of Guillermo Del Toro’s sensibilities – his penchant for horror, his glee for creatures and myth, his ability to see the world as children do, his understated sense of tragedy – cohered beautifully is this Spanish civil war fable. A young girl has lost her father. Her mother has remarried a remorseless lieutenant. The family is relocated to a mountain town where the fascists are fighting the rebels. In a creaking old farmhouse, the girl is visited by creatures and ordained tasks of incredible significance. In the war, the parallel fantasias, and the familial tensions, Del Toro finds heartbreaking moments of human frailty and strength in a film that is ultimately about belief and the capacity people have to do the right thing, when the time comes.
6. Wall-E – A robot love story? Um…ok. I suppose it’s better than traveling the exhausted avenues of Martians and talking animals (though honestly I’m sure I could ever have enough of talking animals cause, well, animals are really cute, even if the films suck). Dutiful Pixar peon that I am, I found my way to the theater, and an experience of complete joy. A wordless, endlessly inventive first act following a robot in his daily routines on a vacant and trash-strewn earth (his only friend, appropriately, a roach) gives way to a touching, very honest love story (between robots!), which follows an adventurous, let’s-save-the-human-race conclusion evoking the best of the original Star Wars triumvirate. Though there are those who point supposed flaws and an unnecessarily grandiose ending, I find nothing to dislike in this film, which lives up to cinema’s great promise: something that anyone can love.
5. Brokeback Mountain – Master director Ang Lee came up trumps twice in the oughts by giving us both Brokeback and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Though the later is the more rapturous and original film, few movies match Brokeback’s overwhelming depth of emotion, thanks in large part to phenomenal, tender, incredibly vulnerable performances on the part of star-crossed lovers Ennis Del Mar (Heath Leger) and Jack Fuckin’ Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). The nearly infinite scope of the film, from the mountains and valleys of Wyoming to the more treacherous territory of human relationships, societal taboos, and missed chances, elevates what might have been overly-sentimental pap or button-pushing propaganda to the plateau of the timeless love story. The scene in which Leger goes through Gyllenhaal’s shirts is heartbreaking.
4. Lost in Translation – Though living in Tokyo when I saw the film certainly biased me, no other movie this decade so expertly spoke to and of lost souls; people adrift in a global society and web-enabled culture that allows us access to any and everything, at an esoteric but painful price: authenticity of experience. In her story of platonic love, Sofia Coppola expertly locates the sense of both wonder and loss of her character. Caught in a vastly foreign culture, one which is so often fetishiszd by those from the west who look east for some kind of transcendental revelation, Scarlet Johansson and Bill Murray bore into the quiet desperation of their characters. In a place without external reference points, the search for understanding must begin within. Lost in Translation is a lovely, melancholy film with an expertly coherent tone that captures the nooks and crannies of Tokyo and its lost ex-pats. A masterpiece of subtle emotion.
3. Before Night Falls – In his film adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas’ autobiography, Julian Schnabel does the author (one of the most shamefully forgotten literary genius of the 20th century) the greatest favor he could have; he gives Reinaldo the life he would have had if his sense of wonder, mischief, and humor had been allowed equal time in the spotlight as the terrors he faced under Castro’s fascism (let’s call it what it was). Despite wrongful imprisonments, torture, and the destruction of his manuscripts (one of his nine novels was destroyed three times – he wrote the book a total of four times in his life), Arenas managed, through his belief in literature and art, to hold onto some of his boyish, wide-eyed love of the world and its poetry. The film captures all of the writer’s, and the world’s, poetry, in lush, surprising, and incredibly lovely ways. Javier Bardem’s performance is astonishing. Few movies have ever offered sequences as beautiful as those of Cuba’s landscapes set to a voice over of Arenas poetry. More than any other film I have seen, Before Night Falls shows us the interconnectivity of art, humanity, love, and hope.
2. There Will Be Blood – When the credits rolled my first time through There Will Be Blood, I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help myself. People around me in the theater, friends included, thought I was insane. But my laughter wasn’t wow that was ha-ha funny laughter. It was holy-shit-did-I-really-just-see-a-movie-that-good? laughter. The film floored me in so many ways I wasn’t quite sure how to react. I went back to see it the next weekend, and have seen it many times since. Enough has been said about Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance that I needn’t say more; it’s so huge it seems as though the movie is an event horizon around Day-Lewis’ black hole. The film is all film, an epic conceived and executed visually, with towering landscapes, claustrophobic interiors, and a genius eye for its characters. The way genius auteur (of Boogie Nights, another all-time favorite of mine) Paul Thomas Anderson subtly moves the film from the daunting grandiosity of nature to the imposing confinements of human creation speaks volumes of his massive take on greed and its avaricious consumption of men’s souls (not many women in this picture). There We Will Be Blood is a brutally American film, as fully realized and unquestionably brilliant as the Godfather or Citizen Kane. The burning rig, the rain of oil, Johnny Greenwood’s score, the bowling alley (“My straw comes across the room, and I drink your milkshake. I drink it up!”) the allegory for American’s 20th century (corporations and religious enterprises vying for the hearts and minds of the public), all of it, perfect.
1. Children of Men – As I sat down with a six pack, a quill pen, four mugs of coffee, and a stuffed sea otter to write this list, there was no doubt in my mind that There Will Be Blood would claim the top spot. I thought Children of Men would maybe squeeze its way into the top ten. So then what happened? What happened was that, unlike near every other movie on this list, Children of Men accomplishes something profound; it’s sets new paradigms. It is subversive in so many ways that it can only be one thing: the future of film. Much has been written about the ten-minute plus tracking shot, the attack on the car in the woods, and how unifying and terrifyingly realistic Cuarón’s film is. Moving away from Orwellian fascistic paradigms, Cuarón creates a future dystopia not radically divergent from the world we currently live in, making the film all the more uncomfortable and unsettling. Rather than marauding military police and secret societies waxing conspiratorial, Cuarón simply extrapolates current immigration dilemmas (primarily that of 1rst v. 3rd world) and the fear/paranoia of “the other” as terrorist. And yet despite all of these sly, brilliant moves, the films coup d’etat is this: it upends the deeply ingrained and somewhat bizarre notion that serious art/films with big ideas/etc etc must be nihilistic, tragic, self-serious, and relentlessly dark anad/or violent in order to be powerful, realistic, and persuasively philosophical. In creating a world in which the human race is facing its imminent demise, Cuarón (from a politically unstable and notoriously corrupt country – Mexico – yet another subversion; see Iñárritu, Meirelles, Gavin Hood et al for proof that America most often requires its developing-world filmmakers to point out how violent and desperate situations in those locales are, thereby highlighting how good we have while simultaneously provoking deep-seated feelings of inauthenticity and white/wealthy guilt) asserts that belief in perseverance and a brighter future is far more powerful than petulant resignation. The brilliance of Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Syd go great lengths to making the film as thoroughly believable as it is. A cameo from Gossip Girl’s Chuck makes the deal that much sweeter. Though released in 2006, the film ushers us perfectly from the Bush era to the Obama years, and is unlike anything before it, coalescing trends and influences into something wholly original and progressive. The night is darkest just before dawn.
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