9 posts tagged “review”

Okay, so just finished the halfway point today of Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, in preparation for reviewing it for the website of my revamped arts center (re-opening this week!). And man, I'm telling you, as much as I've liked this book from almost the first page, it is unbelievably enough just getting better and better the farther I get into it. Take today's 50 pages, for example, in which Houellebecq gets on the subject of human happiness, and posits that most humans have the same three experiences when it comes to the topic...

1) The first time you experience true and profound happiness, which of course you never realize until you've lost it;

2) The second time you experience true and profound happiness, tinged now with the knowledge that you will one day lose this too;

and 3), the rest of your life, which is spent in such fear of losing future true happiness that most will never even allow such a thing back into their life in the first place. And this, he opines, is why most people's passionate phases are firmly in their youth, and why by middle age most people are instead simply treading water, with no bigger of a goal than for their spouse and children to not completely hate them. And this is also why we shouldn't care that much about the fate of the middle-aged and elderly, because the majority of them have given up on life and don't deserve to have their fates considered in the first place.

Brilliant, I tells ya! Of course, these are the same 50 pages where he off-handedly suggests that those who collect unemployment checks should be forced into prostitution for the elderly, in that they are literally stealing money from the elderly and should be forced to pay in one form or another. Oh, and that the only thing young women are truly useful for is their enthusiasm over kinky sex; but that most women outgrow their enthusiasm for kinky sex by their early twenties, so for God's sake you better fuck them before then if you want any use out of them at all. Yeah, not for the weak-hearted, Houellebecq, and certainly not for people who don't understand the dark but legitimate humor behind such outrageous statements, as well as the dark kernels of truth that inspire them. And now that I'm halfway through, it's especially easy to see why so many left-wing intellectuals are just so horribly, horribly offended by Houellebecq's work, because he reserves a special scorn in his writing just for them -- for their two-faced natures, for their inability to get certain jokes, for their tendency to take every single word out of a person's mouth as literal, for their unending natural ability to ignore anything in life that doesn't fit in with their idealized little liberal fantasies about how the world actually works.

Houellebecq is a difficult author, I'll grant you that, and if you're not offended horribly at least once while reading one of his novels, you're obviously not paying close enough attention. But man, I'm telling you, the guy can point out truths about society and humanity in a way I've never seen another author accomplish; scenes that just make you smack your forehead and yell, "Oh, duh! Yes! Of course! I get it now!" Of course, the truths Houellebecq are revealing are things that maybe a lot of people don't want to hear or think about, despite them being true, which is maybe why the academic community has had such a violent reaction to his work; for example, check out this hatchet job on Houellebecq penned by no less than John Updike, which of course ultimately makes Updike just look like the ineffectual doddering old man he actually is. I mean, seriously, does Updike have even a single fan on the planet who isn't a radical liberal with a Master's degree or higher? And usually some pussy with no sense of humor to boot? And who in most cases turns out to be a middle-aged professor fucking one of his 19-year-old students, proving Houellebecq's point better than Houellebecq himself ever could?

Okay, enough of this; gotta save some of it for the actual review, of course. End of line.

Okay, I admit it -- I watched all 23 episodes of freshman NBC show Heroes this year, despite it being a pretty damn stupid show. How stupid?

"Hi. I'm evil. How can you tell? I wear horn-rimmed glasses!"

"Hi. I'm a hot woman who's also a serial killer. Because dudes love hot women who are also serial killers!"

"Hi! I am non-threatening Asian stereotype! My voice high and squeaky to not upset American rednecks!"

Yeah, pretty fucking stupid a lot of the time, is what I'm trying to get at. That said, though, the show does have some things going for it, which is why I ended up watching the entire season...

--The pacing of the plot is amazing -- easily one of the fastest-moving action shows in the history of television.

--Not to mention, they were able to create enough plot to keep the show moving that fast in the first place, something that would probably give the producers of "Lost" an apoplectic attack.

--They hired actual well-known comic-book artists to create all the cartoony visuals associated with the show. Even better, they worked an interesting element into the plot that explains why several different artists were all painting the same scenes over the course of the season. (See, the cartoons are actually visual interpretations of futurist visions; and over the course of the season, three different characters ended up with the ability to foresee the future, each of whom made their own paintings of upcoming events that were slightly different than the others'.)

--They actually finished season 1's storyline by the end of the final episode, something else it wouldn't hurt the producers of "Lost" to pay attention to. And man, it's hard to beat that teaser for season 2 they added to the end of the finale, too.

So anyway, my congratulations to the cast and crew of "Heroes," for actually making it to the end of the season without getting canceled; if I've got my numbers correct, in fact, this makes the show the very first one to last an entire season, out of the 12 or so "We want a weirdo nerdy hit like 'Lost' too" shows that the American networks have put on the air over the last couple of years. Now, will you please hire some better fucking writers over the summer?!

(UPDATE, June 2007: Don't forget that this series hasn't stopped; it's just moved to the website for my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.)

(UPDATE! Novelist Christopher Priest, author of the novel this movie is based on, dropped me an email yesterday to make something clear -- that he granted the film rights to Nolan because he found him the most interesting director of the bunch, but not because he thinks Sam Mendes is a hack, like I said here in my original review. Thanks for the correction, Mr. Priest -- that's what I get for trusting Wikipedia! Also, the story below about the real Caucasian who played an Asian magician during the Victorian Age? Turns out there were actually two guys back then, one actually Chinese [Ching Ling Foo] and able to actually do the "goldfish trick" shown in the movie, the other a Caucasian pretending to be Chinese [Chung Ling Soo], and not able to do the trick. Nolan simply used the wrong name in the movie, which Priest wanted to clarify.)

(Tired of seemingly all discussion of movies in this country anymore sliding towards poop fests and other kiddie fare? Me too, which is why I've decided to dedicate my new Netflix account to nothing but "grown-up" movies, and to write reviews here of each one I see. For a master list of all reviews, as well as the next movies on my "queue" list, click here.)

The Prestige (2006)
Written by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, from the original novel by Christopher Priest
Directed by Christopher Nolan

My mind is still reeling a little, a few days after seeing Christopher Nolan's latest dark, atmospheric thriller, The Prestige -- because really, where do you even start to describe such a film to an unsuspecting audience? It is firmly a period-specific genre film, to be sure (a Victorian-era murder mystery, to be specific), as eligible for those frilly costume and set Oscars as any historical drama; but it is definitely not a historical drama, and in fact might be best described as an HG Wells-style retro science-fiction story, that is if Wells happened to have been an opium addict (and who knows, maybe he was). But it's not strictly a re-imagining of a Victorian fantastical tale either, because it also deals with some very angsty human-interest issues belonging firmly to our modern era; like what lies at the root of obsession, anyway, of whether this is simply a necessary by-product of the quest to be the best at what you do, and of what other parts of our "normal" lives we'll sacrifice for the sake of that goal.

Whew! Oh yeah, and it's a two-hour kickass visual orgy for nerds, too, kind of like cross-breeding Moulin Rouge, Blue Velvet, The Matrix, and that stoner roommate you had your sophomore year in college, who was always screwing with your head when you were messed up simply because they could. It's that too.

So maybe let's start at the beginning, for those who need it; The Prestige is the fourth and latest film from celebrated director Christopher Nolan, who previous credits include the 2000 indie breakout hit Memento, the disappointing 2002 Robin Williams "I'm being a creep now" vehicle Insomnia, and the 2005 big gushing fanboy love letter Batman Begins; it's the second collaboration he's done with his celebrated author brother Jonathan Nolan, who wrote the incredibly convoluted short story that Memento is based on, as well as co-writing the script of both that and this with Christopher (in this case from the original novel by Christopher Priest, an interview with whom is nicely included in the DVD extras). It was a movie released in the fall of 2006 with almost no fanfare, which then limped out of theaters a few weeks later, and just recently finally received a DVD release. And now that I've watched it, my only question remains, "Why?" Why didn't this movie naturally become the biggest hit so far of Nolan's career, it so obviously being the best film of them all, as well as catapulting him from "young promising director" into legitimate genius (also known as "The Apocalypse Now Moment")? It is an exquisite thing, a movie sometimes so beautiful and haunting that you find yourself literally holding your breath. So why did it crawl out of theaters last winter generating neither any particular buzz nor any particular revenue?

As with any Nolan (Nolanean?) movie, surprise is of the essence; I'll be treading lightly with the plot details today, although of course a certain amount simply must be divulged for the sake of making my point. For example, although it takes place around the world and features a dozen main characters, the story is ultimately about two magicians in London at the beginning of the 20th century -- the "Professor" (Christian Bale) and "The Great Danton" (Hugh Jackman, at his absolute career-best) -- at a time before television and overseas jets, when magicians were treated by the public as part showmen and part religious prophets. Indeed, as the Victorian Age was demonstrating to people at the time, a whole lot of things we had thought impossible suddenly were real -- electricity, radio, transcontinental rail, the rapid exchange of far-flung international secrets. If a man like the real-life Nikola Tesla (played here perfectly by David Bowie) can hold an oversized lightbulb in his hand, and make it glow from the alternating current coursing through his body, then maybe a magician really can catch a bullet.

But as we're reminded throughout the movie (and indeed, becomes a metaphorical point to it all), there's a difference between a magician and a wizard, with one getting rich off society and the other banished from it; no matter how fantastical, the audience must always be given an out for it to be entertaining and not terrifying, a possibility that the entire thing is an elaborate manmade sham that any mortal could duplicate, if only knowing the closely-guarded secret. As most poetically put by Cutter (Michael Caine), the behind-the-scenes engineering genius who creates the elaborate traps for them both, "The audience never applauds when the person disappears; they only clap when he comes back."

This dichotomy between "entertaining magic" and "real magic" is a running theme throughout The Prestige (whose title, for those who are curious, refers to the third part of a magic trick, or in other words the part where a magician says "ta-da"); it informs not only the way the characters behave and interact, but also their overall motivations and why they respond to certain situations the way they do. That's another wonderful little touch about the lean and mean script by the Brothers Nolan, and why it proves that they really are one of the smartest screenwriting teams working today; that even though all these fantastical things are going on, requiring a lot of expensive special effects and set decorations, featuring two men who are supposed to be cold, unemotional geniuses at what they do, the story is ultimately about the simple human rivalry that develops between them, over which of them has "suffered more" for the sake of the craft.

It's an intense and base human emotion that we can all intrinsically relate to, simple petty jealousy, and is what keeps the plot moving at an impossibly breakneck and complex speed: it's what inspires the Professor to eventually write down all his secrets (in cipher, of course); and what inspires The Great Danton to then steal that notebook, and keep his own journal about the translation process; and what inspires the Professor to eventually steal that second notebook, reading about Danton reading about the Professor reading about Danton. Why yes, much like Memento, it's easy to get lost during The Prestige if you're not paying attention; and in fact, now that I think about it, maybe that's why this film didn't do so well at the box office, because I'm now suddenly remembering all the people who were hopelessly confused by Memento and actually hated the movie because of it.

It's both the ultimate compliment and ultimate insult I can pay a film, which I definitely do here; that it is much too smart for a wide mainstream audience, the kind of movie that will rattle around in your head for months afterwards but only if you're prepared to let it. Just as physical exercise is a push/pull experience of tension and release, of regularly taking on more than you can handle and then spending an equal amount of time recovering (or "feeling the burn," as they say), so too can one take on challenging stories that have multiple hidden metaphorical meanings, and "feel the burn" of discovering these multiple meanings over long deliberation. Eye of the tiger! As the film progresses, for example, we realize more and more that the magicians are after the same thing, even though they're approaching it in opposite directions, and that they suffer from the same baggage, even though it manifests itself in opposite ways.

We realize that this frisson is what fuels every second of the movie, and what leads the film to the series of surprises at the end that it holds; that the Professor's decision to start wearing a dramatic fake goatee in public, for example, not only demonstrates how inept he is at the "show business" side of magic, but also how much help he's suddenly receiving from his new assistant Olivia (Scarlett Johansson, who unfortunately is not given much to do here), while also all being a subtle clue as to one of the secrets at the end. The two scripts that the Nolan brothers have now written together have both turned out to be much like an aged Zen master you stumble across accidentally at the edge of the beach one morning -- endlessly complex, endlessly simple, endlessly elegant, and wickedly funny and kinda sexy to boot, albeit in an odd way you can't quite put your finger on. Coming from a writing background like I do, it's something I especially look for in the movies I enjoy; and if the above is just too flowery a metaphor for you, maybe The Prestige isn't the right film for you in the first place.

Out of 10:
Writing: 10
Acting: 9.5
Directing: 9.7
Cinematography: 10
Overall: 9.8

Random notes:
--No review of The Prestige is complete without a mention of the extraordinary soundtrack by David Julyan; it alone is half the reason the movie is so damn creepy at points. There are several samples at the movie's official website, for anyone who wants to check it out.

--Sam Mendes of American Beauty was the first director to express an interest in adapting this novel; author Christopher Priest, though, considers Mendes a hack, and insisted that Nolan be given the rights instead. Good for you, Priest; Sam Mendes is a hack! (See the update at the top of this review.)

--Chung Ling Soo, the fictional master magician who provides an early metaphorical scene for the film, was based on a real person from the Victorian Age, who really did perform the trick shown in the movie the way it's explained; he was also Caucasian, by the way, although lived his entire public life as an Asian in order to maintain the illusion. (See the update at the top of this review.) He died because of another running theme from the movie, a bullet-catch trick gone wrong; his last words were "My God, I've been shot," the first English he had spoken in public in 19 years.

--The two main characters' four initials spell ABRA...and letters from their first names can be pulled to spell CADABRA as well. Get it? This was an invention of the Nolans, according to novelist Christopher Priest, not something from his original book.

--And speaking of true stories inspiring part of this movie, Nikola Tesla actually did have a secret laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and received the support of the town for it by providing them with free electricity. Also much like the movie, Tesla was an eccentric genius who was hounded by Thomas Edison because of his inventions, and who often ran quasi-con-jobs on interested parties in order to secure more funding.

--One of the characters (I won't tell you which) gets two of his fingers blown off at a certain point in the movie. Nolan picked those particular fingers as an homage to the 1980s science-fiction masterpiece Blade Runner (Harrison Ford's character loses the same fingers); Nolan has admitted numerous times that the movie is one of his all-time favorites.

--And just because it bears repeating, for those who don't know -- Nolan raised the final money he needed for his breakthrough hit Memento by hosting a special screening of his short student film Following at the 1999 Hong Kong Film Festival, then literally passing a hat among the audience afterwards. Now that's the underground arts in a nutshell, my friend.

Best viewed: with a full bottle of red wine, and your geeky romantic partner who gets sexually aroused by NPR monologues, while listening to the Handsome Family. You nerd!

Next on my queue list: Requiem for a Dream, the uplifting tale of a plucky inner-city school teacher, from the inspirational mind of Darren Aronofsky (Pi, The Fountain). Or, no, wait a minute, actually it's that Oscar-nominated movie about drug addiction, that apparently is so bleak that most people want to slit their wrists by the end. Damnit, I'm always getting this film mixed up with Dangerous Minds!

(UPDATE, June 2007: Don't forget that this series hasn't stopped; it's just moved to the website for my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.)

(Tired of seemingly all discussion of movies in this country anymore sliding towards poop fests and other kiddie fare? Me too, which is why I've decided to dedicate my new Netflix account to nothing but "grown-up" movies, and to write reviews here of each one I see. For a master list of all reviews, as well as the next movies on my "queue" list, click here.)

The Third Man: Criterion edition (1949)
Written by Graham Greene, from his original novella
Directed by Carol Reed

(Special thanks today to essayist Matthew Dessem, who generated most of the screenshots you're seeing in today's review. If you're not yet reading Dessem's blog, The Criterion Contraption [in which he is slowly filing incredibly astute reviews of every single DVD Criterion has ever released], start doing so!)

Time and nostalgia have a way of screwing with even our most consistent memories, not to mention the way we as a society look back on the past; take the 1950s, for one easy example, a time of great racial strife, violence and red-baiting witch hunts, that is nonetheless now looked back on by most as an idyllic "Leave It To Beaver" time of innocence. And so it is with World War II as well; that as the last of its veterans start dying, the Tom Brokaws of the world have stepped in with their clean, revisionist "Greatest Generation" takes on the affair, threatening to turn the whole messy thing in our minds into an orderly and always-justified European holiday.

Thank God, then, that such movies as 1949's The Third Man are still around, much less that they were made in the first place; produced immediately after the war, from a script by celebrated British misanthrope Graham Greene, and shot in the former Nazi headquarters of Vienna while it was still mostly nothing but rubble, it reminds us that there is no such thing as a "noble war," and that even the most pure of heart can easily turn to corruption in such an environment, sometimes for pure survival if nothing else. The movie asks difficult questions of humanity, ones we are pondering yet again during this time of terrorism and torture we are currently going through: of whether you can truly justify inhuman behavior during a time of war, as a means of fighting that war or sometimes merely surviving it, or whether such ethical compromises strip you of the very humanity you think worth fighting for in the first place. Is it better to be morally pure but dead, or morally compromised but alive to see another day? And in a wartime environment, is it fair to even pose such questions? The Third Man ponders all of these topics and more, while still being wickedly funny in a very black way, and while featuring some of the most stunning cinematography you'll ever see in a pre-widescreen movie, restored to its stunning original condition back in 1999 for the movie's 50th anniversary.

The biggest irony of all this, of course, is that the creative team behind The Third Man (Greene and director Carol Reed) never meant to create an "important" or "historical" film; they were merely trying to pull off a cheapie, fast-paced film noir, shot in postwar Europe simply to save money, set in Allied-controlled Vienna simply because they thought it an exotic location that would sell more tickets. And for those who don't know, postwar Bavaria was indeed a great location to set a film noir: basically nothing but rubble for a good decade after the war finished, both Germany and Austria pretty much survived those years through the proliferation of a vast and sophisticated black market, one that virtually every person participated in, simply because there was no other way to obtain many needed goods.

The situation, as well as the movie's plot, begs the question -- that in such an environment, what are we to think of those who profit from the circumstances? This is the question thrust quickly on our protagonist, the sad-sack pulp-fiction writer Holly Martins (played exquisitely by the irreplaceable Joseph Cotton), basically the 1940s version of a slightly inept American sitcom writer, who has been flown to Vienna by his old college buddy Harry Lime (Orson Welles, in a career-defining role), ostensibly because of a mysterious job offer. Once there, however, Martins realizes the truth: that Lime was killed just a few days previous, that he turns out to have been a particularly inept racketeer, and that he most likely made his money by stealing Penicillin from military hospitals, watering it down and selling it to unsuspecting victims. And thus does the jaded American arrive in Bavaria, facing a mountain of questions about his "job offer" from the multinational police force currently trying to run the city, without a penny to his own name, forced to pass himself off as a "serious novelist" to a local cultural group in order to raise the pocket money needed just to stay and investigate the situation.

And investigate the situation Martins does, which as many film critics over the years have pointed out, is where things really start to fall apart for him; because as much as he thinks he's capable (after all, Martins ran moonshine back in the States with Lime during Prohibition), this squeaky-clean American just isn't ready to see the world in the infinite shades of gray needed to understand his old friend's behavior. After all, whose opinion of Lime should he actually trust? Was he the inhuman monster the police claim, one who left behind an entire hospital wing's worth of mutants in order to score a profit off diluted medicine? Or is he the savior described by his ex-girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), who explains how Lime managed to secure her a fake Austrian passport after the war, so that she wouldn't have to return to her native, now-Communist Czechoslovakia? Or was Lime the inept do-nothing portrayed by his former business associates, the simultaneously hilarious and disgusting Popescu (Siegfried Breuer) and Winkel (Erich Ponto), a man so unimportant to their operations (according to them) that not another thought should be given to his demise?

As the genuinely funny black comedy unfolds, we realize that maybe there is no single option which can be chosen in such a situation and called correct: that maybe the complexities of war can make a person both noble and evil at the same time, sometimes through the very same actions. And that of course is what makes The Third Man so ahead of its time, and such a classic now -- that even though we in our modern times are used to addressing such shades-of-gray questions, such topics were almost never tackled in the morally black-and-white world of Hollywood in the 1940s. (Want proof? Check out one of the many cool DVD additions, a radio spinoff series from the '50s also starring Welles, in which Harry Lime doesn't die, comes back to America and becomes a crimefighter. Yeesh.) Indeed, this is one of the things that makes the movie so enjoyable: that Martins reacts to the situation in the way a typical cardboard-cutout 1940s movie hero would, even though screenwriter Greene creates a situation where such reactions are wildly inappropriate and naive. It's an amazing thing to watch in a movie so old, and a great reminder that even in those years, there were lots of people around able to approach such situations with a surprisingly complex mindset...just that they normally weren't given the chance to make big-budget Hollywood films.

Of course, one of the biggest treats of The Third Man is Orson Welles' captivating performance as the legitimate scumbag Harry Lime; which of course is the ultimate irony of the movie, in that Welles actually appears in less than 15 minutes of the finished film. (For a great story about why Welles thought this performance was so well-regarded by the public, do make sure to catch the DVD introduction by Peter Bogdanovich.) It's these 15 minutes, though, and especially the mind-blowing scene between Lime and Martins in the a moving Ferris wheel, that shows why Welles was such a freaking genius -- just witness the callous way he refers to his victims, while still making you completely charmed by his crooked smile and roguish personality. Simply put, this film wouldn't work without Welles' 15 minutes, unlike most of the famous 15-minute cameos throughout film history (say for example, Marlon Brando in Superman).

And finally, no review of The Third Man is complete without a special mention of the stunning cinematography; in fact, as mentioned, this was the main reason Reed wanted the story set in Vienna in the first place, so he could capture the stunning views a thousand-year-old city of rubble affords. It is almost worth watching the movie just for the shots of Vienna's sewer system, where the entire last act of the film takes place; but oh, there's just so much more about this movie to enjoy as well. It's a stunning reminder of just how good and how powerful films can be in the first place, when true geniuses are simply left alone to make the brilliant projects they're capable of; it's a lesson unfortunately forgotten by modern Hollywood, and one sorely needed again if that industry wants to save itself.

Out of 10:
Writing: 9.9
Acting: 9.8
Directing: 9.9
Cinematography: 10
Overall: 9.9

Random notes:

--For those who don't know, this is also the first movie in history to be known just as much for its soundtrack: it is the film in fact that singlehandedly introduced zither music to American and British audiences, who immediately ate it up. Soundtrack composer Anton Karas (discovered by Reed at a dinner party during shooting) ended up going on an international tour because of this film; with his earnings he bought a restaurant in Vienna and named it (what else) "The Third Man Cafe."

--So how did Reed capture such stunning images in the first place? Easy -- he employed three completely separate film crews (one for daytime shots, one for night, and one just for the sewers), shooting on rotation nearly 24 hours a day, Reed overseeing them all through copious use of the toxic stimulant Benzedrine. You don't see many films getting made that way anymore!

--Also for those who don't know, the sewer shots featuring Welles were all done in a London soundstage; and that's because after the first day of shooting in the actual Vienna sewers, Welles found the whole thing so disgusting and dangerous that he refused to go back down.

--Director Reed originally wanted James Stewart for the Holly Martins role; but Hollywood executive David O. Selznick, who was heading up the American half of the production, insisted on using contract star Cotton instead. Looking back now, I can't even imagine how such a movie could be made with Stewart in the bitter antihero role.

--And finally, for those who are curious, Welles actually ad-libbed what is now considered the most famous line of the movie -- "The Swiss have had peace and democracy for 500 years, and what have they produced? Cuckoo clocks."

Best viewed: As soon as possible.

Next on my queue list: The Prestige, the dark 2006 Christopher Nolan film about Victorian Age magicians, starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, David Bowie, Scarlett Johansson and more. I've heard mixed things about this movie; it'll be interesting to see it finally for myself.

(UPDATE, June 2007: Don't forget that this series hasn't stopped; it's just moved to the website for my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.)

(Tired of seemingly all discussion of movies in this country anymore sliding towards poop fests and other kiddie fare? Me too, which is why I've decided to dedicate my new Netflix account to nothing but "grown-up" movies, and to write reviews here of each one I see. For a master list of all reviews, as well as the next movies on my "queue" list, click here.)

The Departed (2006)
Written by William Monahan, from the original by Siu Fai Mak
Directed by Martin Scorsese

Just how many Martin Scorsese films have I seen now, exactly? It's a fair question to ask; I'm an amateur film buff, after all, and Scorsese is one of the staples of the amateur film buff, as important to us as Michael Jordan is to basketball fans (or at least I imagine). And according to the Internet Movie Database (another staple of the amateur film buff), I've in fact now seen 14 of Scorsese's films, of the 19 major ones he's directed between Mean Streets (1973) and now. And what's more, for the most part I've enjoyed almost all of them (some more and some less, of course), precisely because they're so different from one another; that much like the best artists throughout history, Scorsese is obsessed with the new, and with always trying out things within the medium of film that he's never done before.

So how ironic, I suppose (or perhaps not ironic at all), that one of Scorsese's biggest movies of his career, both commercially and critically, would also happen to be one of his most derivative -- one that from start to finish feels like a simple rehash of his better work, kinda like a Martin Scorsese movie done by a film student who worships Martin Scorsese? I'm talking, of course, about The Departed, which last year garnered Scorsese his very first Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, as well as officially being the highest-grossing movie of his entire career; which is a shame, because in many ways you can see this as the worst film of his entire career, in that it's the one that takes the least amount of chances, the one that most skates by on the reputation of its director and stars.

Despite its reputation, the plot of The Departed is simple enough: it's the story of a brilliant cop from a family of petty crooks (Leonardo DiCaprio), who gets sent deep undercover to infiltrate an Irish mob family in Boston led by Jack Nicholson, who also happens to have a crooked cop on his payroll (Matt Damon) who is constantly feeding him information regarding upcoming raids. Both DiCaprio and Damon are aware that the other person exists, but neither knows the other's identity; the entire movie, in fact, is a supposedly complex cat-and-mouse game to see which of them can discover the identity of the other first. Throw in a bunch of famous male actors with hardly anything to do, one unknown female who shows her boobies, and the word 'fuck' 237 times, and you got yourself a Martin Scorsese flick!

Or at least this seems to be the transparent reasoning behind the hacky screenplay, penned by newcomer William Monahan, a former Pushcart Prize winner and Spy magazine editor, who in interviews has admitted that he basically gave up on his literary career to get rich off screenplays instead. And boy, that attitude is certainly in play here -- between the scenes that are literally stolen wholesale from Scorsese's brilliant Goodfellas, the limp dialogue, the gaping holes in the plot and the like, it's a script that could literally have been churned out by any 22-year-old with a laptop and a copy of Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434, and I'm surprised that Scorsese would ever agree to take it on in the first place.

Then again, Scorsese has also said in multiple interviews that The Departed is supposed to be his take on 1950s cheapie B-movie crime pulps, which suddenly causes the weak script to make a lot more sense. But if that was the goal, why not carry that attitude all the way through the entire production? Why not cast only unknown actors, or give yourself the tiny little indie budgets that B-movies typically got during the studio days? Ultimately, Scorsese is guilty here of the same thing Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were guilty of with this year's Grindhouse -- of taking a genre of film they are fans of, known expressly for the cheap and fast thrills it provides, and then killing the spirit of that genre by adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the budget and dozens of prima-donna Hollywood stars.

It's a problem of myopia, I'm convinced; that once you become as big as a Scorsese or Tarantino or Rodriguez, that once you become used to making movies in the traditional bloated way, it must be almost impossible to see how those traditional bloated elements will actually kill the spirit of the quirky, independent production they get in their head that they want to make. The reason '50s B-movie crime thrillers are so much fun, the reason that '70s exploitation films are so much fun, is precisely because the productions are as far away from traditional Hollywood as you can get: they take the kinds of risks that traditional films can't, tackle the issues that would make most studio executives wet their pants in fear and anxiety, and can get away with it because there's not enough money involved for studio executives to give a crap. Adding tens of millions of dollars to such a project, no matter how subversive the project stays in spirit, inevitably brings the Suits whether you like it or not; and anytime the Suits come to a Hollywood production, artistic trouble is not far behind.

Ultimately I guess I shouldn't complain; even bad Scorsese is infinitely better than most of the dreck masquerading these days as "film-based entertainment," and The Departed is definitely an entertaining trifle with an ending I would've never guessed at. It's just disappointing, I guess, to see Scorsese sorta phoning it in with this particular film, when he could've done so much more -- when he really could have made a faithful recreation of a '50s potboiler B-movie crime drama, simply by picking a better script and casting unknown actors. Obviously it's what the public wants, based on the box-office receipts and the amount of awards the film picked up; but since when has it been an artist's job to spoon-feed the expected to the mouth-breathers of the world? That's the usual modus operandi of the Hollywood industry, and why we end up each year with a billion dollars' worth of fart jokes.

Scorsese is above such things, which is why we amateur film buffs love his work so much; but if he's basically going to rip off his own movies in order to appease this mouth-breathing swarm, there's suddenly no reason to watch his movies either, just as there's no longer any special cache concerning Robert DeNiro being in a film anymore, simply because he's put out so much unwatchable crap in the last decade. Sorry, Marty, but that's just how it is! I'm looking forward to his next film, to be sure; but if you're like me and appreciate Scorsese's work mostly for the unexpected elements they contain, do yourself a favor and just skip The Departed altogether.

Out of 10:
Writing: 5.0
Acting: 8.2
Directing: 9.0
Cinematography: 9.1
Overall: 7.1

Random notes:
--Almost none of actors in The Departed were Scorsese's original choices, and just think of what kind of film this would've been if his first picks had all been available -- Robert DeNiro instead of Jack Nicholson, Denis Leary instead of Mark Wahlberg, Mel Gibson instead of Martin Sheen, Brad Pitt instead of Matt Damon, Kate Winslet as the main female.

--And speaking of which, did anyone else wonder why most of Nicholson's dialogue sounds like incomprehensible batshit, and why the movie is loaded with all these short nonsensical scenes from him that are never referred to again (like throwing a fistful of cocaine over a hooker, wearing a strap-on dildo to a porn theatre, etc)? Well, it turns out that this was Nicholson's prerogative -- that the only way he'd agree to be in the film was if he had the right to improvise his dialogue, as well as add elements to scenes that didn't exist before. This, incidentally, is also why Nicholson has long stringy hair in a world full of perfectly-coifed Irish mob dandies, and why his diehard Boston-bred character happens to wear a New York Yankees cap throughout the entire film.

And this of course gets into a bigger and more troubling issue, which is that Jack Nicholson is no longer an actual actor -- much like Marlon Brando at the end of his own career, Nicholson is now basically hired to show up and act like Nicholson for two hours. And no offense to either Brando or Nicholson, but this is pretty much the kiss of death for any movie -- when an actor gets so famous that they are no longer required to act, but rather have entire movies custom-changed around their own ridiculous behavior and ideas. I just can't stop thinking of how different this film would've been if DeNiro had been available to take Nicholson's part like Scorsese originally wanted, and how I might now be giving an enthusiastic recommendation instead of a reluctant pan.

--And by the way, that number I quoted earlier is true -- the word 'fuck' actually is said a total of 237 times in this movie, making it officially the most curse-laden Best Picture winner in the history of the Academy Awards. And also by the way, am I the only one who found the racist-based cursing to be just so completely incongruous to the time period the movie is set in (that is, the early 2000s)? The reason such cursing works in a film like Goodfellas is that it's set among lowlifes in New York in the 1950s through '70s -- you expect the characters to talk like that, because everyone used to talk like that back then, the race-based cursing just a product of that particular moment in history. To have a bunch of contemporary Boston cops, though, uttering some of the most racist language you've ever heard, does nothing but point out just how unrealistic such dialogue is, and how in our modern society such cops would be slapped with citizen lawsuits so fast it'd make your head spin. (I kept imagining, for example, one of these cops trying to explain why he got so angry at a Starbucks the other day -- "You see, this fuckin' nigger faggot didn't get the shavings right on my latte, so I complained to this fuckin' wetback guinea floor manager, and the cunt had the balls to get angry at me over my language!") Just imagine any of these characters trying to have a conversation in a normal everyday environment, and you too can see just how silly the dialogue they've been given actually is.

Best viewed: With a bunch of friends in a party atmosphere, so that you can piss them all off afterwards with your snotty film-school holier-than-thou attitude.

Next on my queue list: The Third Man, the classic Orson Welles adaptation of the classic Graham Greene novel, restored a couple of years ago to its magnificent original condition. I can't wait!

As part of the big health changes I'm making in my life this year, I've decided to start drinking a lot more tea, as a substitute for the massive amounts of intensely sweetened soft drinks I've normally drank throughout my life; and to drink only decaffeinated tea after 3pm, to aid in the quest for better sleep without the need for pharmaceuticals (something I think more and more about these days, the closer I get to 40). And with tea being relatively inexpensive in the US these days as well (typically only US$3 to 4 for 20 high-end tea bags, when found on sale), I thought it'd be fun to try a whole bunch of different kinds out this spring, summer and autumn, and to keep a running journal here at my VOX account concerning what I thought of each.

All teas are brewed in boiling distilled water for a total of six minutes, and have one spoon of honey added unless otherwise noted.

Tea being reviewed: Twinings Irish Breakfast Tea

Caffeine: Yes; amount not stated

Ingredients: Black tea

Aroma: Strong and musky, like what you'd expect a 300-year-old British teahouse to smell like

Taste: Like what Americans expect typical "tea" to taste like, only much stronger. If you compared it to Lipton, for example, it'd be like comparing black coffee to a cup with cream and sugar. (For what it's worth, most of what Americans typically think of as generic "tea" is in reality either Earl Grey or English Breakfast.)

Iced: The same as hot, described above: like what Americans typically expect "iced tea" to taste like, only much stronger. Both the hot and cold versions take not only sweeteners well, but milk and cream too.

Notes: Within the entire subject of British tea, many believe that Twinings sits at the center of it all: it was the first company in British history, after all, to make tea popular, after centuries of coffee being the dominant choice; is the original inventor of the Earl Grey blend, now the most popular style of tea in the world; has been the official supplier of tea to the royal family since the Victorian Age; and has even maintained the same London retail location continuously for over 300 years now and counting. That's probably the most interesting irony, in fact, behind the particular tea I'm reviewing; that it was such a thoroughly English company that ended up first inventing what we now know as the Irish Breakfast blend. Funnily enough, in fact, according to their website, the entire blend was inspired by the slightly racist English opinion of the time of the Irish, as bawdy hard-working alcoholics who loved everything in their lives to be strong and bitter.

Twinings' Irish Breakfast is in fact a special strain of black tea, bred specifically to stand up well to milk and sweeteners, for English drinkers who wanted something with an extra oomph; think of it as the Edwardian Age's Red Bull, mixed with cream instead of vodka and served in porcelain cups instead of martini glasses. For those like me, though, who over the years have become fans of black coffee, red wine and the like, the "black" (unaltered) version of Irish Breakfast is a real delight as well, something with an extremely intense taste that lets you know that you're really drinking some freakin' tea. Not to mention that it takes liquor well too (or at least I imagine), for those who like traditional-style hot toddies in the winter months.

For a good pitcher of sun tea, use a total of five bags (one for each glass, and one more for good luck). Serve with lemon, honey, sugar/sweetener, milk, cream, scones, biscotti -- just about anything traditionally associated with tea.

In conclusion: If you're a fan of strong traditional tea, you'll go through a lot of it; try to find it on sale in bulk sizes. The perfect thing for Americans used to coffee, who are grossed out by generic grocery-store-brand "Tea." Have at least one cup at the 300-year-old London store (216 The Strand) before you die.

Also reviewed at this blog: Celestial Seasonings Teahouse Chai Vanilla Green Tea

By the way, I caught an episode of "Drive" last night, the new high-concept action show on FOX that is replacing "Prison Break" over the summer. And I haven't said this about a television show in a long time, because it hasn't been true in a long time -- but "Drive" is one of those shows that is just so goddamn ridiculous and over the top, it spins around and ironically becomes a sincerely huge delight.

See, it's about this group of random everyday schmucks who have all been forced to participate in this illegal cross-country road race, by having various family members kidnapped or framed for crimes they didn't commit, all of it done by this shadowy organization for reasons we don't know yet. And that, frankly, is a pretty ridiculous concept to begin with; but then the producers pack the show with all these scenes that make absolutely no dramatic or rational sense whatsoever, but did cost a lot of money and look all fuckin' cool when you're watching them.

Like, take this extended riff from last night's episode, where one of the characters thought he had been kidnapped by a rogue cop, who had mistakenly identified him as a cop-killer from Nebraska from a decade ago, and who had him locked in an interrogation room and kept beating him all hour long. That's not my point; turns out the entire thing was a ruse, orchestrated by The Shadowy Organization as a way to get this guy more motivated, and that the fake interrogation room was actually inside this warehouse with the guy's car right next to it. But when the time came to reveal all this, did they just open the door of the interrogation room and tell him? Of course not, idiot! First the fake cop had to give some corny line of dialogue, and then he picked up his chair and hurled it through the room's one-way mirror, revealing the guy's just-washed car gleaming under the lights of a dozen man-sized Klieg lamps set up around it in this giant empty warehouse, with of course corporate hard rock blasting in the background the entire time.

Dude, that is FUCKING EXTREME! But seriously, why go to all that trouble and spend all that money, just to briefly impress someone they've already kidnapped in the first place, and who is completely under their control? The show is full of moments like these -- like the end of that episode, for another example, where the finish line for that leg turned out to be this abandoned drive-in theatre in rural Georgia, which The Shadowy Organization had completely retrofitted with a new screen, projector and speakers, in order to give all the drivers the info on the next leg of the race. And again, you find yourself asking why -- fucking why are they going to all this trouble to impress a bunch of people they've kidnapped? And the answer of course is that they aren't -- they did it instead because it's an easy way to blow half a million dollars and ensure that a three-minute clip of it online will get linked to a million times at MySpace.

Now, it's different when a crew are aware of how god-awful their show might be, and sorta wink with one eye the entire length of the episode; that's not nearly as fun, and is why I claim that a show like this hasn't been on TV in years. It's obvious, though, that the producers of "Drive" suffer no such reality; that they sincerely see themselves as a bunch of maverick creative fuckin' geniuses, like another "Lost" staff or the like. And that, frankly, is what makes it such a delight; is that when they're making these complete and utter leaps in logic a dozen times each episode, they think they're actually making sense and are clever, which then pushes them so completely over the top and into such absurdist territory that you can't help but to be fascinated and impressed.

So yeah, I'm completely ashamed of myself, but I'll probably end up watching at least a couple of more episodes of "Drive," and maybe even the entire summer season. It's been a long time since I legitimately enjoyed a fucking awful television show; maybe I'll finally do so again this year.

UPDATE: You know what would make a great black comedy, though? A show about The Shadowy Organization's construction crew, and all the ridiculous lengths they have to go through for these three-minute experiences. Like take the scene I mentioned above, at the end of the episode; to actually pull that off, their crew would need to locate an abandoned drive-in theatre in the middle of nowhere that hasn't gotten torn down yet, buy it, retrofit it with new speakers, projector and screen, and do it all without attracting any attention from the nearby small-town communities, all to convey three minutes' worth of information that frankly could be much more easily communicated via email. ("You're driving to Oregon next. No, we're not really evil, but we can't explain it to you yet. Please forward this to your friends!") I'd love to see a half-hour comedy about the people in charge of pulling these things off; you know, a workplace comedy, like an even more surreal version of "The Office" or "The IT Crowd." Maybe the BBC could pull it off.

(UPDATE, June 2007: Don't forget that this series hasn't stopped; it's just moved to the website for my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.)

(Tired of seemingly all discussion of movies in this country anymore sliding towards poop fests and other kiddie fare? Me too, which is why I've decided to dedicate my new Netflix account to nothing but "grown-up" movies, and to write reviews here of each one I see. For a master list of all reviews, as well as the next movies on my "queue" list, click here.)

Triumph of the Will (1935)
Written and Directed by Leni Riefenstahl

In our modern times, the term "propaganda" has been saddled with a bit of an evil reputation; its original definition, however, used to be a much more neutral thing, referring to any piece of media that specifically tries to further a specific opinion (as opposed to journalism, for example, which attempts to remain objective). Where the term first started picking up a bad connotation was during the first half of the 20th century, when its aims were suddenly taken a lot more seriously by a series of modern governments; it was the particular ease by which Fascist states accomplished propaganda, to be specific, that then made the term acquire the modern bad aftertaste it now has. In fact, in the decades since the governmental form first came into popularity, it's been proven how crucial propaganda is to any fascist state's success, and how it is the easy manipulation of the masses through media that can many times prolong a fascist government's overall lifespan.

This of course is the ultimate irony of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 documentary Triumph of the Will, is its near total success as a piece of governmental propaganda; it is so successful as a tool for swaying hearts and minds, it can be nearly impossible for many to see it simply as a film to be judged on cinematic terms. Because make no mistake, the film is an extremely important one in cinematic terms -- one of the first to utilize dolly shots, one of the first to utilize crane shots, one of the first to feature moving cameras of stationary orators, among many of the firsts the shoot racked up, not to mention it being made by a forward-thinking woman at a time when most of the world shunned and punished such women for their initiative. But it's impossible to deny -- it's also a two-hour tale about how great it is to be a Nazi, and it's done so well that it's still convincing people to become one almost a century later. And that, as they say, makes things a lot more complicated.

Now for those who don't know, this isn't any old movie about Nazis; it covers a very specific weekend, in fact, a sort of national convention the Nazis threw every year in the picturesque town of Nuremberg, a combination rally for the faithful and demonstration for the uninitiated, with both a little Bible camp and a little Rock 'N Roll Fantasy camp thrown in for good measure. It was a bizarre enough spectacle on its own, something that can only be accomplished in a fascist state where such insane budgets can be dedicated to such a thing; but then Hitler gave Riefenstahl carte-blanche privileges to go anywhere and do anything she wanted in pursuit of the movie, done it's now widely believed because he had a crush on her, of all things. (In fact, Riefenstahl on her own has this fascinating history; a former professional athlete, she was one of the world's first cinematic stuntpeople, as well as one of the world's first extreme skiiers, which is how she first got famous; she used this fame as an actor and hottie athlete, then, to write and direct her own movies.) The result, then, is a bizarre amalgam of film styles; part straight-ahead documentary of a historical event, part justification for why you should support the subjects of the film, and part cultural document regarding how such a monstrous thing as Nazism could've captured the imagination of such a large part of an otherwise smart and humane public.

Because let's not ever forget -- before the existence of the Holocaust became widely known, there were millions of otherwise sane people who publicly supported the concept of fascism, who in fact believed that it was a better form of government than democracy, including such notable Americans as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. These days, of course, after nearly 70 years of propaganda ourselves, we can barely picture a world where millions of people voluntarily support the idea of a despot over the idea of free elections; but that's a world that existed in 1935, an attitude that was rapidly taking over Europe, partly by force and partly by choice. And this issue of course takes on even more immediacy post-9/11, when we've seen an American public that has suddenly embraced more of fascism than many ever thought possible. It's still a very relevant question to ask, of what leads societies to embrace such environments or at least tolerate the attitudes they foster; that's why I think that watching such movies as Triumph of the Will is still so relevant, even though the film itself is weighed down with so much political baggage on its own by now.

So instead of a traditional review of this particular DVD, then, as befitting the fractured nature of the film itself, perhaps I'll simply type in the notes I took while watching it, along with some stills from the movie I found online that will hopefully help illustrate my points. And then maybe I'll try to wrap things up again in a traditional way at the end.