Previously: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005...
Two quick notes, skippable for the disinterested. The Decade Review Revue continues because I always meant for it to take a long time, spread well past when your list-collating people are collating lists of such things. Not because we are now properly in a new decade — as a man once said, "Nobody likes a math nerd, Scully" — but because I enjoy this project and can take my time. See, reviewers and columnist types — those with niceties like editors, paychecks and readers — have to do constant pulse-taking and odometer-checking as they jog their beat. So right about now they're, what?, supposed to be writing about awards and/or festivals and/or generating think-pieces about, like, what celebrities wear to court. Daaamn, that's a harsh gig, but I ain't judgin', I'm just sayin'. Surely this is a stubborn exercise in what my sixth grade teacher politely called “divergent thinking” but the post-mortem on The 2000s is not done till we’ve weighed all the organs and sewn it back up.

One of the reasons the "Two Zero Zero X" lists take so long to write is that I make a point to investigate a lot of films from each year that I hadn't caught up with and rewatch anything I have not seen in awhile. So, logically, the more recent the year of inquiry, the less time I've had to see everything I'm interested in. But I'm finding that it doesn’t really matter. Gaze, for instance, at this original Best of 2006 round-up, and note that it doesn't look much different from a mash-up of the list below plus a couple of foreign film holdouts from 2005 and a couple of items that would show up on this 2007 list. We're entering territory largely already covered, since this journal's inception in 2005. So dread the upcoming day when I have to discover if I really have more to say about Grindhouse (2007!), but in the meantime, welcome to 2006, which isn't so different from last time we visited 2006...

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2006

10. V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, scr. Larry Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, from the comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd)

Well, you can draw this stuff, but that doesn't mean you can film it. The V for Vendetta comic that Alan Moore wrote between 1982 and 1985 extrapolates a political dystopia out of '80s Thatcherism and sets against it a sort of man-against-the-system freedom fighter missing link between archcriminal terrorist Fantômas and the proto-superheroics of The Shadow. It is an almost-direct-engagement of contemporary political situations by way of enlargement. The polemics on-page are located at the inflamed ends of a spectrum, which is the position from which, gods bless him, Moore always makes sociopolitical argument, which is to say that the comic is about Fascism v. Anarchy. The older and wiser Moore gets, the more he boils human power struggle down to these terms, which makes for compelling art and zero tolerance for, say, American and Australian filmmakers futzing around with his book. Multipurpose metaphor, of course, is how one builds things to last.

Of the transition from agitprop comic to the McTeigue/Wachowskis/Silver poli-sci-fi film, Moore offered the astute criticism that the metaphor has been remolded to a sort of contemporary American liberal response to neo-conservativism. This is, of course, meant as a complaint, but might as well be a compliment, because, Jesus, ain't that something? Joel Silver surely has his own peculiar voice as a producer, and the verdict may be iffy on the voice of Mr. McTiegue, but part of the Wachowski project thus far has been to dance a highly subversive ballet on the stage of the monolithic studio system without allowing the sundry associated pressures to interfere with their choreography. The decade's preferred commercial spectacle genres were superhero action and nerd fantasy literature adaptation, and, 2006 being Life During Wartime and a Dark Time for the Nation and Post-9-11 and all, V for Vendetta is rather a break in continuity in this pop art dialectic. It sprays graffiti on the broad, oppressive walls of Batman Begins, and, because it wears a mask, can walk right up and do its business in broad daylight.


9. Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven, scr. Verhoeven, Gerard Soeteman)

There is something of the same work being done in Black Book as in decade fellows The Pianist and Inglourious Basterds, in that cine-serious authors with hearty, ironic senses of humor have made deep-probe adventures set in non-battlefront corners of World War II, and largely in reaction to how the war is depicted and discussed at the movies. In their particular ways, Polanski, Tarantino and Verhoeven find their tendencies to puckish perversity roused by an interesting unresolvable tension: war, this war in particular, provides a marvelous toy chest with which to build stories, and is at the same time the most disgusting thing of which human beings are capable.

Black Book is then a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the ark popped open at the beginning, and the whole adventure story scorched by punishing fire. Verhoeven and actress Carice van Houten go on an epic marathon run with heroine Rachel Stein as she tries to outrun the razing of the European landscape, hopping and dodging through story-modes and transforming from refugee to resistance fighter to girl spy to revenger. If John Rambo grunted that to survive war, you have to become war, here are a dozen variations on what he might have meant, and they all boil down to the constant, increasing moral compromise. Whatever you do to survive in the moment, you pay for later. Whoever is on top after the battle needs a scapegoat. If a principle is exhibited in this formula it is the conservation of mass: all that shit is going to end up dumped on somebody, over and over, forever and ever. If there are tips provided on how to survive the ordeal of existence, they are that once in awhile chocolate can save your life, and never climb into a coffin before it is your time. This is Man's Inhumanity to Man as action-adventure spectacle, and a Thrilling Survival Tale of the Enduring Human Spirit in which history is chronicled in one endlessly long black book.


8. Gumby Dharma (dir. Robina Marchesi)

Shucks, back in 2009 I had hoped Gumby Dharma, the epic-in-miniature biographical documentary about Art Clokey, would find a good distribution channel and lead to sudden widespread interest in Clokey's animation, and there would be a bunch of exciting articles about Gumby for me to read. None of this happened, and, worst of all, Art Clokey stopped motion on this plane of existence early last year, passing away on January 8, 2010 at the age of 88. The bulk of his work remains poorly represented on modern home video formats and Gumby Dharma has shown on the Sundance Channel and was finally released on video in March, 2010.

Documentaries about filmmakers and their work are in no short supply, and in sundry form litter the Special Features menus of a thousand DVDs. Gumby Dharma is automatically interesting for those who value Clokey’s work, but it also builds a case for its subject as a filmmaker worthy of study beyond just the recognizability of Gumby bendy toys. This work begins by telling Art Clokey's story without flinching, which means personal and professional triumphs are not inflated beyond their context, and death, drugs, disease, loss, abuse and bad behavior — those examples inflicted by Clokey or upon him — are met head-on. If that is not extraordinary for a 21st century documentary, please, please do not forget that we are still talking about Gumby cartoons, and that this is a story that has never been told with such depth and honesty. This is not to paint Gumby Dharma as some sort of scandalous exposé of Art Clokey; it is, rather, a complicated, naked, and ultimately joyous portrait of a man, an artist, an animator, a filmmaker.

Last time around, my notes focused on the film's excellent formal choices and valuable research and historical testimonies, and delicately rendered profile of Clokey. I do not want to lose sight of what I feel is Gumby Dharma's overriding thesis, which is that the animator possessed a unique vision of the world and was able to channel that into undulating, speaking, dancing clay. All that passion and pain, curiosity and fear, weirdness and love pulse through Gumby; Gumby skates and plays along the path, and he is the path, the ball of clay, the heart, the part, the enterable book, the blade of grass, the you.


7. A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, scr. Linklater from the novel by Philip K. Dick)

These things cannot be defined in tidy syllogisms or anything, and this isn't about, like, rules, man. But to help sort things out, we might say that: Obviously not all films about drugs are proper head movies. And at the risk of offending, what I'm talking about with this classification does not include a vast majority of stoner comedies, nor the sort of SFX-heavy audio-visual spectacles one might use as an in-home Laser Floyd show. A great head movie A) is about and/or is an investigation into consciousness expansion and/or warping, and/or B) examines, encapsulates, and/or explains the human experience with an eye that is part anthropological, part philosophical, part spiritual. Hints that the film might open up with a chemical key are optional. Whew!

A Scanner Darkly has those qualities, so by my count Richard Linklater has two fine head movies under his belt, and a handful of interesting experiments (the Before Sunrise/Set diptych and Waking Life, which are earnest almost-theres, Slacker, which plays better straight or very caffeinated, etc.) Where the beautiful and fuzzy-hearted Dazed and Confused wafts by on a Circle of Life/Family of Man buzz, A Scanner Darkly is paranoid, doomed, tragic, cottonmouthed. Fueled on dread, it is set entirely during that bad moment you are coming down, notice your fingernails are way too dirty, there is a stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, and maybe you're not coming down after all. So get this: undercover agent Bob Arctor goes so deep under that he ends up investigating himself, and watching with a detective's fascination as the twin serpents of Id and Superego begin uncoiling from their cosmic hula around the center pole. Do try this at home, but maybe not in public.

When last we saw Keanu Reeves on this journey, the effect was opposite: Neo staring back at the threshold of perception, seeing the code beneath the skin, and finally learning to sense the gold that unites it all — no glass, no scanner. If Robert Zemeckis' mo-cap freakout Beowulf accidentally captures the acid-vision nightmare that humans are weird-eyed puppet husks being jerked awkwardly around too-vivid sets, reenacting some kind of mythological parody, the computer rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly serves a not dissimilar function. Here the stage is made vague or simplified with outlines and color planes, while the surface of the players players crawl and squirm; the whole world is covered with a thin metaphorical hide, a construct, a mask, a cartoon envelope that can't quite be peeled back but isn't quite telling the truth.


6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (dir. Gore Verbinski, prd. Jerry Bruckheimer, scr. Ted Elliot, Terry Rossio)

Curse of the Black Pearl reformed the theme park ride’s impressionistic story of skeletal pirates, hoarded gold and the wages of sin into particularly buoyant four-quad fantasy action adventure. With the scant narrative materials of the theme park source material used up, Dead Man's Chest scrapes up the unused themed visuals (fireflies), settings (bayou), and ambiance, then goes about the business of transforming the Pirates of the Caribbean series from a potential string of cast-connected sequels into a trilogy proper, and that is an exponentially more difficult exercise. That is, Dead Man's Chest has to connect forwards and backwards to make three scheduled films into a one massive three-chapter story. To illustrate the difficulty and ambition of that task, consider that while remembered as "trilogies," The Godfather is not built like this, Star Wars is not built like this, and so forth. Pirates is outsized, long-form original storytelling, whether it is "branded" as a concern of a major corporation or not. On the business end, where all films are merchandise, someone in a suit seems to have remembered that the merchandise is still art, that despite all their cruise lines and shopping mall emporiums, The Company is still in the business of stories and characters.

This is all simply to say that despite the increasingly pre-drinking-age milieu of the Summer Movie Game, the Pirates films are unusually committed to and serious about that game. They are crafted with the belief that an audience is invested in the tale and the world, so every nook, cranny, and cannon is crammed to the brim. Completely, seam-burstingly overstuffed, to be sure, but this middle chapter in particular is a Valu-Pak film; it's so much movie. There is faith here that this story should be dense and all subplots should intertwine and motivate each other, that sets should be rich with detail, every single character should grow or change or be tested — that each of them is someone's favorite player and so should have a hero's entrance, a crowning moment of cool, and a dramatic exit — and that half the spectacle is of actors acting. That makes it noisy and exhausting, but heartening next to most of its glib, insincere competition — say, Universal's Mummy movies.

Pirates is blessed with a glinting edge of perversity— an eye for grotesque design, admiration for mischief, a hard-on for the masochistic dimension of heroic sacrifice, and not a little bit of out-of-the-blue weirdness. It is far more sexed-up than Lord of the Rings, and more tripped-out than Harry Potter, breezier than both by several factors. If the comparison to fantasy-lit classics of their kind seems unfair (or unfounded), consider that Pirates is aiming exactly that high, and that ambition alone is pretty damn cool. With this installment, it becomes clearer that in its overstimulated noggin and wistful heart, this story is about mortality, about the death of imagination and adventure at the hands of global business expansion, cultural imperialism, colonization — about fun withering in the brutal sun of finance. In this light, that the Pirates of the Caribbean movie overlay onto Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride does a tragic disservice to both the park and the films can only be bitterly fascinating.


5. The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho, scr. Bong, Baek Chul-hyun)

The monster is big, but could probably fit in your living room if you have high ceilings. We traditionally read human-size monsters as a warped Us or a feared Other, and the bigguns as metaphors for some pressing sociopolitical terror, both are favorite subjects for extensive probing with psychoanalytic theory, and fair enough to all that. The best of the best, from King Kong to Mothra Vs. Godzilla, Q — The Winged Serpent to Jurassic Park, find some magical way to make the ground-level, people-sized story as compelling as the beast rampage and about something besides mere survival. That is no mean feat.

The Host injects intense big monster mayhem into a droll dysfunctional family comedy, warping it into a search-and-rescue abduction suspenser as the Park family looks for their youngest member who has been swiped by the creature, and frames it all in Brazil-style paranoid government thriller. Somewhere near the center of this is another superlative performance by Song Kang-ho as Gang-du, the monster-napped child's scruffy nitwit slacker father. Song plays Gang-du something like Shaggy in mourning having lost Scooby, beginning with literal pratfalls and emotional slapstick, until the lovable cartoon dope is hardened and seasoned with hellfire, and somehow coming out on the other side as a lop-sided, smushy-hearted hero.

So we have here a daikaiju black comedy sprouting agitprop polyps and one can't really predict where it's going, what will happen next. This is not to say that The Host plays as a crazy quilt mash-up, or is as nuts as, say, #3 below, or dreams of being something other or "better" than a giant monster picture. Instead it dreams bigger, striving to be the best giant monster picture it can be.


4. The Notorious Bettie Page (dir. Mary Harron, scr. Harron, Guinevere Turner)

You don't get to be notorious all by your lonesome. "Notorious" is a reputation, and that requires observers to cast an opinion. It goes without saying that pinup models are the locus of much fantasy projection — that's pretty much what they're for. Besides the obvious, consider the imagination fuel of even innocuous swimsuit cheesecake photo. We might imagine the scenario suggested by the photo, or the circumstances of the photoshoot itself, the unseen photographer and the photographic apparatus. We imagine those body parts not on display, hidden by wardrobe or pose, imagine the dimensions not captured in 2D. We imagine the model in movement, imagine her voice, and imagine a personality onto the mute, frozen figure. When we look at Bettie Page, we project an imagined Bettie onto her.

Harron and screenwriting partner Turner begin The Notorious Bettie Page with a basic map of the strategy that will branch out through the film. Adult bookstore customers inquire about the selection of under-the-counter specialty photos ("unusual footwear" stuff, if that means anything to you), but in short order the shop is raided by cops: one trenchcoat crowd replaces another, and Bettie Page finds herself summoned before Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate subcommittee hearings on pornography and juvenile delinquency. So there we have it, two audiences hunting for the same photos but imagining their own Betties for their own reasons and to their own ends, and the flesh-blood-and-bangs Bettie the cause of it all, or tied up in the middle of it, or maybe just there and being Bettie.

Now any old model, real or invented, could potentially serve as subject here. Harron, Turner and Gretchen Mol — their flat-out sparkling, bubbling, fully-carbonated Bettie — never indicate for a moment that they've distilled the ultimate secret true story of their subject. Rather, the film suggests that any biography by its very existence imposes a narrative on the raw data of a life and creates a character in the process. To tell the story of Bettie Page is to make Bettie Page into a story. This, Notorious indicates, has its potential virtues and pitfalls, but is the process by which identity and legend are built.

It has to be Bettie, or at least she is a perfect subject. Page's latter-day immortality as cult pin-up is the reason this biopic exists, and that interest was stoked by the apparent mystery of What Became of Bettie Page? By the mid-'50s she'd become the most photographed model in the world. She worked in nearly every form of non-explicit adult photography, from Playboy centerfolds to 8mm catfight films to underground bondage photo clubs to burlesque revue movies. That's a lot of audience, a lot of imagined Betties. What Bettie Page meant in the middle of the 20th century is not what Bettie Page meant by the end of the century, by which time she'd become America's retro sex icon of choice, plastered on comics shop walls, motorbike gas tanks, and photobooks destined for the coffee tables of the très hip across the nation. That's a lot more audience, and more Betties. The interim is legend, speculation, rumors, stories. And where was Bettie? Unaware that this was happening, that anyone cared about antique nudie pictures, that so many ghost-Betties had come to life.

What The Notorious Bettie Page does that is so intelligent and kind — charitable, really — is suggest that all of our fantasies of Bettie Page — those sexual and political, those that would make her victim or legend, those that would see her in bondage or in angel wings — are legitimate and integral parts of her biography, and her extensive body of modeling work continues to fascinate and inspire, which is the legacy of that work. The photos and films, you can have. The story, whichever you prefer, you can have that too. But only Bettie Page lived the life, and that is not something to solve and explain. That, you don't get to have.

As she once said in Striporama (1953), her only speaking role on film, "I'm illusion!" "You mean you're not real?," gasp the baggypants comedians who would possess her. Replies Illusion Bettie: "Of course I'm real."


3. Brand Upon the Brain! (dir. Guy Maddin, scr. Maddin, George Toles, Louis Negin)

Guy Maddin — the character in Brand Upon the Brain! and director of Brand Upon the Brain! — puts a fresh coat of whitewash on the island lighthouse where he grew up, and feverishly reminisces about his childhood loves, traumas and love-traumas, dramatized as careening melodrama/mad scientist/teen detective/wild child/evil mother/incest romance/zombie horror/steampunk melodrama and made in the style of, um, a Soviet montage/German expressionist/Hollywood silent comedy/abstract cheesecake peepshow. That's all literal as it is metaphorical, and though this is poetic interior autobiography and rumination on the nature of Memory and Self, nothing could be more accessible: it's sex-fixated and silly, the plot never stops moving for five seconds and it's a knee-slapper front to back. No doctors or lit majors need to assist with the decoding, as the plum-syrup narration will do it for you, and it's impossible to be inscrutable when everything is on the table.

Maddin's lighthouse is famously stocked with out-of-fashion early cinema, pulp fiction and avant-garde clutter, but fret not, all you have to do is experience the sight of how that stuff branded his brain, and learn in short order what is so special about all that moldy old stuff. Maddin is, in these blatant ways forever fetishistically gazing at a silver-emulsioned past, a memory eating itself up like nitrocellulose decomposition, but is also forward-thinking, evolutionary. Everybody and their mom knows how to psychoanalyze a filmmaker based on how he frames a shot, can pick out Major Themes from table setting mis-en-scène, and knows which props are phallic and which ones criticize American foreign policy. So what if, asks Guy Maddin, we start with the assumption that this work is already done, and set archetypes and personal symbols on a romp through a story-space that purports to dive straight into the psychosexual miasma of the artist's head? The result is a wholly original breed of comedy, an exciting new kind of storytelling, and cliché-decimating entertainment built entirely out of clichés so disused you've never seen them before.


2. The Black Dahlia (dir. Brian De Palma, scr. Josh Friedman from the novel by James Ellroy)

Certain crimes — big, terrifying, era-defining crimes, mainly — speak to us with layered voices, at first seeming to be manifestations of some core societal fear, but ultimately telling us more about what we are afraid of than actually confirming those dangers, prejudices and myths. e.g., in the moment it can appear, through spin or sincere interpretation, that the Manson Family crime spree confirmed dark fears about hippie culture, drugs, rock music, California. Certainly those events and those figures spoke to a significant portion of the population in exactly that way. But those crimes were so singular, Manson himself so exceptional, the scene so one-of-a-kind that, really, it doesn’t say such a thing at all. In that case, we’re left with a tragedy about this particular nutjob con man, his brainwash victims and their subsequent non-symbolic coincidental murder victims. This is not a cozy thought, but in the ensuing hysteria and excitement Charles Manson is given a constant public forum, and the families of victims are forever caught in this ugly saga. That Family of victims extends on out along this fractal arm, from Roman Polanski in the micro to the entire Love Generation in the macro. When this feedback loop is turned up loud enough, somewhere in the mix Manson’s code-speak bilious rants end up being made true: you wanted a Devil, he’ll be your Devil.

After the tawdry facts of a crime, and beyond the personal aftermath for survivors, the further tragedy is in the myth-making. If we’re adept at keeping our eye on the birdie, the underlying theme tends to be how good the media is at finding an angle to sell a story. Even if we’re dealing with the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11/01 or Jeffery Dahmer, data points are not a story: you need a narrative hook. The big ones leave us all scarred, even if that mark is only across the imagination. So:

Meanwhile, over in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue, Elizabeth Short is transfigured in death into The Black Dahlia. And that particular body, with those particular memory-searing, picturesque mutilations, might have captured public imagination for a few weeks, but that’s not The Story. The Legend of the Black Dahlia is that this poor Massachusetts girl wanted to be in pictures, and ended up in pieces. That seems to say something; about this untamed town that wants to be a desert; about this Boulevard of Dreams littered with the shards of broken would-be starlets; about a Dream Factory that is really a high stakes business running on the blood of pretty young things; about a Tinsel Town adorned with razor wire.

That would be the legend, of course, and it’s a good one — so good that its whirlpool sucks down L.A. “supercop” and local celebrity pugilist Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, doing impotent moron in meltdown like a champ). Poor sap only lasts, what? A week?, so caught up is he in dead white girl mania and troubling, circling questions that are not beside the point, but not conducive to solving the crime. What is this strange system by which starry-eyed women offer themselves up to men with money and cameras? Is this germane to the question that James Ellroy says is at the heart of this mystery, which is: why do men kill women? We note here, that this is the kind of thing that Short's murder makes one think about. Blanchard can't reconcile the black alchemy that discards the bodies and leaves the immortal part on a screen and made of light. He can't make it add up, and as is the hotheaded flatfoot's fate, ends up pursuing the Dahlia into Hell — that is, his throat slit and body fed into the furnace by his mob-connected informant. Blowing out of this world as a spectacular, blinding, horrifying supernova is no substitute for the dream of being a star.

After all is said, done and revealed, Blanchard was scrambling through life to protect an image. His fancy home is funded with stolen money, his career accomplishments puffed up, his promotions earned for their P.R. value, his fame-making boxing win a rigged fight, his live-in girlfriend poses well on his arm but he isn't sleeping with her. In his main squeeze, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson who, you know, poses well and adequately fills out an angora sweater), Blanchard has built a perfect rescue narrative; she's an ex-prostitute-gone-gold-hearted, and he helped her go straight. His motivations are not just covering up his culpability, living a lie or faking it till he makes it. He protects the ones with a good Story.

This is the guy who is "supposed to be the hero," as per the real protagonist, Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett wearing a hat), who holds an ice pack to his aching skull as his partner's corpse is fed into the inferno. Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice, then, promotional nicknames invented by the LAPD, which ostensibly describe their boxing styles, more or less indicate their personalities ("I can't move! I never move!" wails glacial Bucky), and indeed one rages and one is slow to thaw. But it's bullshit, too. "You're a political animal!," the Deputy D.A. chastises the broken-down Blanchard. So are they all, and for the Bucky and Lee it means they're pawns, moved to Homicide and put on the Short case because they're the Supercops. Don't you read the papers? They're characters in someone else's story.

If Bucky is tortured by Beth Short at first, it is because the media ruckus over the dead white woman — whose link to The Industry is not even a whisper of a dream, whose movie-derived nickname is entirely posthumous and newspaper-invented — is drawing him away from important cases he could be closing. And maybe, he tells Lee, this Beth Short wasn't such a nice girl. i.e., the crime needs solving, certainly, but maybe it needn't be glorified, made legend. As Charles Manson often points out, he wasn't shit until you put all those TV cameras on him. But.... there stands Kay in her underwear, and sliced into her back are the initials B.D. As it happens, that stands for "Bobby DeWitt," her old pimp. It stands, symbolically, naturally for Black Dahlia. That doesn't go away when you blink. "Who are these men who carve themselves into other people's lives?" the V.O. ponders, and as serendipity would have it, B.D. are the initials of a renowned director of thrillers, horror pictures and neo-noirs who happens to be directing the scene.

The tale connects Paul Leni's Expressionist melodrama The Man Who Laughs (1928) — a horror film for all intents and purposes — with a (fictional) stag reel starring Short. In direct connection, both are shot on the same set (a frankly insane conceit), the former inspiring the later, a beautiful link in the film's chain of mouth trauma that begins with Bucky's symbolic castration when he loses his choppers in the boxing ring. It is a chart of cinematic lineage, as well, in which German avant-garde technique moves overseas and mingles with hardboiled detective fiction, and the resultant new genre baby eventually grows up and Brian De Palma falls in love with it and has to make The Black Dahlia. In these and sundry other ways, De Palma implicates and investigates himself among those who mythologize this crime specifically, but more generally cleave bodies on screen and burn images onto imaginations.

Bucky solves this one, insofar as he learns the details of Elizabeth Short's death. He follows the money, of course. And all are implicated — De Palma and Mack Sennett and the men with the cameras, media and politicians, institutions and underlings, gardeners and carpenters. By the end, Bucky finds the housing development under the Hollywoodland sign was built of rotten wood and hides a film set with a murder shed out back. The very city itself is a façade constructed of corrupt materials. He might've guessed earlier, when the unstable town vibrates in an earthquake. When we leave Bucky, he's still hearing the crows, still seeing that body on every empty lawn. The facts and the legend are both etched on him now. The big ones leave us all scarred.

The citizens of this Los-Angeles-as-black-hole play at being human beings, covering their faces with flimsy masks to indicate profession, social strata, gender, identity and character (arche-?stereo-?)type. The faster they put on their costumes, the faster they are ripped away by the howling void swirling at the center of The Black Dahlia. It is blacker than black in there, so black we need the French to name it. We call it noir.

More on Bucky in Noir-land, symbol-chains and metafic here.


1. INLAND EMPIRE (dir., scr. David Lynch)

David Lynch's shot on video horror movie tops the very short shortlist of that lowly genre's unabashed masterpieces. It is not as bizarre spectacle as Boardinghouse nor as depraved and feverish as Splatter Farm, but it has many fine qualities and is scarier. INLAND EMPIRE was received, ignored, and criticized in a manner that means mounting a defense, writing a simple appreciation and beginning a cursory exploration all amount to the same thing. Insofar as INLAND EMPIRE is a difficult work, three roadblocks typically greet those having difficulty, and rather than demerits, they are simply its qualities. 1) INLAND EMPIRE is a piece unabashedly shot on digital video, and arriving in theaters with the announcement that Lynch has no future plans to shoot on film. 2) INLAND EMPIRE announces itself as a narrative feature and contains abundant plot information but is firmly rooted in modes of avant-garde cinema that include the non-narrative and entirely abstract. 3) The narrative of INLAND EMPIRE is consistently oblique, but explicitly links itself to mystery stories. It seems to offer thousands of clues and few conclusions. At its most explicit it seems to suggest that it might be solved, at its most opaque it seems to suggest that something crucial and meaningful is being missed.

Speaking of solutions, these problems are all, naturally, intertwined. If there is any help to be found below, I would suggest instead that perhaps if you are sitting in front of INLAND EMPIRE with your eyes pointed at the screen, then you do understand INLAND EMPIRE. Unless your eyes are closed.

Lynch often foregrounds the materials used in the creation of his art — like a Jackson Pollack drip painting, the fabric and construction is the subject. Even his figural paintings are dollopped with paint and scribbled on, flat-planed and collaged. Think of the puppet robin meant as real in Blue Velvet or his film-loop-on-sculpture "Six Men Getting Sick" or the incandescent "Premonitions of an Evil Deed", a stunt film of poetry and prowess shot on a Lumière camera. INLAND EMPIRE is boldly, proudly a video project, exploiting and exploring those things only video can do. The result is Lynch's most abstract feature since The Straight Story (1999) and most experimental since Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1990). That is, a true experiment of the let's-see-what-happens variety, this one exploring the visual qualities and editorial rhythms of consumer grade digital video, and in shooting hours and hours of scenes with no master blueprint for assembly.

How to Watch INLAND EMPIRE may be, as Roger Ebert once opined of Dune, to let it wash over you like a dream. This is, in this case: don't fight it. It is the same advice Lynch gave critic Martha Nochimson when they looked at a Pollack together: you do understand it, he told her, I saw your eyes moving across the painting. To engage that dream any more analytically will find one scrambling for purchase, just as in a dream or maybe as when trying to explain one. Some things that happen, you're at a loss to articulate, some are intuitively understood. Anyhow we're squarely (well, asymmetrically) on the shoulders of Laura Dern as actress Susan Blue, who is warned off making the film On High in Blue Tomorrows, and then walking alongside Susan playing Nikki Grace, who is perhaps her own person or several people. An issue that frequently arises when discussing Lynch's film is that the filmmaker finds increasingly sophisticated ways to preserve what he loves about Mysteries, and that love is not in the solving but of luxuriating in Mystery itself. As Sandy asks Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, "you like mysteries that much?" And Jeffrey answers: yes. So analytical language will be wrongheaded at worst, coy-sounding at best. It is not that Lynch films can't be written about, but the task is like tracing letters in smoke or drawing diagrams on wet paper with a fountain pen filled with perfume. And yet, here we are.

This free-associative ebb and flow creative process births a work about a film struggling to be born — or perhaps resisting its creation — and documents the challenge put forth to Laura Dern. Never positive during shooting where her character had been, or where she was going, Dern is ultimately playing an actress grappling with a role. This is a film of linking and connection, disparate geographies, identities, chronologies that peer at one another through torn membranes, down dark hallways, through burn holes in fabric, ruptures in spacetime. Passageways are important in Lynch's work, and all of the films contain a signature movement/image in which the camera descends/dives/probes/is-sucked-into a mysterious black hole: moving deeper into Another Place. In Lost Highway, Fred Madison wanders into a dark corner of his windowless home and emerges somewhere in his own echo chamber head. Blue Velvet famously tilts down from the sky, dives underground, enters a severed ear, reemerges from a reconnected ear and gazes back to the heavens. INLAND EMPIRE is a series of tunnels sliding into one another, connecting back on themselves.

Susan Blue's task is to fully understand Nikki Grace, and to do so she ventures all the way inside and inside out — for Susan to understand and become Nikki, she'll have to plumb the mystery of herself. Along the journey she finds and embodies a replicating chain of Lost Women, ventures all the way to the heart of the universe to find the most lost of souls, and in the end perhaps she does not fix everyone, but finds them. Susan gathers the lost to her and they rejoice.

And these are the keys to INLAND EMPIRE, but there are so, so many keyholes to be tested. Like Mulholland Dr. on back to Eraserhead, INLAND EMPIRE begs to be played with, have its pieces shifted, riddles catalogued and links tested. The puzzle-solver is not on a fool's errand, but is engaging INLAND EMPIRE as designed: playing an infinite game.

"Satan's Waitin'" (1954) is a cartoon about death and is structured a bit like a classic Ten Little, Er, Indians style pick 'em off, of, if you prefer, a Bay of Blood style slasher picture. The twist is that we're watching the same victim bite it in colorful ways over and over, as Sylvester runs through his proverbial nine lives in seven minutes. The slasher in this case is the Devil in the form of a crimson bulldog, which is a metaphor for Sylvester's worst, obsessive, Tweety-hunting impulses, natch.

So here we have a couple of Freleng's own fixations on display, i.e. the neuroses and psychological torture of Sylvester (Tweety is barely in the cartoon except to motive the story and provide an ass joke when his tail feathers are yanked) and a certain philosophical morbidity that crept into his '50s shorts that is perhaps noirish or Hitchcockian or about the comic possibilities of Order and Chaos pressing and pulling at the weak soul of the cartoon animal Everyman. Whatever the conclusion I note a vague sense of postwar malaise in Freleng's work of this era, if not one totally distinct from other brands of malaise. This isn't a truism across the board, but when the quality is there, it is there in force, and not to be found with his peers. There is a terrible geometric order to "Satan's Waitin", to graphical wit, the pussycat and the canary on precarious chase across a sky carved by intersecting phone lines:


The most restrained, buttoned-down of Warner's major cartoon directors, Freleng's world is not populated with the flailing, screaming humanity of Bob Clampett's, his characters do not explore the complex, broad swath of human personality as Chuck Jones', his stories do not balloon out to the extreme proportions of Tex Avery's. And etc., not to tromp over a well-worn favorite stomping field of animation pundits; point is, speaking of formal issues of character animation, Freleng's cartoons don't squash as much, don't stretch as much, they don't antic as big, don't do takes that distort anatomical forms into graphical abstractions. Now all of this is of variable Trueness, depending on the staff for a particular short and who was actually animating a particular sequence, but certainly Freleng did not ask his animators to hit bigger, crazier poses, infuse acting with more personality and presence, or pick up the pace for the joy of speed. And on one hand, that is not as funny, and perhaps Freleng is puzzlingly lacking that cartoonist's gene that loves a funny drawing. On a different, more contemplative hand, stillness, stiffness, intellectual detachment and a cool demeanor can, indeed, provide a much different sort of comedy, on the Charles Schulz, Chris Ware sort of end of the comic spectrum.


Why was Freleng obsessed with Sylvester? It's not Tweety that the director is interested in — he defanged Clampett's sadistic-widdle-kid character and in design, function and performance drained the bird of a distinct personality rooted in human traits. Certainly every other director artist drew a funnier Sylvester, where Freleng pulled back on the character's previous stupidity and thuggishness. In place of the older Sylveter, here is one sweat-drenched and helpless in the face of his own compulsion.

Anyway, "Satan's Waitin'" is a study of graphic contrasts, spatial orientation, shapes and visual rhymes, and above, the hunter and prey locked in cycle scramble up a fire escape. The only reason to head to the rooftops in a cartoon like this is because someone is going down, and as it happens, Sylvester's journey up the fire escape ends in a pit of flame.


The abyss awaits! Hover. Hold. Beat. One of you is getting out of this alive.


So there's a cause/effect elegance to the cartoon's up/down see-sawing, doubled here as Sylvester's tail is his last erect extremity, then the tail flops down, then his soul springs up out of his butt in its place. A pair of brick and sidewalk square grids reinforce the visual order, but chaotic cracks in the cement emerge from under the cat's corpse, hinting at something else.


There is no tally provided of Sylvester's sins. He has simply Been a Bad Pussycat, and must take the red escalator every time, no matter, as we will eventually see, how he tries or what he does. The vagaries of moral rectitude flit around the fringes of "Satan's Waitin'", and the cat's only crime seems to be the attempted fulfillment of his natural predatory instinct, not that acting on instinct ever got anyone on the golden escalator. Though plenty of cartoons want to get in gags with wings and halos, I would naturally assume that all Looney Tunes characters are going to Hell.

Background painting people, do glance at the complimentary red and green buildings splitting the space between escalators.


Yawning chasm, fanged rock formations, spiraling conveyer belt to damnation.


Judgement!

The story here is that Sylvester's numbered lives must tarry in Hell's waiting room until all nine of their fellows have arrived. The structure is a countdown as the cat loses lives during the course of one long chase scene, with pit stops for exposition.


Life #2 arrives after a tangle with a steamroller. Again, scrambling life-drives are pinned and pressed into two dimensions and squeezed straight through the ceiling of Hell.


"Scare Your Girl," indeed. There are a handful of fine signage gags in this cartoon, another Freleng trademark, if not an exclusive one. Dig also this abandoned urban space, in the middle of an unpopulated city stands an empty carnival about to become a literal carnival of souls, lending an amplified quietude and desolation. There are production, budgetary and technical reasons for the minimal cast and lack of extras in animation, of course, and changing tastes in art and design have a lot to do with the modernist look of '50s and '60s WB cartoons. On the latter front, however, Freleng and Jones were usually ahead of the curve.

More nice muted primaries here; look how this says "carnival" and is all red, green and yellow but isn't just an out-of-tube eyeball cacophony. There's also a clue in the middle to a motif of Sylvester's being plagued by demons, and a big yellow paw that will pay off in a few scenes.


Nice dynamic staging. Noir-y, Third Many shadows that also popped up on Sylvester's first descent to Hell. There is a lot of movement along the z-axis in this cartoon.


Satan is everywhere.

Point demonstrated, I hope, about Freleng's comic reaction takes. Even the moment where Sylvester is so terrified that he dies is not much bigger than this.


Sylvester loses lives four through seven in rapid order on this shooting range. Though it is not different from any other cartoon shooting range, because of its place in this farce of certain destruction, this one seems a particularly apt, fatalistic metaphor: lined up, on track, ready to be blown apart. Also, more signage, more vague, useless moral instruction: "Shoot straight." Yes, good luck with that.

So, the way Freleng stages the gag here is to cut back to Satan's waiting room, as we hear gunfire, victory bells, and bang bang bang bang, dead cats are deposited in a row. There was probably a moment early in the film when we expected nine cat mangling vignettes. Confounding expectation, Freleng burns off four of Sylvester's lives in seconds.


Here begins the speediest sequence in the cartoon, and speaking of movement from back to fore, this roller coaster train slowly climbs the distant hill before rocketing downward — which is rather how we began this story. Then it charges at the viewer's damn face, which is a good deal more alarming than Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, and then zooms over the screen. What's happening here, and in another directly-overhead shot of the train charging down a drop that I haven't pictured, is a) complicated staging with difficult angles, beautifully animated with mathematical precision...


b) more open space netted by intersecting lines, c) the visual rhyme and gag setup that is the reason the escalator to Hell was designed as a long, red, twisty track.

Point A above kind of makes up for the subdued character animation and mild gags. No doubt any other unit was up to the task of pulling off the scene, and if, say, it had been a Clampett, the scene would likely have the visceral impact of riding a roller coaster. Jones would have blessed it with his — how do put it? — peculiarly sardonic sense of physics, and both others would have done it all faster. But faster, gutsier and (ahem, funnier) bloodier is not the point, the point is the go-nowhere trip along a one-way track.


Relish the spare, allegorical quality of this particular pose, and the clever, don't-blink touch of marking the car #9. Because it's the little things.

I note for anyone without art inclinations that drawing this angle totally sucks.


This is the important part of this shot. Were this a Jones Roadrunner cartoon, the timing, the drawing, the sound effect would make the moment of impact the joke, maybe with a microbeat of I-fucked-up Coyote recognition before the carnage. Here it is the belated behavioral instruction that is impossible to follow, and doom rushing at one's head.


Payoff. Probably the funniest cut in the cartoon is between the coaster massacre and the above match, Life #8 blank-eyed, silent, no reason to fight this anymore.


Meanwhile, topside, Sylv takes the "Time Enough at Last" approach and seals himself up in a bank vault. Not trusting his unrestrainable urges, and trying to minimize the universe's chaotic x-factor input, he goes on defense. We'll note yet again that this designy vault is all grids, quads and circles, and fair enough, Everything is Shapes, but '50s design only emphasizes this fact (and my roundabout point is that the cartoon is kind of in dialog with that idea).

Naturally, Satan being Everywhere, two bungling robbers try to dynamite open the vault and kill everyone in the process. And on that front:

-The last manifestation of "Satan's Waitin'"'s thematic/visual theme of agents of explosive chaos and confining order sort of luring then breeching one another. Also crime does not pay, but neither does not doing crimes.
-A mild send-up of atomic age bomb shelter mentality.
-Another cut-to-result staging of a violence gag. Freleng doesn't show the explosive, the explosion or the corpses, just:

Everything goes to Hell anyway.

Satoshi Kon
1963 — 2010
When artists pass from this world, it speaks to the power of their work and demonstrates that they have infiltrated hearts and minds, if the audience hearing that sorrowful news reflexively filters it through the mental lens of that art. Which is to say:


This scene from Kon's OVA Perfect Blue (1998) was the first thought to flash through my head upon hearing of the August 24th death of the animator, director, and cartoonist. This is partly because of the literal content of the scene, in which tarnished pop star turned terrorized actress Mima has just discovered the demise of her entire aquarium of fish. But it is also because this has always struck me as a well-animated crying scene, and crying is notoriously difficult to animate. And all this because among Kon's four features as director, his first, Perfect Blue, remains my favorite. At first pass the unconventional psychothriller meditation on female identity and celebrity culture seemed joltingly Argento-esque, pro-critics tended to invoke Hitchcock and... don't forget we're talking about cartoons here. As soon as Millennium Actress (2001) appeared it was clear that what Perfect Blue is simply a Satoshi Kon film.

If there is one painful, unpronounceable word above, it is "four." Four features, one TV series, assorted animation tasks. Kon's death at 46 (nearly the same age as Whisper of the Heart director Yoshifumi Kondō) leaves us with a frustratingly small body of work. Frustrating not because it is inadequate, but because it is remarkable enough that one cannot help but want more. Every one of Kon's films is an increasingly ambitious technical and storytelling challenge. Satoshi Kon made films expansive of imagination and personal of preoccupation, pushed the boundaries of his medium and tried to break, dodge, and stand out from certain clichés, prejudices and lazy habits of the Japanese animation industry. It is that ambition to blow an audience's mind with sights they have not seen and will not forget that separates Kon's work, and, one hopes, will be the inspirational legacy of his films.

As I always feel lacking during such moments, I direct interested persons to this appreciation and 2003 interview by Brian Camp. The discussion mainly concerns Tokyo Godfathers, but manages to cover several key and under-examined aspects of Kon's films, such as the realer-than-truth documentary qualities possible in animation, and his dedication to visual depiction of Japanese characters that look Japanese.

Further reading at Midnight Eye, a pair of interviews regarding Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress and Paprika.

And so, still feeling lacking, I must allow the artist final say in these matters:

The elusive slogan glows in the dark blue night of the first episode of FLCL.

What does it mean? Or what does it mean to Mamimi who has presumably scrawled "NEVER KNOWS BEST" along the length of her cigarette, and burns the message down as she takes it into her chest? Does Never Knows Best even mean anything, in a series where the title itself is invented nonsense and the cast openly questions its definition?

Never Knows Best isn't even a proper sentence, is it?


It is instead, beyond meaning, perfect as the crowning contribution to the perfect moment. That moment is about being a disaffected 17-year-old standing in the middle of a bridge in the middle of the night, stalled halfway between noplace and notgoinganywhere. She pines for her never-seen, long gone baseball-playing ex, tries to replace the absent boyfriend with his 12-year-old brother, stray cats and strange new robot gods, and in this moment is just utterly convinced that she is lost and broken. The tobacco embers connect with and forecast Mamimi's eventual pyromania, and eventually, eventually maybe (maybe) she'll get over all this and be okay.


But in this moment there is one perfect, cryptic, bleak-sounding, moody adolescent thing to write on a rumpled cigarette.

It burns all the way down,
fire to air to water,
and
never knows best.

Ah! Sweet mystery of life!

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2002


10. Dahmer (dir., scr. David Jacobson)

There are racks and racks of no-budget DTV hack jobs filling the video shops of America, bearing the names of notorious criminals as one- or two-word titles, all tacky, all terrible. Dahmer is not one of them. Though the culture is saturated with stories of serial killers, one of the great lies explaining this trend is that the fascination exists because we want to Understand. Perhaps we do want to understand something, but the use of the serial killer as pop fiction trope has not been bent in that direction. Placing the serial killer in genre films as boogeyman, antihero or funhouse mirror Everyman has the effect of mythologizing or domesticating him.

Serious-faced and nonsensationalistic, Dahmer elliptically charts the adolescence and adulthood of Jeffery Dahmer. The film fictionalizes the crimes of 1992 Dahmer only by compositing his victims and imagining wholly plausible interactions for which no accounts or living witnesses exist. Jacobson’s visual strategy is modernist and spare, with tough, hard-edged compositions and special attention paid to environmental light sources. The film hinges on Jeremy Renner’s daring performance as Dahmer, all bone-deep loneliness and rage trickling through glassy-eyed stare. Renner’s quiet seething dictates the shape of the movie, and Dahmer just stares and stares as if the truth will rise to the surface with enough patience.

Jacobson’s camera does not take an unflinching or documentarian attitude toward Dahmer’s crimes. Murder, mutilation, necrophilia, and cannibalism are mostly framed out of view, out of focus, around a corner or not depicted. We know these details, and they accumulate around Dahmer’s void like tub scum around a drain. If True Crime style reportage implies that the criminal is little but the sum of his crimes — what, when, where, how?— and gets us no closer to truth, Dahmer, interested in who and why, situates its gaze on everything else. Maybe the truth is there. So here is Jeffrey Dahmer working at the chocolate factory. Here is teenage Dahmer exploring and repressing his sexuality. Here is Dahmer out clubbing, sitting on the couch, seducing a victim, lying to cops, visiting his grandmother. By his own account and his father’s, Jeffrey was traumatized by his parents’ divorce, and deeply troubled by his own homosexuality. The film allows that this much is true, but specifies nothing as cause, excuse or reason for the murder of seventeen people. Certainly a man existed inside Dahmer’s crimes, a life existed outside of them, so to solve them both holistically, Dahmer tunnels into Jeffrey’s space. The longer we stare into his eyes, the more we wonder if there really is nothing further to report or learn, no truth, no answer.


9. Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) (dir. A.J. Schnack)

Like a compacted Beatles Anthology for a band that is not The Beatles, Gigantic charts the personal biography, career and artistic development of gyro rock band They Might Be Giants. Though unabashedly fawning toward its subject, A.J. Schnack’s documentary exists as exhaustive celebration of TMBG as cult object and as contravention, an argument for the band’s influence and importance. The senior body of music critics, though largely comprised of nerds, are not the sort of nerd who necessarily reveres TMBG, and have marginalized the band’s place in history. Without even deigning to mention that the band is frequently understood as high-flown novelty act or niche pop for rabid cultists, Gigantic reframes TMBG history, placing them at the epicenter of post-punk, and positing them as elder statesmen of modern alternative rock.

In the spirit of full disclosure, this writer holds the world record for the second most posts to the newsgroup alt.music.tmbg, despite not having frequented the forum for the better part of a decade. They Might Be Giants is not only my “favorite band” but one of my favorite things in the charted universe. Having lived inside TMBG Land for so long, I cannot rightly say how the film plays as an introduction.

It ably sketches the larger contours of the band’s career arc, from creative collaboration in the adolescent friendship of Johns Linnell and Flansburgh to early performance-art-tinged gigs in illegal NYC venues to college radio success (such as it is) to their film scoring work of the early ‘00s. A partially animated opening credits montage bustles through a full kit of TMBG iconography accompanied by an exciting song montage (they don’t blend into medley, they blast, stop, blast, stop), previewing and promising: this will be a concert movie, a rock band bio, a New York story, a buddy comedy. The band’s hyperactive aesthetic is reflected in the film’s form, which cuts between several timelines; in the “present,” TMBG works on and promotes the Mink Car album, and performs a Greek chorus concert staged for the documentary, playing key songs that crop up in the story of how they got from 1982 to ~2001. An unfortunate side-effect of the cross-cutting and a dual organization by timeline and anecdotal topic is that some of the chronology is jumbled — the band seems to make a triumphant Tonight Show appearance with songs from their third record before their demo tape is discovered. Some crucial milestones are glossed over which might have helped define what makes the TMBG story special. The band’s early sound is driven by Linnell’s accordion and Flansburgh’s experimentalism, and their non-traditional rock voices, and some explanation of what separates TMBG’s music from their peers’ would be useful. The band’s output is voluminous, scattered across nontraditional media and spans decades, but dates are scant, and the only record specifically situated in time and space is Flood. The frenzied sonic leapfrogging also gives an inaccurate portrait of the band’s musical development, mashing songs of every era into an incandescent miasma.

Caveats aside, Gigantic has its work cut out for it, and somehow at the heart of the coffee-addled ruckus is a creative partnership, a friendship between two men. Linnell and Flansburgh’s personal lives remain quiet enigmas; fleeting reference is made late in the game to Flansburgh’s wife, and there is a precious, unexplained glimpse of candid footage of Linnell eating bagels with his son, Henry. In uncharacteristically relaxed joint interview, the duo’s interpersonal dynamic is far more apparent than during talk show grillings. Linnell drops his shrinking violet act to ramble thoughtfully, and it becomes apparent that Flansburgh’s boisterousness less masks a blowhard than a man concerned at all times with the public presentation of his life’s work. Two key principles of TMBG: they are generous with their creativity, and they consistently refuse anything that smacks of laziness or to compromise their vision. This leads to projects like the damnedest Dunkin’ Donunts commercials in the world, but extends to matters of generic labeling, message and interpretation (Linnell, hunched over a phone, tells an interviewer: “There is nothing missing in your understanding of ‘Particle Man’”). Gigantic does not press deep into the nonprofessional lives of its subject, but besides simply being private people (typically so, not fanatically), this is part of the TMBG project. The work is already an expression of the artist’s deepest preoccupations, passions and fears (every TMBG song is about death, their mascots are a parade of the reanimated dead, defeat, head injury, madness and alcoholism bless every narrator, and there are no true love songs), and should autobiographical incident leak into a lyric (Linnell’s songs are haunted, for instance, by a bike accident he suffered long, long ago), detailing such incident does not enrich the art but deplete it. There is nothing missing in your understanding of They Might Be Giants. The most valuable insights come when the men are separated and remarkably candid (for these guys, anyway), and Flansburgh explains his awe toward Linnell’s songcraft and musicianship, and Linnell expresses jealousy over Flans’ untrained ear and enthusiastic avant-garde form-busting. These guys need each other, and that’s all we need to know.

There is much on display to drive the diehard fanatic absolutely up the wall with joy. The central L&F interview is conducted on a site that appears to be the exact location of the “Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head” video. A songwriting session to unveil the demo sketch of “It’s So Loud in Here” proves detail-oriented and tense. Trips to the archives provide flash-glimpses of internal PolyGram Records memos (! Get your pause button ready!), long buried early publicity photos (Flans chomping on simultaneous multiple cigars well before the cover of Mono Puff’s It's Fun to Steal). There is material in Gigantic that the most ardent tape trader has never seen, including a snippet of the never-ever-ever released video for “Rabid Child”. That five seconds is worth the price of admission.


8. Far From Heaven (dir., scr. Todd Haynes)

When an artist is learning to paint or draw, attempting direct copy of a better artist’s work is a valuable exercise. The practice lets you know, rapidly, brutally, exactly where your own technical skills stand. It forces study of technique and method. The only analogous major filmmaking experiment may be Gus Van Sant’s 1998 Psycho, but with Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes tries his hand at Douglas Sirk pastiche and in the process of perfect form mimicry absorbs the lessons of a master. Though a period piece, Far From Heaven is not dressed and designed as 1957/8, but as the world of a ‘50s movie (bonus effect of the glass-case stylization, there is an artistic motivation for all the vintage automobiles to be pristine, one of those no-way-around-it details that sinks period picture verisimilitude). Most qualities of Technicolor cannot be duplicated, but the first step is to make a thing that looks like, sounds like, behaves like the thing.

And so Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore, impersonating a ceramic poodle filled with blood and tears) finds her suburban Connecticut Better Homes and Gardens pictorial life aggressively invaded by lurid lighting gels, her husband mutating into an abusive cocktail napkin joke under the strain of homosexual aversion therapy, and no solace in sight but the shade of her burly Negro gardener, who has Opinions about Joan Miró. Haynes tweaks All That Heaven Allows, though, pushing to the fore of the narrative the social issues Sirk (and anyone else making weepies under Breen Office watch) had to coyly hotfoot around. The further twist is that Far From Heaven retains the repression and Cruel Universe anguish, keeps the coding even when the code is rendered explicit. Sirk’s films became exemplary playground for auteur theorists, feminist critics and queer cinema studies (and their slobby pals, camp cultists), but Haynes puts all those concerns front and center: the plot is actively about public and private politics, imploding social and domestic spheres, miscegenation and stifled homosexuality, women’s voices smothered. The most astonishing feat is that by resisting any camp readings of Sirk, Haynes brings into focus the more beguiling and sophisticated brand of irony already inherent in Sirk. A direct critique of ‘50s conformism, consumerism, and social mores there’s no subtext to this study of The Surface of Things. It’s all rich, impeccable text.

Through intense formalist study of Sirk’s social melodramas, Haynes’ film is thrust immediately into deeper understanding of his inspiration. If nothing else, Far From Heaven is insightful, fascinating film criticism.


7. The Happiness of the Katakuris (dir. Takashi Miike, scr. Kikumi Yamagishi)

Takashi Miike’s films have floated out of sight, just below the waterlines of these Decade Faves lists. Miike belongs to the Jess Franco school of sharklike filmmakers who must keep moving or die, pumping out films at a dizzying, prolific rate. In the vast wash of the diretor’s work, some projects have stronger scripts, more focused filmmaking, contain keystone ideas which he revisits, etc., but at the same time, the defining qualities of Miike’s cinema are frenzied imagination, absurdist rupture, speed and quantity. The celebrated Audition, for example, is a fine and nuanced horror film, which is also atypical Miike. Audition contains extreme images of violence, but is not particularly puckish, avoids shock humor, and does not gyrate wildly in tone and sensibility.

The Happiness of the Katakuris is both outside Miike’s normal generic concerns (a musical comedy), and deeply inside his sensibility. Shock comedy comes in many breeds, and Miike’s serves to jar his audience out of complacency by pushing buttons. Those buttons are wired directly to the director’s social and aesthetic concerns. The Katakuris, a family tree rooted in failure, set up a B&B in the forbidding shadow of Mt. Fuji. The presumed tourist traffic never materializes due to a through road that is never built and hotel’s few guests rapidly perish through unlikely accident, suicide, murder. Their misfortune and self-made misery mounting, the Katakuris conceal the bodies to save the hotel and the family. This coherent outline skips the musical numbers, stop-motion interludes, zombies and volcanoes.

An opening stop-motion sequence operates as stream-of-consciousness poetry, as a restaurant patron digs a winged demon out of her soup... who absconds with her uvula, but is gobbled by a raven, which is mauled by a goth teddy bear. With no literal connection to the plot, the title sequence primes the viewer for the film nonetheless: the cycle of consumption and rotten luck continue until the re-hatched demon stretches in triumph, only to be swallowed again. With the hotel built on a landfill as central metaphor and a full-family array of life’s losers, Katakuris is about the ways personal fulfillment is tied up with financial success, social approval and the rotating whims of fortune. In its farcical, distracted way, the film is about what happiness itself “is,” how we attain it, how we maintain it.


6. The Pianist (dir. Roman Polanski, scr. Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman)

There is nothing romantic, nothing noble, nothing beautiful about mere survival. Polish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman watches his world erode and shrink into the Warsaw Ghetto, then bobs, weaves, and dodges the Holocaust itself. Szpilman’s survival requires tenacity, resourcefulness, and, perhaps above all, luck. In the process of shedding weight through an existence of running, hiding and starving, Szpilman’s very identity peels off in invisible strips, with little time to pause or grieve. Survival burns the man away. First the obvious niceties of home, family, name and career. Community, ethics, kindness and dignity weigh down the running man. They crowd his hiding place.

Moral codes can only be modified so much until they’re whittled into kindling. And politics? — Oh, politics burn fast. As Warsaw is finally liberated, the survivalist shell of the once-a-pianist is nearly executed as he stands starving and shivering in a German coat. Why the fucking coat?, he’s asked. Answer: It’s cold. If Szpilman would define himself as a pianist, how long can a pianist go without playing the piano before is no longer a pianist? What do you cling to as reminder that you’re something more than a life drive inside an animal form? Maybe, in the moment, will to live incinerates everything superfluous to survival instinct. In the place where hope is a luxury, these questions may not even apply, and there is no music there.


5. Lilo & Stitch (dir., scr. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois)

The best Disney animated feature in more than a decade, this brief burst of summery joy is the last great film produced by that venerable department before returning to making horrible movies and (temporarily) closing shop shortly thereafter. Animated “Classic” #42 (oh Jesus, must we count Dinosaur?), Lilo & Stitch borrows the roughest outline of E.T., fills in its own colorful, happy details and swaps the mythopoetic tone of wonderment for comic abandon and an outsider’s quiet reflection.

Our protagonists are the deeply eccentric Native Hawaiian girl Lilo and her rambunctious adopted alien mutant koala, Stitch. Lilo and Stitch are kindred spirits bonded by behavioral problems, left-of-center hobbies, and burning love of the music of Elvis Presley. Both bear the scars of broken homes, Lilo being raised by her loving, overwhelmed sister, Nani (Tia Carrere, doing, bar none, the finest work of her career) after the death of their parents, Stitch being an intergalactic fugitive, a monstrous genetics experiment with no parental guidance to nurture his rampaging nature. So Stitch, screaming and slobbering, barely verbal, short-tempered and destructive stands in as Lilo’s ego unbound, all her hurt, anger and confusion in a three-foot ball of teeth and claws. Hand-in-blue-furred-paw, the girl takes on the responsibility of providing the wild thing with a place to belong, with empathy, with discipline, with love. Lilo does more than simply mature and learn to behave through looking after a pet, and Stitch does more than chill out, lest he lose his first and only friend. The relationship gives both Lilo and Stitch access to their own better natures. Through the Hawaiian concept of extended, adopted family, their individual pain and loneliness are channeled into something more powerful, and Lilo & Stitch celebrates the strength and beauty of nontraditional families. That, and the redemptive powers of Elvis Presley.


4. Femme Fatale (dir., scr. Brian De Palma)

Brian De Palma doesn’t really make thrillers. He makes harrowing comic meditations on thrillers, one thesis of this deconstruction being that the words the movies speak are gibberish but the language resonates with us anyhow. The story, from its opening viper-headed jewel heist setpiece to wreathed doppelgängers-and-sex-fever noir to the narrowed and dangerous twist in the tail, is fully improbable/ impossible. The topic is Euro spy/thief adventure, of the waaay-post-Arsène-Lupin variety, sexed-out pulp whose sleek presentation and perfectionist gloss turn sleaze into allure. Femme Fatale is dirty-minded, perverse and unhealthy, but the delivery system is elegant, confident, sophisticated. Like the serpentine, jeweled, precious-metal bra nabbed in the film’s inaugural battle cry, Femme Fatale is cold, uncomfortable, tacky, impractical and wears those qualities on the outside. Its chilly tendrils curl and tighten as the film unspools; it pumps narcotic toxin into the bloodstream with axial cut fangs. If the viewer-victim should start to swoon, there is no hope. Once in the coils of Femme Fatale, intoxication by cinema is inevitable.

This is not style over substance. This is style as substance.


3. Punch-Drunk Love (dir., scr. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Punch-Drunk Love strands its protagonist in Kafkaesque dingbat apartment buildings, the featureless hallways an endless maze, or in cavernous, anonymous warehouse spaces. Barry Egan’s Godardian blue suit gives the edges of his figure visual pop and make him look superimposed onto the acrid urban interiors. The cinematic transponder beam glides Barry from simulacrum supermarket that looks like the Close Encounters landing pad to a languid open-air Hawaii that looks suspiciously “like Hawaii.” A busted, wheezy harmonium appears at Barry’s doorstep in a coincidental meet-cute or a deus ex something, and spends the rest of the movie being a symbol for either his new ladyfriend Lena, or his own heart, or a busted harmonium.

The music is nerve-scraping like few horror film scores. Dialogue comes in clipped, unfinished sentences. Figures are frequently backlit or blown out, color schemes are repeated until they seem symbolic or maybe not, and there is the out-of-breath corner-of-eye sense that something dire is bubbling under the surface, in the history, around the corner of everything. Punch-Drunk Love aims to capture the chemical sensation, if not necessarily the thoughts and feelings, of falling in love. To parties not involved in the affair, this doesn’t look so different from psychosis. This is teeth-rattling romantic comedy.


2. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (dir. Peter Jackson, scr. Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien)

The oliphauntine bulk of Lord of the Rings is populated by superbeings whose psyches are slightly more vivid than the ciphers of genuine myth, but whose dilemmas are those of how to deal with great power. Charismatic, able character actors have been placed in all these major roles (if, in the meanwhile, Cate Blanchett and Viggo Mortensen have become A List Movie Stars, they do not approach their work as icons and personas), and each carves personalized, detailed features into their allotted marble block. The glue is Ian McKellan as Gandalf, god-spirit cloaked in the body of a shaggy hippy elder, a man of creature comforts and earthy vices, wearied and not a little wistful at the duties of being Middle-Earth’s central mover and shaker. All comers are free to take their pick among the Great Performance! array (mine is John Rhys-Davies as Treebeard, at once glorious dying Green Man archetype and senile old man comic relief).

Among the legendarium’s grand tales of the straight-backed and mighty, wicked and fallen, the Rings cycle reaches an apex of exploded romantic tragedy in The Two Towers. In material barely represented in the source novel, Elrond (another personal favorite, Hugo Weaving playing the elf lord as pursed-lipped hard-ass separatist, grimly resigned to leading his people out of this world) narrates the hyperreal/hypothetical end of Aragorn and Arwen’s love story. The brutally honest speech is rhetorically pitched to underline an immortal’s disgust at natural lifecycles, the Maxfield Parrish-inflected compositions of doomed lovers, fading bodies and a hero calcified into his own sarcophagus are just too tragi-delicate to resist. How ever interesting these characters, they remain remote, the kind of people to which monuments are erected.

So at the center are the hobbits, appropriately sawed-off Everyman avatars, reacting with wonder and confusion at the enormity of landscapes and political machination around them. Whether stouthearted bumpkin gardner, stoner comic relief or haunted, curious and reluctant Ringbearer, it is the little people who are free to indulge in the feelings and expressions of normal human beings, and for that, their sorrows are deeper, their bravery greater. Rings finally bares the heart of its down-and-dirty, conflicted humanity in the portrait of Gollum. The storytellers emphasize the creature’s fracturing psyche, design tilts less to the amphibian and more toward lantern-eyed, drug-emaciated Peter Lorre, and unseen actor Andy Serkis ditches Tolkien’s indication of phlegmatic frogginess for a demonic take on Frank Welker’s voice for Slimer on The Real Ghostbusters.

If The Two Towers has a showstopping setpiece, it involves no swelling music or cast of digital billions: Gollum, alone in the dark, arguing with himself about his selfish addict’s desire versus his scraps of latent conscience. Once Two Towers has is zeroed in on this solitary, molecular scene — one rotting waif pinned in this vast atlas— it isn’t about nonsense abstracts like “good” and “evil” but internal, personal struggle and conflict between infinite non-binary choices. Every line, every word, every shot twists the one-man debate in a different direction as this wretched thing which is all of us weighs his compulsions and his moral options. The prosecution rests its case — je m’accuse: “Murderer.” Well. What’s the worst thing you ever did? The defense is reduced to tears in the night, the debate on personal ethics and freedom lost in the riptide of self-loathing, guilt, regret, loss, of being a fuck-up alone in the world. Lord of the Rings may contain more grandiose images of clashing armies of beasts and angels, but it has no more monumental picture of the human experience than this three seconds. A being speaking to his own reflection, Sméagol wails to Gollum: “I hate you.” The moment is epic.


1. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (dir. Park Chan-wook, scr. Park, Lee Jae-sun, Lee Mu-yeong, Lee Yong-jong)

Ryu is a deaf mute factory worker with a) a dying sister who needs a kidney transplant and b) an impossibly hot girlfriend, Yeong-mi, who has links to a leftist terrorist group. Ground zero. Ryu tries to buy a black market organ, ends up stripped of cash and his own kidney. Hoping for ransom money, Ryu and Yeong-mi kidnap the daughter of industrialist Dong-jin. Ryu’s sister dies, the little girl dies. Then the action starts rising.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance continues unfolding in this fashion. The story moves like an accordion bellows or a wooden Jacob’s ladder puzzle that keeps flipping open new panels as others disappear. Characters take turns occupying the role of Mr. Vengeance, connected forward and backward with each other, their choices, limited vision, and personal ethics tripping one another up all the way. Mr. Vengeance expands into a chain reaction vision of the universe in which choices are not black or white, not even grey, just choices with consequences; everyone is linked to those for whom they are hero and those to whom they are villain. Everyone’s attempt to do right, whether wrathful or righteous, boxed-in or self-interested, has the potential (or inevitability) of mashing someone else’s toes; with the slightest perspective shift, every possible move shatters another player’s life.

Park Chan-wook’s metaethics of doom and fatalistic chaos theory are not relentlessly glum. Mr. Vengeance unravels with the crime pulp pleasure of a wild tale well told, a trickster god’s delight at dishing up outrageous misfortune, and the hair-raising exhilaration of inventive violence and outrageous gross-out. It is about sympathy as much as vengeance, after all. If all this cosmic slapstick doesn’t warrant the occasional laugh, we’d just be screaming all the time. The circumstances are different, but we’re all in the same boat. And in the end, no one gets out alive.