Quiet Bubble

Movies I’ve Seen: Speed Racer (2008)

Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. Starring Emile Hirsch, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, Matthew Fox, and Roger Allam.

I would warn that spoilers follow but, if you’ve over ten years old, you know exactly how this movie turns out.

Speed Racer may end up as little more than NASCAR for nerds, but it’s not fascism. When reviewing Speed Racer, both Anthony Lane and Dana Stevens try for the condescending mock-horror pose of dealing with sensory overload (“The colors scare me, Daddy!” “Get her some vapors, and hurry!”) and, even worse, trot out the old canard used to swat aside any piece that a critics either misunderstands or dislikes intensely: fascism. Stevens makes a sidelong glance at it when recalling the movie’s racetrack audience— “so vast they recall footage of Nazi rallies, but no time to think about that now”—but Lane at least has the bravery (and idiotic gall) to issue a direct call to arms:

Though [Speed Racer] is not as criminally poor as V for Vendetta, which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious. There’s something about the ululating crowds who line the action in color-coördinated rows; the desperate skirting of ordinary feelings in favor of the trumped-up variety; the confidence in technology as a spectacle in itself; and, above all, the sense of master manipulators posing as champions of the little people. What does that remind you of ? You could call it entertainment, and use it to wow your children for a couple of hours. To me, it felt like Pop fascism, and I would keep them well away.

It’s funny how often fascism is applied to mass audiences that effete liberals can’t understand—football games, rodeos, Promise Keeper events—but not to such cultural touchstones as, say, the Beatles’ appearance at Shea Stadium or Woodstock (in which great masses of people also had similar dress, tastes, and hairstyles). Triumph of Will is referred to when discussing a NASCAR race but not a Springsteen concert. I say this, by the way, as an effete leftie myself. I merely wish to point out how the “fascism” label cuts off serious conversation and is lazy to boot.

So, I sincerely hope Lane’s rebel yell is taken as seriously as David Denby’s similar alarmist concern that Do the Right Thing would incite riots among the black folks: i.e., not at all. Tar-and-feathering a work of art with “fascism” forces anyone who admits to liking said work start out from a necessarily defensive and apologetic crouch. So, let me say this head-on: Speed Racer is not fascist, though it might be conservative, and Lane and Stevens are proving themselves increasingly to be twits. (Stevens’s case is one of sad decline; as her alter ego Liz Penn for the late thehighsign.net, she was an engaging and provocative critic. Lane’s always been a prick.)

This isn’t to say that Speed Racer is a particularly good film/video/CGI event—it’s got its problems—but that the Wachowskis have some interesting ideas on their minds, and fascism isn’t one of them. First, let’s outline the problems. As linear narrative, it’s derivative horseshit; every plot twist of this very basic story can be seen twenty minutes before, and almost every narrative thrust is clumsily constructed. As racing spectacle, it’s spatially incoherent and impossible to tell where the racecars were in relation to each other, and the physics don’t apply to any recognizable world. As agitprop against the Man and His corporations, it’s muddleheaded and ultimately defeatist. As acting showcase, the cast is game but hindered by too much greenscreen and turgid dialogue. (Only Roger Allam, as a corporate villain who looks and talks almost exactly like Christopher Hitchens, manages to invest his line readings with any zest.) As a diversion for kids, it’s nowhere near as smart as even the toss-offs by Pixar, and the bratty kid and overbearing chimpanzee should have been nixed from the movie entirely. This irritating duo even interrupts what should have been a glorious kiss between Speed (Emile Hirsch) and Trixie (Christina Ricci) on at least two occasions.

As visual experiment, however, Speed Racer might be the most expensive avant-garde movie ever produced by a major American studio. The Wachowskis have created their own pop fantasia—it is their own, because it only superficially looks like the cartoon from which it’s derived—that dazzles and adheres solely to its own mechanics. It broadcasts its emotion in bold, outsized ways, through a Day-Glo color scheme and LSD-inspired design sense. Instead of cuts, the movie relies on fluid, near-constant wipes, zooms that meld into brand-new visuals, and overlapping, multi-layered shots that superimpose the faces and actions onto other, seemingly unrelated shots. The frame is always full, crammed with in-jokes, sly asides, random bursts of color and light, and talking heads commenting on the action.

Those talking heads are significant, as Speed Racer comments on itself constantly. We’re always hearing voices—sports commentators riffing on the road action, mechanics offering advice to drivers through headsets, dashboard dials giving up-to-the-second info on road and weather conditions, blinking advertisements, and news analysts recapping the story and providing context. Even in the quiet moments, the movie is a meta-narrative, and never an unmediated experience. What made Dana Stevens swoon in terror is this sensory overload and I think most critics are finding it false.

I think, however, that the Wachowskis are trying to show the world as it is now—Speed Racer’s mise-en-scene is futuristic-looking, but it’s not clear that this isn’t just some imagined, alternate present that we’re witnessing—and the world they see is one in which we’re bombarded with information and razzle-dazzle that seems tactile, but somehow isn’t quite tangible. Anything’s available at the press of a touch screen but none of it’s quite, you know, touchable. There’s some overkill there—after four movies about virtual reality trumping the real thing, I sorta wish the brothers would just go outside for a nature walk every now and then—but the vision isn’t exactly off, either. TV and the internet, this century’s prime mediums of art and culture dissemination, both provide infinite avenues for short-term sensation and instant connection to the rest of the world. Speed Racer’s use of wipes and zooms as transitions emphasizes this interconnectedness created by technology. Nearly every shot flows into another. This is best shown by the movie’s opening ten minutes, in which the history of the Racer family is given to us concisely as Speed (Emile Hirsch) races, remembers himself thinking about racing as a child, recalls the circumstances of his older brother’s death, and reminiscences about his idyllic childhood. That’s a lot of flashback and exposition to stuff into the beginning but, by overlapping the images, Speed Racer makes us aware that two (or three) narratives run through and around each other—Speed can’t entirely extract the past from the present. One constantly reminds us of the other.

To “wash that man right out of my hair,” the Wachowskis turn to building cars instead of going on nature walks. Turbines, carburetors, and ball bearings are as lively as flora and fauna to the Racer family. The older brother Rex Racer tells young Speed that the car is “a living, breathing thing,” and Moms (Susan Sarandon) and Pops Racer (John Goodman, providing perhaps the only soulful performance) live by this credo. Moms even compares Speed’s driving to painting brushstrokes—it’s that tactile to her. Speed Racer tries to make technology organic, hence the luscious colors and supple contrails of light that curve and linger like kisses and perfumes. The family, and the movie, comes together best when it works as a team, when all the moving parts are working towards a single goal—a fantastic, gleaming car; a hairpin turn negotiated at high speed by all the players; an impromptu kung-fu fight in the icy mountains.

About that last item… yeah, Speed Racer is beyond silly. The movie throws in references to every Japanese anime show the Wachowskis have ever seen and, though it never tries to emulate a comic with split screens and panels (as in Ang Lee’s Hulk), manga’s visual tropes are always present. This attempt to placate the fanboys means that neither the narrative nor the visual scheme are as streamlined as the Mach 5 car that Speed drives.

For all the justifiable complaints about incoherence during the races themselves, and the juvenile simplicity of the plot, the interwoven and overlapping visual textures display how deft the Wachowskis can be at connecting narrative threads, and at merging the exhilarating with the melancholy. Speed can’t escape the multiple versions of racing history that he’s been given. As the movie begins, Speed sits pensive in an empty locker room, his back facing us. He’s unreadable and maybe forlorn, but always in thought. His childhood, his family, and the race ahead run through his brain. Even during his triumphs, he’s got too much shit in his head.

That, of course, is the downside of this sensory overload. I can’t decide whether the Wachowskis are reveling in this overstimulation or satirizing it, which is why I ultimately think Speed Racer is a noble failure rather than a success. Speed never learns how to achieve a balance between his individual consciousness and his community, though the Wachowskis may think he’s done so. Our hero learns that what matters most is not “how you change racing, but that racing doesn’t change you,” but this “individualism over community” thread is upset by the Wachowskis’s insistence on family values and working best as a team. Speed Racer’s stabs against consumerist conformity and groupthink—two lashes that ensure that the movie’s not fascist—are undercut by the blandness of the video-gamey races and the über-whiteness of the Racer family. It’s weird that a quintessentially Japanese movie, in terms of visual reference and cultural tropes, chooses to cast the heroes as whites, and to persist in thinking of ethnics as “others.” (The Japanese characters become villains and side acts; the international sports announcers are little more than stereotypes.) It would also help if the photography hadn’t included close-ups of modern-day brands at all times, seeing as Speed Racer poises itself as anti-corporate art.

This rocky seesaw of capitalism vs. socialism, of cosmopolitan striving vs. white hegemony, of the handmade and local vs. the mass-produced and globalized dooms Speed Racer, simply because the film can’t quite decide which side it’s on. But that confusion and struggle is, I think, at the heart of contemporary American life. That’s why, for all its flaws, Speed Racer is the most interesting and truly pop of all movies made by the Wachowskis. They might not be geniuses but I no longer think they’re mere poseurs.

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UPDATE: The mighty Dennis Cozzalio has written an epic, combative defense of the movie. Go read it.

Lively, even near the end

I’m heading for the social flurries, daunting hills, and wild parrots of San Francisco on Wednesday. My last trip to the city, in 2002, flooded my senses and floored my thighs. So much nature and vibrancy in an urban environment! So much color! So many bums offering $2 handjobs! Seriously, though, I love the city and it’ll be good to return to it.

So life will be light here at Quiet Bubble this week. (There will be a semi-big announcement, however, on Friday.) In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a filmmaker who devoted his life to flooding his audience with sensory overload, Romantic overtures, and total, beautiful incoherence:

[F]ilm is the very, very closest to music of any of the other arts because it relies upon time. It’s a continuity art, it happens across a period of time. You have to read a poem, you have to experience a film across a passage of time. And across that passage of time you have to feel its textures, its color, its tones in other words. Now, to be sure, they are hearable tones as distinct from tones of color—blue, rust, so on. They are hearable: [sings opening notes to Beethoven’s 5th symphony] “Buh buh buh buum.” “Rust rust rust apple-green.” “Rose rose rose—which can also be a color—pea-green.” And one can go on editing a film so that it has melodies, so that its colors keep shifting and changing as one would expect them to when listening to a little piece of the 5th symphony of Beethoven. [sings] “Buh buh buh buum, buh buh buh buum.” Then it all depends on how you place these tones and melodies, these tones of these flowers that are so pictured and what they come to mean as a compendium of music. Because it is really close to music, and it’s dependent finally upon a mystique that none of the other arts have.

That onrush of language comes from Stan Brakhage, avant-garde filmmaker extraordinaire, who really tried to equate cinema with poetry rather than prose for his 50-year career. This Brooklyn Rail interview, the last one Brakhage had before his death in March 2003, is well worth the read.

(Hat tips to The House Next Door and GreenCine Daily for the news. I’ve wrestled with Brakhage here and here.)

Movies I’ve Seen: U2 3D (2008)

Directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington. Starring Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullens, Jr.

Is U2 3D a triumph of aesthetics or merely technology? Either way, it’s a load of fun. As my friend Herman said after the movie, “sometimes, you actually can be too close to the band.” That level of immersion—mike stands veering into your face, Larry Mullins’s drumsticks surging up from the crashing cymbals into your direct line of sight—meshes well with the crisp and clean digital photography. The staging and lighting scheme is simple but surprisingly fluid—a tall gridlike backdrop of lights that looms over the band, sometimes flooding band and audience alike with solid patterns and timed, multicolored flashes, while at other times broadcasting animation, words, and unobtrusive graphics. When the stage’s floodlights are dimmed or turned off, but the backdrop stays lit, the compositions of silhouette bandmembers are arresting. There’s a minimum use of the smoke machine, so the staging gets points for sidestepping cliché. The mix of patterned-light backdrop and silhouettes owes a lot to Mark Romanek’s music videos—see Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound,” Linkin Park’s “Faint” and Audioslave’s “Cochise”—but the visual rhythms aren’t quite as playful and occasionally jarring as Romanek’s best work. (The editing does deserve special mention in one respect: continuity. Despite being stitched together from shows in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and São Paolo on the 2006 Vertigo tour, the bandmembers wear the same clothes throughout and their haircuts remain the same, and U2 3D looks and feels like a single, seamless show. I didn’t notice the cutting-and-pasting until reading the credits.) The photography keeps it straightforward, too—lots of crowd shots, extreme closeups of Bono, clapping and raised hands flooded by overhead lights, and the use of crane shots to get over the heads of everyone—so there are few surprises. That goes for the songs as well. I recognized every song but, then, that’s one hell of an achievement. Over nearly three decades, U2 has amassed enough instantly recognizable songs to fill a 90-minute show, and to have every one of those songs be known—by the end of the first chord progression—by 80,000 raucous fans. I’m writing this, by the way, as a person who doesn’t own nor has ever owned a U2 album, or been more than a casual fan, or been a regular pop radio listener since 1995. Yet I grinned like a maniac with the start of each new song. The foursome has tapped into something universal about pop. A cynic would claim that it’s the banal, purposefully vague lyrics—Really, is “Pride” actually about anything other than Bono’s ability to recite the date of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination? Is the song saying anything profound?—but there’s no denying the distinctive sound. Watching the Edge negotiate keyboards and distortion pedals in closeup, his choppy, shimmering guitar sound becomes impossible to disrespect. With Adam Clayton on bass and Larry Mullen, Jr. on drums, U2 builds musical structures that swirl gently around a center but which remain rock-solid rhythmically. Bono can’t reach the high ending notes of “One” anymore but even that becomes a sort of plus onstage. His voice growls and purrs wonderfully but, without the toe-curling histrionics of his youth, Bono’s more a part of the mix in U2 3D—an element of the sound rather than its defining point. Not that he doesn’t try for the latter. He wears a blindfold with the classically trite “Co-exist” image (made up of symbols from the world’s major religions, don’t you know) on it. U2’s earnestness gets the better of it during “Miss Sarajevo,” which ends in silence while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights scrolls across the backdrop and a background voice recites it—my bet is that’s Bono’s idea through and through. Still, the band’s trying for unity and something greater than getting laid and another paycheck, which is more than you can say about the Rolling Stones after its first three decades. Speaking of which, U2 3D, for all its pomp and self-importance, definitively proves that the band remains relevant. “Vertigo” is a dream concert-opener, with the audience screaming out “Hello! Hello!” along with Bono (the word’s blaring in red on the backdrop, too), and that’s from their 2004 album. The second song, “Beautiful Day,” comes from 2000’s All that You Can’t Leave Behind, and it roused the crowd as much as golden-oldie “Where the Streets Have No Name.” I missed favorite hits—there’s no “Mysterious Ways,” “Zoo Station,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “Even Better than the Real Thing,” or “In God’s Country”—but I got my money’s worth, song-wise. (“The Fly” was the encore opener—the one terrific surprise on the songlist.) To clarify my opening question, though, does the 3-D photography add enough to justify this extravaganza as art? Honestly, the experience only holds up because U2 3D is an effectively shot concert/ After twenty minutes of eye-popping closeness to the participants, the novelty wears thin. Because we weave in and out of the audience and onto the stage, a visual focal point is somewhat lacking. This doesn’t mean that I wanted a stationary camera throughout the movie but rather that the filmmakers haven’t decided on a perspective or a definite lens through which the viewer enters the movie. Compare U2 3D to the Beastie Boys’ Awesome! I Fucking Shot That!, in which we so clearly identify with the audience’s vantage point that the audience effectively shot the movie; or with Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, in which the band is photographed as art objects, like a gallery installation, and the audience is decidedly incidental. These two movies aren’t just recording concerts but also giving us a point-of-view, a sense of the filmmaker behind the camera and the listener seeing the show. U2 3D feels impersonal in comparison, and the 3-D meant—for me, anyway—that I was constantly aware of it as a gimmick. I kept flitting my 3-D glasses on and off, to note the onscreen difference in visuals. Because of this, I was never completely immersed in the movie, even though the songs grabbed my heart. Without resorting to 3-D, the fabulous live video of “City of Blinding Lights”—another great song missing from the set—is tonally rich, cinematically graceful, and genuinely moving. When Bono sings “Oh, you look so beautiful” to the crowd, we believe he means it, and that it’s possible to believe that about ourselves, too. While U2 3D dazzles us with technique, the 4-minute “City of Blinding Lights” makes me want to enter the screen. There’s a difference.

Of time and festivals: Quiet Bubble’s favorite movies of 2007

What constitutes a 2007 movie, anyway? Is it the year of its production or the year of its release? If the former, then does that mean that Tears of the Black Tiger, a nutzoid Thai psychedelic Western that was released in its home country in 2002 isn’t a 2007 film, even though it was only released in America last March? If the latter, this means that Charles Burnett’s masterful Killer of Sheep, made in 1977 but only officially released last fall, is a “new” movie. Is a film a 2007 release if it was shown in New York City and Los Angeles exclusively, starting on Christmas Day, to make it eligible for that year’s Oscar awards? If a movie wins awards at Cannes in May 2007, but doesn’t find its way to theaters until January 2008, is it still a 2007 movie?

Idle questions, to be sure. They’re relevant, however, when you’re compiling a list of favorite movies of 2007 and you don’t live in a major media outlet. It’s customary for Oscar bait (I’m lookin’ at you, Atonement) to come to Jackson, Mississippi, only in the following January. That’s great for me. The cliché is that January is the filmic scuttlebutt month, in which the dregs are unceremoniously dumped out by studios eager to forget—and to have consumers never know—that they spent $15 million to produce Meet the Spartans. (By the way, it recouped its costs. Jesus.) In Jackson, however, January is a cinematic boomtown; there’s almost too much worthwhile stuff to see.

“2007” as an idea was complicated by my entering the festival circuit. I didn’t do it whole-cloth, mind you, but I did attend my two first film festivals: The Crossroads Film Festival here in Jackson, for which I served on the screening committee; and the Toronto International Film Festival. Several of my favorite movies, as you’ll read below, came out of festivals, which means that they’re just now becoming widely available or haven’t become so yet.

I wasn’t sure what to do about that, in terms of this post. So, I made a compromise. If I either saw or had the opportunity to see a movie in a theater in 2007, on a first-run basis, it counts as a 2007 flick.

As with last year’s go-round, I’ve listed my favorite films, but also singled out movies that exemplified the following filmic aspects: photography, sound & sound design (this includes music), editing, writing, acting, mise-en-scene (décor, set design, costumes), and visual effects.

Enjoy.

Cold fun in the wintertime

A still from Whisper of the Heart (1995).

Another year, another quarterly film quiz from Dennis Cozzalio. The winter edition features the usual mix of idiosyncratic, straightforward, and downright nutty questions about cinema. As per my previous two responses, I’m setting down my answers here instead of at his site, so that I won’t clog up his comments box.

APB: Short film blog-a-thon

Culture Snob and Only the Cinema are co-hosting a blog-a-thon devoted to short films, from 2-8 December 2007. There’s oodles to read, with more being posted every day. Be sure to check out both sites, as the table of contents will be slightly different at each site.

Movies I’ve Seen: Pieces of April (2003)

Written and directed by Peter Hedges. Starring Katie Holmes, Derek Luke, Patricia Clarkson, and Oliver Platt.

Happy Thanksgiving.

April’s cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the first time, and she’s in trouble. She’s moved away from her suburban home to live the bohemian life in New York, picked up a wonderful boyfriend, and appears to be adjusting well. But she’s living just above the poverty line, her boyfriend’s black, and the neighborhood to which she’s adjusted has seen better days. Add to this her family’s low expectations about her life, April’s simmering resentments about her family in turn, the fact that her mother is dying of cancer, and the fact that April barely has a turkey (much less any of the other accoutrements), and the young woman appears to be looking headlong at disaster. If she’s going to pull this off without killing someone, April’s gonna need some help.

In Pieces of April, Peter Hedges and crew shows how April (Katie Holmes) gets through a city Thanksgiving. He does so without resorting either to sappiness or snide cynicism. Instead, he’s made a funny, charming, and bracing holiday film, one that subverts holiday-movie clichés at every turn.

The first subversion comes in the movie’s look. Rather than using soft focuses, rosy glows, and shiny surfaces, Pieces of April’s vision is decidedly grungier. Shot on digital video, and often handheld at that, Hedges reminds us that the medium can be good for emotional and visual intimacy. The movie crosscuts between two narratives set in tight spaces—a station wagon and April’s dingy, too-small apartment—and the DV is a good conduit for capturing the ways in which light glances off faces, dusty furniture, wrinkled clothing, and loose floorboards. DV makes light appear flatter and less vivid than it probably is, which makes even the most artificial settings appear more natural.

Obviously, in working with vast panoramas or grandiose visions, this trait is a shortcoming. But here Hedges and crew attune their eyes to small, almost-unnoticed details such as facial tics and the nervousness at the edge of a character’s eyes. The slight grain, and occasional blur during fast motion, force the viewer to move in closer to the screen, to lean into the movie. Even when not using close-ups, Hedges’s camera trains us to recognize that his sense of the holiday will be closer visually and emotionally to Italian neo-realism than to a Hallmark Special.

The characterization won’t let us take much for granted, either, starting with April. She draws us to her, to a large degree because of—not in spite of—her faults. As April, Holmes is by turns sexy, spiky, angry, and tender. She comes across not as the spoiled, reflexively combative brat her family thinks she is, but an endearing young woman whose interests happen to conflict with those of her family. Her eyes exude no-nonsense, but her mouth quivers with neediness. Holmes speaks April’s lines like a girl who desperately wants to sound like a woman, and her every intonation is funny. Holmes understands that the character isn’t quite an adult yet—she’s clearly got something to prove to her family, damn it; that right there confirms that she’s still emotionally an adolescent—but she’s on the cusp of emotional maturity. As April mutters under her breath about her parents, Holmes gets us to realize that this spat-out anger is largely self-directed. It’s a marvelous, cagey performance.

Trusting that the narrative demands of the generic Thanksgiving-movie plot will take care of themselves, Hedges focuses instead on rounded performances and characterization. He imbues his people with more depth and precision than those in movies twice the length of Pieces of April. (The movie is barely 80 minutes long.) Patricia Clarkson, as April’s bitter, cancer-ridden mom is cruel and hilarious, usually in the same breath. She makes you sympathize with her character, but her verbal bites—like a snapping turtle, but faster and more lethal—allow us to understand why April can’t stand to be around her for long. (At the same time, we also comprehend that April—also caustic and ferociously funny—has inherited more from her mother than she’s willing to admit.) Oliver Platt, as the father doing his best to keep the family from flying apart, exudes gentleness and warmth, while remaining firm.

It’s in the supporting cast, however, that Pieces of April makes a leap beyond the standard holiday fare, and becomes something much more profound. April’s building is full of life. Specifically, it’s full of colorful life—the tenement includes a broad mix of races and ethnicities, who more or less cohabitate peacefully. Some critics have complained that these multicultural apartment dwellers are little more than window dressing, Magical Negroes who are employed to conveniently help out the white girl in her time of need.

This is nonsense. Each character resonates, and Hedges’s quick but assertive camera provides enough for us to grasp a lifetime of backstory in furtive glimpses and deliciously timed lines. (I could easily imagine a good movie built around each of them.) As April reaches out to her neighbors for help in creating this Thanksgiving dinner, we see that the brown and beige folks she calls on are not mere ciphers but instead rich characters, and Hedges gives them the good lines and physical space needed to establish themselves.

In fact, if anyone is a cipher, it’s April. Pieces of April smoothly segues from holiday fodder to a racial allegory, one in which the white girl (Holmes) is initially a cultural blank slate. She becomes more interesting and more mature as she increasingly interacts with the black, Asian, gay, and Hispanic characters around her. Tellingly, the straight white folks are the least helpful, and even Sean Hayes (at his flaming best, better than he is on Will & Grace because he’s more tightlipped) turns out to be a scoundrel. As April traipses through the apartment building, she tries to explain what Thanksgiving means—in an especially funny scene, Holmes gives various versions of the story to a Korean family that can’t understand English—and ultimately comes to understand that the holiday represents the time, simply and finally, when “we realized that we all needed each other.”

The white girl doesn’t so much use the colored folks for her own ends as she comes to realize that she needs them to complete herself, and vice versa. They becomes, almost literally, pieces of her. She draws strength, guidance, and maturity from nearly everyone in the building and, in the process, develops a forceful personality. Indeed, as she toughens up and grows up throughout the day, she gets funnier and more distinct as a character.

The successful feast—April’s ritualistic ascension into adulthood—only comes when she learns to rely on others, particularly others outside of her racial and social worldview. (She converges with her family members only at the end—in the context of the movie, they aren’t part of April’s growth.) As a full-fledged adult now capable of handling heartache and holiness, April turns the tables on everyone at the end by sharing her feast with the apartment dwellers. It’s clear: these folks are her extended family. They are parts of her, and helped make her who she is, almost as much as her biological family did. The fact that everyone here eats in peace and gratefulness underscores, quietly, the less-acknowledged fact—that the nonwhite folks need April, too.

This symbiotic relationship is best expressed by April’s relationship with her boyfriend Bobby (the sweet, tough Derek Luke). Hedges is matter-of-fact about their romance. April and Bobby are clearly settled in as a couple—there’s no soap-opera histrionics about interracial love here, no Afterschool-Special schmaltz, no Othello-like tragedy in store for them. They’re built to last precisely because they understand and respect their differences. Bobby feels like a real boyfriend—as with April’s neighbors, he’s not designed solely to make April a better person—with honest desire and concrete affection. (The movie’s flat-out funniest scene is when April and Bobby make love—she initiates it, by the way—and she recites the recipes she’ll be cooking as she comes.) April and Bobby are two people who feed and nourish each other.

The couple extends that sort of relationship to the rest of the world. April starts off white and isolated from those around her, but ends the day as a true Omni-American, connected at the root to the community in which she lives.

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Related reading: Last year, I argued against traditional Thanksgiving cuisine.

Will I remember what this post was about in the morning?, or, stray musings on cultural memory and people who do more than one thing well

My timing is impeccable. As soon as I note the decline of Armond White’s film criticism, in part because he favors broad assertions over detailed examination and sweeping denunciations over arguments supported by details, here he comes with a small gem on Jonathan Demme’s Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains. I saw most of this documentary on Jimmy Carter in Toronto, in the lovely fairie-world Wintergarden Theatre but had to bolt 75 minutes into it to catch another movie I’d scheduled. (Besides, I saw Carter get introduced by Demme, then get a standing ovation from the audience, and then give a short speech before the movie. I was satisfied.) I had seen enough, however, to know that I would revisit the movie. Now it’s out in limited release, so I may get my chance. In his essay, White marries his always-forceful rhetoric with, for once, actual content:

On one level, Man from Plains can be watched for biographical information; flashbacks to the late-1970s Iran hostage crisis provide evidence of Carter’s personality as key to his performance in office, which presaged such post-White House activities as his hands-on work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center, his public policy institute in Atlanta. But Demme’s mobile camera, scanning tight spaces as well as airport lobbies and the areas around post-Katrina Louisiana and Carter’s Georgia home, keeps situating the former president in the always-spinning world.

The information age makes it impossible to create Presidential legends like Washington’s and Lincoln’s, but Demme creates a folk narrative that uses the irrefutable evidence of the photographic image to accomplish something approximate to a Davy Crockett ballad—but better. Scenes of Carter facing his critics and defending his position aren’t hagiographic but proof of character in action. The iconic shot is Carter looking out a car window as the world moves by, but Demme’s peripatetic crew keeps expanding the locales, thrusting into new situations. Visible facts counter denigrating rumor.

As prosaic as that car window footage might seem on the page, White is right—the shots are quite resonant within the movie. It’s a quick visual metaphor to shows that Carter is always on-the-go, always in physical and mental motion. At age 83, he’s more plugged in, and moving more briskly, than most people half his age.

Slip on your dancing shoes: Feist’s “1, 2, 3, 4”

“1, 2, 3, 4” by Feist, directed by Patrick Daughters, choreographed by Noemie Lafrance.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Thai tradition of cinematic blessings before feature films, and why we need more of them. I think I’ve found one that I’d be thrilled to see right as the lights go down.

If you’ve watched TV at all over the past month, you’ve seen snippets of the video for Feist’s “1, 2, 3, 4,” since it accompanies the commercials for Apple’s new line of colorful, shiny iPod Nanos. Feist appears, fetchingly, on the Nano video screens, which are spread out like playing cards. The commercial seems unavoidable, and Apple’s pushing these damn things like new candy bars.

Feist is, of course, part of the product package—now, you can watch her video on your tiny-ass video screen, if you squint really hard! It works both ways—Apple uses her to promote itself as hip; Feist uses Apple to get more airplay, and music videos are essentially extended commercials for musicians, anyway.

But nothing about Feist and director Patrick Daughters’s vision can be reduced to mere product. The three-minute video is an ode to melancholy wrapped in joy, and it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

The scene is an open warehouse, lit coldly. The camera stares at a multicolored wall, which contrasts with the stark gray floor, in the distance. The environment’s scruffy and scuffed—it’s seen better days, or maybe it’s just in use. Slowly, our hero (Leslie Feist) emerges from behind an exit door, dressed in a sparkly blue catsuit and with shimmering brown hair, and walks confidently towards us. The camera follows her slowly—the entire video’s shot in a single take—as an acoustic guitar gently strums out a one-two-three-four riff like a heartbeat. “One two three four, tell me that you love me more,” Feist sings in a fragile but somehow tough croon. (Sasha Frere-Jones describes her voice, rightly, as “gentle but grainy, and full of emotion—capable of swooping up to end a phrase on a full, strong tone.”) She completes the verse—“Sleepless, long nights/ That’s what my youth was for”—as she completes her motion. She’s facing it, in medium-closeup, as the camera’s gradually zoomed in as she was walking in a turn.

And then all hell breaks loose. As the string section and the banjo and the handclaps enter, along with the throaty gospel choir belting out “whoa-oh-oh!,” people start collapsing behind her. The shot moved so fluidly, and as a long shot, that we know there was no one behind her up to this point. But there they are, about ten of them, tumbling out from behind her, as if emerging from Feist. Thank goodness there are people running in, from both sides of the frame, to catch them. Of course, these people immediately also fall down, with others to catch them. The catch-fall continues in a semi-circular pattern, like a slow wave, until Feist is singing and dancing with the accompaniment of about 40 dancers. This all takes five seconds. Then everyone rises, and starts singing and clapping in a somewhat synchronized dance.

“1, 2, 3, 4” as a song could be called ramshackle chanteuse, in that the lyrics—about teenage love, as seen both nostalgically and realistically—and vocal styling is sophisticated and world-weary, but the music is charmingly eccentric and unpolished. At some point, you’ll hear everything from a quick piano cascade to sliding trombone to triumphant crowd whoops to a joyous but almost out-of-step trumpet section, all structured by that simplistic guitar strum and soft-shoe drumwork. Handclaps and finger snaps are more prominent percussion than actual drums. Feist’s earlier stuff feels polished, rubbed to an ironic but immaculate sheen of 1980s new wave and electro. This song sounds as if it were recorded with one microphone, on Feist’s front porch. It clatters, charmingly so, and it’s catchy.

The video emulates the song brilliantly, with abstraction instead of trying to visually show the lyrics’ narrative. The dancers move in rough synchronicity but it’s not exact. The teams of dancers are clad in either red, purple, green, or yellow, but the clothes aren’t uniforms. From person to person, they don’t match shades—one woman’s yellow shirt is solid, while another’s is striped. The clothes themselves don’t even match, as some wear khakis while others wear leotards or skirts or cargo pants. The casting call must have said “Come as you are; we’ll make it fit.” The dance routine is practiced, but not so much so that you can’t see the frayed edges.

In a prominent sequence, we can see one man moving obviously against the current, accidentally bumping into and twirling into others. A lesser director would have used a less sloppy take. But messiness is part of the point. The song and the dancing are both so exuberant that we don’t care about missed notes. Feist reveals her multiple selves and moods symbolically by having all these pieces seemingly s/tumble out of her, just as we all contain multitudes. And some of them clash, go against the grain, and don’t make sense.

In any case, these minor slip-ups have a way of correcting themselves so well that I wonder if choreographer Noemie Lafrance actually planned for that man to be visually off-key. When the zealous choral dances threaten to dissolve into chaos, Feist’s singing snaps onto a precise idea—“One, two, three, four, five, six, nine and ten/ Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then”—and so do the dancers. Suddenly, as we see from above (and, again, the whole video is a single take; no cuts), they’ve formed into a spiral through which Feist is carried by a strong dancer. Just as we have a habit of spiraling back into nostalgia for “teenage hopes” that nevertheless “have tears in their eyes” and “left us with nothing” (all Feist’s lyrics), she literally spirals into herself. She pantomimes shooting out the spiral—again, collapsing dancers all around—and returns to adulthood.

The precision of the visual motifs and motion matches the clarity of such lyrics as “Sweetheart, bitter heart/ Now I can’t tell you apart/ Cozy and cold/ Put the horse before the cart.” At the same time, both song and dance reveal how ecstatically love (especially young love) makes us feel. Again and again, the seemingly slipshod group dances coalesce into tight patterns and formations. Feist bodysurfs on a sea of hands that we don’t quite believe has come together so fluidly; she’s soon after boxed in by the crowd; and then she gets to bodysurf again, this time with the hands moving in a wave.

Throughout it all, Feist proves to a casual, expressive dancer. Her movement, awkward but self-assured and with no trace of self-consciousness, goes well with her conversational singing voice. The song and dance are talking to each other—I’m not sure the crowd cheering is part of the album version of the song or just appropriate to the video. Feist’s videos for “Mushaboom” and “My Moon, My Man” (also collaborations with Daughters) also show a love for non-professional but deeply felt body motion. (Her video for “One Evening” hilariously rips off Michael Jackson and the ultra-low-budget reels of 1980s girl-pop videos such as Toni Basil’s “Mickey.”) Daughters, bless him, understands the need to see the full choreography in long and medium shots, without chopping it into incomprehensibility. His camera moves lusciously from zooms to pans, elevating up to get bird’s-eye views and back down again to ground level.

Because of this, we sense the dance as an organic, singular entity, despite the large number of dancers and not-always-in-sync swirling arms and legs. Shooting this as a single take was risky but necessary. This chaos and clarity, says Feist in her singing and Daughters in his direction, are both part of us simultaneously. We’re the clutter and order and spasticness and fluidity, and nothing brings all this out at once quite like love. At the end of this orgy of motion, all the dancers seem to collapse perfectly behind Feist again. She’s alone again, but sated. She walks forward slowly, the camera backs up, she stops, and takes a bow. We can’t see anything but her on a seemingly empty stage, but we know that the flood of energy must still be there. The façade is a sparkling, smooth, single entity. But facades are tricky things. Each of us contains multitudes of emotion and longing—all it takes is a little love and music to bring it all out.

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UPDATE: To the hundreds of you who've apparently found this site through this place, welcome! To the left, you'll quickly find 2½ years worth of posts on everything from more music and film commentary to personal posts, stuff about food, and everything in-between. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by.

Popeye the movie man

I liked Robert Altman’s Popeye as a kid, but I couldn’t have told you why. It’s trippy, convoluted, chaotic, and I was sure that either a lot of the jokes weren’t funny or I was just too young to get them. It didn’t look quite like the Fleischer Studio cartoons I would later see, but the movie felt like it was emulating a warm, old, vaudeville fantasia that I liked. There wasn’t enough spinach—although, to Altman’s credit, Popeye doesn’t eat spinach in the original comics; that deus ex machina came only with the cartoons a decade after the strip’s start—but that was somehow okay. The songs were corny, but their almost out-of-tune ramshackle quality made me smile. I was never head-over-heels swooning for the movie, but it somehow worked for me.

It didn’t work, apparently, for lots of people. At the time, critics derided the movie; even Altman supporters—and they were legion during the early 1980s—dismissed Popeye. (Roger Ebert was a rare exception.) The common theory is that Popeye represents the nadir of Altman’s long decline in the late-1970s, from which he would not fully recover—critically or commercially—until 1992’s The Player. Oddly, for all the disparagement, someone liked it—Popeye turned a profit, despite its lavish set (built off the coast of Malta) and gargantuan budget problems.

Lately, though, it’s had a critical resurgence, led in part by bloggers and the online community. But I haven’t seen a better-written, more detailed, wittier, or more delightful defense of Popeye than this lovely piece by Noel Vera. A sample:

Crash and boom. Cut to thunderclouds piled high and visibly boiling. Camera pans down to a tiny orange sunset, all but overwhelmed by the oncoming storm; more lightning reveals Popeye's little rowboat, bobbing in a restless sea. Cut to a closer view of the boat—thanks to Altman’s telephoto lenses the boat is surrounded, overwhelmed, engulfed by row after row of waves, in an endless march towards the camera (Popeye lost in an ocean of waves, the way Altman puts it onscreen, is about as lost as one can get). Cut to a bell tower—think of the church in Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972)—shrouded in shadow; the bell chimes, the tower emerges in sunlight (filters, I suspect), and we hear horns blow the fanfare introduction to the song “Sweethaven.” The entire opening is Altman’s way of saying “this is not the Popeye you’re familiar with—not the Fleischer cartoons, not Famous Studios, not Segar’s strip. And not like any musical you’ve seen before, either.”

And Vera’s evocation of Shelley Duvall (Olive Oyl) singing the ballad “He Needs Me”:

Altman doesn’t go for comic-book flatness here; this is cinema, I submit, working with the simplest elements (the finest way to work, in my opine): a bridge, a girl, a song. The music has an odd, unsteady quality to it, as if the players had taken a swig too much sailor’s grog; Olive peeks coyly from behind a log pillar, then sashays (kind of) onto the bridge. “It could be fantasy,” she wonders, leaning against the bridge’s railing; cut to a closer shot as she turns and exclaims “O-oh!” (may just be me but the precision of that cut, timed to punctuate the languorous quality of Olive’s sigh (you can feel the swell of voluptuous—almost sexually so—emotions in that sigh) sends tingles up the spine. “Or maybe it’s because—”

Cut to a camera slowly swinging into place as she spins away on stiltlike legs. “He needs me he needs me he needs me he needs me he needs me he needs me…” (from where Duvall stresses the syllables you can see the realization rolling like a wave through the sentence—through her, in effect). Later, she walks to the left side of the bridge singing: “For once, for once in life I finally felt that someone needed me—” and turns to the right; Altman responds with a Tati-like shot of a house presented face-on (a full-page comic book spread, practically) its four windows manned by four citizens closing said windows in a hauntingly deliberate manner. The realization is sinking in, she’s saying, and Altman responds with a reminder of just how little the rest of the world cares, how emotionally distant she is from the rest of them (she’s drunk on love, they’re readying for bed).

There’s more, much more. Before you read his essay, be warned that it discusses the plot at considerable length. Even if you haven’t seen it, and I haven’t in two decades (but it’s on the Netflix queue now), read the piece anyway.

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For a crash course on Popeye, start with the reprint volume of E.C. Segar’s original Thimble Theatre comics that Fantagraphics has put out, and then seek out the Fleischer Studio Popeye cartoons from the 1930s.