Beyond the Black Maria: "The Great Train Robbery"

Still from "The Great Train Robbery", 1903. (public domain)

9. "The Great Train Robbery" (1903) Watch

The Western was an early member in the vast fraternity of film genres, and "The Great Train Robbery" was its introduction. This 12 minute film, directed by former Edison cameraman Edwin S. Porter, famously pioneered many elementary conventions of the cinematic language, such as intercutting between scenes and camera movement. 

Each scene is a stage, a box, for the action to flow through. Movement in the static frame is ever present. Things change; the shot is changed by time. From the initial action, movement announces itself as an integral element of the film. A lone clerk has his back to us, at work in a telegraph office. A window sits in the upper righthand corner of the frame, but is empty. Immediately a group of bandits rush in through a door at the left of the scene, startling the clerk into a panic and setting the screen aflame with crackling action. Concurrently, a train can be seen passing by outside through the window, moving from right to left, in the opposite direction that the bandits entered the scene, creating a directional discord that adds to the visual cacophony. The clerk is shot and bound by the criminals, who vanish out of the door as quickly as they appeared, followed by the train which finishes its path across the window. 

The visual tryptic of fore-, mid-, and background is used effectively. Take the scene at the end when the bandits, seemingly free of the authorities, stop in the woods to assess their take from the train. The robbers stand in the foreground, their horses sit idly in the mid-ground, and the background, seen through the trees, is quickly filled with law men. A smokey gun fight commences, the horses jump and scatter in alarm, and the stoic camera captures the whole ordeal with a clinical eye. Time, the camera's partner in crime, mercilessly erodes the bandits good fortune. 

"The Great Train Robbery" is actually a pretty compelling short film. The bandits' motivation for their violent crime is never explained; they are simply a malevolent force of nature which blazes across the landscape, leaving a bloody trail of dead, wounded, and traumatized citizens in its wake. The clerk and the train passenger who is shot down after an escape attempt are victims of slipping into the wrong place at the wrong point in time, which is perhaps what each one of us is at some moments. It's likely that the filmmakers never intended for their audience to ponder such esoteric notions, but these notions are pondered nonetheless.

Beyond the Black Maria

Joseph Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle in 1896 (public domain)

5. "Rip Van Winkle"(1896) Watch

It makes sense that cinema has deep and robust roots in live theater, from the Shakespearean to vaudeville and all betwixt. This series of eight short scenes was adapted from the play of the same name co-written by and starring Joseph Jefferson, who'd become famous in the 19th century for his on-stage portrayal of Rip Van Winkle and reprises the role here.

The presentation of these brief scenes, filmed in the woods, looks downright rudimentary and crude; most cellphone-shot videos of idiots hurting themselves in different hilarious ways display more nuance and understanding of the cinematic language than these bits of filmed theater. It actually reminds me of the first film I every made, which I shot on a camcorder in the 10th grade. The inclusion of "Rip Van Winkle" in the National Film Registry is a little baffling; I'm not sure what aesthetic, cultural, or historical significance it has to justify such a decision. What are your thoughts?

6. The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Title Fight (1897)

This film is proving elusive; details can be found here.

7. "President McKinley Inauguration Footage" (1901)

The telegenic quality of a president is practically essential in the modern era, and has been for some time, but it was not always thus. This short collection of two films shot by Thomas Edison himself documenting various parts of the eponymous event lives at the beginning of the time when the relationship between the president and the media was about to go through monumental changes. Until the advent of cinema, these quadrennial events took place and then were finished, visually undocumented except for a few photographs; a president's inauguration, and indeed his entire term in office, passed through time safe from capture by the net of the moving image. These ceremonies happened in their own time and place and remained there forever. By contrast, the sight and sound of JFK's inauguration in 1961 for example has been replayed and broadcast at thousands of times and in thousands of places, not to mention the fact that it is carried in signals that tumble deeper and deeper into the cosmos with each passing moment.

8. "Star Theatre" (1901) Watch

One very popular trend in short-form filmmaking this decade is known as tilt-shift. It's a method of capturing urban scenes, usually shot from a high angle, which causes the people and vehicles going about their business to appear to be miniature, using either a special lens or applying the effect in post production. only a slice of the frame is in focus, and the action plays out faster than real time. The "Regatta Scene" from David Fincher's The Social Network takes advantage of this technique. Tilt-shift is a cousin of time-lapse, one of the earliest examples of which is "Star Theatre", a short piece filmed over the course of about 30 days showing the dismantling of the title building. It is as compelling as any tilt-shift video.

Naturally, the Star Theatre housed staged productions of plays. As mentioned earlier, cinema was born partially from live theater, so the nexus of the subject and medium of "Star Theatre" is fascinating to contemplate. Here, a movie camera observes the death of a house of its own forebear. The film is like a cinematic laser blasting the art of theater into oblivion; a rapidly growing child eating its mother. 

Beyond the Black Maria: in Search of The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Title Fight

Still frame from Corbett-Fitzsimmons, 1897. (Public domain)

The sixth film on my list is The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Title Fight, a documentary depicting the eponymous boxing match. Released in 1897, it was the first feature length film to be exhibited to the public and was instrumental in establishing cinema as a mainstream form of entertainment.

Most of the oldest films in the National Film Registry can be found on the Library of Congress' YouTube channel, but not Corbett-Fitzsimmons. A broader search of the internet brings up some pieces that could possibly be the film in question, though the quality of each is poor and the authenticity difficult to verify. After this initial hiccup, I called Scarecrow Video in Seattle's University District to ask if the film I'm looking for resides in their vast and eclectic collection; it does not. This is the very first time that Scarecrow's immense catalogue has been stumped by one of my searches. The man I spoke with was very helpful nonetheless and did some web searching of his own, but came up against the same dead ends I have discovered. Some reports and reviews claim that only 11 seconds of the film survives, while the Wikipedia article on the subject claims a New York resident by the name of Jean A. Le Roy owns the most complete print, but there is no citation provided and a google search of the name gave no illumination. I may have to place a phone call to the Library of Congress in order to augment this:

@librarycongress Can you tell me where I can find a copy of THE CORBETT-FITZSIMMONS TITLE FIGHT from 1897, or if the film even still exists?
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) January 8, 2013

My search will continue, but unfortunately I will have to skip The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Title Fight for the time being in order to continue apace on my year-long journey through the National Film Registry. Hopefully I can turn it up, and before the year is out.  

Welcome to the Black Maria

Thomas Edison's Black Maria (Library of Congress)

In 2013 I am giving myself the task of watching all 600 films in the National Film Registry. These are the movies that the United States National Film Preservation Board has deemed worthy of inclusion in the Library of Congress. Each year since 1989, around 25 films from all throughout cinema history are chosen based on standards of cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. I'll be watching them chronologically based on when each was made.

600 films in a year may seem like a giant commitment, but its really not as immense an undertaking as it sounds; it averages out to about 11 films a week, which is one per weeknight and 3 on each day of the weekend, and is really no more film-viewing than I'm already accustomed to. Considering many of the early films are quite short, some less than a minute, I should be able to get way ahead of schedule within the first two weeks of the year.

Now, it'd be a shame to go on a cinematic adventure like this and not document the experience, so here begins my journal of a year in the National Film Registry.

1. "Newark Athlete" (1891) Watch

This now-visibly damaged, 10 second clip of a young man swinging Indian clubs around was made by William Kennedy Dickson, a movie camera inventor who worked for Thomas Edison; he filmed the piece in Edison's Black Maria, a little eccentric-looking building used to produce many of the inventor's kinetoscope films (including the four earliest entries on our list), and which is widely considered one of the first movie studios. To my hopelessly modern eye "Newark Athlete" is unremarkable, but remembering the historical context helps me to ponder what a citizen of the day must have thought, unburdened by a lifetime of acclimation to cinema. What in my era is an analog to this brief strip of boring film? What modern wonders amaze and confound me by their mere existence?

2. "Blacksmith Scene" (1893) Watch

Not only was this piece the first Kinetoscope film to be publicly shown, but is also infamously the very first example of actors performing a scene in a motion picture; three blacksmiths take turns hammering a piece of metal, breaking momentarily to share a drink before getting back to work. The action is simple, mechanical, and dull, but nothing had done what "Blacksmith Scene" does before then, and it is a universal truth that once a thing is shown to be possible, it becomes ever more so in the minds of all who witness it. Every scene played out on the screen since owes its being to this piece.

3. "Dickson Experimental Sound Film" (1894 or 1895) Watch

This is a bizarre little clip. It shows a violinist playing into a phonograph, and it constitutes the first time the sound and movement of a thing were recorded simultaneously. Perhaps to avoid boring the viewer, the director, again the afore mentioned Dickson, chose to feature two men dancing to the music. Such an image begs the question - was it a social norm of the time for men to dance together in this way, or could no women be found to take part? Another strange detail is that, though this is technically a sound film, no method (such as a slate) was used to sync the picture and corresponding wax record, and it would be over 30 years until, with the release of The Jazz Singer, the talkies would reach public awareness. For the intervening decades cinema would gestate in silence, and the art is better for it. 

4. "The Kiss" (1896) Watch

The two-shot has become a perhaps over-used part of the cinematic language over the decade, and can be found in nearly every movie. This early example shows a couple chatting jovially and sharing a silly and awkward kiss. The action is simple and ordinary yet this snippet is fascinating nonetheless. Seeing these living faces, watching them interact, I am intrigued to know what they are saying and who they are to each other. It has been said that all films are simply documentaries about people's faces, and "The Kiss" certainly supports that assertion. Having only observed these two folks for roughly 45 seconds, I am already finding myself invested in their lives. Cinema gets at not only the look of people but how they act and relate to each other; its an art that captures us as we move relentlessly through time. 

Thus concludes the part of our journey that took us into Edison's Black Maria. Next we move beyond 19th century New Jersey to find theater in the woods, the great-grandfather of tilt-shift, and the beginning of the long marriage between cinema and the boxing ring. 

The 3 Best Short Films I Saw in 2012

Rezene

Rezene Tsegai is from Seattle's south end and paints his friends and neighbors. This short documentary featuring him and his work was directed by his identical twin brother Futsum, who was a student at Seattle Central's soon to be defunded Film and Video program at the time. "Rezene" is a great document of the eponymous artist and what inspires him. There's an urgency to his painting that should be exciting for artists of all disciplines to hear about.




Ash Tree Lane

MS MR came seemingly out of nowhere this year, but in reality the duo comes from New York. They released one EP of four songs, including "Ash Tree Lane". This is the video for that song, created by David Dean Burkhart out of a dizzying variety of found footage from all over the later half of the 20th century. Besides nicely complimenting MS MR's haunting music, Burkhart combines these recycled images to create a kind of nostalgic terror; it's like a big city having a nightmare, rendered from the 16mm and VHS detritus of our debauched media playground.





Hey Jane

Further blurring the already hazy line between short narrative film and music video, "Hey Jane" is only one of many great pieces by LA based filmmaker AG Rojas. We follow an increasingly harrowing day in the life of a transvestite, which includes struggling to make ends meet and raising a son. The story is a neorealism for and by the residents of this new century.

Top Ten Films in 140 Characters Each

What follows are 140-character reviews of the ten best feature films of 2012 that I managed to see, in the order that I saw them.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

THE AVENGERS: Makers of superhero films need to know it's characters, not the story, we care about. We just want to see them punching stuff.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: It gets big and doesn't implode, though things get pretty precarious towards the climax and might make you nauseous.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED: Guy meets girl. Guy loses girl. Guy (maybe) goes nuts. Guy (maybe) builds time machine. Guy meets timetravel partner.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

THE MASTER: Cult leader Dodd posits that humans are not animals just before screaming at a naysayer and sicking a demented acolyte upon him.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

LOOPER: The year's best genre movie creates a robust mythology out of noir, time travel, westerns, and a great surprise borrowed from Otomo.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK: David O Russell continues to invade the privacy of insane families, and is joined by a fiery Jennifer Lawrence.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

SKYFALL: James Bond just might be getting too old for this shit. But he also apes the new moves Bourne and Batman have and isn't too shabby.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI: Much of the greatness of Jiro's world-renowned sushi is in simplicity. Similarly this doc is understated and gorgeous.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD: This fantastical story of young hushpuppy is a children's movie for adults, too; which is to say it isn't dumb.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

DJANGO UNCHAINED: If you've ever wanted to see what the inside of Quentin Tarantino's brain looks like, this is definitely the film for you.
— Dan Howes (@danwhowes) December 31, 2012

Light and Music: The Night of the Hunter

The song "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" was published in 1889 by American gospel composer Anthony Showalter, naturally inspired by a passage from the bible. The tune is simple, melodic, and warm. Many versions have been recorded in the intervening decades, but I think none is more haunting than that showcased in the film The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum. His religious fanatic serial killer idly hums this comforting hymn as he woos a recent widow in an attempt to locate some stolen money the woman's executed husband had stashed. The widow's young son is the only person in town wise to the violent pseudo-priest's ulterior motive and flees with his little sister and the loot. Giving chase, Mitchum smoothly morphs Showalter's reverent tune into a foreboding war cry as he pursues his quarry, sending its dulcet tones before him with a menacing grin. 

In this scene, Mitchum's smiling reverend is countered in righteous fashion by Lillian Gish as a steely, world-weary protector of wayward children. She takes back the beautiful hymn from the dapper snake, and the tables begin to turn.

Review: In Time

If you like to watch beautiful people run, this movie is for you.

Sometimes, a film's only job can be to convey a compelling set of ideas. Sometimes, that is all a film needs to do. In Time, the latest piece of sci-fi from writer/director Andrew Niccol of Gattaca renown, needed a little bit more than the fascinating thought experiment it shows us. The experiment presented here is a near-future world not unlike our own in many ways, wherein all humans are genetically engineered to cease aging at 25, and are then given a year of time, which has replaced our idea of money. One pays rent in days and weeks, and works to earn more time; the poor must work tirelessly and waste not a second, for when a person's clock (emblazoned stylishly along the forearm) runs down to zero, they die. The wealthy are essentially immortal, and the less fortunate live in a poverty that threatens to kill them at any minute. The brilliant simplicity of this scenario is the best kind of science fiction. A universal, complex, and controversial facet of life such as money is morphed only a little, and the entire thing in turned inside out and thrown to the extremes. 

On a conceptual level, the script is great, but on the practical level, it is gruelingly dull and blandly stupid. The dialogue is frustratingly trite, and the plot is so thinly laid out that it might tear at any moment. Not helping things are the clumsy direction, and mostly over-done or under-done acting. Justin Timberlake, who is a natural at comedy but not so much with the drama, never finds the depth or complexity necessary for his portrayal of Will Salas, our protagonist from the ghetto who suddenly comes into a century of time and goes on the run from the Timekeepers, a temporal economy's lawmen. Timberlake glides handsomely across the surface of the film, never making a big impression or drawing us into the world he is supposed to inhabit. Even in the most extreme situations, he doesn't seem to be concerned, and so we are not concerned for him and our attention drifts to the consistently pretty photography, or to the mysteriously sloppy editing. Cillian Murphy reliably delivers a suitably world-weary and no-nonsense portrayal as Raymond Leon, a Timekeeper who gives chase when Salas takes possession of what might be ill-gotten time. Murphy knows exactly what kind of movie he's in, and we end up wishing he was the protagonist instead of Timberlake, who never seems to know what is needed of him. 

The main take away and best aspect of In Time is the concept it is built to display, and it does an okay job if it. It's just a shame that the package could not have been a little more graceful and robust, instead of a blunt, dumb instrument of conveyance. 

Scenes from the Great Recession

Color in the Pan Teaser from Corbett Jones on Vimeo.

Here's a nice little taste of a documentary about modern day gold seekers in California. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

The Green Wave, cont.

Some good news for a change.

An Iranian court has overturned the lashing sentence imposed on an actor after she appeared in a film critical of the Islamic republic's repressive policies, according to Amnesty International. Marzieh Vafamehr, who appeared with her head uncovered in the film My Tehran for Sale, was released from prison after her sentence of one year in prison and 90 lashes was overturned on appeal. Vafamehr, wife of the acclaimed film-maker Nasser Taghvai, was arrested in July after Iranian authorities took exception to the film about an actor whose theatre work is banned in Iran.

 The Iranian authorities detained Vafamehr for criticism of the exact repression they enacted upon her and continue to level on many of her fellow actors, filmmakers, and artists. Doesn't the government realize that the more they try to squeeze and silence dissent, the more it will slip out of their iron grasp?

(Video: Trailer for My Tehran for Sale, 2011.)

Kickstarter Project: Elder's Corner

from SIJI on Vimeo.

I recently came across this intriguing project via Teju Cole, who compares it to Buena Vista Social Club.  From the film's Kickstarter page:

Shot against the colorful and gritty backdrop of some of Nigeria’s urban cities particularly Lagos and through the clever use of extensive in depth interviews, archival footage and still photographs, Elder's Corner will take viewers on a musical journey through the country's turbulent and colorful history. It will chronicle and showcase the lives and work of some of the leading exponents of the various musical movements that spawned Afrobeat, Juju, Apala, Highlife and Fuji music.

As of this writing, the project is less than $1500 away from being funded. You can donate here.

The Green Wave

Perhaps what fascinates me the most about Iranian cinema is the urgent, visceral interaction between the zeitgeist of oppression in the country and the craft the filmmakers use to react to and comment on it. With renowned directors like Jafar Panahi (Offside) and Mohammad Rasoulof (The White Meadows) being arrested and banned from filmmaking by the Iranian regime, the stakes are so high for all filmmakers in Iran that such jeopardy cannot help but coat the characters and stories in their films.

The latest example is Dog Sweat, wherein young Tehranis pursue such innocent desires as alcohol, companionship, and musical expression, all in the face of systematic oppression.

The trailer is reminiscent of another recent Iranian film, No One Knows About Persian Cats. This, the fifth directorial work by Iranian-Kurd Bahman Ghobadi, follows a couple of bandmates as they race around Tehran trying desperately to both secure visas to travel to London for a music festival and plan one last underground concert in their home country before leaving. The film is a wonderful and at times hysterical journey through the electric, boisterous world of illegal music in urban Iran; its a universe that is quite similar to yet terrifyingly different from the one this American viewer inhabits. What might get you played on KEXP in Seattle will get you arrested in Tehran if you are not careful.

Indeed it is true that all cinema, regardless of national origin, reflects the reality it is conceived in to some degree, but the films coming out of Iran, especially since the unprecedented post-election protests and deadly crackdown, seem like a natural and crucial part of the life of that country. 

Review: The Tree of Life

For an art so young, it is not surprising that vast regions of cinema have yet to be mapped. Terrence Malick is one of only a few bold enough to venture into the untamed wilderness in search of something new; with The Tree of Life, he's gone deeper than before, and what he found is glorious.

If there is such a genre as the memory film, The Tree of Life is of that category. Framed by the premature death of a beloved family member, the story concerns Jack O'Brian as he relives extreme, ethereal, and sublime moments from his Texas childhood.

The film does well to express this restless, endlessly, violently curious boyhood. When you are a child, what surrounds you is your whole universe. And so it follows that the story of young Jack O'Brian should be placed so solidly on par with the frightening, magnificent creation of the universe and the ancient evolution of life on Earth. To a child's fresh mind, nothing has come before, and nothing can be imagined to someday be a memory but this electric moment. Such a vivid, immersive depiction of boyhood has never, I think, been shown to us.

And why not show the birth of everything? It is rendered gorgeously, and to behold such a thing strikes a cosmic chord in all of us, as we are all, of course, citizens of this universe. With such authenticity and grace, The Tree of Life shows us parts of the cinematic language rarely spoken. This film comes at life from both sides; the innocent, unformed, frustrated sponge of ever-changing youth, and the dusty, gray, frozen, existential nostalgia of stagnant adulthood. 

Light and Music: Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction is a film about wrestling your own destiny from forces seemingly beyond your control. Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is a bland taxman whose meticulous life comes unraveled when he starts hearing a voice narrating his actions.

At this point in the film, Harold has fallen for Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a baker he was sent to audit. He has also recently started teaching himself the guitar, a lifelong dream. These threads reach their apex in this glorious scene. It's a great use of a simple song, first played quietly and unassumingly by our earnest hero, then cranked on the soundtrack as we get our sparkling screen kiss. It is another example of music being utilized as a dialect of the cinematic language.

Review: My Perestroika

There are two important themes in Robin Hessman's documentary, My Perestroika - Nostalgia is relentless and grows on every memory; and patriotism is far more deeply rooted than simple military parades and flag-waving, and infinitely varied.

Concerning the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the film tells us Russia's recent history through candid interviews with 5 Muscovites who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s as part of the last generation to grow up behind the so-called Iron Curtain, along with frenetic contemporary footage of the transformative time in question.

One brilliant sequence comes as the subjects recall the wave of political upheaval that swept the Soviet Socialist Republics. It begins with a performance of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, but soon intercuts dramatic black and white footage of tanks rolling through the streets Moscow. The ballet's impassioned refrain swirls around the urban-bound artillery to form the emotional apex of the film.

For an American, particularly one brought up since the events discussed, the film is an immersive if sometimes bewildering history lesson, related by those who lived it. Like any patriot, they each have a complicate and ever evolving relationship with their homeland. Some insist that life was better in the Soviet Union, and indeed all share at least some degree of wistful, inevitable nostalgia for that bygone era. Others are glad of the USSR's evaporation, while some are just as disaffected and dissatisfied now as they were then. Running through every interview is the sense that life goes on, that this too shall pass. Each person's complacency was shaken by the fall of the Iron Curtain; it taught them that the future is never certain.

SIFF Review: Without

For reasons we are left to guess at, 19-year-old Joslyn takes a job on Whidbey Island as a live-in caretaker for Frank, an elderly, vegetative man.
Written and directed by Seattle native Mark Jackson, Without is an expertly crafted film that deftly blurs the line between Joslyn's inner, psychological turmoil and the outer, real world chaos that forms as her passive-aggressive relationship with catatonic Frank devolves.

Jackson elegantly stacks the banal minutiae of Joslyn's new job to build a dark, vibrating tower of isolation and tedium that steadily drives our heroine mad. This is a director that understands and can harness the power of moments. Locking all the sliding glass doors, crushing some pills, buying coffee; collectively and on their own, these drops of everyday life have power.

Without taps into a recurring narrative motif in Western storytelling - that of the island as both physical and metaphorical location. From Shakespeare's The Tempest to television's Lost, the island reflects and comments on the protagonist's inner life. We find Joslyn in such a place; she washes up on the cold, gray shores of grief and does her time thrashing about in a borrowed house for a mute, motionless audience who offers no comment but the occasional wordless moan.

Jackson and his cinematographers, Jessica Dimmock and Diego Garcia, show an aptitude with the unique Northwest color palette, and brush the screen with deep, soggy greens and blues. Taking brilliant advantage of cinema-capable DSLR cameras, the filmmakers get us physically and psychologically closer to Joslyn than film could have. It's exhilarating to see the future of filmmaking unfolding before you so starkly.

Light and Music: The Man Who Knew Too Much

There is relatively untapped power in using music, specifically source music (that which is heard or played or sung by characters in a non-musical), as a cinematic storytelling tool.

I came upon this notion last night after watching Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. Day being, at the time, more famous as a singer than an actress, I suppose it seemed only natural to try and incorporate her hit "Que Sera Sera" into the film some how. When it first appears early in the film, sung playfully by Day and her onscreen son, it reads as just a little forced and corny. But later, once the film has built to it's suspenseful climax, Day's character desperately recapitulates the song in an attempt to find her kidnapped child. Plunking percussively at a grand piano, she raggedly belts the tune until her son whistles back an answer.

Review: TRON: Legacy

Any fans of 1982's TRON who complain that its recent sequel, TRON: Legacy, is badly written, lacks depth, and only exists to showcase the latest advancements in movie-making technology have clearly not watched the original film in some time. TRON was a silly, written-by-committee corporate product that had nothing but then-state-of-the-art visual effects to justify its existence. It was a spectacle, and so is TRON: Legacy, but even more so.

Ignore the first 15 minutes or so. The film is actually pretty lame until Sam Flynn (son of Kevin, hero of the first movie) is sucked into the computer world of "The Grid", a virtual city created by his father. He's come in search of his forebear, who's been missing for the past 20 years. 

Once we're in The Grid, the film finally starts in earnest and things hit the ground running. The digital environment is rendered with skill, sophistication, and imagination, and far surpasses the modest, blocky canyons of the first film. The Grid really has a bustling, believable life to it. It's almost as if this virtual world has been growing and flourishing on its own all this time.

Practically the minute he materializes in The Grid, Sam is captured and forced into gladiatorial combat against ferocious "programs", digital humanoids who exist only in this virtual reality. This battle sequence is exquisitely and excitingly pulled off. It follows a video game logic, as does the whole film from this point, that just didn't exist yet in 1982. The use of 3D space in particular is pretty clever.

After a sequence where the famous "lightcycles" make a  magnificent return, Sam is suddenly rescued by the mysterious and beguiling Quorra, played with aplomb by Olivia Wilde, who's origin goes unexplained for some time. Quorra is the film's biggest surprise; Wilde renders her with such honesty, curiosity, and depth that its hard to believe she is only a computer program (or is she?). I won't say she belongs in a better movie, because she gives this dark, thinly written film some much needed heart. She is by far the most satisfying and fun character to watch.

Garrett Hedlund as Sam Flynn is really nothing special, just a more comatose version of Chris Pine's Kirk in  Star Trek. Bruce Boxleitner is surprisingly effective. Reprising his role as both Alan, Kevin Flynn's best friend, and his digital alter ego, Tron, he has a kind of wistful, old soldier quality to him; the pain of Kevin's long absence is far more present in his eyes than in Sam's. 

Jeff Bridges, who helped make the original TRON so much fun, has duel roles here, both as Clu, our villain who turns out to be something of a digital Hitler; and as Kevin Flynn himself, now grizzled, shamanistic, and somewhat bemused. In the latter role, Bridges is definitely in post-Dude mode; he even walks around in a bathrobe the whole time.

TRON: Legacy is unfailingly entertaining and unendingly gorgeous. Instead of relying entirely on blue screen, first-time director Joseph Kosinski opted to have physical sets built, and to clothe the actors in working lightsuits; these decisions help to give the look of the film some substance. Credit is also due to cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who manages to light faces in a unique and grounded way. Kosiniski and his team have finally done justice to Steven Lisberger's original vision of virtual reality, which was so far ahead of its time back in 1982.

Review: Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is a suspenseful masterpiece of body horror and paranoia set in the rigorous world of the New York Ballet as the company rehearses a new, "stripped down, visceral" rendition of Swan Lake. 

We follow Nina, a technically brilliant but emotionally timid ballerina with the company. She lives with her mother (herself a retired dancer), does no socializing, and thinks only of dancing. Nina has built and perfected her ballet technique over the years while letting all other parts of her life atrophy and slough away. She is ballet.

Two things fall into Nina's world to challenge her. One is the prospect of being cast as both the white and black swans in the company's upcoming show. The other is Lily, an imperfect but free-spirited newcomer. Thomas, the director of the ballet, subtly casts envy in Nina's mind for Lily's apparent effortlessness and ease of expression, which Nina has yet to attain. So begins a psychological character study that skillfully descends into the most terrifying depths of Nina's fragile, beleaguered psyche.

As Nina, Natalie Portman just might be giving the performance of her life. Her voice is a brittle leaf in the wind. When confronted with embarrassment or ridicule (which happens often), her face struggles to mask the crippling blow to her self esteem; the heartbreaking way Portman renders Nina in the first act of film is impressive on its own, but not until our consummate ballerina begins her slide into madness does the portrayal become truly masterful. Oh, and not to mention that the actress does 95% of her own dancing, and believably at that. 

As opening night draws closer, the pressure mounts and the terror builds. Nina has nowhere to turn for comfort, not to her director, not to her mother, and certainly not to her fellow dancers, who belittle each other at every opportunity. This is rare in cinema story-telling - a protagonist with no safe place to land, no port in the storm. We feel that same hopelessness, that same despair. It gets under the skin.

Black Swan feels like a culmination of everything Aronofsky has made thus far; there is the paranoid psycho-drama of Pi and Requiem for a Dream, the elegance of The Fountain, and quite a bit of the deep character study that The Wrestler did so well. The film also evolves into a very loose adaptation of Swan Lake, with it's story of seduction, rivalry, and chaste beauty vs. lustful passion. Long-time Aronofsky composer Clint Mansell even lets Tchaikovsky's opus seep into the score. And the cinematography by Matthew Libatique (also an Aronofsky veteran) dances with the actors, at times caressing them and at others mercilessly cornering them. The film and the 19th century ballet feed off each other; there are no islands in the arts. Aronosfky knows this, and it show. 

Review: Agora

Agora, Spanish-made but filled with the king's English, tells the mostly forgotten story of the female astronomer Hypatia, a proto-feminist and secular aristocrat who teaches the fledgling science of the heavens to classes full of men in ancient Alexandria, a city boiling over with religious strife. Brought heroically to life by Rachel Weisz, Hypatia is an intellectual and political force to be reckoned with. She wades headlong into the male-dominated seas of philosophy and religion in the face of radical Christian leaders who loudly declare the dominion men must have over women. This creates tension right from the start, and you get the sense that at any minute the fanatical masses will rise up to put Hypatia in her place.

One thing I did not expect was all the stoning; there is a lot of stoning. Christians stoning Pagans, Pagans stoning Christians, Christian's stoning Jews, Jews stoning Christians. Apparently it was the mass murder weapon of choice in those days. The sound of the stones is so strange and benign, like fat raindrops, as they cast death. 

Lensed by cinematographer Xavi Gimenez, the film is unfailingly gorgeous. Director Alejandro Amenabar, however, shows his greatest aptitude with actors, especially in the quieter, subtler scenes. Moments between Hypatia and her slave, Davus (Max Minghella), who falls hopelessly in love with her, are particular tense and riveting. 

For a swords-and-sandals picture, Agora is admirably fresh and accessible; the acting and much of the dialogue is natural, the production design is robust and lived-in, but what stands out most is the cinematography. The lighting and shot-making really give the action room to breathe. It's rare to see a film set circa B.C. that is not stuffy or overly ponderous.

The film's major flaw is its overall pacing; most individual scenes have a good flow to them, but the picture as a whole feels uneven, at times too slow and at others jarringly rapid. There must be a steadier director's cut tucked away somewhere, and indeed the cut that screened at Cannes last year was longer by 20 minutes, but given its lukewarm critical and box office reception (in this country, at least), I fear this or any better version may never see the light of day. 

There is an excellent film lurking just beneath the surface. Agora should have risen to Gladiator-type levels of praise and cultural relevance; alas, it is largely lost in the sands of time, much like Hypatia herself.