Season of the Witch

A recent College Humor video humorously posited the life of Nicolas Cage's agent, a man forced to contend with his client's perennial inability to say "no" to any project in order to keep himself in castles and pyramids. But that sketch, of course, was lighthearted and broad, building the man's outsized grief at being saddled with Cage's willingness to do everything and dilute his brand until the pain reached a frenzy. I like to imagine Cage's agent as a man who expresses his sorrow in the opposite fashion, silently nodding with resignation as his client agrees to be in the latest piece of crap, hanging up the phone and reaching for a home blood pressure kit to test his heart.

He must have had to put a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue when Cage signed onto Season of the Witch, a film that all but begs comparisons to Monty Python and the Holy Grail despite its straight face. As with that legendary comedy, Season moves largely in a series of vignettes vaguely resembling a plot, but where that played into the Pythons' sketch comedy genius, Season merely moves as if caught in the death rattle of the Black Plague, leaking pustules of narrative drying and caking around swollen nodes of plagiarized fantasy tropes. The plague features prominently in Dominic Sena's film, and I found myself in the unexpected position of feeling sorry for a pandemic disease.

Opening with a scene with only the slightest bearing on the rest of the film, Season of the Witch establishes its style -- for want of a better term -- instantly, carving out its identity with disorienting edits, a slew of references to other (and better) movies and an adherence to historical accuracy that could charitably be described as laughable. Three women accused of witchcraft receive the farcical trial afforded to heretical suspects before being chucked off a bridge with ropes around their necks before their corpses are lowered into the river below, hydroponically planting the corpses in such a way that one simply must expect something bad to happen soon (does that then make this the Spring of the Witch?). A priest wishes to read an incantation to ensure the accused witches stay dead, but a knight says that a hanging and drowning were sufficient. In the interest of honesty, I should say I found this a fair and logical assessment. But of course, they should have let that monk read from his blinged-out book, and soon a drowned woman comes back long enough to wreak a bit of havoc before heading...to some other damn movie, apparently.

But don't think about that, 'cause here comes a Crusade montage. Thousands of miles away, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman), two knights in service to the Church, gleefully hack their way through Saracens and other enemies of God. Whatever statement Sena might have wanted to make about the hypocrisy of religious purity -- and Lord does he want to make that point -- gets swallowed up in the fun he has clumsily staggering through this montage, broken up briefly by a "wait, what?" shot of the two knights reveling in the most minimalistic medieval tavern ever set up on an empty stage before returning immediately to more shots of God's warrior tearing through the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Unhelpful title cards provide no sense of logical progression -- they seem to go into the Middle East, return to Europe to fight dissident Christians and then back to Smyrna for a bit of Turkish delight.

But then, after years of killing, Behmen accidentally stabs a woman whose protracted death gasp stuns the man into suddenly giving up his ways and returning to England with Felson, only to immediately be recruited once more by a monk who believes the outbreak of bubonic plague in the knights' absence can be attributed to a young woman who has "confessed" to being a witch. A monk, Debelzaq (seriously?), charges the deserters with helping deliver her to trial in some mysterious monastery, the location of which he barely knows. "I serve the Church no more," Behmen intones with solemn finality, about five minutes before he willingly serves the Church again.

And there, after 20 minutes of largely unconnected, gaudy visuals, ends the plot. The rest of Season of the Witch gets by on weak jump scares, poorly choreographed suspense sequences and dialogue so stale you could store it for food on the long journey to the New World, which of course wouldn't be discovered for another century after the timeline of this film but why should I be held to an accurate, linear account of history when no one involved with the film was? Out of context, some lines attain a terrific comedy: one of the women at the beginning about to be hanged pleads innocence for her ointments. "It was just pig fat," she shrieks with wild eyes. "It wasn't witchcraft!" In one scene, Felson undercuts Behmen's religious rants by saying "Keep your souls. I just want a chicken." Behind him is an untended, well-fed dairy cow that could provide drink and meat in much larger quantities. In context, the lines pile up in collisions of exposition, a crisscrossing web of dialogue as self-defeating as the contradictory plots and themes that dialogue attempts to elucidate.

Nothing in this movie fits together, as if someone attempted to complete a single puzzle with the pieces from five or six separate boxes. The only chemistry that exists between Cage and Perlman must be drawn from the juxtaposition of their faces, Cage's giant forehead playing off Perlman's massive, sloping jawline (Perlman's head is so huge that he can make medium shots into de facto close-ups). Perlman, the only decent aspect of the film, brings his one-man, don't-give-a-damn swagger from Hellboy to the role, making him mesmerizing despite his clunky dialogue (nothing but references to food and sex) but solitary, while Nicolas Cage has the look in his eye of a gold digger lying there and thinking of the Lambourgini that's coming his way once the old bastard dies. A veritable "who's that?" fills out the rest of the cast, some of whom are getting their first major international exposure in a manner they will no doubt attempt to hide in the coming years. Oh, but Christopher Lee shows up for a cameo as a dying cardinal with the world's worst zit, inspiring the question, "Is Christopher Lee running out of money?" God damn it, David Cameron, I don't care how bad the economy is; give this man his proper pension. When FDR installed Social Security as a means of protecting the dignity of the elderly, this has to be what he had in mind.

What the hell even happens in this movie? How can a plot so linear and derivative yet so incomprehensible? Everything exists as a storyboarded sequence, though that would imply that enough planning went into the movie that even a connected series of suspense and action scenes might have arisen from pre-production. Season of the Witch moves through so many Tolkien ripoffs that one setpiece impressively manages to plagiarize Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep in one go. They wade around a bit in a forest, engaging in one of the dullest rickety bridge segments I have ever seen, and there is in fact competition for so narrow a scenario. Sena's camera moves with all the precision of a North Korean nuke, though it makes me just as wary: no spatial continuity exists between random close-ups and medium shots that make up all action shots. Even establishing shots don't help, and most long shots appear to move away from the action as if the DP was trying to slink out of the project as surreptitiously as possible. Poor Claire Foy, in her big-screen debut, is forced to oscillate so rapidly between shivering innocent and manipulative, sinister harpy that one could use her performance as a fan.

So jumbled and meaningless is the film that whatever points Sena and writer Bragi F. Schut (who undoubtedly uses the middle initial to distinguish himself among the other Bragi Schuts) might have made are instantly canceled out by a plot contrivance that occurs typically minutes later. Behmen has seen the evil of the Church and both he and another knight (Ulrich Thomsen) know that religious leaders use witch trials to eradicate dissidents and those who don't fit neatly into the Church's vision of the ideal society. Oh, but wait, there actually are witches and demons so some of these hanging/drowning/inexplicably necessary incantations are clearly justified. Ergo, a few holy men might be full of hot air, but the Church itself is founded on a true basis of supernatural connection and some of the most grisly executions in human history are warranted. Likewise, someone finally has the sense to point out the protagonist cannot atone for years of atrocity by saving one pretty girl, but then that's exactly how how Behmen redeems himself.

That's what makes the film's smug tone all the more infuriating. It actually thinks itself clever, gracelessly speaking aloud its perceived subversion before showing another picture entirely. But everyone involved clearly thought they were making something intelligent until the focused looks begin to slack off about halfway through and Cage starts letting his hair do the acting. Sena even had the audacity to cite The Seventh Seal, one of the landmarks of film history, as a key inspiration. One can almost imagine the haughty son of a bitch lounging in an interview, casually taking a pull from a long cigarette and unironically saying, "Well, I felt a certain intuitive bond with witchcraft, because I'm in the business of making magic."

Season of the Witch has that cheap blue-gray glaze that directors like to use to instill a sense of chilly foreboding and despair, but I didn't need color suggestion for this film to make me sad. Compared to the host of oneiric films last year that incorporated dreams and highly subjective filmmaking into corkscrewing narratives, the third-person distance of Season of the Witch should make the movie far more linear, yet the lazy abandon of continuity and thematic development made the film so hard to follow that those series of useless title cards upfront become even more offensive in their inefficiency. We are spared even the glorious overreaction of Nicolas Cage's weirdness, and I feared that the accused witch at the beginning got that pig fat for her ointments by draining that glistening ham that is an unleashed Cage. Too dully self-confident and plodding to work as unintentional humor, Season of the Witch denied me even the thrill of a Nic Cage stinker. I'm giving the film one star, and that's solely for the brief flash of unintentional humor that had me rolling: a freeze-frame on Cage's face that looks as if someone snapped a drunken self-portrait at a Renaissance Fair-themed frat party. It's magnificent: the shot is supposed to move the audience, and I had tears in my eyes, all right.

Alice in Wonderland: Comparatives

Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland is awesome. Many people rejected the movie, but I think it is just brilliant. The Red Queen is the best character in the movie and I used one of her scenes to practice comparatives. The White Queen, though, is the weakest character of all, but the scene is perfect for this grammar goal.



I. Watch the movie segment, which shows two queens, White and Red. Place the adjectives below under the column that you think is more appropriate for each of the queens.

BEAUTIFUL - ARROGANT - TALL - OLD - YOUNG - THIN - FUNNY - POWERFUL - FRIENDLY - UGLY - AGGRESSIVE - CALM

THE WHITE QUEEN

1. 
   
2. 
   
3. 
   
4. 
   
5. 
   
6. 
   

THE RED QUEEN

1. 
   
2. 
   
3. 
   
4. 
   
5. 
   
6. 
   

II. Now write down one comparative sentence for each of the adjectives in exercise I.


Ex:

1. The White Queen (The Red Queen) is more beautiful than The Red Queen (The White Queen).

1. _____________________________________
   
2. _____________________________________
3. _____________________________________
4. _____________________________________
5. _____________________________________
6. _____________________________________
7. _____________________________________
8. _____________________________________
9. _____________________________________
10. _____________________________________
11. _____________________________________
    

WORKSHEET

Leaves of Grass

A stuttering mash-up of drama and stoner comedy, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass plays as a cross between the podunk classicism of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the spiritual vacuum-cum-autobiography of Midwestern Jewry of A Serious Man. Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton), philosophy professor at Brown and, soon, Harvard, teaches his students about the illusion of control and centered balance in life just before his own life proves his point. Identical twin Brady lures his brother back to their redneck home in Oklahoma by faking his death, only to trap the poor educator in a hare-brained scheme to get out of trouble with a major pot dealer in the Tulsa region (Richard Dreyfuss, who continues to look as if he's pissed off even to keep getting work).

Coenesque in conception but not execution, Leaves of Grass attempts to build a twisted comedy of errors as well as a philosophical treatise on issues of God, free will and fate, but it cannot reconcile its stiff gear shifts between moods and the fatal gaps in momentum that derail it constantly. Where A Serious Man built a thriller-like sense of dread from its comic severity and mounting sense of spiritual despair, Leaves of Grass attempts to do the same in reverse, saddling a conventional narrative with so much extra weight that the bridge collapses. Norton shines as the two brothers, giving a performance reminiscent of Nicolas Cage's in Adaptation, in that even when the brothers groom themselves to look alike for Brady's plan, you can instantly tell which brother is which without Norton uttering a word. A strong supporting cast buoys him, from the always-transfixing Keri Russell as the poetry-lovin' catfish wrangler who steal Bill's heart to Steve Earle as a half-joking rival dealer sour for being edged out by Brady's superior product (though less ambitious than his professorial brother, Brady supposedly has the higher IQ and used it to grow hyper-quality weed via hydroponics).

Nelson here falls back on his theatrical training, never making anything particularly cinematic. With the exception of scenes in cars, everything in the film looks as if it could have been a set design, even outdoor shots. A subplot involving a skittish, broken orthodontist (Josh Pais) works neither as comedy nor dramatic thread, and a lovesick coed who hounds an uncomfortable Bill with poems in Latin and threatens his potential promotion to Harvard might have worked as a tendril of the man's mounting pressures had all of the young woman's scenes not played out in tedious predictability. Of course she starts undressing in Bill's office, and if you think that door isn't going to be opened at the worst time, then you made an odd choice for what is clearly the first film you have ever seen. Only rarely does anyone not project past the nonexistent proscenium, such as a tender, believable moment when Bill drunkenly hits on Russell's Janet in that awkward manner that suggests he's not only rusty at picking up chicks but is interested in more than sex.

Nelson appears to have a chip on his shoulder about growing up in Tulsa and looking like a redneck while trying to prove himself as a learned literature freak and Shakespearean thespian -- a frustration with which I can empathize. That makes Whitman his ideal conduit, the poet's original cover for his own Leaves of Grass displaying merely his rugged portrait that belied the beauty within, but Nelson gets caught up in the plot over the mood. A shaggy dog jokes only works if you can control the audience's interest, setting up the joke for so long that the crowd loses interest only to climb back on board when the monologue continues and people commit to hearing the end of it. Nelson doesn't have the Coens' ability to string along an audience, and the punchline is less a dark, anti-climatic punch than a mere caesura that, like the end of a verse in Walt Whitman's rule-breaking poetry, indicates that the proceedings are over simply because the characters stop speaking.

Still, it's got a goofy charm at times. For all its flaws, stop-starts and misjudged laughs, Leaves of Grass certainly doesn't make me think of a host of other films to compare it to, save for the Coen brothers, and they're not bad role models when it comes to anti-comedy. Nelson was supposedly the only person to have actually read Homer's The Odyssey during the production of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and he strives for a greater respect of the arts in his vision of that fine line that separates suburbia from rural backwoods in states with few cities. Besides, how many stoner movies are structured as treatises on Socratic dialogue?

Dalí: The Late Work

Though my younger sister has always been given to drawing, painting, scrapbooking and various other forms of artistic endeavors, I have never known her to be all that obsessed with art. Imagine my surprise (and joy), then, when it was she, not myself, who approached my mom about heading to Atlanta's High Museum of Art to see an exhibition of Salvador Dalí's late period before the works returned to Florida. I assumed I would have to make up some excuse about seeing friends downtown before the week's end so I might peek around the place myself, but the unexpected interest of other members of my family made my exposure to the wild Spaniard's post-Surrealist work all the more pleasurable.

To say the least, the relegation of the entire second half of Dalí's life the nebulously defined realm of kitsch made the revelation of his work's potency all the more overwhelming, and the question of how it could be so handily dismissed all the more baffling. Having begun his artistic career at the age of six with impressionist landscapes, Dalí moved into Cubism as it gained ground in the 20s and fell in with the Surrealist group in Paris at the end of the decade. But his "official" involvement with surrealism ended another 10 years later, leaving the last 49 years of his life to essentially be defined by a single decade.

One look through the gallery assembled for the High Museum, however, will silence anyone who would dismiss the artist's second half as conventional. "The only difference between me and the other surrealists is that I am a surrealist," Dalí once said, and if the movement was all about capturing the subconscious, Dalí certainly never stopped painting surreal works.

Compared to the more out-there work of his accepted Surrealist period, Dalí's later work displays a clearer influence of classicism, with outright nods to Velázquez, Raphael, Vermeer and others. Subjects look more photo-realistic, and Dalí incorporates Renaissance aesthetics all the way down to religious imagery, brought about by the re-embrace of the Catholicism he rejected in the '30s. The critic Robert Hughes charged Dalí's late work with being repetitious, and he does return to themes and symbols throughout his later paintings and sketches. The Virgin Mary, inevitably modeled by his wife and muse, Gala, features in numerous paintings, as do Christian symbols of ostrich eggs (once associated with virgin births) and some of Dalí's own pet motifs such as rhinoceros horns.


But there is also a seemingly contradictory usage of scientific imagery. The detonation of the Hiroshima bomb changed something inside Dalí: whatever he thought about the morality of the bomb -- and those thoughts, as far as I could see as I scanned over the assembled text for the exhibit, were curiously unaddressed -- he recognized that the Atomic Age had begun and art had to adapt to stay contemporary. Gorging on science magazines and studies, Dalí picked up remarkably on the nature of nuclear physics, and he mixed it into his religious imagery, crafting what he called a "nuclear mysticism," a way for him to justify his belief in God but lack of faith. Somehow, he found a way to trace Catholic dogma into the realm of advanced physics, finding proof of God in such a way that he honored his childhood teachings but circumvented dogma in all but an aesthetic sense.

The mash-up of contemporary and classical is at times astonishing. Dalí breaks up that image of his wife as the Virgin Mary to show the Christ-child growing inside of her, bodies elongated into particles to suggest atomic energy as the force that impregnated her. One of the artists best and most well-regarded paintings, Christ of Saint John of the Cross, is painted from an extreme, high angle, looking down on Jesus as he hangs overlooking a smaller landscape of the artist's childhood home. But I did not notice that Jesus was floating over Port Lligat when I stared up at the large canvas; to me it seemed as if he were in space orbiting around Earth, Christ as Major Tom, occupying two figurative heavens at once. Furthermore, Dalí left out the crown of thorns and stakes, removing the torturous element of Christ's execution, turning a moment of guilt-inducing need for atonement and forgiveness into a gentler embodiment of the painter's alternately classic and futuristic view of Jesus.


Unquestionably the highlight of the exhibit, and possibly Dalí's career, is the immense canvas of Santiago El Grande, finally taken from its permanent residence in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick, Canada. The placard next to the painting advises the viewer to crouch down and look up at 13.5 ft long, 10 ft wide painting for maximum effect. It is an unnecessary instruction for a masterpiece so awe-inspiring that the reverence it engenders will bring one down on a knee anyway.

Depicting St. James, the patron saint of Spain, on horseback, Santiago El Grande represents the apotheosis of Dalí's nuclear mysticism: despite the considerable size of the canvas, St. James and his horse are perfectly proportioned, and the combination of photo-realism and artistic license is incredibly subtle, especially for this artist. The horse's head looked so real I had a difficult time looking at anything else, while the rest of it had a soft blur, making it one with the sea it stands upon. In James' upraised hand is the Crucifix, born aloft as if brandishing a sword, a moment of religious epiphany as impressive as anything in the Sistine Chapel. Surrounding this dominant image are symbols of both religious and atomic significance. Angels appear at the top of the painting, and a highlight of one seamlessly melds into the horse's chest and neck. At the beast's feet, a mushroom cloud swirls, yet Dalí tempers the potentially fearsome sight by placing a jasmine flower in the middle of it, a sign of purity inside the symbol of mass destruction. And that shade of blue! That glowing, heaven-lit iridescence that seems to fluctuate even among the areas of color that remain constant. It's as if Dalí used a normal tint but God decided to always shine a light on it in approval and appreciation. Add one Gala-modeled woman looking on from the shore, and you've got a painting that more than earns its rarely used subtitle: "In Search of a Cosmic Unity."


Other highlights included the sketches and etches Dalí did, either as drafts for paintings or self-contained work he quickly dashed out to support himself -- Dalí once said that he loved nothing more than to finish his breakfast and spend the rest of the morning earning $20,000. But even these illustrations have a beauty, depth and inventiveness to them that belies their classification as minor works. While illustrating some plates for use in an illustrated version of Don Quixote, Dalí used such bizarre techniques as shooting paint squibs out of a musket to splatter the plates, or painting with rhinoceros horns. The plates have a psychedelic quality reminiscent of Ralph Steadman, who vomited acid visions of caricatured horror onto the best work of Hunter S. Thompson.

Obsessed with Vermeer's The Lacemaker, Dalí made his own copy of it, an almost note-perfect recreation with a warmer color tone, though that may be from the centuries of age between original and duplicate. Then expelled the obsession fully by deconstructing the image as he did Raphael's Madonna, finding his beloved rhino horn buried into Vermeer's composition. This second version is as striking for its originality as the proper copy is for its immaculate recreation. In preserving the Old Masters in a contemporary setting, he has dissembled and reassembled them with the modern. Dalí's Lacemaker may look like something out of an issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, it has the same respect for classicism with a dash of personal innovation that also dots that comic series.


Many point to Dalí's public persona as a significant reason for the decline of his art in the discussion of the artist; critics charged him with being a fraud and an attention hound, and supporters increasingly agreed. But Dalí's showmanship was just another way to flaunt his weirdness, to let nothing hold back the id he regularly slung onto canvas. There were numerous great 20th century artists who enjoyed attention, of course, but Dalí is the one who got to be an A-lister in the age of Hollywood and rock 'n' roll. Andy Warhol idolized the Spaniard's ability to court press as much as he did the man's art, and for Dalí to remain one of the more recognizable names in art even to laypeople could not simply have come from his talent, not with material so alienating and weird. Sure, he could be kitschy -- one room in the gallery featured his experiments with stereoscopic painting complete with 3-D glasses for maximum effect -- but Salvador Dalí was a mad genius, and the world is less interesting without him. I'm glad I got the the chance to see just how brilliant and daring he was long after so many wrote him off.



P.S. Though this is an example of Dalí's fame-baiting, this clip of the artist's appearance on What's My Line? ran through my head several times as I walked through the High Museum's exhibition. As you can plainly see, Dalí may have loved to be on television and in print, but he never courted the mainstream by dulling himself down. If he became an icon through the media, it's only because he remained so damn strange even within the confines of a frothy game show that one couldn't help but love him.

Gamer

Gamer suffered from such an abysmal marketing campaign that I never once even cared enough to bother looking at the names listed under the director credit. A film targeted at the attention-deficit, violence-inured current generation, it met with general derision in trailer form before a host of the same mindless entertainment it clearly wanted to comment upon. Even your friend and humble narrator joined in the chorus of sighs that greeted the final shot of Ludacris telling the audience, "This is not something you can control!" with all the actorly sincerity he could muster, and only the presence of the handful of proper adults in this college town theater stopped youths from making the dismissive hand-wanking motion, a sort of cynical version of The Wave. Nearly a year elapsed until I finally discovered what I'd somehow missed: Gamer was a Neveldine/Taylor project. Why, oh why, didn't I look into this beforehand.

Taking into account the self-admitted attention deficiency of the filmmakers, allow me to be brief: Gamer is one of the most daring, avant-garde mainstream films in recent memory, alongside Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Inglourious Basterds and Domino. It is, as much as any sociopolitical tract, a movie about The Way We Live Now, but rather than sit back and discuss cultural perspectives in a way that allows critics and other audiences to more easily dissect its meanings, it embodies that which it examines. There are innumerable examples of films in the first category being provocative and great -- The Social Network, for example, mines the same territory as Neveldine/Taylor's movie via dialogue and more lyrical direction -- but Gamer belongs in that rare breed of films that do not always work, but only because they reach for something fare more difficult to grasp. Jean-Luc Godard rightfully viewed filmmaking as the purest form of criticism, because all art is commentary on some level and film allows the critic to criticize through embodiment of that which is being critiqued. To be sure, Neveldine and Taylor are not critical in nearly the same fashion as Godard, but their frenetic embrace of the way information has processed in the two decades since Internet usage has completely rewired the brain makes them the best filmmakers currently depicting an attention-deficit world.

A title card cheekily informs the audience that the film occurs "some years from this exact moment," a wry bit of humor but also a way of communicating that, like all dystopic fiction, Gamer is directly extrapolated from from sociopolitical conditions of the present. Thus, it projects a future that is even more dominated by the immediacy of self-satisfaction than the one we have now: the masses consume the latest fad like a swarm of piranha, stripping it to the bone in minutes before moving on to the next big thing. Coupled with a more philosophical extrapolation of Moore's Law, the accurate prediction by Intel's co-founder that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a computer chip doubles every two years, this rapid consumption of the new fuses the exponential breakthroughs in technological advancement with a consumer base hungry to make all those breakthroughs turn huge profits.

Thus, Gamer exists in a neoliberal nightmare, in which consumerism has grown to such mania that the entrepreneurs of the world have effectively taken over governments. As with a number of dystopic films, Gamer posits a society that uses death row inmates as entertainment, teasing them with the faint hope of freedom in exchange for putting their condemned bodies on the line to risk grislier deaths than they'd ever suffer in a lethal injection. By broadcasting these events, the man behind "Slayers," Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), creates such a lucrative enterprise that he single-handedly pays for America's penal system, which is brutally taxing state budgets back here in the present, to the point that privatization of prisons is already occurring. The use of death-row prisoners as slave labor no longer has the connotation of mere satire: prison labor is already happening, a means for corporations that invest in penitentiaries to get cheap work in return, maximizing their investments.

John Tillman (Gerard Butler), renamed Kable by an adoring crowd that needs a snappier name, becomes the unofficial star of Slayers for surviving 27 games, far more than any other prisoner. If he completes 30 matches, he gets to go free, though everyone appears to look forward to the potential release of a killer they also feel deserved a death sentence. Like a college football player, Kable makes millions for everyone but himself, luxury labor that makes the owners rich but the actual workers unpaid. He doesn't even realize how many people around the world are cheering him on; if he had any concept of the money he personally brings in to Castle's empire, he might reasonably demand some of those profits. But then who would pay a prisoner?

But the corruption of America's prison system does not particularly connect to the kinetic, addled vision of the modern world: to make matters more interesting, Castle's Slayers runs on a technology the wunderkind invented that allows people to control other human beings. In effect, Slayers ups the ante considerably over, say, Death Race 2000 because it turns the carnage into a video game that necessitates direct involvement over passive spectating. Death Race 2000 was extrapolated from a generation that still looked to television for mindless entertainment; Gamer represents the cultural evolution of the present. A society raised on video games and the consumer power of the Internet, in which everything from entertainment to facts themselves can be programmed according to taste, is more apt to demand hands-on interaction.

And because they've spent a generation or two growing increasingly inured to violence, they can gather in stadiums to watch inmates be controlled by teenagers and fat shut-ins and cheer with each death. Castle's other invention to come out of his nanite technology is Society, the ultimate endpoint of The Sims and Second Life, where people are paid to be the avatars of players who can control an actual human being and live out their fantasy life. Naturally, the section of city carved out for Society is a lurid, hedonistic explosion of glitter and cum, a den of sin that projects the aesthetic and sensual hollowness of a strip club onto a large section of metropolis. Where Slayers feeds into bloodlust with its desaturated look, cloudy haze and urban rubble, Society is shiny, shiny, too shiny. It looks as if a hentai cartoon vomited on a Lady Gaga album cover.


What links Society and Slayers is the uncomfortable suggestion of the future of the working class. With menial labor being outsourced to save corporations even more money or being done by programmed machine, the disparity between skilled and unskilled labor in terms of wages and living conditions is wider than ever in this country. Kable's wife, Angie (Amber Valletta), must makes ends meet with her husband in prison by becoming one of the Society avatars. Each day, a fat man glued to a chair consuming junk food sends her out to be screwed so he can watch a hot woman reamed. Even porno is interactive, it seems. (that too, to my utter amazement, is not an invention but merely an expansion of something that exists now). The poor, then, become the literal playthings of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy after spending so many centuries as figurative playthings. As Castle sees it, one can be paid to be a character or pay to be a player. Capitalism in action. (This treatment of Angie also suggests that, even in a world that caters so exclusively to the id as this, slut-shaming is still ingrained in the patriarchal consciousness.)

This neoliberal lack of any sort of regulation, of reveling in the misery and indentured servitude of human beings, is founded on a harsh vision of Social Darwinism: Angie goes to see her caseworker about regaining custody of her daughter, but the man notes that she has been placed with a wealthy family and that the girl wouldn't have as good a life with "people like you." Class warfare continues to rage, and those who must prostitute themselves or risk their lives are viewed as inferior. Of course it's alright to cheer for the deaths of the I-Cons; after all, they went to prison, right? And no one has ever been falsely imprisoned, especially when corporations can tap the inmate pool at will for labor. Simon, the rich, spoiled 17-year-old who controls Kable in battle, views him as a toy, having justified the man's sure guilt in his head and done his best to keep the man alive simply to prove his own prowess as a gamer. Simon hasn't had to work a day in his life, yet he literally holds power over a man's life (and the lives of all the other prisoners he kills through Kable). And until a mysterious, anti-Castle organization known as Humanz (a revolutionary cabal as led by Banksy), sends him a modification for the nanites in Tillman's brain that allows two way communication, he never once considered what the man he operates thought about all this.

Earlier I compared Kable to a college football player, and the same hypocrisy that surrounds the ethics of not paying players extends to the ludicrous sense of good form here. Simon gets flagged for cheating for (reluctantly) letting the man he controls go free before his time, and the fans turn to jeering detractors who spam his wall with cries of "Cheater!" By displaying a slight amount of humanity, Simon will be casually dismissed with the same flippancy that he himself previously called things "gay."

As for Castle himself, he exists in pure B-movie fashion, the identifiable head of an organization that has infiltrated society to such an extent that taking down one person could never undo it. But, in the movies, all you need is to take down the head. However, Castle recalls numerous heads of mega-corporations specializing in entertainment and leisure. Neveldine & Taylor say they modeled Castle as a loose amalgam of "Mark Cuban and Bill Clinton," but he could just as easily stand in for Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, figureheads who become the personification of a brand. When someone complains about Facebook's privacy issues, is a personal insult on Zuckerberg's exaggerated personal stake into reading everyone's secrets far behind? The entire reason Castle arranges for Kable to be killed before reaching his 30th match is to ensure he remains the true face of Slayers.

But the questions of identity raised by the film compound the issue of who, if anyone, could be considered the face of anything. Tillman becomes Kable to further emphasize his loss of identity, and though his face adorns the Slayers ads plastered on every building, it is Simon who is the top player? Or is it? Back at the prison/training ground, one of the guards at the rifle range reverently asks Tillman, "Who aims? The player or the Slayer?" Kable responds that his player might see what's going on, but it's ultimately up to him to pull the trigger as the split-second lag between Simon's command and his brain receiving the information could leave him open to death. Ergo, Tillman deserves more credit for his success than simply being Simon's conduit, but that also means he shares in the culpability of mass murder for spectacle. Castle's overriding use of nanites allow him to take over more than simply a player in a gruesome game of his making: having made Tillman one of the first test subjects of his technology, he owns a piece of Kable's identity as well, and his way of connecting millions, maybe even billions through his entrepreneurship, might soon become more literal.


All of these ideas swirl around what is, fundamentally, a conventionally structured science fiction thriller. In their (often hilarious) commentary track, Neveldine and Taylor acknowledge the influence of '80s action films on Gamer, and it is by far their most straightforward picture in terms of plotting. We move from seeing Kable in action to slowly uncovering his back story and how it conveniently connects him to the grand villain, leading to a showdown that pits massive social upheaval on the outcome but is ultimately fought on more personal terms.

Yet the film also displays the duo's typical avant-garde aesthetic, now condensed just enough to turn the pure anarchy of the Crank series toward a more honed form of satire (and even a bit of anti-satire, for the filmmaking team are as gleefully turned-on by their antics as they are revelatory of a cultural mindset). Even outside Society and Slayers, the epileptic pops of light roll over the film, whether flashing in strobes through the holes of the prisoner transport that takes what few I-Cons survive back to the penitentiary or exploding in holographic computer displays that fill entire rooms with images of porn, commerce and entertaining violence. Their vision of the future is so chaotic that even the conservative groundswell of humanism that is Humanz could never be mistaken for a Luddite group for all their anti-technological screeds because the members themselves have grown up in the same wild environment, and even their hacks have an element of childish amusement to them (they use crude and lewd animations to insult Castle).

It never ceases to amaze me how Neveldine and Taylor can be so arrhythmic with their editing yet create a decently clear sense of continuity. Where, say, Michael Bay continues to haphazardly edit his action scenes in an inept fashion, a garish display of thick-headed cluelessness, Neveldine/Taylor rank with Tony Scott as some of the few filmmakers who can not only push action cinema to its gaudiest extreme but make something that flows out of the insane result. Behind-the-scenes discussion on the home video release reveals that the duo did not storyboard their giant Slayers and Society sets, simply setting loose extras, stuntmen and effects teams and following behind with a camera, catching all that caught the eye. It's a seemingly random approach, one informed by their A.D.D., but it leads to a presentation that teases the audience even as it adds up to a complete picture. They may foist a loose hodgepodge of imagery and sound onto us, but it works. For all their trickery, I have had a much easier time sorting out the spatial relationships of objects in the frame during the most frenetic moments of Neveldine/Taylor films than I do with the average work of sub-Greengrass shaky-cam action. And only Neveldine/Taylor can get away with the use of 1st-person camera in shooting scenes, recalling video game playing in such a way that, while we are still frustratingly spectators instead of controllers, that frustration is played against itself to show how quickly a film audience will turn on the medium when reminded of something that lets them interact with their entertainment.

Gamer inspired as much derision as all other Neveldine/Taylor movies upon its release, and I certainly didn't rush out to defend it, though I might have if I'd been interested enough by its marketing campaign to check who helmed the project. There have been defenders, however, and none more impressive than cultural critic Steven Shaviro, who penned a towering, 10-000 word defense of the film that goes into much greater detail on the neoliberal extrapolations and the crises of identity posited by the film. I feel critics too often avoid saying they don't understand something, so it behooves me to admit that I don't get large swaths of Shaviro's essay (I always had to work at understanding philosophy, so when he wades into it I occasionally get lost). But it is a fascinating read that breaks down the film in ways that the makers most assuredly never thought of. Shaviro says that Gamer isn't really satire but an embrace of its warped view, and that's probably true: in their commentary, neither Neveldine nor Taylor discuss any deeper thoughts to their process, even if the sheer cleverness of the details of their action shooting suggests more active minds than they let on*. But they also display a keen ability to gauge society as it is now and expand from there, and if the critical element is underdeveloped, the sheer accuracy of its projection allows the audience to make its own commentary without the setback of being forced to sit through a lecture.

Very much a genre film, Gamer is also proof that people should stop considering that some sort of setback. I don't know when critics stopped accepting B-movies as legitimate artistic endeavors (presumably some time after critics accepted B-movies as the only legitimate artistic endeavors), but Gamer offers more than exceedingly well-made action sequences. If it is not a commentary, it is at least a summation of our times. Apart from a deliciously show-stealing performance from Hall, all Southern drawl and arrogance, everyone else is very much locked into the more rigid, inexpressive roles defined by their types. But that is merely the identifiable anchor for the rest of the film, which breaks so many boundaries that one forgets how normal its structure is. The Crank movies may be better examples of the pure artistic anarchy Neveldine and Talyor are capable of, but Gamer demonstrates how daring they can be when actually aiming at something. Perhaps it will grow in stature as the years wear on, or perhaps not. Either way, I can only regret not seeing this ingenious work when it came out and will do my best to make up for lost time. But that's the great thing about genre movies: not only can they be smart, they're a damn sight esier to return to with frequency.


**They are, however, magnificently witty, and their commentary, apart from being surprisingly revealing when it came to their aesthetic, was also delightfully freewheeling. My favorite excerpt: "We hired a speech coach to beat the Scottish out of him [Gerard Butler]. As you can see in this scene, he was an overpaid speech coach."

Pete Postlethwaite, 1946-2011

Like all mourning film fans, I awoke this morning to the terrible news of Pete Postlethwaite's passing.One of my favorite character actors, Postlethwaite will leave a hole that cannot be filled by any ordinary "that guy."


One of the great character actors, Postlethwaite carries a particular resonance in my life, as he was the first supporting player I ever noticed. When I was 7, I watched Dragonheart with a friend, not a film that set my wee mind ablaze even at such a young age, I nevertheless enjoyed but, more than the dragon or any of the action, I was mesmerized by this goofy side character, Brother Gilbert, a monk and aspiring poet who turned up at the oddest times and had the best lines. To this day, I remember giggling like the little brat I was when, during the climactic action scene, Gilbert secreted himself up a tree with a bow and arrow, inadvertently shot a man in the ass and said with hilariously focused glee, "Turn the other cheek, brother!" I was hooked. Who was this loon?

Since then, I've been delighted by him at nearly every turn, no matter how brief his appearances. He recently lit up an already strong cast in The Town with but two scenes that transcended the cops vs. robbers plot to show what real evil looks like. I didn't notice him at first in Inception, playing the dying but still disapproving billionaire father of Cillian Murphy's heir to the corporate throne, but when I did I got the same wash of elation I do whenever I recognized him in a movie.

It was part of the reason I never actively looked for his movies, never surfed IMDb to fill the gaps in the Postlethwaite canon, if you could call a series of roles that usually amounted to no more than a few lines of dialogue and one or two scenes each a "canon." I preferred to meet him as an old friend, randomly running into him on the street, thus preserving that constant delight I got from seeing him. Every time I got to see how he was doing, to briefly exchange pleasantries and move on to a day that suddenly seemed brighter.

Postlethwaite had "unconventional looks," though it's funny how the vast majority of people who have appeared in films since the medium's inception have not lined up with "conventional" beauty. He emerged looking fatherly, as if this man never existed as a youth but simply sprang up from the ground ready to look after children of his own. That paternal charm was double-edged: to take his two most prominent film roles, both of which were fathers, look at the difference between the man in In the Name of the Father and the tyrant of Distant Voices, Still Lives. In the former, he wants to help his son stay out of trouble, only to be used as leverage by outside for condemning the boy. In Terence Davies' anti-nostalgic poem, he captures the vicious, domineering, frightful side of patriarchy, a man who is violent and monstrous yet all the more terrifying before being raggedly, recognizably human. When he pauses while decorating the house for Christmas, a moment that occurs just before and after examples of his horrid abuse, his moment of gentle love, a touch that may have seemed a scripted, hollow moment in any other actor's hands becomes psychological and real.

That was his specialty: no part, no matter how small and even stilted, didn't leap off the page when he embodied it. Take his part as the hunter, Roland, in Steven Spielberg's misguided Jurassic Park sequel: The Lost World: he has killed beasts of all kinds and casually mounted some of the last of endangered species in a parlor, but when he sees the corporatization of animal herding, a cynical amalgamation of breeding and spectacle that outstrips even the most corrupt and abusive zoo, he blanches. It is a moment that makes no sense, the idea of a hunter suddenly leaving behind his ways when the only change in his usual ways is a matter of scale, but the look of utter disgust in his eyes, the dawning self-loathing that accompanies his friend's meaningless death and the capitalistic monetization of a primal impulse makes you feel the wrongness of what happens in that movie far more than Spielberg's overly suggestive camerawork and the speechifying of the good guys.

I'd follow Postlethwaite anywhere, always placing my trust in him but reserving enough wariness to expect his intensity. Sheila O'Malley already has a piece up on the actor that focuses on his devilish scene in The Town, where he sadistically and theatrically carves the thorns off roses while laying out why and how Ben Affleck's character will continue to work for him. It is a keenly acted piece, each thrust of the knife down the stem a punctuation to the mounting horror of his monologue. It's also a clever visualization of what Fergie is actually saying, his pruning of the rose matching up eerily to his descriptions of what he did to Doug's mother and what he'll do to his girlfriend if the disillusioned robber does not carry out his missions. The scene fits perfectly into Affleck's genre mash-up, a deliciously vile and exaggerated moment that taps into the character as totally as Jeremy Renner's own psychological development of his sociopath.

To say that I will miss Postlethwaite is an understatement. I would have loved to see his King Lear on the stage -- I cannot imagine an actor better suited for the role -- and to be left with a series of cameos seems unfitting for a talent that huge. But those performances still exist, some of which I've yet to discover, and I can still stumble upon his work with that same elation that I felt before when his sharp, foreboding but faintly kind face appeared on the screen. Steven Spielberg called him the best actor in the world, to which Pete responded in characteristically British fashion, "I'm sure what Spielberg actually said was, 'The thing about Pete is that he thinks he's the best actor in the world.'" But I have to side with Spielberg: even among the finest of character actors, few could do as much with as little as Pete Postlethwaite. May he rest in peace.

Paths of Glory

Stanley Kubrick employs numerous tracking shots in Paths of Glory, using geometric precision to undermine the sense of expansiveness normally evoked in long shots. As the opening narration reminds its audience, World War I was fought for four years in the same area of battlefield where it started. Kubrick's camera tracks down the fortified trenches and, occasionally, in the No-Man's Land between them, moving perfectly forward and backward inside and horizontally outside across hundreds of feet of space. Yet even when not trapped between the walls of earthen lines, the film feels cramped and claustrophobic. Over the top, the sudden erasure of horizontal restriction is canceled out by the simple fact that the wide world outside those trenches matters only insofar as the distance to the next hole forward.

The unnatural movement creates a sense of unease, as if the characters caged within the frame are but lab rats to be exploited and arranged by the man behind the curtain. Ergo, Kubrick, that perfectionist taskmaster, casts himself as the same overbearing general that so casually sent millions to their deaths in World War I. Though Paths of Glory is Kubrick's most earnest and immediately emotional picture, this alignment of filmmaker with a corrupt power structure that places those with the least amount of hands-on knowledge with the various types of people under hum at the top of the heap suggests that his satiric grasp is not dulled for the film's impassioned messaging.

The use of "La Marseillaise" over the opening credits is bombastic but, as we'll soon find out, ironic. The stirring sound of its patriotic brass gives way to a shot of a French château miles away from the front, the drum roll over the soundtrack and the soldiers standing in formation on the mansion grounds wholly at odds with this idyllic view of lingering French aristocracy. Inside, two generals, Mireau (George Macready) and Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), meet for wining and dining in a manner that recalls Renoir's Grand Illusion. Broulard, the direct superior, discusses the top brass' want of a section of German-controlled land called the "Anthill" and wants Mireau to send his regiments to take it. Mireau, aware of how beleaguered his troops are, notes that sending them over the top would amount to nothing more than a suicide mission that would cost hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. Then, Broulard casually mentions that Mireau would be up for promotion if he ordered the attack, and the other general begins planning how an attack would succeed as if he never voiced opposition.

The camera cuts from the expansive, high ceilings of the château to the trenches, where there is no structure hanging between people and sky yet the sudden lack of high-angle shots compresses the frame. As it eerily glides through the ditch in straight lines, the camera resembles a ghost moving unnaturally through the land of the living, or at least the fractured nebula between life and death. Where a handful of wealthy generals occupy the vast castle, these cramped pits hold throngs of men stewing in filth and claustrophobic fear. By maintaining medium level and angle with his camera, Kubrick offers no break in perspective, no chance to feel anything but the stark dimensions of the trench.

For all the obviousness of the script, co-written by Kubrick with Jim Thompson and Calder Willingham, the staging adds degrees of chilling, realistic repulsiveness to the more melodramatic dialogue. Mireau's tour of the trenches is supposed to have that effect of boosting morale, but all he does is offer transparently supportive pablum before slapping around a shellshocked man after stating flatly that there is no such thing as the psychological condition. In Col. Dax's (Kirk Douglas) bunker quarters, he voices dissent with the general, but the lighting and blocking indicates that even the mighty Douglas is in the role of the inferior. If he refuses to send his men to a pointless death (and one costly to the war effort, since it will fray and tatter the front line), Mireau will simply replace him. He agrees to the charge not for personal gain but because it will happen with or without him and he actually has his men's safety at heart.

If Paths of Glory has any one point to make, it's that the titular journey to glory cannot exist in war. On one hand, it is a merciless meat grinder, pushing wave after wave of men through a giant abattoir, and glory is awarded retroactively to the side that say "Enough" last. On the other, it is even more garish, a bureaucratic power struggle that reduces the station of fighting men even below that of animals, all the way down to a number. As Stalin said, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." Mireau, Broulard and the other brass will tally up the numbers before and after and use the outcomes to justify advancement and demotion along an arbitrary hierarchy. It's a cold, merciless overview of humanity, which makes Kubrick, the distant, arty provocateur, the perfect man to examine it.

He calmly establishes the absurdity and meaningless of military ranking with Roget and Paris (Ralph Meeker). Lt. Roget heads a small band of scouts on a reconnaissance mission before the main charge. In the dead of night, Roget prepares for his mission by getting plastered on wine while his two subordinates look on in disgust. Paris went to the same school as Roget, had the same family background and is clearly more competent than the officer, but Roget knew how to play the game and won advancement. During their scouting run, Roget panics and throws his grenade at the other scout and flees back to the trench while Paris confirms that the lieutenant murdered one of his own. When he comes back, he threatens Roget with turning him in, but the officer smiles because he knows a military tribunal will decide he is the more trustworthy and truthful soldier because of the bars on his shoulder. He falsifies his report and goes back to his wine, satisfied that Paris won't bother bringing charges.

As for the battle scene itself, Kubrick captures the terrifying frenzy that Steven Spielberg would later command in his Saving Private Ryan despite his use of more formal technique over visceral hand-held shots. In so doing, the director avoids the side-effect of glamorizing the fight and making it exciting. Compounding this approach is the horrible fact that the French, the heroes against the Germans and the only side focused upon in the film, never gets to fire back, never gets to take an enemy position or do anything but die in droves. The Americans might have been chewed to pieces when those ship ramps dropped in Ryan, but they eventually took the beach. This is nothing but a slaughter, and Kubrick's camera just keeps gliding over the carnage, occasionally panning quickly as if curious to see the strange ways in which mankind destroys itself.

Kubrick's detached approach to the fighting makes for gentle horror: when Dax falls back to a trench to reorganize and plan, the once-cramped area now looks tattered and empty save for the occasional corpse belonging to men who never even managed to climb out of their trap before being mowed down. POV shots of the binoculars show an entire contingent of men who refuse to follow orders, but that telescopic shot become a form of targeting when an enraged Mireau orders artillery to shell his own men to motivate them from the trenches. The artillery captain refuses, ensuring that the mission's inevitable failure will not kill all of the three companies assembled.

At this stage the film kicks into its proper narrative, the court martial trial that arises from Mireau's outrage. He and Broulard invite Dax out to their château to choose men, and Dax sarcastically responds that all surviving members of the charge should be killed. Sufficiently aware that it wouldn't do much good to execute the whole French Army, Broulard whittles down Mireau's 100-man demand to a dozen. Finally, three are to be chosen, one from each company. Dax attempts to volunteer himself, saying he was the officer in charge, and his pointed glare withers Mireau's fire as the man shrinks away from Douglas' stone face. Broulard dismisses that idea outright, not wishing any officers to lose face. Besides, he probably knows that killing an officer for incompetence might raise morale so much the enlisted might start doing it for entertainment.

The trial itself is so farcical that Kubrick deserves credit for not lapsing fully into comedy. The three men are chosen harshly by their superiors: Paris gets sent by Roget to ensure no word ever gets out about his friendly fire, Pvt. Ferol (Timothy Carey) goes because his C.O. finds him a "social undesirable," and Pvt. Arnaud, twice decorated for bravery, found himself sent to trial when his company drew lots to find the "guilty" party. Each is hammered by the prosecution, who delivers his questions with sneering contempt, as if he not only will send his compatriots to their death but wants to. Kubrick frames each soldier's examination in medium close-up, allowing us to peer behind their faces to see the other two defendants seated in front of armed guards, the slightly shallow focus allowing us to seem the clearly while still emphasizing the space that isolates each; they may be tried together, but they're being torn apart separately to prevent any connection of defense. When the camera pulls back to a high-angle long shot at the back of the hall, we see the soldiers aligned on alternating black and white tiles. The dominant visual metaphor of Dr. Strangelove was a poker table in the War Room; Paths of Glory evokes chess. Either way, those in charge continue to play games using those without.


Not even the verve of Douglas' screen presence can sway the jury determined to carry out its "example." Kubrick ironically used Douglas, one of the great antiheroes, as a beacon of true morality and heroism in both this and Spartacus, yet both films turn that inversion over once more by making Douglas' sudden purity wholly inadequate to stop the mounting fatalism of both endings. The other voices are clear in the mix as they give testimony or ask questions of the prosecuted, but Dax's voice echoes in the vast parlor, communicating less the power and authority of his words than the futility of fighting. His words break and fade into nothingness while the generals continue smirking. At the end of the film, Dax meets with the generals once more to bring charges against Mireau for trying to fire on his own men in battle, and Broulard believes he knows the colonel's motivations, believing him to be throwing Mireau under the bus to secure his own advancement. (The slight tone of admiration and approval in Broulard's voice suggests that even the camaraderie of the officer class is based entirely on how well people play the game.) Dax viciously responds, and Broulard changes tone to one of pity and parental disappointment at Dax's idealism, utterly blind to his own culpability.

Kubrick tempers the messaging of these scenes with darker, ostensibly superfluous scenes that may contain the same direct dialogue but deepen the film for their extraneous development. Before the charge, a fast-talking soldier wakes up a buddy in a panic to get into a discussion about whether one would rather be killed by machine gun or bayonet. The comrade agrees the machine gun fire would be preferable because it is instant, leading to a chat on the difference between fear of pain and that of death and that soldiers really fear injury. An antipersonnel explosive is worse than nerve gas because the gas kills in seconds; a mine designed to maim instead of kill, draining national resources in terms of health care and sapping civilian support when some limbless freak gets foisted back onto his parents and spouse. The power of that scene downplays any romantic sentiment of death for glory: death is simply the quickest way to make the horror stop.

Low-key lighting adds a noirish touch to Paths of Glory, perhaps a lingering affect from Kubrick's work on The Killing but also a means to tie in this war film with the aesthetic and mindset of the more cynical, anti-authoritarian genre. Formal lighting places Dax in brighter profile while Mireau and Broulard are shadowed even when standing right next to Douglas, but the manner in which lighting can spin on a dime from the illuminated long shot of the château parlor to a darker medium shot in the same room instantly changes mood. James Jones, veteran and author of The Thin Red Line among other novels, panned the film for still adhering to enough conventions that, to him, it failed as an anti-war picture, but Paths of Glory goes out of its way never to glorify anything. One cannot even get a thrill of horror from the actual execution, as, after following the condemned in medium close-ups, he cuts to a long shot from the firing squad's POV as the drum roll ends and the faint chirping of a songbird can be heard. The command to fire breaks the terrible tranquility, and the bodies fall over without sound or accompaniment.


Of course, the most superfluous touch is also the film's greatest moment. Rather than end with the execution and Dax's rousing but pointless condemnation of the generals, Kubrick inserts a coda of the remaining men drinking and carousing in a tavern, unloading the pain of the battlefield and of what they just witnessed from their own command. A captured German woman (Kubrick's later wife, Christiane), beautiful and terrified, is brought in to sing for the men, who scream and hoot with rapacious savagery. When she begins to sing a German folk tune, however, the catcalling ceases, and the men realize suddenly that they are like her, trapped and forced to perform for those arbitrarily deemed "superior." Their hoots turn to hums and tears stream down men's faces as they do the girl's. It is one of the most powerful moments in the director's filmography, and therefore all of cinema, a complete deflation of whatever tinge of nationalistic pride that can make these men forget how little their lives are worth to those who send them to die.

The film at last ends with Dax returning to his quarters, the dolly that tracks to his door a reflection of the shot that followed him out of his bunker. The drum roll flourish also creates a reflective aural element, recalling the opening sounds. Not a damn thing has changed by the end of this movie: neither side has advanced, and the French Army has not solidified loyalty by killing its own. It is one of the bleakest endings put on screen, and as damning an indictment of war as has ever been made. Yet by embodying the remorseless remove of those who play chess with men's lives, Kubrick reveals the abhorrence of rationality and mathematical views of humanity. He would not display such outright humanism again until his swan song.