Robert Zemeckis' excitable reimagining of the Dickens classic is a triumph of something -- but it's certainly not the Christmas spirit. The movie overflows with fa la la la las and snowflakes and rosy-cheeked Victorians, many of whom are granted numerous opportunities to point right at you, dear audience member. But the 3-D film is flat, the CGI-enhanced characters oddly waxen. In the center of the action is Jim Carrey -- or at least a dead-eyed, doll-like version of Carrey -- playing Scrooge, the ghosts, a younger version of himself, and probably a dozen other parts. As a general rule of thumb, one Jim Carrey is plenty for any movie.
Though motion-capture technology has improved since Zemeckis' prior attempts, "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf," the process still ranks several notches below the Country Bear Jamboree on the suspension-of-disbelief scale. Why is Zemeckis so fond of the technique? And what's up with having the same star play almost all the parts, just as Tom Hanks did in "Polar Express"? Have we learned nothing from "The Klumps"?
At least Dickens' tale, one of the most filmed in all of cinema, gets a fairly faithful translation here. The script itself isn't dumbed down or modernized -- it's faithful to the author's lilting prose and his deeply compassionate, still painfully relevant worldview. "It is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices." Nor does it shy away from the grim horror of Scrooge's adventure: There are plenty of jump-in-your-seat moments designed expressly to make your 5-year-old burst into tears. There are also moments of scary fun, when the action feels quite literally in your face. Undulating spirits melt into the shadows, jaws unhinge and flesh falls away.
But too much of the film is at once overblown and sadly emotionless, and too many of Dickens' lovely words sound hollow. Underneath all the effects, Carrey gets to try on a variety of funny voices and bellow "AAAAAAIEEEEEEE" an awful lot as he careens around with assorted versions of himself. But when Scrooge comes face to face with a grieving Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman, who delivers his lines with subtle stoicism), reeling from the loss of his son, it's like two mannequins blinking at each other. Sure, we can see the wispy hairs on Scrooge's nose, but what does it matter when we can't relate to the anguish in his soul?
Animation doesn't have to be cold. In fact, the medium can convey a wealth of feeling and imagination that traditional live action can't. It didn't matter in the least that the characters in "Up" -- another movie about a misanthropic geriatric -- were Pixar-generated; it was still one of the wittiest, most bittersweet movies of the year. The problem is when effects take precedence over the story itself, when they become as crippling as the chains around Marley. Hey, you want lots of vertigo-inducing scenes of whipping through the London skies? Here's a movie for you. Want a more humanized take on the tale? Stick with the Muppets' version.
For what's essentially a scary story about a mean old man, "A Christmas Carol" remains a perennial source of yuletide inspiration. And why not? It's brisk, action-packed and profoundly redemptive. It's a story of generosity, with a message that all the money in the world doesn't matter if you haven't any heart. And likewise, you can make a 3-D movie in which characters are constantly reaching out of the screen -- and still touch no one.
It seems to me that if I were the owner of the only independent-film distributor the general public has ever noticed or cared about, the company that brought the world "Pulp Fiction," "The Crying Game," "sex, lies, and videotape," "The English Patient," "Shakespeare in Love," "Chicago," "The Queen" and "No Country for Old Men," I might try to cash in on that brand name in perpetuity by making or selling some really good movies. Fortunately for all concerned, I am not the owner of Miramax Films, and in recent days the once-mighty indie empire founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1979 has reached the end of the road, or pretty nearly so.
Actually, what's happening to Miramax isn't even as dignified as a public execution. Instead, now that its corporate overlords at Disney (owner of Miramax since 1993) have drained the company of its vital essence, it will be kept alive in shrunken, zombie-slave form. Reportedly, Miramax will be reduced to around 20 employees -- definitely not including current head Daniel Battsek -- and relocated from its longtime home in New York to the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif., where it will release something like three boutique-film titles a year.
I say again: Harvey's old company, the one that launched, catalyzed and perpetuated the indie revolution of the '80s and '90s. Three movies a year. In Burbank. That's not a studio or a distributor or even a "specialty division." It's a hobby, or an off-brand. It's like that weird brand of Pepsi they sold in the '80s that was neither regular Pepsi nor Diet Pepsi, the one that came in a sky-blue can and was flavored with lemon, and inexplicably had one calorie instead of none at all. That's Miramax.
It might seem utterly baffling, at least at first: Sure, the economy stinks, but Miramax's collapse comes less than two years after the company collected a big pile of Oscars and other awards for "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood." Not only had Miramax fully recovered from the 2005 split with the Weinstein brothers (it seemed), but post-Weinstein head honcho Battsek was riding high, pushing forward with an aggressive list of productions and acquisitions. "When you think about how glowing it looked for Battsek just two years ago," says longtime indie guru John Pierson, who partnered with Miramax on various projects in the Weinstein era and now teaches film at the University of Texas, "it's amazing that it could all fall apart so fast." (CORRECTION: In the first published version of this post, I described Pierson as a former Miramax executive, which is not accurate.)
As Pierson also notes, Miramax almost certainly didn't fall apart that fast. While no one inside Disney is talking (at least not to me), veterans of the indie industry almost unanimously suggest that the Miramax collapse was a long time coming. As filmmaker and distribution veteran Jeff Lipsky puts it, there was always "a lack of transparency" in the relationship between Miramax and Disney, meaning that we never knew for sure whether Miramax's supposed hits were adding anything to the corporate bottom line. "Since the day Disney bought Miramax, who knows whether they were bleeding red ink left and right?" Lipsky asks. "I would speculate that this might be a case of pure financial practicality, and Disney finally needed to stop the bleeding."
Pierson observes that when we saw Joel and Ethan Coen picking up their statuettes for "No Country for Old Men," or Daniel Day-Lewis winning the best-actor prize for "There Will Be Blood," we didn't see how much money was spent on publicity and advertising before those guys reached the stage of the Kodak Theatre. "You can easily get into a situation where you're spending money hand over fist in search of that glory," he says, "and along the way you're eroding whatever profitable bottom line you might once have had." Indeed, although those two films grossed more than $110 million between them, well-placed industry sources suggest, amazingly enough, that neither one managed to turn a profit.
Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles, who worked at Miramax in the '90s, sees the company's near-total desiccation as just another chapter in a lengthy and necessary restructuring of the film marketplace. Over the course of the last two years, numerous other studio specialty divisions and small indie distributors have disappeared, including Picturehouse, Warner Independent, Paramount Vantage, THINKfilm and New Yorker Films.
"The landscape has changed a lot since last summer, when all those companies closed down," Bowles says. "The market has gotten back to a more sustainable level. Those companies whose basic M.O. was to chase the Oscar at any cost created an absolutely false marketplace." He suggests that surviving companies like Magnolia, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC and Zeitgeist, who focus on marketing quality films to niche audiences, are now in a stronger position. "Producers are the ones who may be hurt by this, because there are fewer players with fewer resources, and it's a buyer's market. But we've done very well since last summer. It's inherently a more reasonable situation."
While the Miramax of the '80s and '90s was a legendary institution whose movies and mystique will linger for years to come, no one I spoke to this week expressed much nostalgia about the current edition, which has flailed around since its 2007 Oscar run, without finding an identity or any notably successful films. "Whatever the name brand was worth, once upon a time, it doesn't mean much today," says Pierson. "I think anybody who was smart enough to know about Miramax knew that the company meant Bob and Harvey, and unless they go out of business, you can't really say that Miramax is dead." (The brothers' struggling new entity, the Weinstein Co., was buoyed somewhat this year by the success of "Inglourious Basterds.")
During the Weinstein glory days, when the company made money, won awards and produced or distributed important films by everyone from Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith to Pedro Almodóvar and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pierson adds, "Miramax changed the world, totally and completely. The closest analogy I can draw in film history would be United Artists, from about 1960 to 1972, where you're talking about winning Oscars, about bringing European films to America, about working with important auteurs and also making films for large audiences. Does that mean people will forget about Miramax in 40 or 50 years, the way they've mostly forgotten about U.A.? I don't know. Probably."
To a fan (and creator) of challenging art-house fare like Jeff Lipsky, the Miramax story is more about extraordinary marketing than extraordinary movies. "Harvey Weinstein has proven himself to be a marketing genius," he says, "and that's what the success of Miramax, and all the dollars it generated, were built on. He could take a movie that was savaged by the critics, like 'The English Patient,' attract huge audiences to it and then win best picture. As for 'Pulp Fiction,' I'm not sure that any other company could have done what Harvey did with that film. And, listen, it's an overrated film, in my opinion. But the marketing campaign they built around it -- that wasn't overrated at all."
Some Internet commentators have pronounced the Miramax collapse to be a symbolic death knell for independent film. On one hand, that's lazy, short-term meme-think from people who know little about business and even less about art. On the other hand, they might be right, in that a certain era of independent film -- the one in which it appeared as a hip, hot but fatally nebulous commodity -- is coming to an end.
"If you're in the arts there's always going to be independent work, and an audience that wants it," says Eamonn Bowles. "It's going to be more complex, it's not easy to synopsize and it's not easy to market. We're always going to have independent film, but is it going to be independent film as played out in the pages of Us Weekly? This isn't the end of independent film, but it might be the end of the large-scale tarting-up of independent film."
AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, file
Comic book creator Stan Lee stands beside some of his drawings in the Marvel Super Heroes Science Exhibition at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, in March 2006.
Back in the long-ago days of my youth, when I walked through clouds of tear gas on the streets of Berkeley, Calif., to get my weekly comic-book fix, the Walt Disney Co. and Marvel Comics seemed to belong to impossibly different worlds. Their products were even sold in different sections of the Shattuck Avenue variety store I frequented (one that transmuted, a few years later, into a gourmet sausage-maker's shop).
"Walt Disney's Comics & Stories," with its nominally wholesome yarns -- albeit loaded with sub-rosa Freudian imagery -- about tightwad millionaire Scrooge McDuck, his ne'er-do-well nephew and his impish, apparently parentless nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, was right there at the front counter, along with Topps baseball cards and Bazooka bubble gum. Marvel comics, with their pantheon of hypermasculine gods and heroes virtually oozing early-onset testosterone, were squirreled away in the back of the store, a more than faintly disreputable realm where shaggy-haired older kids played the Eight Ball Deluxe pinball machine ("Stop talkin' and start chalkin'!"), spat gobs of imitation-grape-flavored goo on the dirty tile floor and occasionally smoked cigarette ends in their cupped hands while the aged Middle Eastern gentleman behind the counter pointedly ignored them.
Amid all the waggish and frequently overheated Internet chatter over Disney's $4 billion acquisition of Marvel, announced on Monday, the central lesson -- how far both companies, and our culture, have come since my days as a patron at McHaffie's Variety -- has been little noticed. On one hand, we have industry observers disputing whether Disney paid a fair price, and who the deal's winners and losers may be: In The Wrap, founder and editor Sharon Waxman praises Disney chief Bob Iger for his "stealth move," quoting a rival exec who says he is "jealous beyond belief"; while Kim Masters of the Daily Beast suggests that Marvel's secretive CEO, Ike Perlmutter, made out like a bandit, sticking Iger with a roster of comic-book characters who've "gotten long in the tooth" and been drained of their commercial potential.
It's more entertaining, on the whole, to consider the fantastical fulminations of comic-into-movie buffs, including numerous imaginative Photoshop experiments. (There's a nice roundup of all such things available from SpoutBlog's Christopher Campbell.) Quite a few bloggers have humorously suggested (e.g.) that one or more Jonas Brother will soon replace Hugh Jackman and Robert Downey Jr. as Wolverine and Iron Man, or that a hypothetical (but entirely possible) Marvel-infused film made by Pixar, another Disney subsidiary, might pit the Incredibles against the Incredible Hulk. I'm fond of S.T. VanAirsdale's suggestion on Movieline that Disney start selling Mickey gloves with Wolverine claws, but you have to worry about the real-world orientation of a blogger like First Showing's Alex Billington, who is so deeply immersed in the arcana and epiphenomena of this deal that he earnestly speculates about Marvel's Ant-Man becoming a Pixar character. Hello? Ant-Man? He could become a gay porn character and no one would notice or care.
For what it's worth, I'm going to endorse two apparently contradictory views of the deal. New York Times reporters Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply nicely sum up the industry consensus by noting that the Marvel acquisition helps Disney with teen and tween boys, a market segment where the Mouse's princessy, Hannah Montana-flavored products have had little appeal of late. As a corollary to that, all the wild fanboy maundering about Disney draining the alleged edge and darkness out of Marvel's universe is laughably misplaced on various levels. First of all, what the hell are such people talking about? Anybody who feels satisfied with the rapidly diminishing returns of the "Spider-Man" and "X-Men" franchises hasn't been reading any decent comic books, still less watching decent movies, and badly needs to attend Andrew O'Hehir's Clockwork Orange-style cinematic reeducation camp.
Furthermore, at least since the Michael Eisner era, Disney has been a diversified global infotainment empire, with much less of a governing identity or ideology than many people think. Disney management didn't meddle much with Miramax during the Weinstein years and hasn't meddled much with Pixar, and after the $500 million-plus worldwide returns of "Iron Man," company honchos aren't likely to bland down the franchise in an effort to pitch it at 8-year-olds. I'm about to argue that they made a dumb decision, but they aren't dumb in that particular way.
OK, so all of that is argument No. 1. Argument No. 2 is the fact that Marvel sold itself at a premium, hey-what-recession price point, and did so at a moment when most of its prime properties and characters are licensed out to other studios for the medium or long term. (Fox, for instance, can keep making Fantastic Four and X-Men movies as long as it wants to.) While I don't doubt that Disney can mine some of Marvel's lesser-known characters with some success, the comic-into-movie marketplace is beginning to display some fatigue, and Iger basically just bought an oil well that's been pumped at least halfway dry. Marvel's stock went way up after the deal was announced, but Disney shares declined, and the financial-rating firm Standard & Poor's views the transaction as negative overall.
Lastly -- this is either Argument 2B or a schismatic third stream -- it totally doesn't matter who owns Marvel Comics. And we will all very soon forget that we ever pretended to care. The cigarette-smoking, Jimmy Page-listening veneer of preteen badness that Marvel possessed in my variety-store days is dust in the wind, along with the jarhead-Republican, get-off-my-lawn, so-called innocence that Disney once embodied. To quote Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere, my favorite Internet source for uncensored spleen-venting, "Transferring ownership of a major brand from corporate entity A to corporate entity B is a meaningless thing. All 21st-century entertainment corporations are invested in selling the same basic heroin."
Jeff's right, but I won't claim to be immune to the lure of that heroin. If the Disney-Marvel mega-Borg can bring my boyhood favorite back to the big screen -- that would be the pompous, foppish, mustachioed Marvel magician, Doctor Strange -- in a non-terrible incarnation, perhaps directed by Terry Gilliam (as suggested by Campbell of SpoutBlog)? Then, you know, screw all the nuance and skepticism. Bring on Ant-Man!
The work of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is almost universally adored -- just not by me. I've already written about my failure to be enchanted by Miyazaki's work, despite the fact that I often enjoy wavy, dream-logic narratives of the kind Miyazaki specializes in. I do appreciate the artistry of some of his images, and I love his tendency toward subtle coloration rather than garishness. But his stories, and often his character design, just leave me cold. I know I'm supposed to be magically transported by his fanciful tales and his whimsical grandiosity, but they make me listless: I just don't swoon with delight at the idea of grannies being turned into onions, or whatever.
I wish I could say Miyazaki's latest, "Ponyo" -- its Japanese title is "Gake no ue no Ponyo," or "Ponyo on the Cliff," although the version being released here in the States by Disney is a dubbed, English-language one -- changed my mind. It didn't. But this story of a small girl (she's actually half-human, half-fish) and her friendship with the boy who rescues her from tragedy, loses her, and finds her again, is certainly simple and modest, as well as, at times, quite beautiful to look at. The magical little fish girl -- she's the Ponyo of the title, and she's voiced by Noah Cyrus, younger sister of Miley -- is the daughter of the wizard Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), himself a former human who lives beneath the sea. Fujimoto, angry with humans for spoiling the ocean environment, is hatching a plan in which the sea and its creatures will rise up to regain their rightful place on Earth. Fujimoto is fearful for his little daughter's safety when she's first swept out of the ocean and rescued by 5-year-old Sosuke (Frankie Jonas, of the same family that gave us the Jonas Brothers), who lives with his mother by the sea. At that point, Ponyo, like her many identical-looking sisters, is just a little tadpole squirt -- she's like a miniature baby doll in a swimmy red dress. But when Fujimoto gets her back to the ocean, he learns that all she really wants to do is get back to Sosuke, with whom she's already forged a bond. She also wants to be human -- she has, among other things, discovered a taste for ham -- but if she makes that transition, Fujimoto tells her sternly, she will lose all her magical powers.
"Ponyo" represents a more pared-down Miyazaki; the movie is rated G, and the story it tells is a relatively simple one (allowing for the usual Miyazaki squirreliness) that little kids can easily grasp. There are many scenes involving the adventures of Ponyo and Sosuke: When the coastal area in which Sosuke lives is flooded by a tsunami (caused by Ponyo's attempts to become human, which result in an imbalance in nature), Ponyo uses her magic to "grow" a toy boat to a usable size, and the two embark on a journey to find Ponyo's mom. Ponyo and Sosuke are appealing enough, with their chubby, rounded limbs and wider, even more rounded eyes.
And, as always with Miyazaki, there are plenty of good-looking images: The picture opens with a lovely wordless sequence that introduces us to a number of wild and marvelous-looking ocean creatures, accompanied by a symphonic score that's as graceful as gently waving seaweed. It's a gorgeous, hypnotic opening, rendered in softly blended blues and greens, dotted with families of translucent pearl-gray and pink jellyfish drifting through the depths. My favorite image, though, is that of a submerged coastal road that is now free of cars; instead, numerous types of fish from ancient times, recently resurrected from the depths, swim placidly along this underwater highway as if they had every right to be there. "Ponyo" hasn't changed my mind about Miyazaki. But I'm willing to accept and enjoy this little window into the dream life of fish.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a Disney crown. Princesses are a plucky if put-upon lot, girls who regularly contend with black magic, evil stepmothers and all manner of talking animals. But imagine the plight of the newest member of the royal family, Tiana, because the heroine of December’s "The Princess and the Frog" is the studio’s first African-American princess.
Tiana (voiced by "Dreamgirls" actress Anika Noni Rose) is a 1920’s-era aspiring chef working in New Orleans, who via a bit of magical misfortune gets turned into a croaky amphibian. And, like Mulan and Jasmine and Pocahontas before her, Tiana bears the weight of representing her whole darn race. As the New York Times reported on Sunday, not everybody is rejoicing over how the fairy tale is unfolding. Writer William Blackburn says that "Disney should be ashamed" of setting the story in the Big Easy, home of "one of the most devastating tragedies to beset a black community." Other critics have taken issue with Tiana’s Prince Naveen, a light-skinned character voiced by Brazilian actor Bruno Campos.
It’s not like Disney's previous track record on race is anything to brag about: Check out "Song of the South" or the crows from "Dumbo" for starters. As antiracistparent.com says, "It’s important to get Tiana right on the first (and probably only) shot." So a movie whose trailer (posted below) features tap dancing and voodoo is sure to spark raised eyebrows. Tiana has already undergone a few magical transformations -- she was originally a maid named Maddy, a choice ultimately deemed too close to the historically loaded moniker Mammy (a controversy Judy Berman wrote about last July). Before the movie’s holiday opening, the movie will likely undergo whatever further changes it needs to in order to make her as culturally sensitive and profit-friendly as possible.
Because the thing about a Disney princess movie is that it’s first and foremost a Disney princess movie. Tiana doesn’t look so much like a black role model as a blandly pretty, made-to-be-emblazoned-on-pillowcases Disney dreamgirl -- the wide eyes, the almost unnervingly bright smile and the fantasy dress.
A few weeks ago, I took my five-year-old daughter to a birthday party. Every other child in the room was African-American or Latina, and almost all of them were wearing a Disney-issued white girl’s face on their chests. They played together in a room festooned with images of Belle and Cinderella. They danced in blonde Hannah Montana wigs. And as one parent observed, "We’ve got to give these girls something other than Dora or the Bratz."
Whatever the princess’s color, most parents I know have an ambivalent relationship to the whole Disney juggernaut anyway, watching our girls clamor for the latest pink mountain of hype. Nor are we thrilled with having them identify with big-breasted, uncomplaining doormats whose main talent seems to be falling asleep for long periods of time. But our daughters worship them anyway -- the crowns, the gowns, the romance. That Disney has created them a princess with dark skin is a decent start. That she also has a brain and a job is, in its own way, just as revolutionary.
Clockwise from top left, Zeitgeist Films, Facets Video, Mitzi Trumbo, A.M.P.A.S., Severin Films
Clockwise from top left: "Careful," "The Steamroller and the Violin," "Johnny Got His Gun," "The Hairdresser's Husband."
For those of you who found last week's offerings too glaringly obvious and mainstream, here is further proof that we live in an age when no director and no film will ever be completely forgotten. OK, one selection this week is an obvious ringer, but I explain my reasoning below. Where can you find the only movie ever directed by the blacklisted writer of "Roman Holiday" and "Spartacus," the almost unknown first film from Russia's greatest director, some French arty softcore never released in the United States, and a double dose of films from a Parisian underground legend so obscure he's barely known in France? Right here, that's where.
All these videos were released within the past few weeks, but more keep pouring in, Godard help me, and I'll try to keep up a little better. As advertised previously, we're ramping up around here for another round of the Awesome Kids' Video Project, our crowd-sourced list of somewhat offbeat, largely non-Disney family summer viewing. I'll issue a formal call for submissions shortly, with a preliminary list to get things rolling. But feel free to show your cards if you got 'em.
"Johnny Got His Gun" You couldn't call legendary Hollywood 10 screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's only directing effort, a 1971 adaptation of his 1939 novel about a brutally maimed World War I soldier, subtle or delicate cinema. Made on a meager budget using threadbare sets, "Johnny Got His Gun" is harshly lit, unevenly photographed and excessively talky. But its claustrophobic, artificial, quasi-mystical properties are precisely the source of its power. It resembles a 90-minute episode of "The Twilight Zone," and as that might suggest, it freaked out a generation of Vietnam-era viewers (myself definitely included). With Shout Factory's first-ever DVD release of the film, now you've got your chance.
"Johnny Got His Gun" is anchored by a peculiar, almost feminine performance from Timothy Bottoms as Joe, a quadruple amputee who cannot hear, speak or see but finds some degree of freedom in memories, dreams and encounters with a philosophical but not especially helpful Jesus Christ (Donald Sutherland). As Joe's uncommunicative but tender-hearted father -- seen both in life and as a ghost -- Jason Robards virtually steals the show. As my sister-in-law observed, "Johnny" loses some of its mind-blowing potential if you're not stoned while watching it, but it remains a blunt and devastating critique of militarism and unthinking patriotism, as well as the coda to a unique career in American film. Extras include the doc "Dalton Trumbo: Rebel in Hollywood," commentary tracks from Bottoms and cinematographer Jules Brenner, and the Metallica music video "One" (which incorporates footage from the film).
"Careful" (Remastered and Repressed) Possibly the cultiest of Canadian eccentric Guy Maddin's deliberately mannered films -- which is really saying something -- gets a meticulous, gorgeous hi-def remastering from Zeitgeist. Like Maddin's other movies, the 1993 "Careful" is designed to recall an earlier cinematic era, in this case the hand-tinted colors and stilted, theatrical acting of early German talkies. Set in the fictitious Alpine village of Tolzbad, where talking, dancing and virtually any other kind of expressive behavior are forbidden (for fear of avalanches), "Careful" combines the ludicrous melodrama, incestuous lust and not-quite-buried homoeroticism that are Maddin's stock in trade.
This is arguably purer and more demanding than Maddin's later films, with less self-deprecating shtick, which may make it less accessible to some viewers. But if you give up on following the nearly nonsensical plot and just ride from one troubling erotic interlude to the next, the startlingly beautiful hand-tinted imagery and expressionist sets will keep you watching. Ample extras include Maddin's rarely seen 1995 documentary about painter Odilon Redon and Noam Gonick's 1997 doc about the making of Maddin's early-career near-disaster, "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs."
Tarkovsky Rediscovered: "The Steamroller and the Violin" / "Voyage in Time" First of all, if you're new to the admittedly slow and challenging work of Russian master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, don't start here. (The Criterion Collection offers beautiful DVD editions of Tarkovsky's most famous films, "Solaris" and "Andrei Rublev.") The two films in this newly packaged double-disc set from Facets Video are marginal items from opposite ends of Tarkovsky's career: "The Steamroller and the Violin" was his diploma film, made when he was a 28-year-old student at Moscow's state-run VGIK film school, and "Voyage in Time" is a travel-diary documentary he co-directed with Italian producer Tonino Guerra in 1982.
Still, when you're talking about an undeniable genius who made only seven narrative features (Tarkovsky died of cancer in 1986, at age 54), every bit of new material counts, and these films will prove hypnotic and delightful for devotees. Officially a children's movie, the 43-minute "Steamroller and the Violin" represents an early collaboration between Tarkovsky and co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky (later an important director in his own right). From its first frames it's a gorgeously composed work, and its apparently simple story about the friendship between a bullied violin student and a steamroller driver -- on the surface, a perfect socialist-realist topic -- becomes the occasion for a haunting, sad, almost abstract meditation on streets, buildings and water, on the dreams of adults and of children. It's perfectly lovely! I'm so grateful to have seen this at last.
"Voyage in Time" (my Italian is pretty bad, but I don't think that's an accurate translation of "Tempo di viaggio") is quite a different kettle of fish. It was shot during Tarkovsky's early-'80s exile in Italy, after the Soviet authorities had let him leave but kept most of his family behind, and it's hard to watch the movie without reading that knowledge into it. As he and Guerra spar about the script and Italian locations for their forthcoming film -- which would turn out to be the beautiful but not entirely successful "Nostalghia" -- Tarkovsky seems both desperately unhappy and devoted to the self-defeating mission of finding suggestions of Russia amid the landscape and architecture of central and southern Italy. The seemingly careless construction of "Voyage in Time," as we watch Tarkovsky and Guerra search for chimerical tiled floors, or dismiss the Amalfi coast as a tourist cliché, may be illusory; it offers a casual, unguarded portrait of one of the world's greatest filmmakers at work and at rest.
"The Hairdresser's Husband" and "The Perfume of Yvonne" I've never known what to make of the near-total American invisibility of Patrice Leconte, a big name in French cinema. He's had a few films distributed in the United States -- "Monsieur Hire" in 1989, "The Widow of Saint-Pierre" in 2000 -- but has never had much of a following among critics or film buffs. Leconte is almost stereotypically French, which may be the problem: His movies are erotic, nostalgic and only mildly acerbic; he likes beautiful women, handsome men and nice clothes; he suggests both François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer without quite being either of them. I decline to think that any of those things are good reasons to ignore him, and present herewith these two underappreciated examples of his work, in bare-bones DVD releases from Severin Films.
"The Hairdresser's Husband" (1990) seems at first like a minimal, almost plotless fable of erotic fascination and its aftermath, but offers a curious undertow that will stick with you long afterward. At age 12, Antoine (Henry Hocking) becomes besotted with the local hairdresser (Anna Galiena), and once he grows up (as Jean Rochefort) he meets her again with unexpected consequences. "The Perfume of Yvonne" (1994) is a similar story of lust and yearning turned strange, this time played out in the Gatsby-esque surroundings of 1958 Lake Geneva, where a defrocked Russian count (Hippolyte Girardot) finds himself entangled with a luscious young actress (played by then-prominent supermodel Sandra Majani) and the mysterious gay older "doctor" (a great performance by Jean-Pierre Marielle) who is her companion and protector. Some, I guess, see Leconte's tales of erotic secrets and lies as shallow art-house skinflicks. I say: Sign me up for more!
Philippe Garrel x2: "I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar" and "Emergency Kisses" If we're on the topic of unappreciated Gallic auteurs, however, Paris underground legend Philippe Garrel takes the gâteau. A veteran of the 1968 anti-government street uprisings -- the subject and setting, more or less, of his 2006 masterpiece "Regular Lovers" -- Garrel was also the longtime lover of Velvet Underground singer Nico, who certainly appears to be the subject matter of his 1991 "I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar," included herein. Like most of Garrel's films, "Guitar" slowly builds a trippy, meditative state out of apparently miscellaneous, formless material. If you have the patience for his work, it evokes the peculiar feeling that you've known his characters all your life, gotten high in the same crappy rooms with them, slept with them, had the same endless discussions with them. (And perhaps you have!)
A handsome, self-involved artist named Gérard (Benoît Régent) gradually wriggles free from his destructive relationship with a blond German junkie (Johanna ter Steege, in the Nico role) and suddenly finds himself with a wife (Brigitte Sy) and an infant son, although he's still a liar, a cheat and a failure. In fact, as we learn in the 1989 "Emergency Kisses," Sy was then Garrel's real-life spouse. In this tender meditation on love and inconstancy, Garrel himself plays the philandering artist at the center of the story, with wife, his father Maurice and his son Louis (then 5 years old, and today a major French movie star) rounding out the cast. Garrel is totally unafraid of self-absorption or of telling the same essential story over and over again, and he's not interested in pleasing critics or any version of a wider public in France, let alone anywhere else. He doesn't pay much attention to chronology or internal narrative consistency, and major plot developments go unexplained. I believe he's a masterful filmmaker, with a magical, transparent command of the medium, and so those choices don't bother me. I don't kid myself that large numbers of other viewers will feel the same way.
"No Country for Old Men" (3-Disc Collector's Edition & Digital Copy) (also available on Blu-ray) I know, I know: This one doesn't really fit the profile. You've definitely heard about this movie, and odds are damn good you've seen it. My agenda here is twofold. The first is to violate the Prime Directive of film criticism by confessing that I didn't really get the Coen brothers' fatalistic, well-nigh nihilistic neo-western on first viewing. I was distracted by Javier Bardem's silly haircut! It was 8:30 a.m. in Cannes! Those are just excuses. When I got around to watching it again, I didn't see it as a clever imitation of 1970s American cinema but as an outstandingly crafted combination of genre film, moral parable and dark comedy. (Actually, the theatrical and DVD version that now exists is a little shorter and tighter than the film the Coens premiered at Cannes in 2007, which may account for at least a little of the difference.) So if you too were among this multiple Oscar winner's detractors, I suggest a second dip.
The second thing is to commend Miramax for doing these expensive collector's edition sets the way they should be done. Most importantly, the wide-screen, hi-def transfer looks awesome (and I haven't seen the Blu-ray version). There are a bunch of the extras you'd expect, like a behind-the-scenes doc and multiple TV interviews with the Coens, Bardem and Josh Brolin, and some nice surprises, like Brolin's funny on-set home videos. There's stuff you'll never get to, like acres of audio interviews. There's also an easily transferable digital copy of the film included, which you can watch on your PC and/or iPod with either iTunes or Windows Media. That's certainly not a brand-new innovation, and it's easier for a big corporation like Disney to do this stuff than it is for an indie distributor. But that's the kind of added value that can keep the DVD business alive at least a little while longer.
2. when talking to your roommate.
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