A site sharing my painting, photography, cultural criticism and commentary.
The art form of cinematography is no stranger to an exploration of landscape as a central theme. It is used as a device in film to echo our own mythological claims and serve as that boundary between sentience and the sublime.
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I’ve been fascinated by cinema since I was young. It’s unquestionably the dominant art form of our culture and I often feel as though my own paintings wish to create a filmic quality in their abstraction.
In the spirit of that fascination, I decided to create some film lists during this pandemic, in an effort to inspire others. I’m not a film historian, and I bring my own biases to bear on these lists, nor are these lists intended to be definitive in any sense of the word. Think of these as cinematic mixed tapes (or playlists if you prefer).
I hope to both expose you to films you may not be aware of as well as get you to reexamine films you may be familiar with. The lists are curated in the same way I used to curate art exhibits; there are rules I apply to the themes beyond their genre which I will describe with every b-weekly list. My choices are based on artistic credibility. Each film adheres to the principals of great cinema, writing, directing, acting, production design, and cinematography. I endeavor to include a few choices that have been little seen or have been underappreciated. All of these films defy convention or break new ground.
I hope you enjoy these lists and I look forward to your feedback and thoughts.
Film biographies have become all too common and more often than not they fall into obvious story arcs of the rags to riches to drug abuse to death scenario. The films on this list all avoid cliché even when they retain a familiar story arc. I also avoided films where the lead actor was the dominant focus, even if their work was critical to the film. There are many good biopics out there like Ray, or the most recent Judy, that although well intentioned become weighted by an overwhelming singular performance that causes you to lose sight of the other aspects of the story.
If you’ve ever heard Edith Piaf sing Non, Je ne regrette rien (No, I do not regret anything) then you understand the power of her voice and how she captivated a nation with it. Marion Cotillard’s portrayal of Piaf in La Vie en Rose delivers a stunning performance. Directed by Olivier Dahan who also co-wrote the screenplay with Isabelle Sobelman, the film is wonderfully shot and avoids falling into cliché despite its now all too familiar rags to riches plot. The music is all original Piaf which makes it all the more potent.
I think I was nearly 40 before the genius of Bob Dylan hit me. Looking back on that revelatory day when I listened to a radio marathon of his life’s work, it seems impossible it took me so long. He has always been enigmatic to many, and more so due to his continuous evolution as an artist. I’ve always been a fan of the director Todd Haynes who brings wit, and sensitivity to his characters and has always managed to portray music in a thoughtful way. I’m Not There is an inventive, delightful melange of multiple actors—Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin, and Richard Gere—portraying the multiple personalities of Bod Dylan. It’s a tribute to Dylan and the American songbook in the best possible way.
Steve McQueen, the director of 12 Years A Slave is an artist first, and film maker second. He rose to prominence winning the Turner Prize in 1999 for his video art. He has always brought forth a connection to body and art, forcing the viewer to confront his filmic experiences in very real, tactile ways. This film could be considered brutal except for the fact that in America our persistent need to repress the realities of slavery only makes it so. The beach landing in My Private Ryan is equally brutal regarding human horrors, but somehow more palatable because it is within the context of white history. Chiwetel Ejiofor is extraordinary in his ability to place any viewer into the shoes of Solomon Northup. Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography of the deep south makes you believe you’re actually in 1841. This film is of course, particularly poignant given the current Black Lives Matter protests.
It’s still hard for me to believe we lost Philip Seymour Hoffman, the greatest actor of his generation. His acting in Capote is in perfect sync with Catherine Keener (who plays Harper Lee) and shows off what made him such a great actor, his ability to play even iconic figures in an understated, human way. The production design is wonderful in its juxtaposition of Capote’s NYC Mad Men like life, and the barren farmland of small-town Kansas. Bennet Miller the director wisely lets the actors do what they do best. The writing is also exceptional interweaving class, sexuality, race, and culture into what on the surface starts off as a detective story.
Raging Bull is the film that made Robert De Niro and Martin Scorcese legends in filmmaking, both a the absolute height of their powers in this film. The film accomplishes a rare perspective on a very old and very controversial sport, boxing. As Joyce Carol Oates said; “To watch boxing closely, and seriously, is to risk moments of what might be called animal panic—a sense not only that something very ugly is happening but that, by watching it, one is an accomplice.” The same could be said for watching Raging Bull. One of the rare films where violence becomes poetry and the sport becomes more compelling than the story of the man. It’s also a clear lens on the undercurrent of white male privilege.
Speaking of extraordinary actors, Paul Giamatti was made for the role of Harvey Pekar, the late comic book writer who the comic book series of the same name. In an age when Marvel has its own film studio, this film is a revelation and accidentally predicts the resurgence of the form. I love American Splendor because it elevates the beauty in the mundane suffering of everyday life. It celebrates oddity and eccentricity. Hope Davis is the perfect foil to Giamatti as his third wife Joyce Brabner. The interplay of Krumb’s original drawings and the understated cinematography of Cleveland makes this film a real jewel.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon) is based on the biography of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the subject of the film. Bauby was the editor of French Elle magazine and before his unfortunate accident what you would call a playboy. If ever a painting was made into film, this would be it. Julian Schnabel the famous NY painter directs with a visual flare that perfectly maps to the experience of its lead character. Mathieu Amalric stars in what is probably his best acting. A visually stunning and emotionally powerful film that leaves you realizing just how precious life is.
Before the form in American cinema became a cliché Coal Miner’s Daughter established the biopic form. It closed out the decade of the 70’s with it’s gritty, real-life characters that owe’s tribute to films like Deliverance, and McCabe and Mrs Miller, when films were made as art not as marketing campaigns. Sissy Spacek deservedly won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Loretta Lynn, and is supported by exceptional acting by Tommy Lee Jones, Beverly D’Angelo, and the late great drummer from The Band, Levon Helm. Michael Apted’s directing is tight and unvarnished. It’s a window into Kentucky Appalachia, and the realities of American poverty.
This film has often been referred to as the greatest biopic nobody has seen, and that’s a shame. It is truly a masterpiece and unlike any other film you’ll watch in this genre. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters abstractly captures the life of the larger-than-life Japanese artist Yukio Mishima. At times surreal, perverse, and violent, it mirrors the extraordinary isolated life of its subject. Written and directed by the brilliant Paul Schrader with a score by none other than Philip Glass it is truly a wonder to behold.
A REVIEW OF THE REVENANT
“We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.” ― Ernest Shackleton
There is a surprising amount of water in Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant. The film begins with water and ends with water. Water is the central metaphor for what it is to be human. Humanity and nature can be both fluid and an unstoppable force, soft and hard. The power of The Revenant lies not in its unrelenting fury, but in its subtle grasp of an uncaring universe.
No one and no thing is spared from an unwashed treatment in this film. Nature is as unforgiving as humanity. Native Americans are as brutal as the Europeans and Americans. There is betrayal and compassion in nearly equal measure. The Revenant lays bare, in sweeping cinematic meditations and succinct episodes of violence the experience of the earliest settlement of the American west. It may be hard for us to grasp the unknown rawness that was the Dakota territory in 1823, or for that matter America. In 1820 Maine, yes Maine, became the 23rd state in the Union. After the Missouri Compromise of that same year, declaring state’s rights over Federal dictate, fur trappers and settlers poured into the Missouri river region.
Although filmed in Canada, Montana and South America, The Revenant is based on a story of the fur trapper Hugh Glass whose party, the Henry & Ashley Company (Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Company in the film) was attacked by Arikara (Ree) indians while trapping in the upper Missouri river in South Dakota. Soon after Glass splits off with the remaining party of trappers to travel overland in order to deliver their haul and escape the rath of the Arikara indians. Shortly into the journey, Glass stumbles upon a Grizzly mother who ferociously defends her cubs with Glass ending up the recipient of near-death wounds. The remainder of the film is the harrowing tale of Glass’ determination in the face of punishing odds to find his way back to Fort Henry and the rest of the fur traders.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OfPMJQ3Bpo]
Iñárritu’s film differs substantially from what is known of the real Hugh Glass but that is unimportant to the film or the viewer. What lies at the heart of the original story and The Revenant film is a European ideology that persisted a never ending conquering of all things they deemed savage in the pursuit of wealth and territory. This is the soft underbelly of North American history. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 opened up a great swath of the American plains to settlement and began a relentless exploration that ended with the subjugation and genocide of millions of indians. Iñárritu’s story embellishment of Glass’ lust for revenge (in real life Glass forgave Fitzgerald and Bridger), provides an underpinning of darkness that matches the true story of European destruction of native tribes. Despite Glass’ heroic survival against indians, nature, a bear, the French, and even his own trappers; the lesson Iñárritu wants us to understand is this fundamental lack of European compassion. Glass is the revenant or ghost of European continental oppression. There is nothing redemptive in the history of North America and you will a similar lacking in The Revenant. In the end Iñárritu’s Glass is left trapped between dreams and reality, built on the random consequences of an unpredictable life.
As cinema, there is little to find fault with in The Revenant. It is everything and more, that The Hateful Eight is not. Iñárritu paints violence with a delicate brush in sharp contrast to Tarrantino’s dull hatchet. Where Tarrantino embraces without question the mindless consumerist cartoon characters of our popular culture, Iñárritu reaches back into our dark past to show us the true vision of what led us to this point in time, leaving us along in a wilderness of the mind to contemplate our shared history. Leonardo DiCaprio, is uniquely suited for the role of Hugh Glass. DiCaprio brings a vulnerability in terms of scale that allows a wider audience to identify with him. Indeed all of the acting is at its professional best including an understated standout performance by First Nations actor Duane Howard as the Arikara leader Elk Dog.
The film pays homage to the work of Terrence Malick sans the heavy-handed spirituality, and borrows from Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson, and Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography focuses on earth, water, and sky creating unspoken relationships between humanity and the ultimate arbiter, nature. There are extraordinary moments when crystalline snow clouds rush across tree tops as they crackle with the icy cold, or the hot breath of human or animal cloud the camera lens. The film exquisitely captures the fierce, desolate majesty of the early 19th century Louisiana Territory while avoiding an emphasis on grandeur over reality, or style over substance. Despite some sweeping vistas and breathtaking scenery, one always feels firmly planted in place, in a specific location that is witness to the smallness of humanity.
I worry American audiences inured to fake violence and accustomed to ten second cuts will find the film burdensome and as Anthony Lane of the New Yorker inaccurately stated that “the beauty has a willful air”. Despite its more than two and a half hour length, I never found it overwrought or willful. Although there is a Shackleton-like endurance to the film, it underpins the Revenant’s message of our human desire for incessant domination of nature even at our own expense. Like all great art, The Revenant is more interested in ambiguity than answers. I can’t wait to see it again, and again.
A RETURN TO FORM WITH A REVIEW ON THE HATEFUL EIGHT
It’s a new year and we, meaning the royal we, shall begin with a renewed fury. In 2015 I took time away from this blog to focus on other projects, but now it is time to renew my commitment to this site and the writing. I hope I can continue to provide a unique perspective on American culture, focused on the intersection of our ever diminishing society and the art that it produces.
[Spoiler Alert]
Last Monday (12/28) I went to see the latest film by the supercilious director Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight. My expectations were high having thoroughly enjoyed Django Unchained (2012), Tarantino’s revisionist commentary on slavery in the American south. Although far from a masterpiece (a term that is all too often thrown about along with genius, these days) I felt Django balanced well between pulp operatics, witty repartee, and cartoon violence that has become the signature of Tarantino’s work. When a Tarantino script works, it gives rise to banal conversations that act as trojan horses toward greater tension and hints at the history of film. The violence becomes a counterpoint to the everyday, suggesting rightfully that underneath American life flows a red tinted river of brutality. What made Django Unchained function at a high level, was the clever interplay of elements that Tarantino has refined over the course of seven films.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_UI1GzaWv0&w=560&h=315]
The Hateful Eight breaks the Tarantino arc, destroying all subtlety with rapid, rapacious indignation. Where Kill Bill, Django Unchained, Jackie Brown, and of course Pulp Fiction succeed, The Hateful Eight fails with near spectacular free fall. Most, if not all of the familiar Tarantino dialogue is rendered as louche, simplistic phrases where the characters speak to apparently hear their own voices more than provide artistic expression. Staged character devises used so effectively in the past; the dignified but vengeful black man, the surprisingly resilient and lion-hearted woman, the mysterious foreigner, all become redundant, overused tropes in this film. The characters aside from a few brief exceptions, are cutouts in a store window display, their intent to conjure a memory of character’s past, archetypes of the Tarantino oeuvré, but lacking any real substance. This is so true that it borders on racist stereotypes throughout the film. Tim Roth’s Oswaldo Mobray is the stereotypical effete Londoner with a disdain for all things American. Michael Madsen’s John Gage follows suit as the loner 'cowboy' from the American west, hinting at, but falling far short of his predecessors Clint Eastwood, Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, or even Henry Fonda in My Name is Nobody. It goes on, Walton Goggins, the racist southern rebel; Kurt Russell, the principled bounty hunter; Demián Bichir Nájera, the snarky Mexican; and lest we forget Tarantino’s favorite black actor, Samuel L. Jackson appearing here as Major Marquis Warren, a cartoonish foil for racial indignity surviving slavery and the Civil War to seek fortune as a bounty hunter in the West. There are tidbits that come entirely from the deftness of the mostly gifted cast, that hold back complete catastrophe, most notably Jennifer Jason-Leigh and the legendary Bruce Dern. What makes The Hateful Eight so painful to watch is the lack of substantive dialogue provided to such an outstanding group of actors, leaving perhaps Madsen, Tatum, and Goggins aside. If you’ve had the good fortune to watch Soderbergh’s Che, than you saw a great performance by Demián Bichir as Fidel Castro. In The Hateful Eight, Tarantino gives him nothing but mumbling insouciance.
Where the character archetypes of Tarantino’s past breakdown, so too does the the soundtrack and cinematography. Tarantino’s deep knowledge of the history of cinema, makes the choice of Ennio Morricone the composer for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West an obvious choice. Although on several levels I would say the score for The Hateful Eight is far from Morricone’s best, it is more noticeable in how it is applied in a rip shod way. Bursts of music push through at times in the movie as though they’re ensuring audience alertness more than cinematic verity. The opening Overture in the tradition of movie Roadshows, acted more as a placeholder than a tension builder. It felt repetitive rather than a crescendo, which mirrors the general tone of the film. The uneven use of music throughout the film matched the unusual choice of the resurrected Ultra Panavision 70mm film format. The widest aspect ratio film ever created (2.76:1) Ultra Panavision 70 was only seen a smattering of times between 1957 and 1966. The aspect ratio projected on a huge curved screen begs for sweeping, majestic cinematography that loves sweeping vistas, and awe inspiring landscapes. The last film to be shown in Ultra Panavision 70, Khartoum leverages it beautifully as an introduction to the ancient, exotic aesthetics of Egypt and Sudan. Although The Hateful Eight was shot in the backcountry of Telluride, Colorado little of it is capitalized on during the movie. Early scenes of birds taking flight, panoramic mountain landscapes and the distant shots of a six-horse stage coach pushing through deep snow are the only real glimpses you get of Ultra Panavision 70’s unique quality. Much of the balance of the film is shot indoors (in one room) in a barn, or in white-out conditions. Hardly a qualifier for the majesty of a long lost camera technique. It all inevitably feels like so much hubris instead of art. Tarantino can’t even help himself by providing two segments of awful expository voice over that adds nothing to the film other than enriching his own ego.
Then there is the violence. Layer upon layer of mind-numbing graphic violence. Throughout much of the film I felt witness to the gladiatorial spectacle of a Roman coliseum where human sadism was laid bare for public entertainment. Early on the film disposes with any gentleness when Kurt Russell delivers a crushing elbow to the face of Jennifer Jason-Leigh, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The violence continues to surge forth in wave upon wave of ever greater graphic display—heads blown to jelly, expurgations of sprayed blood, and continuous beatings of the only female character (the others are ghosts brought back in flashback who suffer no better a fate). This theatrical barbarous blood bath leaves you with only two choices; revulsion or mindless celebration. Unfortunately I heard too much celebration in the theater during the showing which begs a deeper commentary on American sadism. At one point there is so much bodily fluid and brain matter scattered about Eli Roth would blush. All of this blood, gore, and guts only serves as a fantastical mask that obscures the fact that this is a terribly written film. My sense is that the snowy setting was only employed to embellish the contrast of blood red against stark white, a weak, didactic ploy at its best.
The Hateful Eight is Hollywood at its worst. It is a film that wallows in the current American desire for more violence built on a culture of fear. I’m sure some critics and academics will argue that The Hateful Eight is a cinematic exposition on our times. I am not one of those. The whiteness of the film’s blizzard is an apt metaphor for the blankness of content. The Hateful Eight comes across as cheap torture porn and lazy filmmaking where a director is out of ideas and only has his own canon to drawn down on again and again, ad infinitum.
A review of the movie Birdman (2014) - spoiler alert.
“If I leave here tomorrow Would you still remember me?”
― Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd
In a world encased in irony and cliché the hardest art to produce is that which wades right into that milieu and inverts it, onto itself. The movie Birdman against all odds, does just that. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s wonderful new movie behaves like a stone skipping across the pond of popular culture. With every scrape against the surface, it reveals a deeper, often sadder truth about our culture while simultaneously tearing at the fiber of the system that perpetuates it.
Iñárritu in Birdman has created a macroscopic view of our cultural landscape using the microscopic lens of an 800 seat theater on Broadway in New York and a play by the late poet, playwright and short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver’s play What We Talk About When We Talk About Love serves as the foundation for the move. The production is being staged by Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) an ex-movie superhero named Birdman, whose fame faded with the last of a blockbuster tripartite in the early 90’s. Funding, acting, and directing in Carver’s play is a somewhat last ditch effort by Riggan to regain attention through art rather than pop culture. Riggan’s shame about how he obtained his fame stands directly in contrast to his penetrating desire to be loved as something richer. Against this backdrop Riggan must contend with a cadre of actors replete with a mountain of their own emotional baggage, his daughter’s cold disdain, and his lawyers’ forceable pragmatism. It is a world anyone could empathize with wanting to fly away from and soar above the streets of New York.
What makes Birdman great is its tempo. The soundtrack is simply a drum kit pulsing out Riggan’s life in syncopation. The jazz drummer Antonio Sanchez created a soundtrack that paired with Iñárritu’s direction, creates an unnerving pulse that rises and falls, pounds and runs silent throughout the film, leaving you with an erratic heartbeat for the film. Iñárritu even puts an actual drummer (Nate Smith) playing the soundtrack visible in the film from time to time to reinforce Riggan’s growing delusion. It is a fantastic device not just for its pacing of the movie but because it suggests the beating heart of our own lives and gently nods at the protagonist of Carver’s play, Mel McGinnis who is a heart surgeon.
Beyond the use of an aged drum kit for a background, Iñárritu works against fiction and pop culture clichés that thrust the viewer into a bullfight arena of competing pettiness, comedy and tragedy. As a visual artist what I found most striking was Iñárritu’s wonderful use of visual metaphors. A scene in a liquor store mirror Ralph Ellison’s invisible man captured by the photographer Jeff Wall. A fogged filled stage littered with gauzy actors posing with tree filaments on their heads pokes fun at almost every stage production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A drunk on the street reveals a soliloquy from Macbeth. Even the actors themselves become visual symbols of their own roll in Riggan’s life. Sam (Emma Stone), Riggan’s daughter is bleached out with dark rimmed eye liner making her look like a creepy doll. Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), prances about like a mirror of Riggan’s former self, often barely dressed. In one scene, Shiner is literally the visual metaphor for The Emperor Wears No Clothes. All of these actors and stagings mainly take place in a Broadway theater’s claustrophobic back hallways and rooms, painted in nightclub garishness and faded putrid tones. Riggan’s dressing room resembles more of a prison cell than a lead actor’s sanctuary. Often during the film the chambered back end of the theater becomes the inner chambers of Riggan’s increasingly demented mind where only the stage provides open terrain and safety.
A poignant, keystone scene in the movie leaves Riggan accidentally locked out of the stage door right before the play’s apotheosis. Panicked and left in his tidy-whities (a reference to Breaking Bad?) Riggan awkwardly speed walks around the block, right through Times Square and a crowd of smartphone wielding fans who immediately tweet the experience to over a million followers. On the surface it speaks to the desperation of male middle-age, fading fame, and the cult of personality but what it most beautifully mirrors is Ellison’s Invisible Man;
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
A man whose fame is derived from playing a fictional superhero can stroll through one of the busiest places on earth and yet not really be seen. In this case of Birdman fame replaces race.
There are too many moments in Birdman to recount without spoiling the uncomfortable pleasure of the experience. Few films so eloquently balance comedy with desperation all the while making serious commentary on society, but Birdman succeeds admirably in doing so. The film reminds us of our shared humanity, and our fragility in order to disrupt what seems like an ever increasing reliance on fantasy over reality. Icarus is mentioned in the film but like everything else in Iñárritu’s Birdman, it is not the metaphor it seems. In this case the parable is directed at the viewers not its central character. A society bound to the cult of personality, and superhero movies is indeed flying too close to the proverbial cultural sun and like the Egyptians, Inca’s and Romans before, is destined for destruction. As with Carver’s Mel McGinnis, Riggan’s shame is a grounding force that creates a beautiful destruction in order to reveal a larger truth, “and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”*
*from Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"
