Focus Features rocks my socks

Just got back from seeing Milk at the Castro Theater. I'll write more about that experience later on, but for now, can I just say how much I love Focus Features? Seriously, it is almost absurd how frequently a Focus Features release turns out to be my favorite movie of a given year. Sometimes when I see their logo appear before a movie or a trailer, I even get giddy with anticipation.

For a run of 3 or 4 years earlier this decade, Focus Features held utter sway over my heart and the hearts of other cinephiles. I can never settle on what my favorite movie of 2002 is, but Focus' Far From Heaven is definitely up there. (The other contenders are The Hours and Adaptation. Great year for Streep and Moore!) And my favorite pictures of 2003, 2004 and 2005 are all Focus releases: Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Brokeback Mountain.

After that, Focus lost their way a little bit. 2006 was the first year that none of their movies got any Oscar nominations; and in 2007, Atonement was certainly a well-made and acclaimed movie, but in some subtle way, it doesn't feel "Focus-y"... it's the kind of prestige drama that any studio could have released. Besides, I think I love the book Atonement too much to ever consider naming a film version of it, no matter how good, as my favorite film of the year.

But this year, Focus is back in form and I am loving it. My two favorite new movies of 2008 are In Bruges and Milk--both of them Focus Features productions. Like I said, this is getting ridiculous... but I don't want it to end!

The Law of Timespans

As I blogged earlier this month, I think that both Australia and Synecdoche, New York are interesting but flawed movies, and in both cases, I liked the first part of the movie better than the second half. That's the thing: both movies divide easily into halves, with a big jump in time separating the two parts.

The first part of Australia, the cattle drove, takes place over a matter of weeks, then there's a jump of several years, then new complications in the form of the Japanese invasion. These later scenes are comparatively weaker, and unnecessary; at the end of the first part, Nullah even says "Everyone got what they want," which is usually a signal that it's time to wrap things up. Synecdoche, New York is trickier because it plays with time throughout: still, in the first half of the film, the jumps in time are not large. But after Caden wins the MacArthur grant, the next thing you know, seventeen years have gone by and the movie's tone becomes increasingly "meta" and stifling.

And that brings me to an artistic axiom I devised, the Law of Timespans: There tends to be an inverse relationship between the amount of time a movie covers and the quality of the movie. In other words, a movie that takes place over a short period of time is more likely to be good than a movie that takes place over a long period of time.

I came up with this theory a couple of years ago after my first viewings of The Godfather, Part II and Chinatown. I became annoyed that Godfather II had won Best Picture in 1974 when I felt that Chinatown was clearly a better movie. But what made it superior? Its perfectly constructed, inexorable plot where nothing is out of place. The way it covers just a few days' time yet takes Jake Gittes from cocksure private eye to tragic hero. Whereas Godfather II is actually kind of messy, toggling between Michael's life as mob boss and Vito's early days in New York City. Despite its decades-long timespan and 3+ hour running time, it doesn't hit me like Chinatown does.

When I first came up with the Law of Timespans I thought it was profound; now, I realize it is more common-sense than ingenious. After all, a shorter timespan = fewer available moments to dramatize = fewer opportunities to make the wrong choice. With less potential story material, it's easier to get a handle on what you do have, and shape it accordingly. In general, I don't believe in Unfettered Art. I believe in form, structure, working within a set of constraints to spur creativity... all of which are aided by a short timespan.

Indeed, my Law of Timespans might be just another way to describe Aristotle's "Unity of Time and Action." It's funny, you read Aristotle's Poetics so many times in drama classes that it becomes a cliche... and you grow to despise the Unities when you read too many classical plays that follow the Unities to an absurd degree, taking place all on one day in some palace antechamber... and then you see a few flawed movies that don't respect the unity of time and action, and you realize how necessary the unities are!

I guess because Homer and other epic poems are fundamental texts of Western civilization, there's a perception that epic works are inherently better or more worthy. Maybe that's true for literature, but it seems like the opposite is true for drama and film. It's become a cliche to say that epic movies are "Shakesperean in scope," but if you think about it, Shakespeare's most acclaimed plays do not take place over long periods of time. He compressed time in his history plays; his comedies (as comedies must be) are madcap and quick; Hamlet is the most famously indecisive character in literature and yet his eponymous play takes place over only about a month's time. Meanwhile, The Winter's Tale is notoriously hard to direct because of its big shift in time, tone, and action halfway through!

Or, alternatively, what made Hitchcock such a great filmmaker? Lots of things... but might one of them be that none of his movies cover much more than a year's time, and many of his best movies cover even shorter timespans?

Highly-Anticipated Movie Reviews: "Synecdoche, New York"

Second in an occasional series. Note: "highly-anticipated" in this context means "movies I've anticipated for a long time," not "I believe you, the reader of my blog, have been waiting with bated breath for me to write about this film."


Title of movie: Synecdoche, New York

Reasons for anticipation: I seem like the sort of person who would like Charlie Kaufman movies, right? Indeed, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was my favorite movie of 2004--and four and a half years is a long time to wait for a follow-up! And learning that Synecdoche, New York centered on a playwright/director sent my anticipation up to a fever pitch.
My verdict: It definitely feels like a Charlie Kaufman movie. And yet: I want the old Charlie Kaufman back.

Explanation: Synecdoche, New York feels like the work of a man gripped by fear, grief, and a sense that time is running out--as if Charlie Kaufman had actually had a twin brother named Donald who died in a freak accident, and this death triggered in Charlie a sadness and a paranoia that spilled over into the script he was writing. The most ambitious of Kaufman's movies by a long shot, it is also the bleakest.

Kaufman's work has always had a sense of comic miserablism to it--I mean, Adaptation begins with Charlie's voice-over about being a fat, bald, incompetent loser. But at the same time, the movies were so wacky and original that they couldn't be anything other than life-affirming: watching such a creative mind at work, you felt invigorated, and thrilled that Hollywood could still surprise you. The movies were always delightful, and Eternal Sunshine was more than that--it was profound.

Synecdoche, New York certainly aspires to profundity, but it's lost the sense of delight. It follows its protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard, for about forty years of "one bad thing after another." The only good thing that happens to him--he wins a MacArthur Genius Grant--turns out to be a curse in disguise, as he feels he must prove himself worthy of the grant, and spends the rest of his life conceiving and rehearsing a massive theater piece that never opens. Rather than engaging with life, he becomes lost in the simulacrum/synecdoche world that he has created--building an exact replica of New York City inside a New York warehouse. The last part of the movie is a blur of deaths and funerals both real and re-enacted.

Where the earlier movies had John Cusack or Nicolas Cage making themselves look schlubby to play Kaufman's heroes, Synecdoche casts Philip Seymour Hoffman, probably the schlubbiest actor working today, as Caden. He gives a fearless performance, but he's maybe too passive in the role--not displaying enough of the mad-genius ambition that propels Caden to create such a massive work of art. Catherine Keener, who was so sparky and vibrant in Being John Malkovich, plays Caden's first wife as a glum-faced shrew with awful hair.

Brightening things up a bit is Samantha Morton, giving a very charming performance as the guileless box-office girl Hazel. And in a brilliant bit of doubling, Emily Watson plays the actress who plays Hazel in the play-within-the-movie. Hope Davis, in a small role as Caden's therapist, seems to have come from another, less dour Kaufman movie--she'd fit in with the mad scientists of Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine.

For me, the scene that encapsulates Synecdoche, New York (it's even on the movie poster above) shows Caden, late at night, working on his magnum opus. He has hired thousands of actors and now needs to tell them what their roles are, so he writes short scenarios on pieces of paper and distributes them to his cast the next morning. As the camera pans over the slips of paper, which cover the floor of the warehouse as far as the eye can see, we note that every scenario is sad and depressing: "You were raped last night." "You just lost your job." Thousands of papers, and not a happy one in the bunch.

If the movie took a skeptical attitude toward Caden's seeming belief that only unhappy situations can make for great art, I probably wouldn't have a problem with it. But because the movie, instead, reinforces the idea that depression = genius and genius = depression, my entire belief system rebels against it. People have called Synecdoche, New York a profound commentary on what it means to be an artist--but my God, if being an artist was always like that, who would ever choose to become one?

One could see parallels between Kaufman's life and his protagonist's: like Caden, Kaufman has been awarded a coveted honor, and his first work of art after he won the prize is deliberately big and ambitious--perhaps an attempt to prove himself worthy. So let me just say: Charlie, don't be so insecure; you richly deserved that Oscar for Eternal Sunshine. But you won't deserve any more Oscars if you spend the rest of your life self-consciously trying to make Great Art, at the expense of the light and witty touch that is the reason we came to love you in the first place.

Other observations:

• I may actually end up cheering for Charlie at the Oscars again this year--not for the Synecdoche script, but for its song "Little Person"--lyrics by Kaufman and haunting piano-ballad music by Jon Brion. I hope it gets nominated, since it's definitely one of the better movie-songs recently. Go listen to it on the movie's Facebook page.
• As I mentioned, this movie has few laughs for a Kaufman film, and even fewer if you are not familiar with the theater. When I went to see it with a theatrical friend, we were the only ones in the cinema laughing at lines like "My play has 567 lighting cues--of course we're not ready!"
• I remarked to my friend upon exiting the cinema that "this may just be the first absurdist movie I have ever seen." I mean this both in the sense of philosophical absurdism, and Theater of the Absurd. Kaufman plays around with time and identity and existence in an absurdist way--even the first scene seems to take place on just one morning, but if you pay attention to the clues, three months go by during it. At any rate, there's plenty of fodder here for philosophizing, theorizing, and writing essays; and first-time director Kaufman handles the dreamlike time-is-passing-by-too-fast thing very skillfully. I just feel like the movie is trying so hard to be fodder for philosophy (Roger Ebert even asserts that Caden's life is a true representation of every human life, which might be the gloomiest thing I have ever heard) that you can see the strain, and it's not pretty.

All I Want for Christmas is a New Holiday Song

Ever since Love Actually came out, Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" has been hard to avoid during the holiday season--making it exponentially more popular than any other Christmas song from the last 20 years.

It's a bouncy tune, and Mariah really sells it, but all the same, I wondered whether it had the staying power to become a holiday classic. It feels so commercial and the title is so obvious; also, I didn't know whether people liked it for the song itself or for Mariah's performance of it.

Well, yesterday I witnessed a major milestone in the unstoppable march of "All I Want For Christmas Is You" toward holiday ubiquity. On the street corner outside my office, at lunchtime, a brass band--probably fifteen people total--oompahed their way through "All I Want For Christmas Is You." Instrumental. No singing.

So this proves that the tune has become popular, and recognizable, and evocative of holiday cheer, even when it's divorced from the lyrics. And so I'm afraid we'll be hearing it even more in years to come. What do you want to bet that Mannheim Steamroller's next Christmas album will feature "All I Want For Christmas Is You" orchestrated with lute, recorder, and 80s-style synths? When that happens, we'll know the song is really here to stay.

Highly-Anticipated Movie Reviews: "Australia"

First in an occasional series. Note: "highly-anticipated" in this context means "movies that I've been anticipating for a long time," not "I believe that you, the reader of my blog, have been highly anticipating my thoughts on this movie."

Movie title: Australia

Reasons for anticipation: Moulin Rouge was my favorite movie of 2001, the movie I was obsessed with in high school, the first DVD I owned, etc. Seven and a half years (that's a third of my life!) is a long time to wait for Baz Luhrmann's follow-up!

Actors in major roles: Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, uptight English aristo left on her own in Australia
Hugh Jackman as the Drover, Outback cowboy, so rugged that he doesn't need to have a real name
Brandon Walters as Nullah, a little half-white half-Aborigine boy, persecuted by the authorities because of this

The verdict: Kind of awesome and kind of a mess

Elaboration: Rarely have I enjoyed so many moments of a movie while acknowledging that it doesn't work as a whole. There are patches of really astounding filmmaking in Australia, times when I gleefully thought "This is the Greatest Thing Ever!" (OK, I exaggerate: the Greatest Thing Ever [not to be confused with The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn] is still the "Roxanne Tango" from Moulin Rouge.) It helps that I have a high tolerance for stylization, corny jokes, old-fashioned movie moments, and the rest of Luhrmann's bag of tricks. All the same, he's trying to juggle too many disparate elements, and the genre pastiche doesn't hold together.

I loved Luhrmann's chutzpah in blatantly copying the shot that plays during the intermission of Gone with the Wind--you know, with the red sunset and the big tree on the left side of the frame--for the opening shot of Australia. Later in the movie there is a scene that is basically a gender-reversed version of the scene where Rhett dances at the ball with Scarlett even though she is a social pariah. (And Kidman wears another great red dress. And she and Jackman dance to "Begin the Beguine." Be still my heart!) Australia begins in 1939, so its allusions to Gone with the Wind and to The Wizard of Oz pay tribute to the two most famous movies of an incredibly rich film year, and I found this delightful.

(Also, how did I never before notice that in one of those movies, Scarlett's old way of life is "gone with the wind," and in the other, Dorothy gets carried off by a literal wind?)

Unsurprisingly, Australia is a great-looking movie. So was Moulin Rouge, but that one moves so fast that you don't necessarily notice the beauty of individual shots and compositions, as you do in Australia. There are obvious showpieces, like the initial Gone with the Wind homage, or the soaring landscape shots, or Hugh Jackman's entrance clean-shaven in a white dinner jacket (audible gasps in the theater). But smaller moments also show great attention to aesthetics, e.g. a shot where Kidman lays her milky-pale hand on Jackman's chest, then he grasps it with his tanned weatherbeaten hand, then Walters runs in and puts his caramel-skinned hand atop theirs. Beautiful! And it's fun to see Luhrmann make a movie that takes place almost entirely out-of-doors, after the studio-bound Moulin Rouge.

The original New York Times review of Moulin Rouge said "You get the feeling [Kidman] would set herself aflame if Mr. Luhrmann asked her," which is a wonderfully apt description of her performance in that movie, and applies just as well to Australia. She is willing to go along with all of Luhrmann's tonal shifts--first playing Lady Sarah's snooty repression for laughs, then throwing herself into the melodrama of the latter part of the film. (How can a woman who has so little vanity when it comes to her acting have so much vanity when it comes to the smoothness of her forehead?) Meanwhile, what's interesting about Jackman's performance is that even though he's playing a brawling, riding, hyper-masculine hero, he is the one who must allow his beauty to be objectified, deliver an affecting monologue about his past, and cry on cue. Usually those things are the woman's responsibility.

Kidman and Jackman are accomplished actors who know that Australia requires them to play archetypes, not real human beings. Brandon Walters, however, is too young to realize how stylized and schematic the movie is, and that he is supposed to embody the archetypal Cute and Spunky Orphan. Therefore, he plays Nullah with absolute sincerity, and Nullah is the only character here that you believe could have ever existed in the real world, not merely in silver-screen imagination.

So now I'm getting to why Australia is a mess. For one, this clash of acting styles reveals that Luhrmann's love of movie archetypes and over-the-top scenarios conflicts with his desire to treat the discrimination faced by Aboriginal Australians with the seriousness it deserves.

Now, people accuse Moulin Rouge of being a mess too, and even if I disagree with that, Australia is undoubtedly messier. For all its excess, Moulin Rouge is a backstage story based around two simple questions: will the show be a hit, and will the lovers end up together? When those questions are answered, the movie ends. Australia, however, switches between several questions, and introduces new questions more than halfway through, and the characters' motivations have to change in rather arbitrary ways in order to keep up. Plus, we never get a real sense of what Lady Sarah was like back in England, which leaves her under-characterized for the whole movie. What does she want?

So, while Australia tries to juggle too many questions and is thus too long, parts of it also feel rushed, or too short, or under-motivated. For instance, on the cattle drive, the Drover tells Sarah that they'll need to wake up at midnight and sing to the cattle in order to keep them calm. Now, this sounds like a perfect opportunity to develop the love story: at this point, the characters have gotten over their initial dislike but are unwilling to admit their attraction. What would they say to each other, when they're the only people awake under that vast Outback sky? I anticipated a charming scene of Hugh and Nicole singing, flirting awkwardly, and getting mooed at by cattle. But it doesn't exist. And so there's not enough sexual tension built up before they have their first kiss.

There are a few other times in Australia when I thought scenes were "missing"--I won't bore you with specifics, but let's just say that I'll need to see whether the DVD has any deleted scenes, and usually I don't care about that.

There are many parallels, too, between Australia and Out of Africa--a movie that gets a lot of flak these days, I guess for being middlebrow, but it hangs together much better than Australia does. Meryl Streep gives a detailed portrayal of how it would feel to be an aristocrat falling reluctantly in love with a free-spirited adventurer, while the overstuffed script of Australia requires Kidman to do that in shorthand. Though as I said, she's up for anything, it's hard to find a through-line between her scenes.

Australia has a really exciting first half, centered around the set-piece of a cattle drove and stampede, and maybe the movie should've limited itself to the drove and its immediate aftermath. But then it skips forward 3 years to the Japanese attack on Darwin, Australia (glossing over in about 10 minutes what Out of Africa took an hour to do), and everything just becomes too much, excessively resorting to the old children-in-peril trick to manipulate the audience. Still, if Luhrmann had told only the story of the drove, his movie would have been basically a Western--very entertaining and beautifully shot, but probably not ambitious enough for him. He's trying to create a mythic, epic Australia, and for that, nothing less than a switch halfway through to World War II drama will do.

Other observations:

• Do you know how happy it made me to see that the Narcoleptic Argentinian has a role in this movie too?
• In America, if you want a PG-13 rating, you can only use the F-word once, so it'd better be good. Titanic got this wrong. Australia gets it right.
• The credits say that the "Drover's Theme" is by Elton John, but the music that plays whenever Jackman appears is really Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze." At first I thought that this was clever--the music director has orchestrated and permutated this simple melody to fit all kinds of situations, like the Marseillaise in Casablanca--but after a while it just got on my nerves. The movie's not about sheep--it's about cattle!

Dressing with a Degree of Difficulty

I don't know if I'd call myself a "fashionista," but one thing I really like doing is coming up with outfits inspired by where I'm going or what I'm doing that day. (I rock costume parties, if I do say so myself.) It amuses me, and in an odd way it makes life easier: having some parameters eliminates the "paradox of choice," you know.

But I just found out that my office's holiday party is going to be held at a tiki dive bar, and for once, I'm at a loss to come up with the perfect outfit.

Let's parse the situation:

• The party is at a dive bar, meaning that it would be wrong to look too fancy, dressy, or "done." So I need to look studiously nonchalant--which is hard.
• It's also a tiki bar, which requires a certain sense of whimsy and lightness. Bright, summery floral prints sound more appropriate than wintry sweaters.
  
• But at the same time, it is a holiday party, which means that it would be wrong to look too summery, as though I'd forgotten that it's December outside.
  
• This is an office party, and I'm the new girl, so I don't want to look too outrageous, or like a floozy. I have to work with these people every day, after all.
• But at the same time, because I work with these people every day, I want to wear something that they haven't seen me wear before--something I probably wouldn't wear to the office.
  

So you understand the quandary I'm in: wanting an outfit that is tropical but Christmasy, distinctive but not wacky, fun but not immodest, relaxed but not staid. If choosing outfits got scored for degree of difficulty, like Olympic gymnasts, this one would be a 10.

And we haven't even touched on the other challenges of my first-ever office party (and first-ever time in a tiki bar), foremost among which will be refraining from singing "Mele Kalikimaka" when I get a little tipsy.

Image of tiki bar stolen from Mead Hunter's blog.

Timofey the Emigré

I spent the past several months slowly working my way through an anthology called Fierce Pajamas: Humor Writing from The New Yorker. Among all the parodies and comic sketches (many of which are very funny, indeed), one story stood out as richer and stranger and more poignant than the rest. It also contained the best literary description of a panic attack that I could ever hope to read.

That story was "Pnin," by Vladimir Nabokov. With minor revisions, it became the first chapter of his novel of the same title – a novel I immediately bought and read.

Pnin, which Nabokov originally composed as seven New Yorker short stories in order to earn money and amuse himself while working on Lolita, has been criticized for its loose structure, but this didn't bother me. It recently occurred to me that many of my favorite childhood "novels," such as Mary Poppins, are really just collections of short stories, so I think it's a perfectly valid form. Besides, this is Nabokov we're talking about – a.k.a. The Tsar of Ultra-Clever Literary Gamesmanship – so the further you read, the more you notice repeating motifs, brief allusions to characters who then get fleshed out in later chapters, flashbacks and recursions, and (no surprise) an unreliable narrator who gives everything a final twist. Thus, though there's no overarching plot, it still seems very much of a piece.

And Prof. Timofey Pavlovich Pnin – the linchpin holding it all together – has quickly become one of my favorite literary characters. At one point we learn that Pnin dislikes Charlie Chaplin movies, which is funny, because he himself is lovable in a similar way to the Little Tramp. Pnin is the eternal underdog – a divorced Russian emigré with a hilariously shaky command of English and a talent for botching what he sets out to do – yet he never loses his dignity and never stops striving. His continuing in his Pninian ways despite the fact that his colleagues make fun of him behind his back is almost heroic.

So buried underneath all the dazzling Nabokovisms is a thoughtful exploration of the way that we perceive, judge, and underestimate each other. Because of the language and temperamental barrier separating Pnin from his colleagues at a small 1950s college, they consider him a buffoon. But he has led a harder life than most, he remains good-hearted and optimistic, and despite his inability to master English, is a real egghead. When trying to talk sports with a 14-year-old boy, Pnin can only mention the fascinating (to him) fact that Anna Karenina contains the first mention of tennis in Russian literature. There is exquisite comedy in this – funny but oh so human.

So I know that this sounds like the kind of sentimental and "uplifting" conclusion that Nabokov would scorn, but one of the things I take from Pnin is a resolve to treat the real-life Pnins of the world (the awkward, the eccentric, the people whose visible flaws frighten me because they recall my own secret flaws) with the care and respect that they deserve.