The Best Years of Our Lives: Direct Address

Postwar rebuilding, or, romantic architecture

Read about the critical and popular reception of Citizen Kane and you’ll see that it was not only a box-office bomb, but even the likes of Andre Bazin thought that Welles’ unusual camera shots (or perhaps those of Gregg Toland) were cheats, an invalid novelty that detracted from the cinematic images. It is easy for us now to scoff at that past populous, and even at Bazin (though we should have a reason for doing so), after scores of years have validated the film and brought it to Number One status on countless lists worldwide. But it must be admitted that the arguments for Citizen Kane‘s greatness are largely technical. While the film’s story is somewhat epic in nature, retracing the life of an enigmatic man that lived the American dream only to die unhappily and shrouded in mystery, it is the form, structure, and style of the film – in a word, what makes it so distinctly cinematic – that has caused so many to swoon over it.

In deep, back home

Contrast Kane with William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives. Unlike Welles’ film, Wyler’s was embraced by popular audiences and, mostly, by critics. The only across-the-board panning it received was due to its length: 2¾ hours and a little change. Despite the success of Gone With The Wind only a few years earlier (and so much of what D.W. Griffith had done a generation earlier), the immediately postwar audience seemed to feel a little resentment at the excesses of Hollywood, even toward a film that was made largely to help build the postwar world into a better place. Still, audiences’ embrace of The Best Years of Our Lives, along with all of its Oscar wins and its explicit message to its contemporary world, makes the film a cultural and sociological artifact worthy of more than just technical attention. For the cherry on top, there’s the fact that Andre Bazin simply adored this film.

The obligatory screenshot

It’s impossible to read anything about this one without coming across the term “deep-focus” a lot. Arguably, the technique hadn’t been practiced to such an effect since Citizen Kane, and Gregg Toland’s work as cinematographer on both films is no coincidence. Bazin’s praises of The Best Years of Our Lives notwithstanding, he may be wrong about one point. He insisted that the use of deep-focus allowed for a more “democratic” viewing experience. It was “realistic,” allowing the viewer freedom to look about the frame, deep within or up close. There are at least two reasons to call this argument into question. First, as many have noted, Wyler gives cues as to where to direct our attention, cues that are hard to ignore. Take the famous scene when Homer and Butch are at the piano. Al stands next to them watching, and far on the other side of Al is Fred, using a payphone to make an important phone call. Al’s mental attention is clearly on Fred, even though he spends most of his time watching the men at the piano. He turns his head a number of times, so even though Butch and Homer are in the extreme foreground of the shot, the viewer is strongly encouraged to have his/her eyes on Al and Fred, in the background. But second, and more significantly, Bazin’s charge rather ignores the politics of cinema, the impossibility that there is anything like “democracy” taking place in the film-viewing experience. How many films have highlighted the fact that there is something sinister about filmmakers and something prison-like about theaters? See the recent look at Chris Marker’s La Jetée, or other films like A Clockwork Orange, which equate cinema with a power play. To say that a cinematic spectator has a democratic view within any given frame is tantamount to calling a dog “free” when it is chained to a fence. Any given frame has limits, limits that have been defined carefully by the powers that be, the committee or the director or, at root, the commercial entity behind its production. This is not to say that “art” can’t exist in cinema, but even in the most “artistic” films, the spectator is bound to a certain view. Whether that view has depth of field to it or not, s/he is bound to what is on the screen rather than to what is above, below, behind, or beside it, to say nothing of the temporal constraints imposed within a frame or a scene of frames.

Fore and aft

But that’s all quite formal, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. The point here isn’t that The Best Years of Our Lives is formally brilliant with the likes of Citizen Kane, while that may be true (especially if you’re Bazin). It’s the melodramatic aspect of the film and its overt criticism of its own audience that make it interesting. Its narrative is a three-pronged account of class difference following the relatively egalitarian experience of fighting in WWII, culminating in a critique of civilians who live life in the aftermath of global war without a care for those who lost parts of themselves, literally or figuratively, while overseas. Some of these mid-late 40s Hollywood films are remarkably and refreshingly honest toward their audiences. Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend addresses the problems with alcoholism head-on, without fear of presenting a world anything less than rosy. Wilder’s Ace in the Hole similarly exposed the press as fundamentally self-interested and mendacious, and Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life didn’t hesitate to critique the effects of ultra-capitalism even while embracing classic Americana. Wyler’s film is direct and unflinching in this regard. Wyler takes what may be the ultimate step by enlisting a double-amputee veteran of the war to play one of the three returned soldiers. In so doing, Wyler makes it clear at the forefront whose side he is on, with whom his sympathies lie. After gaining the audience’s sympathies with the character of Homer in the first two-and-a-half hours of the film, Wyler pulls out all the stops and has Homer undress himself for the camera, removing his prosthetic limbs and struggle to put on his pajamas with stunted arms. This scene could not have succeeded in the film’s first half, as the audience would have been suspicious of exploitation of both the actor playing Homer as well as the audience’s own emotions. This is no force-feeding, however. By the time the audience is shown what is left under his sleeves, we know Homer as well as we can know a character in a film.

Healed

When the three men are reclining in the nose of the plane bringing them back home to Boone City, they look over the landscape of their town and marvel at the changes. They are being given – for the first time – an aerial view of a familiar territory. While they recognize certain sites, others are different. The fact that they are being carried in the underbellly of a war plane contains a certain irony; it’s as if these men are, unwittingly, three bombs about to be dropped on a normal American city that would gladly do without them, as far as many of its inhabitants are concerned. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but each of these men ends up punished for his participation in a war in which he had no choice but to join.

Bombs away

In sights

Good old days

Re-domesticated

No hands, no eyes

No give, long take

Revisionist histories

Mothballed

Engaging

La Jetée: Something is real?

Goggles or blinds?

Eli Friedlander makes a philosophical and psychoanalytic case for Chris Marker’s La Jetée working in part as a metaphor for cinema while questioning multiple boundaries and definitions, including that of cinema itself (boundary 2, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2001, Duke University Press, pp. 75-90). In what sense is La Jetée a “film,” anyway? It is composed of 28 minutes of montaged photographs, with one brief, blink-of-an-eye (literally) exception. Friedlander locates this exception to the film’s formal rules as part of its key. Consciousness and unconsciousness are integral to life and to cinema, to say nothing of the film’s narrative content. In a word, the film has us “look” at the “gaze.” This is not a Mulveyan gaze, but more like the gaze of cinema. Of most essential import is, can the gaze return itself? Can a film return the gaze of the spectator? As a production – a reproduction – and an artifact that creates the impression of movement intended for viewing, one might consider it non-real, unreal. Friedlander forces the issue, however, probing the ramifications of our prejudices concerning “the real.”

Consciousness functions as a filter for the real. What we “know” and, much more, what we have experienced, is a complex web that protects us from the real and prevents entrance of the real into our psyches. How many components of our experience have seeped through the filter even while we are conscious, sneaked through our framework and permeated our unconsciousness, becoming one with the web? The man in La Jetée finds himself in a dark room time and time again. He is thrown into another time and another space during a period of unconsciousness – the term “jetée” comes from “jeter,”connoting “thrownness,” not only “levy,” as this aspect of the film’s narrative, Friedlander notes, is fundamentally dispensable. Similarly, “projeter” is related to “project,” to throw ahead, in to the future, precisely what the man experiences. Only after these episodes does he awaken, return to consciousness. His mental problem revolves exactly around his inability (and therefore ours, too, as spectators) to discern the real from the unreal, to know what part of his unconscious has absorbed real experiences, persons, and interactions.

"Still life," death's misnomer

While he sleeps, his eyes are covered. This prevents the entrance of light while he sleeps underground, recalling Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But Friedlander insists that the concepts with which we are dealing here are not so simple, not so formal, not so dichotomized between real and unreal. This has to do with the possibility of the real becoming unreal, and vice versa, and the problem of knowing them apart. Freudian thought is more active here than platonic. We are dealing with dreams, unconsciousness, and repression. Memory and trauma are wed inextricably; the latter takes its toll on the former and blurs boundaries between dreams and reality and even time and space. The gaze is spatial in nature, but its movement is temporal. The man’s temporal movement in the film – time travel – problematizes the issue of the spatially real. As he and the woman walk through the museum, they encounter freakish creatures, like a toucan with a double beak. The creatures are inanimate just as the man and the woman are for the spectator, and just as likely, freaks.

What the man’s experiences create is a subjective mythology, not unlike that which Marker suggests the cinematic spectator constructs, albeit unconsciously. A potential problem with this term is that a mythology is intended to offer narrative meaning to a person or to a people, but not traditionally to be confused with a real, historical, temporal heritage. The cinematic spectator may do this with cinema; s/he may encounter images with a surplus of meaning, images that return the spectator’s gaze by injecting (“injeter,” throwing-into) the spectator with mythological meaning without confusing the spectator with the possibility that the cinematic is equal to the real. The man within La Jetée, however, is so crazed by his participation in the medium of the unreal that all is one with itself. He believes the woman to be real, but the scientists who inundate him with temporally unstable images do not confirm or deny this. They maximize the practical possibilities of his obsession, borrowing or stealing from his insanity for their gain. Is Marker thereby admitting the guilt of the scientists behind the unreal, the maker (“Marker”?) of the film? Friedlander points out Marker’s possible autobiographical self-identification with the man, however. While he is the “marker,” the one leaving an effect on the viewer, the one whose unreal creations reconnoiter into the minds of the viewer, his self-given first name recalls the tortured, the Christ. The man within the film wears a t-shirt with the words “Il Santos,” “The Saint.” So problematized remain every simplistic distinction: who offers the gaze, who/what returns it, who creates, who receives, who is complicit in the guilt of the psychical attack.

Aria: Cinema Plays with Opera

Roeg

Aria is one of the better-known omnibus films from the 80s, a strange period of film history that almost brought together the likes of Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Derek Jarman, and Nicholas Roeg. Minus Welles, Fellini, and Allen, and plus a few others, Aria was constructed with relatively broad formal freedom but strikingly narrow thematic content. Perhaps predictably, many of these segments are very operatic indeed, paired as each of them is with a piece or two from Verdi, Puccini, and others. Considering the caliber of the filmmakers participating, it is surprising how tethered many of the shorts are to traditional operatic content. Jarman’s contribution may experiment most with the wedding of cinema with opera, offering a montage of images somewhat liberated from narrative confines and thereby allowing such a short piece to stand on its own. Roeg’s attempt to integrate narrative (from a classical source, no less) into into such strict temporal constraints results in a rushed product, something that defines neither opera nor cinema; but maybe this was his intention?

Godard

Godard is right at home here, especially following his 80s fare like Passion and First Name: Carmen. In this decade more than ever before, Godard was preoccupied with the fusing of image and sound, in the vein of Renaissance art and music. This means that he’s obsessed with the human form, male and female bodies. Historically, this creates something curiously hybrid. While classical opera may have to do with bodies, Godard’s style is decidedly closer to that of pre-Classical painting, with uncovered figures posing still in order to be admired or, better, worshiped. Godard’s use of male bodies juxtaposing the females here fits nicely into his standard approach to bodies along with everything else: exchange of commodities. The transaction doesn’t take place in the segment; the problem is an imbalance of supply with demand, a Marxist cliché that Godard is only too glad to inject into a series of films supposedly just about art and love. Such pretense is beneath him, effecting what may in fact be the most (retrospectively) comical episode of the bunch, even next to the straightforwardly funny segment with Buck Henry and Beverly D’Angelo.

Temple

Opera is in many ways a romantic medium, in both its form and content. While this probably shouldn’t be debated, Aria fascinates by its general failure to expand on the basic, proverbial romance. Exceptions have been noted above, but tongue-in-cheek and slapstick stand only on their relation to what they mock. It seems that only Derek Jarman’s episode in Aria really does justice to romantic form and narrative while experimenting successfully with a new attempt to blur the classical with the contemporary.

Jarman

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Mating season

If there weren’t already a colon in the title of the film, a good addition to the title of this post would’ve been something like, “Primal Regression.” Werner Herzog’s film is concerned with first things, and also with returns, but not necessarily in that order. The first shots of the film include a snake slithering through the flooded prison cell of immediately post-Katrina New Orleans. A trapped inmate proceeds to tempt (as it were) pre-promotion Sergeant Terrence McDonagh to free him from his cell before he drowns. The sergeant initially resists temptation, especially as his partner encourages him to lay down money as to how soon the water will rise and kill the trapped man. After flirting with his more sinister tendencies, McDonagh gives in, jumping down into the water to unlock the door. When he lands he irreversibly injures himself, causing chronic pain and a suggestive limp for the rest of the film. So we have a snake, temptation, and a “fall” (literal and figurative), all in the film’s first scene.

Cursed are you of all creatures

What follows in the film problematizes the world and all those who dwell in it. This is New Orleans after the hurricane, after all. So we’re starting out in a version of Hell much more than a version of Eden. The fact that McDonagh’s initial dilemma is actually a temptation to do good and not evil corresponds to the backwardness of this new world, a world defined by destruction rather than creation. McDonagh was never good in the first place, as evidenced by the film’s first few minutes of him wandering around the dilapidated police station and reviewing items of a most personal nature belonging to another man. He pockets the violated marital photos and plans to use them for his own gain. What problematizes the otherwise insidious nature of McDonagh at the outset is his deliberately moral gesture of saving the inmate’s life. Everything is a little backwards in this world, and Herzog does justice to real-life complexity by avoiding simple good-cop-bad-cop distinctions. McDonagh isn’t one or the other, and he isn’t in-between; he sways violently and unpredictably between the two poles.

Doubly exposed

Consistent appearances by animals reflect the primal preoccupations of the film. These appearances are sometimes real but oftentimes surreal. They’re either projections of McDonagh’s drug-addled mind or representative injections of it by his environment. In one scene he hallucinates a couple of iguanas, to the minor consternation of his comrades as they prepare for a raid. In another, he appears at the scene of an accident to ask an illegal favor of another officer. The camera retraces the marks of the accident from the same direction as the vehicle when it hit a freeway-crossing alligator and flipped over, killing the reptile and apparently at least one passenger. Following McDonagh’s angry exchange with the officer, the camera shifts modes and offers a POV shot from an onlooking alligator off the side of the road. The animal views the carnage before finally turning around and wandering away. This documentary-style camera POV gives an alternate perspective of a scene being viewing by only two human vantage points: simple disregard for the event and professional handling of it. More significantly, though, this is one of at least three appearances in the film by reptiles (see also the iguanas and the snake). Reptilian creatures evoke first things, the prehistoric, the remnant of what is now largely extinct. In the same way as the world of post-Katrina New Orleans regresses back to an earlier, more chaotic and hellish state, so also does McDonagh, who is one with his environs.

Return to the regressed

The term “amoral” is very popular nowadays. Particularly in the movies, whenever a bad person wallows in his/her vices, showing little or no hint of goodness, critics love to apply this dubious term to them. There seems to be little understanding of the difference between the amoral and the immoral. An individual who utterly gives into vice and evil, while maintaining a conscience and understanding what it is to be good, is simply immoral. This describes Lieutenant McDonagh better than the term “amoral” could, indicative as that term is of non-morality, a universe devoid of moral concepts. The point of Bad Lieutenant is to illustrate the basic nature of human beings, who so easily suture themselves to their surroundings and permit their own actions and mental dispositions to compromise accordingly.

Guilt by association

Inception

The Matrix meets Batman Begins

An alternate version of this can be read at Riverside Examiner.

For all its diegetic hype about an original, pure, truly inspired idea, Inception is a film all about story and almost not at all about ideas. Certainly the narrative premise of this film is interesting, but it owes an obvious debt to a lot of films (and not just films), in which The Matrix stands perhaps most obviously. The problems with auteur theory are as problematic as ever these days, if not more so. However, to say that Christopher Nolan doesn’t have a distinct style is just ignorant. Inception plays almost exactly like the Batman films, particularly Batman Begins, and it carries plenty of similarities with the rest of Nolan’s oeuvre, too. Hans Zimmer deserves as much authorial credit for Nolan’s work as Nolan himself. The films are brimming with Zimmer’s distinctive soundtrack, working as a metronome for the narrative pace beginning as soon as the audience is thrown into the action of the film’s first scene and then growing steadily faster and louder. Whether this is a clever device or just a ploy to trick our aural sense into telling our brains something big is about to happen is uncertain. There is little to no rest in the recent Christopher Nolan films, just as much as there is little to no humor in them. The lack of any respite from the story’s intensity is fitting for a filmmaker who elevates narrative above all else. If the story takes a break, what is left to fill its place? Certainly not humor; Leonardo DiCaprio is even more humorless than Nolan, who at least tries to add a joke here and there via Gordon Joseph-Levitt. (Aside: Joseph-Levitt’s uncanny resemblance to the late Heath Ledger, who had just portrayed The Joker in Nolan’s last film, makes his “joking” all the more uncomfortable to watch.)

Return of the repressed, etc.

Not unlike Nolan’s in-between-Batman project The Prestige, Inception is about Nolan as a storyteller: the story he tells and how he tells it, and how he’s able to slip some conceit/deceit into it without the viewer noticing (hopefully). The overt message of The Prestige was arguably identical to whatever actual message it offered: “Look closely.” Like The Sixth Sense before it, these are films whose successes depend on their form misleading the audience until the final act, when the ace of spades is uncovered only to reveal a stacked deck. Subtract this component from the films and what remains? Something? Nothing? The Sixth Sense has been often compared to Hitchcock, a real disservice to the Master. While Hitch’s films have plenty of tricks that toy with the viewer, they are also chock full of ideas; ideas that don’t pretend to be “pure” or “original” like those masquerades in Inception but, rather, that are twisted with enough diabolical self-references and Freudian tropes that they may as well be original. Subtract suspense (form) from Hitchcock and there is still more than enough content to go round. Subtract it from Inception and what remains is a very weak version of Love’s Labours Lost. Like the Shakespearean source, it’s a play within a play centering on a romance surrounded by action. Also like the play, it ends on a note of uncertainty that throws its entire narrative into question, ending before the audience can discern its finality. For Inception, this is one of the only hints it contains of an actual “idea”. One could have banked what this idea would be before seeing the film, based on Nolan’s previous films. The “idea” of uncertainty only very loosely fits the requirements for being an “idea” in the first place. It’s somewhat akin to the “idea” of nothingness.

Leo, stop smiling.

While all of this might incite a negative reaction to the film, the film has been wildly popular among filmgoers. Not long ago it was still ranked as the #2 all-time best film on IMDb, right behind The Shawshank Redemption and in front of The Godfather, Part II. The absurdity of IMDb movie ratings notwithstanding, they function as a gauge of the popular to some extent. And even if ideology is strangely absent from within Inception, the film itself clicks comfortably into the reigning ideology of popular culture, in which form supersedes content. The “what” of a discourse is much less exciting than the “how” of it. The success of everything from films to text messages depends on not what is said but rather how it is phrased. The final shot of Inception, whether predicted from the film’s beginning or not, is intended to effect wows from the audience, to make them walk away and foolishly debate what happened in the film. This is more interesting to most than discussing what the film meant to say by staging its events in the way it did. This very lack of ultimate meaning, however, this ultimate uncertainty as to what is happening in our world (and the question of whether it even is our world, rather than someone else’s!), has become as much the prevailing ideology as the main “idea” of Inception is an “idea”. It seems a misnomer, but it is what it is. After Inception, one gains a new appreciation for the brand of meaningless endorsed by the Coen brothers: if everything is vanity, we at least shouldn’t take it very seriously.

For A Few Dollars More: Form, at all costs

Don't blink

Like any other trilogy, the Dollars trilogy shouldn’t have to be viewed chronologically if it’s worth its salt. So, after A Fistful of Dollars and then The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, finally sat down to the oft-neglected middle one. Everything active in the other two is happening here, without a doubt. The absence of women as anything but flashback-driving-force material from the narrative seems stronger than ever in this one, even while skimming through other Spaghetti Western fare such as Django. The Italians love their women (perhaps more shamelessly than ever in the 60s), but Leone created a man’s man’s world in these films, and unlike Peckinpah he didn’t even bother to objectify or exploit women to any considerable extent.

Light my fire

The Man With No Name takes a back seat here, noticeably more than in the first and third installments. He’s content to be the ronin, the man with no real loyalties or passions, who seems to take part in the quest for the bounty out of boredom and a desire to entertain himself rather than for any meaningful reason. Colonel Mortimer even carries some human baggage in this one, leading The Man to withdraw from the final gunfight. His passivity here is contrasted with that from A Fistful of Dollars, in that he actively staged, or at least encouraged, a war between two clans. Here, he recognizes that a fight is happening whether he participates or not.

Why can't we be friends?

Nearly to a greater degree than in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the film For A Few Dollars More seems to elevate form above content and channel all of its discourse through its exaggerated style. After doing a lengthy study on a so-called “amplified” style, Leone’s becomes qualitatively different by consistently drawing attention to itself from beginning to end. An amplified style, on the other hand, breaks through the film’s standard discourse to highlight important themes, moments, and the like. Leone is creating a new grammar for the Western, one that is highly self-referential; referencing its own genre without ceasing. The sheer number of shots in any given scene, and the deliberately repetitive and loud manner of editing those shots, is designed to raise this world and all who dwell in it to something mythical. This kind of form may be the logical end of the Western genre, a kind of style that was always destined to be and one that signified the imminent death of the genre. Taken to such extremes, some kind of rebirth or reboot is now necessary to rethink this cinematic category. Leone doesn’t seem to rethink it but rather to wallow in it, to amplify it 100% of the time and thereby exaggerate it to force its inclusion into the canon. It may be that such films are, ironically, the best introduction to the genre than anything John Ford ever made.

Worst enemy

Déjà vu

Quickies, Vol. XX

Ever heard of Van Gogh?

Age of Consent (dir. Michael Powel, 1969) – Trying to catch up, so it’s gonna have to be another one of these; machine gun style rather than the usual fire hose style…and definitely quantity over quality, with the exception of this first one. Age of Consent, that classic of the great Brit Michael Powell’s, is lent some theatrical legitimacy by virtue of its casting: James Mason and Helen Mirren. Powell gives Mirren’s young girl character secondary but strikingly strong point of view here. While engagement with Mason was unavoidable (and not only because of his “producer” status) given the nature of the narrative, the young model grows a little out of her naivete while remaining constrained by her environment. There was more here, originally, but it’s been a few weeks.

Cotton mouth

Me, Myself & Irene (dir. Farrelly Brothers, 2000) – It had been awhile, and it was on TV, so what the heck. The Farrellys are addicted to shock comedy, and usually to its companion, the buddy film. This one veers away from the latter, probably because Jim Carrey was through sharing the spotlight at this stage in his career. Music is used effectively as an interior musical soundtrack to Charlie/Hank’s transformations but Carrey’s performance draws more attention to itself than it does to intended comedic effects. The film doesn’t seem to mind its inherent contradiction: nature/nurture. Charlie’s upbringing and general social treatment in life lead to his schizophrenia (or split-personality), while “his” black sons remain quite stereotypically urban despite being reared by a (very) white male parent. But whatever, this is one of the few things that makes the movie funny.

I just shot Bill Murray.

Zombieland (dir. Ruben Fleischer, 2009) – Probably the American answer to Shaun of the Dead, and somewhat admirable. It’s being commented upon that Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera are the go-to guys for affable, impotent American male youth, and this feels true. This is about location and rules, law and space. As the last semblance of the living, the survivors take on the names of their hometowns while, interestingly, doing their darnedest to eat (Twinkies) and play (amusement park). The unique edginess of the film seems coincidental with the popular outlook these days: fatalistic hedonism, or, society’s going down the tubes so I’m going to go live it up.

Crashed

Wedding Crashers (dir. David Dobkin, 2005) – The buddy comedy reaches new levels of (attempted) legitimacy by casting Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson at their peaks, then adding Christopher Walken and Jane Seymour. While Vaughn steals the show, he’s given a run for his money by the up-and-coming Bradley Cooper, who plays the most insane-funny bad guy since the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This is all bros-before-hos, of course, with Isla Fischer and Seymour constituting the only non-boring, non-judgmental females in the film…and they’re both clinically nuts. This one follows the formula, albeit more effectively than your average Starsky and Hutch or Envy-type fare.

Objects in mirror...

Mission: Impossible – 2 (dir. John Woo, 2000) – Pure nostalgia, for some of us. Apparently this is loaded with John Woo trademarks, but who knows. Overt yet vacant symbolism makes this quite apropos for MST3K. As Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, of course) descends into the bowels of the enemy compound on a note-so-remote island off the coast of Sydney, he buddies up with a lone dove surrounded by filthy pigeons. I’m not making this up. There are too many vantage points from which to attack this allegory, so we’ll just choose one: why is Hunt identified with the avian symbol of peace and life when he proceeds to unload round after round of ammunition on his pigeon-like enemies? Maybe it’s for a greater cause, but peace this is not. This Mission: Impossible movies are about the star image of Cruise, more than anything. But if there’s a flow to the three we have thus far, it’s moving into what could be considered a more “human” direction. The first film is about computer hacking, with a little biblical verbiage thrown in. The sequel is about the body, biological warfare, and (of course) the use of the female body as the petri dish for transporting a killer virus. (She, by the way, is so incessantly punished and generally put-back-into-her-place that no female agency exists here at all. She’s a thing to be used, which is ironic, since Tom Cruise is such a tool.) The third film gets very personal, with a psychotic super-bad guy who gets off on being pure evil kidnapping, holding ransom, and nearly murdering Hunt’s new woman (this time, wife). Seeing as the villain in the first film is a middle-aged woman, the fact that women become major factors that only propel the subsequent narratives by virtue of their powerlessness is quite fitting and natural.

Coen Brothers’ True Grit Photo

Brings new meaning to "The Dude"

Quickies, Vol. XIX

Bonnie and Clyde (dir. Arthur Penn, 1967) – It’s got New Hollywood written all over it, and it’s affected so much that’s come after it. Still, it contains plenty of echoes to all that is old and non-Hollywood, like Battleship Potemkin, e.g. Hard not to think of Eisenstein’s peasant woman on the steps getting shot at in the glasses like so many good and bad guys in this film, through glasses or glass. So different, though: not about morality, justice, and nation, but rather about escape, lawlessness, and fate. Bonnie’s opening sequence shows her about to be born again, in the womb and beckoned outside of it by her anti-savior.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (created by Rob McElhenney, 2006/2007) – Seen just a few (maybe five?) episodes now from seasons 2 and 3, and it’s quite in-your-face. Plays like a cartoon in that characters are consistently teetering into death without caring or realizing it. Teeth are pulled out with reckless abandon and what is shot somewhat like a mockumentary is, in its diegetic world, quite abject. So what seems at first like pure idiocy stretching beyond the characters into the writing actually isn’t. It’s written coherently and cleverly, its content is often disgusting albeit oblivious of itself, and the jury is still out as to whether its shock value is outweighed by something both novel and substantial.

Archer (created by Adam Reed, 2010) – Saw the first two episodes of this one (eight more to go and then all caught up). Adult animation super-spy spoof stuff, we have here something witty and fast-paced, all about timing and circular/repetitious themes and punchlines. As my guy on the inside tells me, it’s got something Arrested Development to it, and not just Jessica Walter, Judy Greer, and Jeffrey Tambor. Genuinely funny stuff, it seems to fit in great with a relatively new wave of television that includes the aforementioned and prematurely canceled masterpiece, Curb Your Enthusiasm, It’s Always Sunny, and almost-but-not-quite Modern Family. These are edgier fare that demand fuller attention than your laugh-track driven drivel that’s easy to watch without actually watching it.

It’s Complicated (dir. Nancy Meyers, 2009) – Am probably one of the many/few who noticed the cast, saw some promise, then saw the trailer and the director’s name. It can at least be said for Meyers that she’s been giving some attention to the silenced voice of the middle-aged woman…sort of. She makes movies for women and about woman that seem to entertain a lot of women, but that also get women to accuse her of betraying her race. You don’t find a lot of unlikeable men in her films, at least in terms of the film’s point of view. The ladies, on the other hand, range from the b-word to the girl-next-door in the body of the girl-next-door’s mom. Things in this universe look too perfect, too polished, and have no reference to reality. You don’t run a bakery of that caliber and have nothing but time and money for additions to your Santa Barbara, Martha Stewart-style chateau. Actors are clearly stifled here (Steve Martin) like they were in Meyer’s earlier The Holiday (Jack Black). This is an unimportant point, but whatev. This one exists for Meryl Streep looking lovely, Alec Baldwin being a charming cad, and John Krasinski being funny.