Butter is an unfunny, arrogant satire that tries to skewer the Midwest but exists so far outside the realm of reality that it says more about the ignorance of its makers than its targets. This is a film written with such hyperbole that the actors conflict with the roles they play by virtue of being human beings, bringing a basic sense of human decency to such wafer-thin stereotypes. Occasionally, it gets a laugh in spite of itself, but Butter is so condescending and superior that it mainly just made me feel angry at those who thought it was clever enough to fund.
My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.
|
|
|
|
|
Monday, October 8
Friday, October 5
Cars: Modal Verbs for Prohibition - CAN'T - TO BE NOT ALLOWED TO
Take a look at the rules for the race that will take place in the movie segment. Try to match the rule and its meaning.1. No pushing
2. No shoving
3. No bumping
4. No cheating
5. No spitting
6. No biting
7. No maiming
8. No road rage
9. No lolly gagging
10. No road hogging
11. No back stabbing
12. No oil slicking
( ) no idly wasting time
( ) no useless slow driving
( ) no saying bad things behind their backs
( ) no letting oil on the road
( ) no using of physical force to remove the opponent
( ) no pushing rudely
( ) no hitting
( ) no behaving dishonestly
( ) no insulting
( ) no using of teeth to hurt the opponent
( ) no mutilating
( ) no aggressive behavior on the road
Watch the movie segment now and then rewrite the rules, using CAN'T and NOT ALLOWED TO.
Ex: 1. You can't push / You're not allowed to push
2.............................................
3............................................
4............................................
MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - CARS
WORKSHEET
Answer key:
Ex I
9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Thursday, October 4
Musketeer Mania
I've got not one but two (sadly not three) pieces on Musketeer movies freshly up on the Internet. One is a discussion between myself and the lovely Allison from NerdVampire on Peter Hyams' simultaneously underrated and very appropriately rated 2001 feature, The Musketeer. Wire fu meets swashbuckling in this gratingly scripted but finely lensed POS. Check out our discussion here.
The other is on the deliciously, ludicrously scripted and gorgeously lensed Paul W.S. Anderson feature, The Three Musketeers. I gave this a positive, if somewhat backhanded, review after its theatrical release last year, but the severity with which I now treat Anderson's talents can be directly traced back to my fondness for this sailpunk take on the novel, with its beautiful, vast interiors, coherent action, and even a sly bit of satire or two. My full review can be found at Spectrum Culture.
The other is on the deliciously, ludicrously scripted and gorgeously lensed Paul W.S. Anderson feature, The Three Musketeers. I gave this a positive, if somewhat backhanded, review after its theatrical release last year, but the severity with which I now treat Anderson's talents can be directly traced back to my fondness for this sailpunk take on the novel, with its beautiful, vast interiors, coherent action, and even a sly bit of satire or two. My full review can be found at Spectrum Culture.
Tuesday, October 2
Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)
Take time travel out of the scenario, though, and even the denser, more classically sci-fi first act of the film could still run under the same circular title. Young Joe's life moves in endless repetitions. As a hired gun employed by future mobsters looking to dispose of their enemies in the past (where bodies are harder to track, especially if they technically do not exist), Joe's life follows a set pattern. Be at the right place on-time, blast the target when it suddenly appears, collect his money and go party. Joe saves most of his money for the early retirement people in his line of work receive, but as Johnson's montage of Joe's routine speeds up under the influence of the cleaner's drug use and dispassion, it becomes evident that retirement may prove more debilitating for him than his profession. Not that he will get to find out, however, when his final target, himself, manages to overpower his younger self and threatens to create a whole new timeline. Imagine how weird this would be if the director didn't try so hard to avoid time talk.
Johnson has built a name for himself as a visually dynamic shooter, and his stylistic flourishes are certainly welcome among the more impersonal, incomprehensible mega-blockbusters. In an early scene, he amps up the sensory experience with a sudden camera stutter and explosion of volume when Joe drops drugs into his eye and blinks. The camera is then set a-reeling, the spartan visual setup accompanying the pulpy, mercifully terse expositional introduction giving way to swooning, arcing movements around the decayed urban shell of 2042 Omaha. The best and most disturbing play on the time-travel angle involves the fate of Joe's friend and colleague, Seth (Paul Dano), who helps set everything in motion by failing to kill his own future self and revealing to Joe how horrifying the punishment for this failure is. He does not even see the worst of it, which the audience gets to view via the future self, whose escape attempt is thwarted when his extremities start slowly, terrifyingly disappearing as his past self is brutally changed. Editing maintains a consistent sense of clarity and flow, never using the time-travel story as an excuse to confound. This is true even of the shots that blend the alternate timelines of the two Joes and the memories the older one has and wishes to protect as his younger self's path is drastically altered by his refusal to die according to plan.
The one memory Old Joe treasures most also acts as his motive for carrying out a mission to alter the future by dealing with a monster in its infancy. Without going too far into this sudden story development, suffice to say it readily recalls The Terminator, down to a shot of a gun-toting Willis kicking in a residential door and stalking inside that comes right out of James Cameron's film. This change of pace introduces a deep moral element into the film to fill the gaps where, in other films, more time-travel play might go. Teased as a warped action film, Looper instead devotes its time to the morality of killing an innocent before it can grow into a mass-murderer, and whether such actions work or merely exacerbate the problem.
Where the film stumbles is in its middle passage, after Old Joe's mission has been made clear but before he realizes which of his small list of targets is the person he wants to terminate. Trading the rotted city for open fields, Looper abruptly, and by the admission of its maker, looks to Witness as a key inspiration. But where Peter Weir's film maintained the overall level of tension by altering its source from corrupted cops hunting one of their own to the friction between the honest, modern cop and the Amish community in which he hides. Looper only sporadically transfers over its own suspense, but it also places that tension into a vessel that clangs against the time-travel story with a whole other issue that throws off the film's momentum. This shifted focus on mutation, though somewhat grounded in brief sights of low-powered telekinesis being used by arrogant showboats in the city, is never meshed credibly with the rest of the story and comes off as tacked-on rather than fluid.
Nevertheless, Johnson manages to spin even this awkward addition into a positive, using it to probe questions of the impermanence of the future and the question of whether love can be as powerful a method of saving lives as a disposal of evil. Emily Blunt makes a powerful impression as the rural mother who takes in Young Joe and could expose him to that which Old Joe wishes to eradicate. Her performance is all the more so affecting because she never makes clear whether her care is sufficient to alter the future. But then, Looper does not suggest that only one person's love can hold back the darkness, nor does evil exist in a vacuum. If the film's middle act lags, it almost makes up for it with the ending, in which an evil is attacked, but perhaps not the one you would think. The final act is motivated by love, but then so is much of the horrific content of the film, from Old Joe's vendetta to the emotional instability of the figure who could grow up to be a tyrant. Because of this, Looper does not leave the audience with a tidy, thrilling high but a morally unsure, emotionally devastating conclusion. If nothing else, it shows a willingness to try to be something other than "awesome," which has weighed down so many summer films in recent years.
Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)
But Hail Mary goes one further. Godard strips the film of the political underpinnings that inform nearly all of his films from the mid-'60s (and a few that date back even earlier) to this point, instead turning to matter of the corporeal and incorporeal. In retelling the story of the virgin birth, Godard breaks down the layers of deification and mythos surrounding the story to examine what such an occurrence would mean to the young virgin, to her relationship with Joseph (Thierry Rode), and to her sudden obligation to sacrifice her corporeal desires and wishes to serve something greater. Godard still employs dialectic, but here it focuses entirely on matters of existence, the split between the body and the soul.
Naturally, Godard portrays this dichotomy through the conflict of image and sound. We see Marie (Myriem Roussel) in plain naturalism: watching her play on her high school basketball team and lightly brush aside the sexual advances of her lover. Over such scenes, however, Godard plays Bach and Dvorak, art made in the service of God doubling as His voice singing from her soul. Cutaways to pillow shots of nature—including recurring shots of the phases of the moon that come to represent Marie—poeticize the image, but otherwise the director maintains an honest appraisal of the woman and her figure that always grounds the soaring, sacred beauty of the music.
That Godard films Roussel and her frequently nude body with such straightforward, matter-of-fact openness represents a step forward in his always contentious views of women. One of Godard's most recognizable thematic tics—the elevation of the female prostitute as the ultimate symbol of capitalism and its commodification of everything up to and including the body—made up such a fundamental part of his canon that the director's renewed interest in the topic coincided with that vaunted return to film. But the cut-up manner in which he filmed women's bodies, simultaneously reflecting and critiquing the male gaze as a materialist fetish, is nowhere in sight in Hail Mary. Instead, he films Roussel's body on its own terms, as an instrument of sex and life-bearing. And when Joseph and, less sinisterly, Marie's gynecologist, attempt to invade that body, Godard does not frame their gropings as Marxist analogy but physical reality. As if to further delineate this method from the director's usual style, Hail Mary occasionally cuts away to a teacher and his female student debating matters of sex and religion in theoretical abstracts, their conclusions of the impossibility of Marie's conception hilariously useless when juxtaposed with that impossibility happening before our eyes.
Yet if Hail Mary frames its subject in the most pared-down, apolitical manner of Godard's career to this point, it also emerges one of his most evocative, and humorous. When the Lord needs something a bit more blunt than Bach to communicate, he sends a messenger, here identified as "Uncle" Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste), who looks less like an angel than a vagrant suspiciously toting around a young child. His dubious legitimacy adds an element of extreme discomfort to his instruction on God's will, but he can also be farcical, as when he responds cryptically to a taxi driver and his child companion chides, "That's not your line, Uncle Gabriel!" Shots of women toying with Rubik's cubes make for amusing interludes whose obviousness morphs into density as Godard holds the shots. A placid montage of close-ups inside of flowers would be an almost Hitchcockian visual pun were labias not already so prominently on display, therefore allowing the images to exist as poetic, sumptuous art for its own sake. Joseph's frustrated lack of sexual access gives an insight into how the Biblical Joseph might have reacted to his wife's news, but might his pent-up aggression be an indication of what the "real" Mary might have faced?
Before one can ponder that too long, however, Godard shows Marie gaining the upper hand in their relationship, eventually converting Joseph to the cause of raising the son of God and leaving her untouched. But even this domination comes at a price. Dutifully putting her faith into the idea of bearing a child as a virgin, Marie nevertheless reflects upon what the elevation of her spirit means for the body "I am a soul imprisoned by a body," she says in voiceover, though if she sees her corporeal shell as limiting for her spiritual growth into a goddess, she also recognizes that her beatification will strip her of her natural sexuality. My favorite insight into this aspect of Marie's reflection comes from Christopher Long in a brief review appended to DVDBeaver's analysis New Yorker Video's DVD of the film. He brings up a connection to Roman Polanski's seminal horror film Rosemary's Baby, about a woman bearing Satan's child. Long notes that carrying God's baby could be as harrowing as the devil's, but not why: Polanski's film served as a twisted allegory for women being forced to carry their rapists' children to term, but does Marie have any more say in being the Lord's vessel than Rosemary does being Lucifer's? Polanski plays this for unrelenting terror, but Godard finds elegiac mourning in it. As Marie says right before the film ends on a close-up of her lipstick-rimmed mouth hanging open in the vague memory of desire, "I am of the Virgin, and I didn't want this being. I only left my imprint on the soul who helped me. That's all." In maintaining a platonic relationship with Joseph, Marie retains her independence. In entering into a "sexual" relationship with God, that independence is eradicated. Viewed through that perspective, the story of the Virgin Mother becomes one of subjugation, not exultation.
Monday, October 1
Head Games (Steve James, 2012)
Steve James' weakest feature almost doesn't even feel like a James film at first, presenting a straightforward call to increased safety in sports to reduce the rising number of concussions. But as James and his subjects uncover a sickening level of self-justification and obfuscation on the part of sports organizations looking to maximize the playing time (and, therefore, profit margin) of their players, Head Games emerges as something more classically "Jamesian." In peeling back the layers, the director starts to live up to his usual quality, and if nothing else, Head Games is proof that when James acquiesces to play by convention, he can still make a fine, probing work.
My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.
My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.
Center Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1992)
[The following is my Blind Spots review for September]
Using period-appropriate filming techniques for movies set in the 20th century is hardly new, especially in the use of melodramatic lighting and color. But Stanley Kwan's Center Stage (a.k.a. Actress) actually incorporates the techniques into the film at hand, the biopic of 1930s star Ruan Ling-yu doubling as a recreation of both period-appropriate Chinese melodrama and the postwar American melodrama as practiced by Sirk, Ray et al. By going outside the stylistic touches of the film's time to broadly canvas melodrama as a fluid, evolving, international artform and expression. As if to to prove to the audience why they should care for the film's subject, Kwan establishes the artistic worth of the medium and genre in which she worked.
Yet this also sets the stage for Kwan to show how the films in which Ruan gained her fame—tales of harassed and martyred women misunderstood and abused by social forces and an ignorant mob—were reflected in the tragedy of her short life. Her penultimate film, New Women, portrayed the press as an insensitive pack of jackals who drove a women to her suicide, an outrage that prompted vindictive newspapers to...drive this woman to her suicide. It is a twisted irony, and the director adds a layer of his own by including black-and-white scenes of himself and the actors as themselves, discussing their "characters" and interviewing surviving members of the Chinese film industry who worked with the actress. The film's first scene depicts Kwan explaining Ruan's career arc, which began with minor roles in fluff before she went to a film studio that prided itself on more progressive, artistic work and her career exploded. Maggie Cheung, who plays Ruan, notes with a laugh that her own path recalls Ruan. In another case of life imitating art, Cheung would use this very part to transition from supporting roles to becoming one of the most respected actresses on the international stage. When making a film biography of a film star, one supposes that self-reflexivity is unavoidable.
The shift to color when Center Stage moves into the past floods the screen with golden light, radiant reds and the cool blues of Technicolor night. Seemingly everything is a reflective surface, the ascendant star always surrounded by twinkles of brilliant light. Yet as with so many melodramas, all that florid beauty serves as a cage for the protagonist, who finds herself restricted not only by the sudden, overwhelming fame that falls on her young shoulders but by the male-dominated system that exploits her to cast a bitterly ironic image of a progressive studio. Kwan shows the shooting of Ruan's most famous films from behind the scenes, his color stock picking up the extra makeup pancaked onto actors's faces for the black-and-white silents, the male directors calling out from behind the camera to give Ruan instructions during a shot. As a symbol for the Lianhua Film Company, Ruan and her bevy of impoverished, sacrificial prostitutes and workers put them at the forefront of class-conscious filmmaking, yet the audience for Center Stage sees all the strings attached to the marionettes.
Nevertheless, Kwan and Cheung do show Ruan's talent as an actress. Where the men on-set tend to give pointers through a simplistic recap of how the character feels as a result of what has happened to her, Ruan can actually empathize with the characters set up as props for the studio's pro-Communist viewpoints. On the set of Little Toys, she coaches her costar, Li Lili (Carina Lau), by succinctly and eloquently guiding the other actress to truly picturing the scene as it affects their characters. So skilled is Ruan at inhabiting her characters that her youth—she did not live to see her 25th birthday—feels irrelevant to the maturity and dignity with which she imbues her roles. In Little Toys, for example, Lili's character in question is Ruan's 17-year-old daughter. But Cheung and Lau play the actresses as taking it as seriously as the real people appear to be in the clips of the actual Little Toys Kwan includes in the film. Throughout, Cheung plays Ruan not as a wide-eyed girl off the bus who finds herself swept up in stardom but an intelligent woman who knows full well that her entire professional life is being decided by studio executives who want her to always be "the next ______," the new big thing who will one day be thrown out when she is "too old" at 30. Likewise, Ruan is aware she must work overtime to make sure the details of her chaotic personal life never escape closed doors lest it destroy. And when, in the wake of New Women's disastrous press screening, she looks in a newspaper and sees headlines about her affair, her scream sounds like that of a mother who lost her child. She knows in an instant what this means, and she cannot cope with it.
Soon, Ruan would be dead, immortalizing her as an icon in China but also preventing her from working into an era with more consistent film preservation. As if to further complicate her mythic status, so many of the films she made are now lost, as explained by intertitles Kwan places over stills and surviving reels of those movies. That the film partially "recreates" those movies by showing their production adds a metacinematic element to its reconstruction of the star's life by rebuilding the work that, in many cases, no longer exists. In the climax, Kwan waves together real images of Ruan's funeral with Cheung posed for the same, but he also contrasts his sets standing in for Lianhua studios for the real thing, in disrepair at the time of filming. The studio fell into decline after Ruan's death, largely because of the escalating war with the Japanese. But Kwan turns this into a final melodramatic flourish, the actress' demise turned into a final revenge upon the company that used her by turning the tide in their fortunes. In her films, Ruan symbolizes the injustices of society; as an avatar, she comes to stand for the injustices within the industry that claimed to take a stand against them. In other words, it is an awards-ready film about the fraudulent and hypocritical nature of so many awards-ready films.
Yet this also sets the stage for Kwan to show how the films in which Ruan gained her fame—tales of harassed and martyred women misunderstood and abused by social forces and an ignorant mob—were reflected in the tragedy of her short life. Her penultimate film, New Women, portrayed the press as an insensitive pack of jackals who drove a women to her suicide, an outrage that prompted vindictive newspapers to...drive this woman to her suicide. It is a twisted irony, and the director adds a layer of his own by including black-and-white scenes of himself and the actors as themselves, discussing their "characters" and interviewing surviving members of the Chinese film industry who worked with the actress. The film's first scene depicts Kwan explaining Ruan's career arc, which began with minor roles in fluff before she went to a film studio that prided itself on more progressive, artistic work and her career exploded. Maggie Cheung, who plays Ruan, notes with a laugh that her own path recalls Ruan. In another case of life imitating art, Cheung would use this very part to transition from supporting roles to becoming one of the most respected actresses on the international stage. When making a film biography of a film star, one supposes that self-reflexivity is unavoidable.
The shift to color when Center Stage moves into the past floods the screen with golden light, radiant reds and the cool blues of Technicolor night. Seemingly everything is a reflective surface, the ascendant star always surrounded by twinkles of brilliant light. Yet as with so many melodramas, all that florid beauty serves as a cage for the protagonist, who finds herself restricted not only by the sudden, overwhelming fame that falls on her young shoulders but by the male-dominated system that exploits her to cast a bitterly ironic image of a progressive studio. Kwan shows the shooting of Ruan's most famous films from behind the scenes, his color stock picking up the extra makeup pancaked onto actors's faces for the black-and-white silents, the male directors calling out from behind the camera to give Ruan instructions during a shot. As a symbol for the Lianhua Film Company, Ruan and her bevy of impoverished, sacrificial prostitutes and workers put them at the forefront of class-conscious filmmaking, yet the audience for Center Stage sees all the strings attached to the marionettes.
Nevertheless, Kwan and Cheung do show Ruan's talent as an actress. Where the men on-set tend to give pointers through a simplistic recap of how the character feels as a result of what has happened to her, Ruan can actually empathize with the characters set up as props for the studio's pro-Communist viewpoints. On the set of Little Toys, she coaches her costar, Li Lili (Carina Lau), by succinctly and eloquently guiding the other actress to truly picturing the scene as it affects their characters. So skilled is Ruan at inhabiting her characters that her youth—she did not live to see her 25th birthday—feels irrelevant to the maturity and dignity with which she imbues her roles. In Little Toys, for example, Lili's character in question is Ruan's 17-year-old daughter. But Cheung and Lau play the actresses as taking it as seriously as the real people appear to be in the clips of the actual Little Toys Kwan includes in the film. Throughout, Cheung plays Ruan not as a wide-eyed girl off the bus who finds herself swept up in stardom but an intelligent woman who knows full well that her entire professional life is being decided by studio executives who want her to always be "the next ______," the new big thing who will one day be thrown out when she is "too old" at 30. Likewise, Ruan is aware she must work overtime to make sure the details of her chaotic personal life never escape closed doors lest it destroy. And when, in the wake of New Women's disastrous press screening, she looks in a newspaper and sees headlines about her affair, her scream sounds like that of a mother who lost her child. She knows in an instant what this means, and she cannot cope with it.
Soon, Ruan would be dead, immortalizing her as an icon in China but also preventing her from working into an era with more consistent film preservation. As if to further complicate her mythic status, so many of the films she made are now lost, as explained by intertitles Kwan places over stills and surviving reels of those movies. That the film partially "recreates" those movies by showing their production adds a metacinematic element to its reconstruction of the star's life by rebuilding the work that, in many cases, no longer exists. In the climax, Kwan waves together real images of Ruan's funeral with Cheung posed for the same, but he also contrasts his sets standing in for Lianhua studios for the real thing, in disrepair at the time of filming. The studio fell into decline after Ruan's death, largely because of the escalating war with the Japanese. But Kwan turns this into a final melodramatic flourish, the actress' demise turned into a final revenge upon the company that used her by turning the tide in their fortunes. In her films, Ruan symbolizes the injustices of society; as an avatar, she comes to stand for the injustices within the industry that claimed to take a stand against them. In other words, it is an awards-ready film about the fraudulent and hypocritical nature of so many awards-ready films.
