En route to FL after three bone-chillingly feverish days back in Brooklyn. I haven't been this sick since last January, but this flu has laid me low, destroying my plans to get up to the Upper West Side and see There Will Be Blood while I was home. Now, I wait for the good folks at Paramount Vantage/ Miramax to realize that two screens in limited was a little bit of an underestimation ($90,000+ per screen average? Um, more screens, maybe?) and roll this movie out now, while the reviews, awards and accolades are fresh in America's minds. I'll have to see it in Sarasota. With my luck, it will come and go while I'm at Sundance. Sigh.

That said, I did have some interesting "cinematic" experiences this weekend, mostly in the form of fever-induced hallucinations while I made futile attempts to sleep. The best of the bunch? I woke up at 3:30 am and took a peek at the clock, and went back under the covers and immediately fell asleep. I began dreaming that each of my body's motions was connected to a specific function on the iPhone and that by tossing and turning I was simultaneously turning the phone on and off, browsing the web and making desperate telephone calls for help to Aston Villa owner Randy Lerner. This went on for what seemed to be hours, with me sweating and thrashing under the blankets, magically manipulating my iPhone (I don't own an iPhone, by the way) until I woke up and looked at the clock and it was 3:33 am. Three minutes had passed. It was that kind of weekend.

I plan on buckling down in Sarasota in the coming weeks, but I do plan on offering a summary of some of my favorite cinematic moments from 2007. I did get a chance to submit a Top Ten to indieWIRE (thanks for asking, Eug!), but I want to flesh things out in terms of my year at the movies. It's always fun to draw a line in the sand and take note, before the flood of new experiences washes away the relative immediacy of the old. Keep an eye out for that soon.

Plane is boarding now. Happy New Year all and I'll check in with you in 2008.

Ladies and Gentleman, may I have your attention please?
Are you looking for cinema bloody yet wise with a hero and heroine you should despise?
I can see in your eyes
How, ladies and gentlemen, this proposal must seem like a tease,
How a movie with music could be such a thing;
A bloody endeavor with actors who sing!?
Gentleman, you won't believe that a story that seems so depraved
is the movie you've craved!

--

The tale of Sweeney Todd is long and bloody; The story of the murderous London barber whose victims are baked into meat pies literally dates back to the turn of the 19th century. As the grime-soaked days ground by and the industrial revolution choked London's skies, the story of Sweeney Todd began appearing in print, most likely in the "penny dreadfuls" of the era and probably as an urban legend (although claims have been made by some that Todd was a real criminal who was hanged at the Old Bailey in 1802). The story took hold in the popular imagination when it was presented in the novel The String of Pearls in 1846, which itself was adapted for the stage as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street the following year. The play was made into a film in 1936 and despite earning popularity for the film's star, Tod Slaughter (the perfect name, no?), the story of the demon barber slowly faded in and out of the collective consciousness, popping up here and there until 1973, when the playwright Christopher Bond took the tale and made a few radical changes, the most important of which was the transformation of the Todd character from the thieving criminal of the 19th century tale into a man seeking revenge for his unjust imprisonment; It is Bond who invented Benjamin Barker, the barber banished to Australia by a powerful judge who covets his beautiful wife and child. Suddenly, the killer becomes a person with whom we empathize.

Bond's play caught the attention of Stephen Sondheim, one of the 1970's most popular Broadway composers and lyricists. Sondheim took Bond's re-imagining of the Victorian tale and in 1979, his musical version of the story, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened on Broadway. While the show won numerous Tony Awards, I have always thought of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd as an opera, and probably one of the most important pieces ever written for the American stage. For me, Sweeney Todd is Sondheim at the height of his powers as a lyricist and composer; The work in its entirety is so rich and complex, so revolutionary in terms of bringing structural detail to such grim, "low" subject matter, that I could spend thousands of words trying (and probably failing) to tear it apart and reassemble it. There are, however, some very important points to be made about Sondheim's craft in this score.

Sondheim himself is said to be a lover of games and puzzles, and the brilliance of Sweeney Todd above all that came before it (and frankly, since) rests squarely in Sondheim's almost mathematical understanding of dramatic structure and how, using a musical score, that structure can be manipulated, twisted and bent, into a captivating story. But what really separates Sondheim from the pack is that his structural rigor in the score is matched by his lyrical gifts. When listening to Sweeney Todd, it seems almost impossible to believe that the same man who wrote its score, with its moody swings from horror film music to Stravinsky-like pulsations to kitschy 19th century operetta, could possibly be the same person who wrote the lyrics, which are at once hauntingly confessional, full of longing and desire, and yet so horrifyingly funny and hilariously terrifying. The effect is staggering; Throw in a heavy dose of bloodshed, a little sprinkle of cannibalism, that soaring score, the lyrical precision and Sondheim's achievement becomes remarkable.

Which is why Tim Burton's adaptation of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd has to stand as an equally towering achievement, a near-perfect cinematic interpretation of one of the theater's most staggering compositions. Burton's work to this point suddenly seems, in retrospect, to be both a thematic and stylistic progression toward Sondheim's opera, and nothing in Burton's preparation for Sweeney Todd has been more important than his long-term partnership with the brilliant Danny Elfman. Burton's use of Elfman's music in films like Batman, Sleepy Hollow and Edward Scissorhands, sweeping scores that articulate the unspoken emotional complexity on the screen, has always been one of the definitive tools in the Director's arsenal; The mood and feeling of Burton's films seems impossible to imagine without Elfman's essential contribution. But while the use of Elfman's scores is evocative in many of Burton's films, it is Burton's collaboration with Elfman on two films in particular, Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas (which Burton produced) and the Burton Co-Directed Corpse Bride, that laid the groundwork for Sweeney. These two films, each of which utilize the tropes of the musical to tell their stories, feature a narrative concision that is pure poetry; The films don't get too bogged down in the fussy cinematic trickery and narrative drudgery of a film like Batman. Instead, the animated musicals allow the music and story to flow naturally together, using song to reveal their character's desires and lyrical poetry to deliver the story.

Swing Your Razor Wide, Sweeney: Johnny Depp As Sweeney Todd In Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd

Of course, the suspension of disbelief in an animated film like Corpse Bride is a much simpler achievement than pulling off a film like Sweeney Todd, which is why the film is so rare and wondrous; Burton has translated the expanse of Sondheim's piece by stripping it of its theatrical scope and recasting the movie in close-up. Instead of arm-swinging jigs and blowzy operatic gestures that have been a feature of most stage productions of the play, Burton's film is the first to understand the intimate nature of the character's pain and longing, and his decision to cast Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in the leads is a masterstroke; Their faces, writ large on the big screen, bring us inside of the character's minds in a way that the theater cannot. Almost magically, this decision also transforms Sondheim's score; Instead of having his characters thunder their feelings to the heavens with operatic grandeur, Burton's Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett become all whispered threats and hushed longing, which then allows the score's biggest moments, particularly Sweeney's Epiphany and the film's final ten minutes (wherein Sondheim reprises the majority of his songs, revealing their bloody, ironic meaning in full) to have the power of lightening bolts ripping across the screen. The score itself becomes an almost ironic comment on the sad, anonymous lives of its characters, lending a heroic muscle to the murderous intrigues of the working-class barber and the baker whose love forever remains unrequited.

Sweeney (Johnny Depp) and Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) Get Reacquainted In Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd

Visually, the film echoes Sondheim's structure in several important ways. First, Burton uses pastiche, particularly the history of gothic horror, to great effect; There isn't a frame of this movie that would be out of place in a Hammer Film, a Poe story or an Edward Gorey book. The story is pure 19th century melodrama, with orphans, murder, incest, blackmail, buckets of blood, lovers separated, imprisoned virgins and judicial corruption all mingling together, as black as billowing chimney smoke. So is the story's bleak view of humanity as divided between the vain and insane; Is there any other story that proposes that the city is "a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and it's filled with people who are filled with shit/ and the vermin of the world inhabit it?" Burton ties his gothic mastery into the score's own self-references; More than any other theatrical composer, Sondheim's score for Sweeney utilizes a modernist's understanding of leitmotif to tie his dramatic moments together, usually ironically, to devastating effect. Burton follows suit, and the results work; The teeming streets of London are boiled down to a cast of roughly nine characters whose lives are interwoven by circumstance. This allows Burton to visually echo Sondheim's musical leitmotifs in brilliantly constructed ways; Sweeney's enchanted gaze into the mirrored blade of his razor during My Friends is rhymed with his psychotic breakdown in a shattered mirror in Epiphany, the duplicitous barber Pirelli (played to perfection by Sasha Baron Cohen) not only doubles Sweeney's own secret identity, but his death at Sweeney's hand will echo the dread experienced by Johanna when, disguised as a boy, she is uncovered by Sweeney in the trunk that served as Pirelli's coffin.

For every dissonance in the score, Burton assembles a visual to match; The ghastly upstairs/downstairs relationship between Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett provides counterpoint to the innocence of the relationship between the imprisoned Johanna and the smitten young sailor Anthony, her image eternally hovering in the windows just out of Anthony's reach. Or the way in which Sweeney's muddy reflection in the blade of the razor, his own face obscured by madness, is the equivalent of his view of life on the streets outside of Mrs. Lovett's shop the moment the couple decide to utilize a new ingredient in her meat pies. Of course, when these visual rhymes are echoed in the score (other songs and musical motifs are constantly drifting in and out of the songs being sung), the harmony and dissonance are perfectly manipulated; The film is as dramatically precise as it is palpably alive.

Much has been made of the actor's singing, from doubts about the strength of the voices to criticisms that the film's distributor removed the songs from the promotional campaign in an effort to sucker young people into a musical they wouldn't otherwise go see, but having seen the film on Opening Night, these points seem moot. In the age of heart-felt sincerity and High School Musical, Sweeney Todd may seem like an improbable candidate for success, but the opposite is true. Audiences are more open than ever to the musical form, and they seem to be looking for emotional thrills; Sweeney Todd delivers them in spades. Again, credit is due Tim Burton here because his relationship with Johnny Depp, one so seasoned and sympathetic (Burton just seems to inherently know how to shoot Depp's complexly comic deadpan gaze), allows the actor to utilize his voice to the benefit of the score, but importantly, his face to the benefit of the film. Is Depp as powerful a singer as Len Cariou or George Hearn? No, but his Sweeney is different from theirs; In the dark of the movie theater, his voice can be amplified to near rock-concert intensity (as it was in the theater in which I saw the film) while being mixed perfectly with the orchestra, allowing his singing and the music to be in perfect balance for every note. It works; All of the actors come off admirably as singers and actors, which lends the film the dramatic credibility it needs to succeed with any open-minded audience. But it is the intimacy of those well-known faces, here beaten and battered by life, confessing their heart's deepest desires in song, that makes the movie so profound. Sweeney is Burton's masterpiece, a bloody, beautiful evocation of madness and need that honors the source material in form and function. I can think of no higher praise than to say that this is an adaptation is worthy of Sondheim's score, the cinematic equal of the composer's masterpiece of revenge and its terrible costs.

“You’re out of touch, I’m out of time.”-- Hall & Oates

There is a plague sweeping its way across the face of film writing, an anxious, foot-tapping idea that squirms and writhes its way into the sentences and paragraphs of some of our best minds; The length of a movie has become an international critical obsession. Late to the game as always, I started noticing this problem at this year’s New York Film Festival when, in conversation with friends and colleagues, the same words, “too long,” were repeated over and over again, used as a pejorative to criticize a film and filmmaker. At that festival, it became a sort of pet peeve, annoying but tolerable. Since then, like a sore tooth that you keep worrying until it erupts into a full-blown ache, I am unable to escape it; I see it everywhere.

Now, I promised myself I would not go into a diatribe about how time as we experience it is an illusion, so I'll leave that concept alone, but I don't understand how the constant mention of a film's length adds anything at all to the critical conversation; It is the equivalent of a literary critic finding relative value in War And Peace based on its page count. If we don't judge the quality and value of literature by how many pages there are in a book, why do we (and I include myself here, because I know I've been guilty of this) constantly talk about a movie's length as if it carries some sort of insight into its quality? I have a few ideas.

There are the cinematic marathons, those coveted experiences of extreme length that test our physical endurance, wearing their runtimes like a badge of honor. Rivette's Out+1, Tarr's Satantango, Fassbinder's made-for-TV-but-let's-watch-it-all-at-once Berlin Alexanderplatz; Cinephiles boast of enduring these movies, their ecstatic claims of pleasure seemingly intertwined with a teenager's self-congratulatory satisfaction of making it all the way through. Which is not to say that there is not a great deal to talk about in the films themselves, but it's rare that you hear or read it; Instead, the primary discussion of the movies is about the physical length. As such, a mention of a film's runtime becomes the bourgeoisie equivalent of its value. It's like boasting that you've read a book to someone who hasn't read it; No one is going to ask you what you think about it for fear of being out of fashion or, shame of shames, having to admit they haven't read it yet. So, you get a pass; You don't need to analyze the work itself. You get a gold star just for consuming it in its entirety. Good for you. You can almost see the equation; The closer a film's runtime moves toward Satantango or Out+1, the more interesting it is. The longer the film, the more "intellectual" it is, the more "challenging," the less "commercial." Epic, ambitious. Worthy.

Rivette's Out+1: Twelve-Plus Hours Of Fun With Jean-Pierre Léaud!!

As such, I think what people are saying when they say a movie is "too long" is that the film and director hold a pretension to the intellectual/challenging mantle that is bestowed on the über-long art house monsters mentioned above, but for whatever reasons, the film fails to achieve its goal. In this way, the words "too long" operate as code for "failure." Herein lies the biggest problem; Length, in and of itself, is not a problem if a film fulfills its narrative potential. If each frame of a three-plus hour film is bristling with ideas, energy, character, aesthetic daring, then who cares how long it is? You don't experience time when watching a movie like that; You sit in the dark in a near-trance, deeply engaged. You only experience time when, in whatever way, a film fails. As such, the issue of length becomes doubly irrelevant; What we should be asking is "How did this film fail?" because, and I think we can all admit it, the length of a movie is absolutely irrelevant as an indication of anything at all.

Now, what really confuses me is the mention of a runtime for a film of modest length. Case in point? The recent spate of reviews that discuss Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming There Will Be Blood and its two hour and forty minute runtime. Think the problem is not really that much of an issue? Let's look at a controlled sample, taking only the current pre-release reviews linked by David Hudson at GreenCine. The teeth once again go on edge:

"Anderson’s film, however, is much too long and unnecessarily obscure at key points." -- Michael Guillen, Twitch.com

"But There Will Be Blood represents the moment at which Anderson's material and his sense of scale are in perfect harmony: it needs to be this vast, this long (it clocks in at around 160 minutes)." -- Ryan Gilbey, The Guardian

"More pointedly, the title... is the film’s first trigger pulled to wring its audience anxious and uneasy for a terse, dire, cunning two hours and forty minutes."-- Ryland Walker Knight, The House Next Door

"The 160-minute film covers Plainview's journey from rock-scratcher to oil tycoon as it runs over the course of 29 years."-- Scott Weinberg, Cinematical.com

"The year is 1898. Two and a half hours later (and more than thirty years later in the time span of the film), he’s on the floor again..."-- David Denby, The New Yorker

"Day-Lewis owns this movie, which makes sense, since it's an epic two and a half hour character sketch rather than a thickly plotted narrative..."-- Ty Burr (of The Boston Globe), Boston.com

...and for shits and giggles, what sayeth the industry staple, Variety?

"There's no getting around the fact that this Paramount Vantage/Miramax co-venture reps yet another 2½--hour-plus indie-flavored, male-centric American art film, a species that has recently proven difficult to market to more than rarefied audiences. Distribs will have to roll the dice and use hoped-for kudos for the film and its superb star Daniel Day-Lewis to create the impression of a must-see."-- Todd McCarthy, Variety

Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson's Two Hour and Forty Minute There Will Be Blood

'Impression' of a must-see? Difficult to market? I'll give Todd McCarthy a pass; At least he has the courage of his paper's commercial convictions. But honestly, what does each of these individual mentions actually mean? I don't know to which narrative failure or success they are referring, which moments in the runtime work or don't work. But boy oh boy, I certainly know how long the movie is now. It's 160 minutes long, which is two hours and forty minutes. Now what? Obviously, the reviews go on to weigh the relative merits of the film's story, filmmaking and characters, but I can't get over the fact that everything I read has to make mention of the runtime. Why not tell me that the print was placed on a reel and run through a projector, because that tells me as much about the movie as a mention of how long it is.

Is it possible that, in the age of "user controlled content" and Attention Deficit Disorder, asking adults to sit still and engage deeply with a movie is simply too much to ask? Have our narrative clocks been reset by YouTube, TV and Hollywood junk? Is the critic actually doing the viewer a favor by raising the red flag that, god forbid, one might need to sit in a theater and engage with a movie? Why is two-hours the gold standard for movie-going, other than the fact that exhibitors love it because they can squeeze more screenings into a single day? Have we been physically conditioned by the financial concerns of the theater owner? What is the value of using the runtime as some sort of critical barometer of anything at all? Enough talk of runtimes. Tell me what there is to love in a film, what works and what doesn't. Criticism needs to step away from this obsession and grow up a little. The film's story should matter, not how much time out of your busy schedule is swallowed in the telling. Time's up.

A few of the little things on my mind this week...

Citizen Kane

Awoke to the news that Orson Welles' Screenwriting Oscar for Citizen Kane goes on the auction block today. Am I the only one fantasizing that in the Sotheby's auction room in Manhattan, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kent Jones and hundreds of other supporters of Welles' legend will be sitting, paddles in hand, bidding against one another in some sort of cinephilic feeding frenzy, leveraging homes and cars, throwing wrist watches on the table, hoping to outbid their colleagues and bring the Oscar home? The idea that some wealthy banker or real estate mogul (or, irony of ironies, a newspaper magnate) will pony up the expected $1.2 million dollars for the Oscar is sort of tragic. Not that film fans don't exist in the halls of power, but would it be a double insult to have perhaps the most coveted piece of movie memorabilia, almost a Holy Grail of late-20th Century cinema criticism, not receive a proper home?

Which of course, made me think of this sketch. I should note that this Kids In The Hall skit has grown nearer and dearer to my heart over time. As a film programmer, this conversation happens to me about fifteen times a week, primarily when meeting a new acquaintance who discovers what I do for a living. It cuts close to home.

UPDATE: The Citizen Kane Oscar Fails To Meet The Minimum Selling Price At Auction. Long after his death, Welles doesn't get the respect he deserves. Oooh, if I only had a million two burning a hole in my pocket...

Foxes and Hedgehogs

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.-- Archilochus

I've been thinking about that quote quite a bit lately, and about Isaiah Berlin's use of it as the taking off point for his discussion of artists and their work. I am, without question, a hedgehog who wants to become a fox, much like Berlin's discussion of Tolstoy (see the link above); I spend my days watching films, reading blogs and news, staying on top of sports and politics, family, household issues, just like everyone else. But at the core, I do see the world as a hedgehog does, governed by a single idea of reality and truth. How to become more like a fox?

When the idea strikes, the mind immediately races to Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, one of my favorite of his films, and the great scene between Judy Davis and Liam Neeson when Davis' character Sally, lying in bed during lovemaking, starts dividing up her friends into foxes and hedgehogs, which to this day may be one of the best, most neurotic things I've ever seen on the screen. And then, a minor jealousy fills me, because who in their own life wouldn't love to come upon that idea and spin it into comic gold? Maybe instead of looking for my big idea, I should begin assembling smaller ideas and details, the cumulative effect of which might be something beautiful?

The Characters! The Drama!

I can't wait for Sweeney Todd; I'm a huge fan of Stephen Sondheim's music and Sweeney is his masterpiece. The question is, will I revert to my childhood behavior of singing along from my seat? I have watched many of the online clips and they have only enhanced my excitement for the film, and this holiday season looks to be a blood soaked affair for me; I am also dying to see Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which is the one film this year I've been tracking like a Junior High School fan boy. Well, not as Junior High School as some. I have no idea of when the films will arrive here in the Provinces (oh, Florida), but I may sneak in some screenings when I head home to New York for a couple of days over the holiday season.

Most of all, I am hoping these films are successful because, of late, I have been lamenting the absence of great American dramas at the movie theaters; Films aimed at adults that deal with serious, intimate issues but that carry ambitious ideas about character and a profound aesthetic sensibility. In my opinion, 2007 has been a step in the right direction, with films like The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, I'm Not There and now There Will Be Blood and Sweeney Todd leading the way back from the new age nonsense found in pap like Crash, Babel, 21 Grams, etc; Ultra-thin ensemble pieces that bludgeon audiences to death with their boring, empty notions of human interconnectedness. For me, these movies have been an inversion of great storytelling because they refuse to focus on character; The way that movies can transcend is to be found in the interconnection of the empathetic response we have for great characters, for stories that show us life but don't tell us everything.

The drama has been perhaps the greatest victim of the new, profit-pandering Hollywood because of its emotional complexity, its need to show us things we don't think we want to see. That said, even when Hollywood tries, so often it fails; the thundering artlessness of so many serious films, especially those that deal with the ultimate feel-bad situation in Iraq, have done nothing to enlighten us and instead tend to pummel the choir with their own guilt. Audience guilt has never been a successful formula for great drama. There is only one road to greatness, and that is through empathy, which we should never confuse with sympathy. Too often, people I know discuss how they can't "relate" to certain characters, and I wonder if they aren't so used to being forced into a condescending situation, constantly forced to experience other people as foreign, external and unknowable, that they have confused the need to empathize, to know through feeling, with the need to sympathize, or feel for. The distinction is not small, and it seems to me that sympathy is the plague that inspires some people to demand tax cuts while they gloat over their charitable contributions; Drama should not inspire pity, but a deep connection with the needs and desires of the characters. So often of late, cinematic characters have been these empty shells for all sorts of "ideas" and "messages" about things one step removed from the human condition; We know what they mean, what they think, but we hardly ever see how they really feel. Casey Affleck's Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James was, for me, brilliant in its depiction of the human desire to transcend that feeling of inferiority and to become something great; It was a deeply human movie and a great role/performance. My hope is that in films like There Will Be Blood and Sweeney Todd, we will continue to see the evolution of the drama, returning to a time when seriousness was not a curse, when cinema told great stories.

Just up the road from the Sarasota Film Festival offices lies the IMG Academy; The premier sports academy in the United States for soccer, tennis and golf students. What started as Nick Bollettieri's modest tennis academy has grown into an amazing campus for young athletes of all types; They even hold the NFL Draft combines at this facility. Saturday afternoon, after watching Rafa Benitez shit the bed with some misguided tactics against Reading, I grabbed my camera and headed up to IMG to watch the USA Men's National Under-17 team take on the Brazil Under-17's. There was a nice, vocal crowd surrounding the pitch, and it was a blast watching the boys beat Brazil for the first time, 2-0.

The game was end to end action, with Brazil's No. 10 Wellington Aguilar impressing with his silky skills, while the USA's No. 13 Joseph-Claude Gyau matched Aguilar move for move. These kids were all born in 1992 or later, many of them under the age of 15, and their abilities were pretty spectacular for being so young. But the immaturity showed in other ways; with the USA leading 2-0, the boys from Brazil lost their cool and the handbags came flying out. In addition, at least four players were stretchered off after suffering rash challenges. There was a long break late in the match when one of the Brazilian players received a red card for spitting at a USA player; when he didn't leave the bench area, the refs demanded he depart, but there was nowhere to go as this wasn't a stadium with an adjacent locker room. After reaching a compromise, cooler heads finally prevailed, and the USA left the field as the victors. Unfortunately, the Brazilian players surrounded the referee, furious with his decisions, only to have another player red carded after the whistle. The drama!

It was a lot of fun on a sunny afternoon, and I look forward to the opportunity to head back to Bradenton to watch these young men play the beautiful game. Well done, USA! Any win against Brazil is a a cause for celebration.

Carlos Martinez Takes A Corner

Carlos Martinez celebrates His First Goal

Stefan Jerome Cuts The Ball To The Endline

Stefan Jerome Scores A Penalty After A Clear Handball In The Box

The Boys Celebrate Their 2-0 Lead While Edson Lemus Gives A Smile

Handbags: Stefan Jerome LITERALLY Invites The Brazilians To A Fight (the things you hear that close to the pitch...)

Woke this morning to find some good news in my inbox; The State of Michigan has opened the door for funding for the Ann Arbor Film Festival after repealing its censoring guidelines in its funding laws. Instead, the state has aligned itself with federal rules that already govern institutions like The National Endowment For The Arts, rules that have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and have governed federal arts funding for years.

The rights of artists and citizens to free speech, unhindered by government control, has been a passion of mine since I was a teenager; my sense of outrage was galvanized in my senior year in high school when the author Salman Rushdie was placed under treat of death by the government of Iran for publishing his novel The Satanic Verses. At just that time, I was learning about Mario Savio and the Free Speech movements of the 1960's and, as a young student, I felt a deep connection to the issue, fueled by the certainty of youth, that energy, that makes one a life-long advocate. When I went to school in Ann Arbor, I couldn't have imagined a safer haven for free thought and free expression (aside from the top-down tendencies of the educational experience itself), and so this latest attempt to strike a blow against artistic expression, against the cinema, struck me deeply.

While I understand that state and local governments have no Constitutional mandate to actually provide funding for the arts, I believe we have a social and historical obligation as citizens to make sure they do it anyway. Once the state recognizes that the arts are a crucial component in developing our civilization, and we have made that decision many, many years ago in this country, then the question becomes how can artists and arts institutions maintain the sometimes competing interests of support from government funding sources AND artistic freedom to say whatever they want? As this settlement makes clear, the answer is for the state to stay out of the content area altogether and focus on making sure the environment for artistic creation is as healthy as possible. I know that many believe an issue like this doesn't effect them directly, but as we have all watched the slow erosion of artistic appreciation and the perceived value of art (not financially, but culturally) in America, I would argue it's more important than ever.

As such, this settlement is a major victory for free-speech advocates around the country and for the Film Festival in particular, which can now resume its mission of shining a light on the best in experimental and avant-garde cinema, hopefully with help from the State of Michigan. I wrote about the campaign against the festival a few months ago and made a small contribution to the festival's Endangered Fund; I hope you will join me in supporting this wonderful institution and celebrating their hard-won victory today.

Ann Arbor Film Festival Wins Settlement From State of Michigan on Free Speech Lawsuit

December 5, 2007 Ann Arbor, MI – The oldest film festival in North America showcasing independent and experimental films, The Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) announced today that it has settled a federal lawsuit, filed by the ACLU on its behalf, against the State of Michigan. In exchange for the state legislature repealing unconstitutional restrictions on arts funding, the AAFF and ACLU agreed to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit.

Since its founding in 1963, the festival has screened works by filmmakers like George Lucas, Yoko Ono, Brian DePalma, Gus Van Sant, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Kasdan, Kenneth Anger, Will Vinton and Barbara Hammer. It is a non-partisan festival created to celebrate film as an art form, to exhibit work that challenges ideals, pushes techniques and styles in artistic expression, and celebrates cultures and countercultures from around the world.

The lawsuit, filed in March 2007 in U.S. District Court in Detroit, claimed that the State of Michigan unconstitutionally punished the AAFF for screening films that the state deemed “objectionable” by withdrawing undistributed Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs (MCACA) program grants. The legislature had concluded that the AAFF had violated the MCACA speech restrictions and would not be eligible for funding.

These vague speech restrictions included a ban on funding art that contained “depictions of flag desecration” and “displays of sex acts.” Some legislators specifically accused the AAFF of showing films that contained “displays of sex acts” and labeled these films as “pornographic,” a charge vehemently denied by the AAFF.

The new guidelines for arts funding, resulting from the AAFF’s lawsuit, mirror the National Endowment for the Arts guidelines, which have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. These flexible guidelines state that “Artistic excellence and artistic merit are the criteria by which applications will be judged, taking into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the people of this state.”

"This decision isn't only a victory for artistic freedom of expression, but a reminder to stand up and ensure that our government is held accountable for the power they wield,” said Christen McArdle, AAFF Executive Director. “We are pleased that arbitrary guidelines will no longer be used to deny artists their creative rights.”

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, one of the AAFF’s prominent supporters, shared his thoughts about the lawsuit, “I am thrilled by this decision--it protects us all, even those who might be inclined to limit this great Festival's free expression."

After funding was restricted, the AAFF Board of Directors voted unanimously to forego state funding for as long as the restrictions were in place in order to safeguard the festival’s international reputation as an uncensored channel for artists and filmmakers showcasing independent and experimental films. Prior to the restrictions, the festival had received funding from the state for the past 10 years.

To recover financially, the Ann Arbor Film Festival recently launched its Endangered fundraising campaign, a creative and participatory online call to action for people worldwide to contribute support. The campaign seeks to offset the financial hardship created by this prolonged funding controversy by raising $75,000 by the end of January 2008. Supporters of the Endangered campaign have already contributed more than ½ the monies needed. The campaign has generated public awareness both locally and nationally about this critical issue.

To read more about the AAFF’s Endangered campaign, visit: http://www.aafilmfest.org/endangered

To read the Agreement to Dismiss, visit:
http://www.aclumich.org/pdf/aaffdismissal.pdf

To read the complaint, visit:
http://www.aclumich.org/pdf/aaffcomplaint.pdf

There are certain moments in the cinema that leave a total sensory impression on the viewer, allowing moments to linger in the mind with an unprecedented totality. I have written about some of these moments before, the most powerful example being my first screening of Arnaud Desplechin's My Sex Life... (or how I got into an argument) at a small theater in Washington, D.C. in 1996. As I’ve written before, I have a complete physical memory of that screening; the smells, sounds, images (both on screen and off), the texture of the seat against my back. This is, for me anyway, a deeply intimate feeling, one I can only ascribe to the moment when a movie breaks through the artificial barriers of the projection and sound system and somehow comes to inhabit me, a possession, when the entirety of my perceptive ability is so finely focused that the world is condensed and intertwined into a singular experience of observation. I have often wondered if this wasn’t the gift of great artists, those who discipline themselves to inhabit the world in such a deeply-felt way that they are later able to manufacture their experiences within their art, to create the conditions for a new way of experiencing the senses. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to live within the realm of observation and memory. For me, these moments in the cinema exist like lightening bolts, striking me without warning; in an instant, I recognize my own awareness of being completely open to a film, and the context of my spectatorship somehow becomes an integral part of the experience of feeling, of understanding.

One of those moments arrived from nowhere in the late summer of 1995 when I attended a screening of Todd Haynes’ Safe at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in (again) Washington D.C. It was my first experience with Haynes’ films and it left me blistered; the frigid air-conditioned breeze punishing against the humid night, each gust (on again, off again) seeming perilous, as if Carol White (Julianne Moore) was slowly being made ill by the theater itself. For me, a twenty-something who came of age during the Regan years, Safe was a profoundly disturbing experience, a horror film about identity in the age of conspicuous consumption, indifference and social isolation that eviscerated both the desire to remove oneself from our collective responsibility of human suffering and the hokey, do-nothing mysticism that we grasp in order to cope with the toxic world we’ve manufactured. To this day, Peter Friedman’s portrayal of Peter Dunning, the touchy-feely P.T. Barnum of New Age nonsense in the film, is the epitome of everything that I can’t abide when dealing with suffering of others; Can we love ourselves? Yes, we all want an answer, a cure, comfort for our suffering, but in the end, we are alone with what we’ve made of our lives. Which is, interestingly enough, the connection, the thread, that kept running through my mind when I saw Haynes’ latest film, I’m Not There.

The swirl of mystery that Bob Dylan has created around himself seems to have sprung organically from that strain of American celebrity that allows for the act of self-invention to somehow, almost magically, be taken seriously. Dylan’s privileged self-invention seems to arise from his status as the “voice of his generation,” a man whose public personas and choices anticipated the changes in America with frightening accuracy, almost always by looking backward. Don’t Look Back my ass; Dylan ripped off the electric blues and re-invented folk music, stripping away the liberal self-satisfaction of the middle class white kids who created the scene. He dug into his Jewish heritage and eventually became an evangelical Christian (before coming back to earth years later), forecasting the mystical turn that took place in this country between President Kennedy (and his assertion that his own Catholcism did not supercede the need for the separation of church and state) and President Bush (who holds imaginary conversations with his god.) Dylan always showed us where we were headed, like it or not; If anything, he was an immaculate thief, the man who heard answers blowing in the wind and changed course accordingly. Maybe you don’t need a weatherman, but that didn't stop Dylan from leading by example.

I’m Not There is a portrait of Dylan unlike any other, a fractured story of parallels; Haynes tells the story of Dylan’s life and genius by separating him into six pieces, each overlapping the others like spheres in a Venn diagram. Much like Todd Solodnz’s multiple Avivas in his unfairly maligned Palindromes, Haynes’ six Dylans paint a singular portrait; there is Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), the young romantic who imagines himself as the heir to Woody Guthrie, Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the reclusive populist folk singer who finds Jesus a suburban California, Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), the unfaithful movie star whose marriage collapses in parallel with the VietNam War, Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), the poet whose ideas are under literal interrogation, Billy The Kid (Richard Gere), the outlaw in hiding whose past catches up to him in a small town and Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), the drugged out rock star who must pay the price for change after plugging in the guitar and revolutionizing music. Haynes brings these disparate Dylans together with visual and narrative couplings, using images and ideas to tie the characters into a fragile chain; Billy and Woody ride the rails, Robbie’s wife reads Rimbaud’s work aloud, Jude and Robbie are failures at love, Jack and Woody bring the music to the people, Jude and Jack alienate separate audiences, Billy and Jude are exposed by their harshest critic, and on and on.

Ramblin': Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) Sings In Todd Haynes' I'm Not There

At heart, each story (and therefore the composite Dylan) hinges on the conflict between responsibility and desire; the need to sing about modern circumstances against a love of the past, the demands of personal relationships, the needs of a community in crisis versus the desire to remain isolated and anonymous and, most importantly, the competing responsibilities of an artist to both please an audience and the need to please the creator inside. Responsibility haunts the Dylans throughout I’m Not There like a specter, whether it be the withering criticism of fans outraged when Jude plugs in, the music critic who demands that Jude’s reasons for creation be equal to the creations themselves, the wife who waits at home while the road is littered with sexual temptation, and all the while, the meaning of the work itself hangs in the air. “Never create anything,” Rimbaud says. The implication being that any piece of art is a burden the artist must carry forward forever. Better to run and hide, to leave it all behind. And there, like Carol White in the mirror in the final shot of Safe, Dylan as Billy remains alone to examine what he has made of his own life.

Much has been made of Haynes’ decision to embody the multifaceted Dylan by separating and highlighting each of Dylan’s ‘characters’ with a different actor, but what is discussed in less detail (and is equally important) is Haynes’ decision to emulate Dylan’s propensity to steal, his retrospective genius, by drawing cinematic parallels between his Dylans and the history of movies. A few filmmakers in particular are clearly referenced, most importantly Jean-Luc Godard, whose Masculin Féminine provides the intellectual framework for both Jude’s assault on stardom and Robbie’s marriage (with Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Claire a wonderful French pop pun on Chantal Goya’s Madeleine); even the wrapping paper Robbie brings home evokes A Woman Is A Woman. There is also the wonderful way in which Haynes combines Fellini’s withering 8 ½ and D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back/Eat The Document to evoke both the literal Dylan and the fantasy of superstardom. This amalgamation is brilliant and provides, along with Blanchett’s stunning performance, the most engaging of the Dylan stories, if only because it is the one section of the film where Haynes’ visual pyrotechnics match the depth of his ideas.

But I’m Not There would not be sustainable as an entertainment if each of the Dylan narratives were pure pop brilliance, and this is why, in my opinion, the much-maligned Billy The Kid section of the film, which evokes Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and other psychedelic westerns of the early 1970’s, works. As a portrait of an exile, Billy’s story is crucial to bringing meaning to Jude Quinn and Dylan as a whole; when Jude “dies” in a motorcycle accident (twice, in the first shot of the film and again near the end), Billy picks up the tale, only to be haunted by the ghosts of Dylan’s past. Another common misunderstanding is that somehow, Billy’s story exists in the deep past. Not so; After putting on a mask and speaking for the people, Billy is exposed and cast out from the town in a car before hitching a ride on a modern freight train, reconnecting Jude to Woody, Dylan to his past, and completing the character and the film.

Hey Man: Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) Makes The Scene In Todd Haynes' I'm Not There

I’m Not There is an ode to the complexity of Bob Dylan, but it is also a love song to the art-house; This is a film of ideas, both visual and intellectual, historical and narrative. Haynes has made a tremendous movie, a rare combination of art and pop that attempts more in a single sequence than most movies would dare in their entirety. A final thought; It was not so long ago when a film like I’m Not There would be an event, essential viewing for film lovers and Todd Haynes, probably the most interesting and exciting independent American filmmaker of his generation, would be venerated as a major auteur. Today the film is finding an audience, but there is something missing in the culture; A sense of exhaustion seems palpable. Is this how movies die? Changing? The times have changed. It is the responsibility of film fans everywhere to be a part of this process, to get to the theater and give this movie the life it so richly deserves.