Take 2

You may have noticed that this blog has been mostly dropped lately. No recent posts, no responses to comment(s), no love. The main reason is that it simply wasn't sustainable as it was. The posts were consistently too wordy, we stopped seeing so many new releases, and the posts were consistently too wordy. So, let's try again.

It's just me, Justin, now. Kathryn has her own blog happening, which is quite good and far more important than this one. You should check it out. Since it's just me, I don't have to ask before doing what's about to happen...

I'm moving to wordpress. Follow me!

Royale with Less Cheese

Where’s my bag of superlatives?

Casino Royale is the best Bond movie I’ve seen (and I’ve seen them all) starring the best Bond yet (Daniel Craig). I know this qualifies as sacrilege for you Sean Connery fans out there, but I see little room to quibble about this. Connery was great as the original Bond, but Craig takes Bond places Connery never did…or could have, for that matter. The Bond series needed to grow beyond the same cheesy one-liners and misogyny that has been coming down the assembly line since Connery’s days. It’s a tribute to just how good Connery was that all the Bonds since have essentially been doing great (Roger Moore), good (Pierce Brosnan), terrible (Timothy Dalton), or forgettable (sorry, George Lazenby, but didn’t we almost have it all?) impersonations of him. Until now.

I’m not one to prize realism above all else, and I certainly understand that when watching a Bond movie, especially, it’s fairly silly to harp on what’s realistic and what’s not. That said, it is refreshing to see a Bond who is buff enough to do some of the things that wimpy James Bonds have been doing for decades.

Not to mention a Bond that actually seems at least slightly tormented by a touch of humanity—you know, that conscience thing that bugs you when you keep killing people or using them for sex and information to kill someone else before killing them or realize that your entire life is dedicated to saving a country that doesn’t know you exist. Villains have been challenging Bonds with this information for as long as they’ve been revealing their diabolical plots just in time for them to be foiled, but, for the first time, we have a Bond who confronts himself with this depressing truth.

With a few exceptions, there are fewer outlandish explosions, but nearly every other part of the Bond formula is there. The woman he may or may not be able to trust, in the end. The gambling (lots of it, and thank you, writers, for not making Le Chiffre’s tell as obvious as it at first seemed), the fast cars, the guns, the martini (kind of). But with Craig we’re allowed a certain depth of character that wasn’t revealed to us with the other avatars. And, with the exception of the pedantic explanations of Texas Hold ‘Em awkwardly threaded through the film, the dialogue is much improved, as well, as is the cinematography (dig that black-and-white intro).

Within the Bond genre, Casino Royale is the new king. Just where that genre fits into the broader world of movies…well, I’ll leave that for some other time.

-Justin Burton

Sc(c)oots On Over

FYI: Justin has a 'guest posting' on Scott Haile's blog. Scott is a PhD student at Boston College and writes about many things theological. Somehow, he's let The Simpsons slip in... All the same, his place is a good read, J's post excepted.

The Departed

Martin Scorsese intrigues me in a way that few directors can. I don’t love him, and I don’t wait with bated breath for his next movie to release. I think his films are gratuitously violent in unnecessarily fantasy-like ways. When they’re over, I think to myself, ‘What just happened here?’ Yet, when I’m in the middle of a Scorsese flick, I am fully engrossed, as he pulls me in in a way that only the best storytellers can.

The Departed is all about corruption, from the opening scene until the final bullet-through-the-head. Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is a high-ranking policeman who actually works for local mafia boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) desperately wants to join the police force and can’t. Costigan is hired for deep cover to find the rat in the force. All of this we know from the get-go; there is no real suspense for the viewer, as the good guys and bad guys are delineated before the opening credits. Watching the dance between cops, mafia, supposed cops, and supposed mafia, however, turns out to be quite delightful—it’s a 2.5 hour movie that doesn’t require a watch glance.

Most of what is great about the movie is the acting. Damon and DiCaprio are seasoned veterans at this point, though their boyish faces make them seem like they are still new. And Nicholson justifies much of the raving about his role. Mark Wahlberg as Dignan, however, turns in far and away the best performance. I’ve been enjoying Wahlberg since Boogie Nights, as he’s proven himself profoundly suited for some of the quirkiest and most obscene roles in Hollywood. He doggedly abuses every character that crosses his path in The Departed, and, despite his calloused and insensitive bombast, he turns out to be the only moral compass in the movie that is not also cutely naïve (see Martin Sheen as Queenan).

One note on realism: It is refreshing to watch a movie full of cops and mafia where everyone shoots everyone else in the head. It is exceedingly frustrating to keep watching movies where a character gets shot in the chest and falls over, only to return to save the day minutes later because s/he was wearing a bullet-proof vest, after all. Why, I have often asked myself, can’t movie characters just learn to shoot people in the head? The movie depicts realistic Boston accents from all involved, and the characters are embarrassingly racist, just as the city itself is.

There is a good chance that Scorsese had some broad, overarching moral he wanted to convey with The Departed. The lesson I learned? Don’t join the Boston police force unless I want to get shot in the head.

-Justin Burton

City Lights

We watch a lot of movies, but a particular weak spot for us is classics. I’ve seen a decent representation of AFI’s top 100, but Kathryn and I have always gravitated towards newer movies (there are good reasons, I think, that I do, but that is the stuff of another post). But when staying with our friends John and Alicia Pittard a few weeks ago, the four of us watched the 1932 Charlie Chaplin film City Lights.

Chaplin was quite a remarkable figure, writing, directing, arranging music for, and starring in his films. City Lights was a dying breed when it was released. Talkies had been around for half a decade, and one must assume that only someone of Chaplin’s reputation and stature would have expected much success with a silent film in 1932.

The most talked-about scene in the movie is the final one, which seems to produce divergent readings. Months after the tramp secures money for his unnamed object of desire (Virginia Cherrill) to travel overseas for a surgery that will end her blindness, he encounters her at her flower shop and, after an awkward exchange, she recognizes her benefactor. When she does, the tramp points to his eyes and says, ‘You can see?’ to which the woman responds, ‘I see now.’

What, exactly, is meant by this final statement is unclear. The optimistic reading says that she sees him for the kind soul he is—she, who has gotten to know the tramp’s inward goodness, is able to see him in a positive light that no one else has before. The more jaded reading says that she sees him for what he is—a homeless, penniless tramp who can offer her no sense of security or any kind of life together at all. Each sense of ‘see’ involves a new kind of understanding. In the former sense, the woman understands the tramp in a way that is new for him (positively); in the latter, she understands him in a way that is new for her (negatively).

Facial expressions help little. The woman maintains the sympathetic face she models throughout the movie. It could plausibly signify either love or pity. The tramp’s face is equally unhelpful. He seems both hopeful and nervous, which places him with the audience in trying to determine what it is the woman is trying to convey with the word ‘see.’

My tendency is toward the happier ending. It is, after all, called a ‘Romance Comedy,’ which rather predetermines my expectations. Whichever reading is applied, the ambiguity of the ending is a perfect conclusion to the brilliant scenes of pantomime that precede it, as the viewer has been drawn into an interactive medium where visuals are supplemented by her imagination, and she is left to supply the final verdict for the film’s climax.

What is up with it, Vanilla Face?

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is the most irresponsibly offensive movie I have ever seen.

Now, I realize that I am usually fairly liberal in my opinions on what works of art, including film, can do as regards the limits and boundaries of taste. What rubs me wrong here, however, is that Borat Sagdiyev, a sincere if sometimes bigoted Kazakhi, has been exploited by 20th Century Fox, as his misguided attempts at a documentary of America have been appropriated for the mocking laughter of a calloused and xenophobic world.

Borat, as I mentioned and as the title of the movie makes clear, is from Kazakhstan. His foibles—and, let’s be honest, there are many—result from his limbo-like positioning between being a newly converted Christian, on the one hand, and a dyed-in-the-wool secular humanist/communist, on the other. This duality produces in him a curiosity with the world and a desire to know (almost) as many kinds of people as he can, but it also means that he is left with the vestiges of misogyny and anti-Semitism. As Borat travels across America, we are supposed to pay more attention to what he doesn’t understand (like how to use toilet paper or more proper methods of proposing marriage) than to the valuable lessons he learns. And somehow, all of this is supposed to be funny.

But, even if 20th Century Fox tried to obscure them, the valuable lessons are there, nonetheless. One of my favorite scenes is when Borat is driving through Atlanta and pulls over to ask directions from a group of black teens. Instead of being afraid or making judgments about the teens based on their skin color, Borat engages them and ends up learning some slang as well as how to sag his pants. Now, of course, these things are still mostly foreign concepts to him, and it is actually funny to see him trying to master slang terminology and sagging a pant-and-underwear combination that was never meant to be sagged. But it is only funny because Borat himself knows that he is outside of his comfort zone and gets a kick out of the differences between his culture and the teens’.

And it is his willingness to embrace these differences that ultimately gives me hope for his evolution as a culturally- and socially-aware person. If he can learn to laugh and grope for some common ground with a group of Atlanta teens with whom he has nothing in common, then perhaps he can also learn that Jews, women, and whatever other group of people he currently misunderstands are more similar to him than he realized, also.

It is this lesson that should have rung true in the Borat movie. Instead, we are left with some sick executive’s idea of a joke at the expense of a sincere man who has made himself vulnerable by being willing to share his journey through film.

Obviously, I don’t recommend that you waste a cent on this horrendously mean-spirited movie. I hope, though, that those of you who have seen it, along with the millions of others who are flocking to theaters, are able to see past the production editing that attempts to highlight only Borat’s quirks and ‘foreign’-ness and realize that the real Borat is a little more like the rest of us—sometimes misinformed, often lost, but always yearning to be accepted.

And I hope that we can all realize that that is nothing to be laughed at.

-Justin Burton

Ranger-Man Diction (or something like that...)

Stranger Than Fiction is a quite charming movie, upheld by predictably good performances by Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Dustin Hoffman. I was a bit surprised at how enjoyable the movie is, as I thought it looked like one of those flicks that shows everything you need in the movie trailer, then falls flat when it runs for 90 minutes (if we ever get the wherewithal to pull it together enough to pass out annual awards on this blog, I think Best and Worst Movie Trailers should be honored). Not so, however.

One of the main themes running through Stranger Than Fiction is agency. That is, who—or what—controls our actions? According to Fiction, not our selves. Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is controlled in this movie by patterns of behavior that he no longer thinks about, bureaucratic efficiency principles, a watch, and a third-person omniscient disembodied narrator’s voice. Crick is able, at moments, to impose his own will upon his own life, but he inevitably finds his steps redirected by outside forces. The movie climaxes with Crick agreeing to a particularly tragic set of events as set forth by Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson), his narrator, but this is more a conceit to let us know that he is noble; there is no indication that he really has the authority to make this decision.

What is striking is that the moral of Fiction, if there is one, is that we should stop striving to control our lives. Crick finds ultimate contentment when he finally stops struggling and yields to Eiffel. At the heart of this moral seems to be some localized notion of chaos: much of our lives are happenstance or luck, so why try to make them otherwise? The first part of this many of us would be served well to ponder. Realizing the role of happenstance helps us better understand that, for instance, we are not members of a class of the richest 1% of the history of the world because of anything we have done. But, to follow such a realization with some form of nihilism is simply irresponsible. While there is much about our lives that we did not or will not be able to control, there is much that we can and should.

The end of the movie was a bit fluffy for my taste. Without going into too much detail and ruining it, I can say that I thought the opportunity existed for the perfect ending, but it was missed. Late in the movie, Kay Eiffel and Prof. Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) are discussing her latest book in his office, when the matter of the ending is broached. The conclusion I wanted would’ve had Hilbert saying, ‘The ending sucked.’ Then cut to black, cue music, and roll credits. Give it a try when you see it and see how it strikes you, and feel free to submit your own ideas for endings.

-Justin Burton