Gravity

80/100. See it. 

With great hope and expectation I entered the ext 3D theater in downtown SF to see Alfonso Cuaron's follow up to Children of Men. I wasn't there for the stars, I wasn't there for the setting, I wasn't there for the 3D. I was there for Cuaron. When I walked out of Children of Men I was in awe. I had seen something truly human. Truly groundbreaking. I had been taken to a dystopic future that I would never forget. Human values. Human camera work. All within a very high budget high concept wrapper. 

The first ten minutes of Gravity are perfect. The theatrical sound precision of a big theater is not to be underestimated. Wide dynamic range. Perfect placement of effects. Radio chatter is so accurate it feels visual. I loved entering the world of astronauts in such a simple mundane way. Routine exercises. Three personality types. Captain, science officer, extra guy. When the inciting incident comes, it is both a surprise and an exquisite shock. It is cinematic excellence. An event that could only be portrayed now, with this technology. 

The level of fear, subjective excitement and shock cannot really be understated. It is cinematic masterwork. It is what inciting incidents should be: the worst thing that could possibly happen to the protagonist. I loved this moment. I smiled broadly at the virtuosity. The boldness. The exquisiteness of execution. The grandeur. 

Cuaron is a filmmaker of the subjective. I love that. The subjective shaping the plastic screen. We move from point of view to point of view. Sometimes the camera's. Sometimes the protagonist. Sometimes another astronaut. Defining the narrative. The moves in subjectivity becoming part of the narrative structure. 

As the protagonist swoons into her crisis the camera moves closer and closer to her. It goes into her helmet, seamlessly. The world spins. We are lost with her. Seamless, almost. Almost perfect. 

Seamless except for its self consciousness. The move draws attention to itself somehow. It itself is an act. The shifts of subjectivity from bullock to cloney shortly later, while cinematic high wire work, seems to be asking for applause. Which I gave. It was illicited and I felt compelled to give it. To smile broadly at the boldness. I smiled broadly. 

Later on bullock finds herself back in the safety of a space station. She gasps for air and hangs free of gravity before the airlock, just breathing. The image is absolutely and unequivocally a womb shot. Protagonist in the womb. Echoing 2001. I found myself again self-conscious. Conscious of the view. The directors choice. The explicitness of it. I began to realize what had been shortchanged in the director's equation. 

It wasn't beauty, it was beautiful. It wasn't grandeur. It wasn't boldness. It wasn't inventive and really new cinematography. It was all these things. And I believe for many this will be enough to call it excellent. 

The problem for me is that the "moment" lasts too long. The shot saturates and saturates and saturates. 

There is an interesting analysis by Tarkovsky in his book on filmmaking, Sculpting in Time. Tarkovsky was no stranger to the subjective nor to the symbolic. Nor either to the saturated shot. No one I can think of rivals the long takes of Cuaron better than Tarkovsky. However, Tarkovsky held an important caveat when it came to the presentation of symbolic imagery: If the audience becomes aware that they are looking at a symbol, if they know the filmmaker is presenting a symbol that they are intended to accept, they inevitably reject it. They reject it either by flat out pushing it away as a coercion, or become reflective and pat themselves on the back for having noticed the symbol. The removal from the experience of the art is the same. The art and critical job of the filmmaker is to create what he called metonyms (proxies or symbols) that do not reveal themselves too easily to the conscious mind. If they do, the suspension of disbelief will be lost. The real purpose of the symbol is to communicate with the subconscious, not the conscious mind. 

I did love this film. But I was angry at this film as well. I felt it too simple too often. Like a Rubic's cube that has been cheated, ten steps and all the colors match. I wanted to work harder. To strain more into the blackness of space. To yearn with the humans desperate on the edge of the black void. The horrifying unknown. Cuaron wanted to take us there. I know it. Read his opening titles. Yet he didn't leave enough room for me. He didn't ask us to penetrate this horror and this fear ourselves. He did it all for us. He served it up like a breakfast in bed. In many ways a children's story. I always knew what he wanted me to feel. There was no collaboration. No shared dream. 

Now. All that said. This is a hell of a ride. That inciting incident has a way of coming back and developing. The world of astronauts in space has never been so vivid. So clear. The will of the protagonist grows and grows. It is a very American movie ironically. She has to become more adaptable. More driven. She has to survive. It is quite fantastic to see. It may be a unique cinematic feat, something never done to this scale in this setting.

I feel this film's strength is its cinematic virtuosity. Truly in a scale all it's own. Rivaled only by Cuaron's previous work. It's weakness is its underestimation of its audience's ability to recognize its symbols quickly, and our desire to dream into this space with less direction, with more openness, with more ambiguity. 

The Kids Are All Right

First world problems.

Inside Job: A film by Leni Riefenstahl

Inside job was not an epiphany. It was more of an afterthought.

I wanted to get some insight or greater understanding to the point
of enlightenment about the condition that rocked and continues to rock
and redefine our world global economies etc. What I got was an
extra grind

Now please note this film is extremely well made. Extremely
beautiful extremely high-quality, creative, inventive in its use of
interview positions, questioners voice present - this is an advanced documentary.
Really.


But the problem is:

When one construct stories that cease to be a quest - when the truth is laid out plainly and clearly and bluntly at the start and reinforced with more and more heavy handed (beautiful) imagery and interview, what are we dealing with?

We're dealing with propaganda.

I don't know where issue pieces like this really lay. where they need to go, what they need to do when a filmmaker comes to the project already knowing what he wants to say.

But it can't be this. It can't come out like this.

It's the same dilemma for fiction filmmakers, novelists, poets. In some way, maybe even explicitly, they know what their story is about, they know what they want to say to their audience. But they cannot explicitly spell it out or it becomes repugnant to the audience - like a bad pill, like bad cheese. Like bad food that that body simply rejects.

This film did not bring me in. Despite its beauty and authority. It only sent me away.

That cannot be what the filmmaker intended.

Someone smart once said, that Symbols must be used in stories and films because they elevate the story to an archetypal level. But if the symbols become explicit and recognizable as symbols, the power reverses and the audience is thrown back down to their terrestrial plane with no insight, noe elevation, and only the sense that symbols are dead.

Don't kill the symbols that you are trying to create.

Dil Chahta Hai: Sublime

Continuing on the Bollywood titles I don't know, the 2001 three person
buddy film titled Dil Chata Hai (The Desires of the Heart). It's a badass film. It's a film's film.

But of course it's more than just that. It's hard to put into words really. The fact that I can't verbalize it might be because I've watched it without subtitles in the whatever Hindi dialectic it must be in. Don't think I'm being just weird: I'm measuring something: I'm measuring the film language itself.

Plus luckily there are a number of english words peppered in along the way. Just enough really to keep me in the loop.

I can see this: He (the director and Amir Kahn, the star) - He's looking for romantic truth. Not just romantic love, or romantic pleasure. Some people look poetic truth or emotional truth, ecstatic truth (think Werner Herzog). This is the searching for romantic truth. And he does so in a three helix shaped maturation plot centering on the transformative power of true romantic love. And daggumit he pulls it off.

It's a gloriously long 3 hours which means: nothing is rushed and montages of togetherness / separation unfurl with utter lack of self consciousness or guile.

Something the Indian filmmakers of this genre seem to understand most is the emotional power of pleasure followed by pain and pain followed by pleasure in increasing dynamics and deepening realness. We FEEL the experiences these young men go through, and their different loves.

What does all this amount to?

Keep several things in mind: Indian cinema is designed as a true experience for the millions and millions who pay good good money to see it. The places, the sights - Goa (the beautiful resort region), the fair with roller coasters, the city and its grandeur, the night clubs and their exotic sexuality, the music - and the dancing.

Listen: The dancing in these movies has a bad wrap in our cynical, faux sophisticated culture. Look: dance and song are older that talking. Dance and song are designed to transcend that which cannot be spoken or demonstrated without rhythm. Our american culture idolizes musical talents as highly as film talents. We just made a divorce between the two in the 70s that we seem unable to mend. Our loss. If you stick with this movie til the Act I climax dance number where Amir Kahn meets HIS transforming love, you will know what I am talking about.

The scale, the sweep, the fact that a seeming Kahn-sibling or Cousin is making a kind of dramatic debut in this film, that Kahn himself - by the way - Amir Kahn is considered one of the top - say - three stars in India. His films are considered the best, highest quality, and his persona is unmatched. And yet he took a back seat in many ways in this film graciously giving time to his two counterparts.

Amir Kahn - it deserves a moment of mention. Kahn is not a star in the same way that we have Brad Pitt. Pitt is a kind of natural, magnetic star. He just looks good, and makes men want to be sexy like him and women want to have sex with him, but we all know there's nothing going on upstairs. Kahn is different. Watching him is like watching Charlie Chaplin act out a contemporary romantic lead. Kahn has the intelligence and the craft to move us as an audience exactly where we need to go. To give us the journey that we have paid for, that we need to go on, to the places we need to see. Kahn as much as guarantees this. This is why his films are considered the best, the highest quality. He is delivering something, like Chaplin did.

All right, enough about Kahn. Now, maybe the print you'll see here in the states will have dirt and hairs on it. Maybe the lighting is not perfect in every scene to our standards, maybe they're using cinemascope lenses from the sixties and it feels all squished and anamorphic like Lawrence of Arabia in the wide shots - I don't care! This is a film's film.

In the end: Three juvenile kids end up three mature men: compassionate, authentic, themselves. It is a maturation plot. And not just "responsible" or "compassionate".

What is great about this film and others like it (read Three Idiots) its that these characters are "Becoming Themselves" in the existential sense. They are going through hardship, trauma and love and becoming more than adult boys. They are becoming the men that only real life plus authentic soul can create. Read Nietzsche.

This story is a pleasure to go through, for we in the audience mature too when a movie is allowed to be three hours long.

Up Yours, Wallander

Oh, Kenneth Branagh, the shame, the scenery chewing. How dissapointed I was when your vehicle remake of an apparently wonderful Swedish detective series turned out to suck.

Granted, my steady diet of Foyle's War has made the prospect of hammy, mousey cryiey complaining in loo of detective work a repulsion to begin with. But was all summed up by one phrase:

Gilding the lily.

All the shots, all the hair, all the costumes, all the plot twists, all were overdoing what was already done. Perhaps they knew they were already redoing a series that was loved and successful. I shudder to think what will result in David Fincher's upcoming similarity.

Suffice it to say this: Kenneth Branagh had a terrible time mugging for this pilot. So did I.