TIFF '14 Diary: Day 3

In the five years since Inglourious Basterds came out (a time span in which I've probably seen the film a dozen times), I've repeatedly said that it felt like a movie made just for me. "I'm both Jewish and a French film nerd," I would say, "and here's a film that presents an alternate history of WWII being won by Jews and French film nerds." It's a fun analogy, and one I've gotten some good mileage out of over the last five years. But Day 3 of TIFF really presented a film that feels like it was made just for me. It's a German film called Phoenix, and it's the first masterpiece I've seen at TIFF '14. 

The Third Man is what I generally consider to be the Greatest Film of All-Time; I named my blog and Twitter account after it, and I have a giant poster of it hanging in my living room. My other favorite pre-1970's film is probably Vertigo, which is one of the great psychological exercises of cinema, one of the best uses of color as a formalistic element, and also the film that Sight & Sound named the greatest ever in its most recent poll of the world's film community (generally regarded as the most reliable "Greatest Films" list). What Phoenix does is really incredible. It essentially adapts the story and psychology of Vertigo into the world and setting of The Third Man, without ever feeling like a purposeful attempt to recall either film. It's a film that distinctly has its own identity, and never feels like a Tarantino-esque exercise in creative winking homage. 

Phoenix takes place in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with the bombed-out buildings and the presence of different troops and sectors providing the setting just as they did with the Vienna of The Third Man. Nina Hoss stars as Nelly, a Holocaust survivor who requires facial reconstruction surgery, and is unrecognizable to her husband, who she quickly finds out may have sold her out to the Nazis in the first place. I'll resist the temptation to explain much more than that, because this film has to be seen and experienced without any knowledge of where it goes from there. 

I was entranced by this film for its duration, but where it really entered another level is the ending. Sometimes, great films have the audacity to not resolve any of the conflicts they set into motion, but to merely arrive at the moment where we know a resolution is imminent. It's a fascinating acknowledgment that sometimes conclusion is a completely superfluous part of great storytelling, or rather that a great conclusion doesn't always require the actual concluding of anything. Instead Phoenix merely leaves us with a facial expression; a look of understanding that the director described in the post-screening Q&A as "an implosion," and it's absolutely heart-wrenching. It's a moment of cinematic perfection that's likely to stay with me forever. 

Unfortunately, that statement doesn't describe the other two films I saw on the third day of TIFF. First up was the new Jason Reitman dramedy, Men, Women & Children, about the evils of technology on modern life, and how it negatively affects the quality of our inter-personal relationships. 

Men, Women & Children is an ensemble film with around a dozen main characters--half high-schoolers and half their parents--and all of their meaningful communication with each other is via various forms of technology. Or, as is the case with some of the characters, technology is the very reason their lives lack meaningful communication with others. There are some good scenes and ideas in this film, but overall it's very forgettable. Most people who've seen it are likening it to a version of 2005's Crash with social media as the culprit of society's ills instead of racism. I had initially intended on avoiding that comparison because it's too obvious, but the more I thought about it, it's obviousness is exactly why I feel it has to be included. This is simply an obvious movie, in most of the same ways Crash was. All of the emotional and character subtlety that Reitman filled his best films (Up In the Air and Juno) with is absent here, and in their place are a lot of scenes that go exactly where you expect them to. That isn't to say that some of those story destinations aren't still affecting, because a few of them are. But this is still far, far short of the Reitman that Up In the Air has perpetually made me hope to get again. 

Waste Land, the Belgian cop psychological noir film I ended the day with, was much better, but still had problems of its own. A story about a damaged Brussels homicide detective with masochistic behavior, a beautiful pregnant wife, and a case that requires him to investigate the underworld of Congolese immigrants, Waste Land is visually and tonally stunning. It's mood and color scheme recall early Fincher, while it's pacing and shot composition feel like Steve McQueen. The main character is played by popular Belgian star Jeremie Renier, who has been in several acclaimed French films of the last decade. He's at his best here, all brooding intensity that hides an interior we're sufficiently fascinated to see revealed. In fact, most everything about Waste Land is great, until the final third of the film when Renier's character increasingly loses his mind and his grasp on reality. It's a left turn into Shining-like territory that just doesn't work. What remains is an artistically compelling film that narratively tries to ruin itself, and very nearly does. Even still, there's enough great work here to make director Pieter Van Hees someone to watch out for in the future. 

Tomorrow: The great new Indie-comedy by Noah Baumbach, Reese Witherspoon's attempt to save Africa, Richard Gere playing a homeless man (yes, it's a stretch), and the best musical I've seen in at least seven years. 

TIFF '14 Diary: Day 2

One of the keys to making it through a long film festival (or music festival) is to give yourself lots of counter-programming to keep your attention from waning. A full schedule for the duration of TIFF allows somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 films, and it would be very easy to concoct a schedule in which you saw nothing but heavy dramas for 11 straight days. I've made the mistake in the past of not diversifying my slate enough, but like all things with practice, I've gotten a bit better at TIFFing in the last five years. So for day two, with most of the major Hollywood films still a few days away, I attended, in order, a Kristen Wiig mental illness comedy, a Brooklyn crime noir, a Dutch character drama, and a Finnish action movie with Samuel L. Jackson playing the President of the United States. 

This is the third straight year that I've gone to a first weekend, afternoon premiere of a new Kristen Wiig film. The first two yielded mixed results. 2012's Imogene (later retitled Girl Most Likely for its theatrical run) was funny, but stupid. The climax of the movie involved someone making a turtle tank costume for protection from the outside world. Last year's Hateship Loveship wasn't as ridiculous, but it also wasn't fun. It saddled a great and funny cast in a somber awkward drama about people that don't know how to access personalities. When I saw Wiig was back for a third straight year, I was initially hesitant. I tried to see the Turkish Palme D-Or winner, Winter Sleep, instead, but struck out on tickets. So I dove back in to the Wiig train, and I'm pleased I did. 

Welcome To Me is Wiig's best and funniest performance since Bridesmaids, and the first film since then to really harness her comedic skill set while also reminding us that she can act. Wiig plays Alice Klieg, a pseudo-invalid with severe bi-polar personality disorders, who wins an 86 million dollar lottery and pays a local TV station to give her a talk show where she doesn't actually have guests. The station, run by sleazy brothers James Marsden and Wes Bentley, are all too eager to give Alice anything she wants as long as she'll keep writing them checks for millions of dollars. Can she enter on a swan? Yes. Have cooking segments involving meatloaf cakes with sweet potato frosting? Yes. Can she reenact traumatic moments from her teenage years where friends lied to her and stole her makeup? Yes. Can she neuter dogs on live television? Sadly, amazingly, yes. 

Welcome To Me is hilarious in parts, especially in the early scenes of the show's first few episodes. Joan Cusack is particularly wonderful as the show's in-over-her-head producer, commanded by her bosses to just say yes to everything Alice wants. But the film also doesn't shy away from weighty subjects, especially in its final act. Wiig even goes all in for the most surprising full-frontal nude scene since Jason Segel's in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but unlike that one, which was completely played for comedic awkwardness, Wiig's is a dramatic moment of real pain for her character. I won't go overboard and try to tell you this film is a profound statement on mental illness, because it frankly isn't. But it does do a good job of alternately appealing to your sense of humor and your heart, and it works as a good character piece. It's a major course-correction for Wiig after a few years of getting away from what she's so good at, while also being a pretty daring leap forward for her dramatic chops. 

The Drop was not only my second film of the day, but also the second film for which I had tempered expectations going in. This time, those expectations weren't related to the recent pedigree of the talent, but rather to a legendary bad portent in Hollywood--the longer a finished movie sits on the shelf, the worse it probably is. The second lead star of The Drop is none other than James Gandolfini, who died nearly fifteen full months ago. So yeah, not a good sign. As it turns out, that wasn't the case with The Drop. It simply wasn't finished with post-production in time to be released last fall, and it's clearly an early-fall style crime film. But… that still doesn't mean it wasn't disappointing. 

I had a hard time with The Drop. It's a film where almost every piece works on its own, but the pieces don't work together. The dialogue is great, but the pacing is glacial. The screenplay is by acclaimed novelist Dennis Lehane, whose stories have been previously adapted into Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone (both outstanding films). But this is also his first feature film screenplay, and he doesn't acquit himself well with the ins and outs of how to structure a film. Likewise, the acting and characters are quite good, but neither are used in compelling ways. The film is directed by Belgian filmmaker Michael Roskam, who made 2011's Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee Bullhead. I can tell it's the same director, because The Drop has the same problems Bullhead did. In both films, fascinating plots and fascinating character dilemmas are set into motion, but then neither set of driving elements ends up impacting one another. Both films star tough men damaged by their past, and both characters swirl around lives of crime. But neither film can really seem to decide whether it wants to be a character piece or a crime film, so they end up half-assing both. In Bullhead, the climax is all character, while the crime plot remains largely unresolved. The Drop does a better job at addressing both, but only in the sense that both end ambiguously and unfulfillingly. This is a film worth seeing--Tom Hardy's performance and a final glimpse of Gandolfini both ensure that--and it has moments of real gravitas. Just know going in that when the final fade to black happens, you'll likely be questioning whether those two hours ought to have been used more effectively. 

The Dutch-by-way-of-Morocco character drama, The Invader, did not have that problem. It was a brisk 86 minutes that were used incredibly effectively, and ended at their dramatic peak. On the surface it's a somewhat traditional undercover cop story, with Amsterdam cop Sam entering a Moroccan drug family under cover of his mixed ethnic heritage. But where The Invader really goes right is in not being a crime story at all, but a character piece about a man trapped between the morally right world where he feels alone, and the morally corrupt world where he feels like part of a family. The dilemma is all internal, and first-time director Shariff Korver does a nice job of getting the audience into Sam's head. The great director Sidney Lumet once said that the key to an effective character piece is for the audience to have no idea where it's going, but to know when it gets there that it never could have ended any other way. The Intruder does that. it ends in a hard place, with no screen-time devoted to resolution. But it's an ending that feels earned and true. The Intruder isn't likely to get international distribution, but if you have a local film festival, drop them a line and tell them to seek this one out. 

For as long as I can remember--probably since repeated childhood viewings of Die Hard, The Road Warrior, and Big Trouble in Little China--I've always been a sucker for a good, old-school, high-concept, action movie, and that's exactly what Big Game is. What if I was to tell you that Samuel L. Jackson plays the President of the United States, stranded in the mountain wilderness of northern Finland, hunted by terrorists, and with his only protection a thirteen-year old Finnish boy armed with a bow and arrow, roaming the mountains for 24 hours on his village's traditional ritual of manhood? Would you be all in? Yes, yes you would be. 

Big Game was EXACTLY what I wanted it to be. It is completely ludicrous, cheesier than the most artery-clogging Cheetohs, and totally bad-ass. I couldn't help but smile widely for almost the entire movie. This is the kind of action movie that every set piece is set up so you know exactly what will happen before it does, and then you can only watch in delight as the movie does exactly what you expected. It's basically Escape From New York crossed with Cliffhanger, with a Finnish kid as Snake Pliskin. There are also knowing homages to Die Hard and (why not?) E.T. When the movie reaches it's totally and utterly inevitable conclusion, you just want to high-five the screen. 

Amazingly, Big Game isn't an American movie, even though it absolutely sounds like the kind of stuff Hollywood would concoct.  Big Game was written, directed, produced, shot, and edited by an all-Finnish creative team, and they landed Samuel L. Jackson the old-fashioned way--they sent him the script and he liked it. Somehow, this movie doesn't even have a U.S. distribution deal yet, but I have to imagine that will change soon, because the audience absolutely loved it. Every time the Finnish kid, Oskari, did something cool (which was approximately every six minutes), the crowd erupted in cheers. This is a movie with all the makings of a future cult classic that people impulsively watch on TNT re-runs. 

Tomorrow: The new Jason Reitman ensemble drama about the evils of the internet, The Shining as a Belgian cop film, and the first masterpiece I saw at TIFF '14. 

TIFF '14 Diary: Day 1

It's interesting when you visit a major city once a year like clockwork, how you can notice not just subtle changes, but also the things that conspicuously don't change. There are a handful of spots in Toronto--the street front of Union Station, the plaza in front of City Hall, a huge building one block north of Yonge/Dundas Square--that have been under the same construction, behind the same chain link fences and covered in the same scaffolding, all five years I've been coming to TIFF. How could it possibly take so long? But the changes can also take you by surprise, and mark the passage of time as well as anything. I found out last month when I started booking my trip that the place I've stayed for the last four years apparently closed in January, so now I'm at some new place that's infinitely nicer, but costs the same. I feel spoiled. It's also in an area of Toronto I hadn't explored yet--Little Italy--so this is bound to be a trip lavished with some great food. 

But the biggest change this year is with TIFF itself, and it's been the major talking point of the first day of the festival. (Well, other than the late, great Joan Rivers.) When TIFF started in 1976, it was originally called the Festival of Festivals, and the idea was to bring all of the best films from the major European festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin) to a North American audience. As the years have gone on, the film calendar has changed, and now Toronto comes just after Venice and Telluride, so the general trend has been for big fall prestige films and awards hopefuls to have their world premiere in one of those markets, then everything comes together the next week in Toronto, where films from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Venice, and Telluride all mingle together at the world's largest cinematic party. But this year, apparently TIFF decided they didn't like the major films (such as last year's Gravity and 12 Years a Slave) having their world premieres the week before in other markets, taking the attention away from Toronto. So they laid down the gauntlet. Any film that wants to play TIFF's opening weekend can't have played Venice or Telluride the week before. The idea, presumably, was to pressure major films into skipping those festivals all together, because the Toronto exposure was of a higher value, and thus securing the exclusivity of TIFF going forward. 

Well,that did not happen. The major films all still went to either Venice or Telluride, and just settled for playing TIFF after the first weekend. TIFF is, apparently, unhappy with this development, but I'm ecstatic. In year's past, virtually every major film playing Toronto (an 11 day festival) has had it's premiere in the festival's first four days, leading to an agonizing selection process for cinema goers. Six or seven different major venues in the city would all be hosting gala red carpet premieres at the same time, and any decision of what to go see meant an equal decision of five other potentially great films to miss. But not this year! Now that the first weekend is reserved for TIFF exclusives, the high profile premieres extend well into the next week, with major releases like Wild, Foxcatcher, and The Imitation Game all still several days away from their TIFF screenings. This hasn't exactly eliminated any scheduling nightmares. With over 300 films playing TIFF, there will always be stuff you can't fathom missing, and yet do. But  things are a bit easier now, and the first Friday and Saturday of the fest are marginally less chaotic. 

Of course there are slight downsides, such as not having anything playing the first time slot of the fest that I really wanted to see. And that's how my first film of TIFF '14 ended up being an erotic sex drama from South Korea. 

Scarlet Innocence is part of TIFF's City to City program, which spotlights the contemporary cinema of a major world city each year. TIFF's of recent past have spotlighted Mumbai and Buenos Aires, and this year is Seoul. I haven't attended much of the City to City program in the past--last year was Athens, and I didn't see a single one of the films. But this year I set a goal for myself of being more diverse than ever in my selection, and I've consistently read good things about South Korean Cinema over the last few years, so I dove right in with three tickets to films from Seoul. 

Scarlet Innocence was a sumptuously shot, compulsively watchable sex revenge thriller, but it didn't come across as very original for anyone that grew up in America in the 1990's, when films like  that were all the rage. The best part of the film were the many sex scenes, and not just because of the nudity (though there was that!)--honestly, these were some of the best photographed sex scenes I've ever seen. My gold standard for the art of filming a great sex scene has always been a tie between Out of Sight and the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. I'm not willing to say Scarlet Innocence surpasses either of those, but it's in the same league. Director Pil-Sung Yim has a great eye for visual composition and color, and I'm interested to see what he'll be able to do in the future with a more interesting story. 

Luckily, the other film of opening night was a great exercise in story depth. Clouds of Sils Maria, the latest film by French auteur Olivier Assayas, premiered in Cannes in May to enthusiastic reviews, and I was excited to see what Assayas could do with Hollywood actors filling out his cast. Juliette Binoche, who had previously worked with Assayas in 2008's Summer Hours, stars as Maria Enders, a famous actress of world cinema, who is preparing to maybe work with the hottest young star in Hollywood, Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz). While Moretz is mostly just seen through footage of her acting and antics, the real co-star is Kristen Stewart as Valentine, Maria's assistant. 

The bulk of the running time is taken up by conversations between Maria and Valentine, about Maria's career, her future choices, her past affairs, and her impending work with Jo-Ann. While it may sound boring, it's anything but. As Maria and Valentine go hiking through the Alps, we experience their dilemmas and arguments as meditations on life in the pursuit of artistic satisfaction. Stewart is particularly fantastic, and as she tells Maria about the reputation of Jo-Ann Ellis, much of her dialogue acts as direct commentary on her own career as a hot young Hollywood starlet who sometimes often gets press for the wrong reasons. There are actually three levels of meta-commentary going on here, as the roles the characters discuss and act out inform directly on their dilemmas, and their discussion of these dilemmas provides commentary to their careers as actresses in the real world. 

Assayas has fun with the material where he's able, particularly in a great scene of Maria and Valentine watching Jo-Ann's latest 3D sic-fi epic in the theater, and afterward when Valentine attempts to explain the value of such a film to Maria, who just isn't having it. What we see of that sci-fi film within the film is absolutely ridiculous, and it feels like Assayas giving us his own views on crowd-pleasing sic-fi blockbusters as a part of "cinema." But while that may feel pretentious, it's impossible to not notice how much fun Assayas seems to be having by shooting the fake sci-fi movie scene, as though he were seizing the opportunity to wear the costume of a different type of filmmaker, without having to go through the arduous process of making such a film. He's slumming and being a comic-book movie tourist, but role-playing in a way that he's clearly stimulated by. 

These are the types of questions delivered to us in Clouds of Sils Maria. Indeed during the post-screening Q&A, Assayas said that he believes films should present questions, not answers. The only notable flaw to the film is the casting of Moretz, who's simply too young for the role. Moretz does an admirable job, but she was only sixteen when she filmed the role, and she just looks too young for us to buy her as a peak-of-her-fame Lindsey Lohan type. At its best, Clouds reminds me of the best Godard films from the 1960's, with their musings and romanticisms on the lives of people doing things off the beaten path. Clouds is never as visually inventive as Godard was at his peak, but that same restless desire to place us in the nitty gritty of different lives is all over this one. 

Tomorrow: Kristen Wiig's new comedy, Dennis Lehane's new Boston crime saga (and James Gandolfini's final acting performance), and my first Midnight Madness film of TIFF '14: Samuel L. Jackson as a US President stranded in the frozen tundras of Finland being hunted by terrorists. 

Revisiting 1991's Hook, the Most Important Bad Movie of My Life

There are few movies that I liked better as a child than Hook, and there are also few movies that were bigger debacles in the careers of great directors. Steven Spielberg regards Hook as the worst movie he's ever made, and he's embarrassed to even watch it now. Roger Ebert panned it, along with most other major critics. The movie made money, but also fell hugely short of expectations.  All of the film education I've given myself as an adult should have prepared me to see it for the failure it is, and yet I can't. I acknowledge that huge chunks of it are an unmitigated disaster. The sets and production design are terrible. They make Neverland look like it was designed during Michael Jackson's worst kind of sleepover. The final set piece of the Lost-Boys-versus-pirates-war is reprehensibly cheesy. Dustin Hoffman gives what might be the worst performance of his career, so overacted that the titular character is turned into a Looney Tunes parody. It takes waaaaaaay too long to get us the hell to Neverland, spending almost 40 minutes with a cell phone as the movie's breakout star. And yet, there's so much magic here bubbling up from all of the bad decisions. 

The great French filmmaker Francois Truffaut once said that a bad film by Jean Renoir (who he regarded as the greatest filmmaker ever) was far more interesting than a good film by a lesser director. The takeaway is that hugely talented people reveal something to us through their failures that's still fascinating, and those failures allow us to see their genius in interesting ways. And so it is with Spielberg's Hook. Spielberg is not an art-house auteur, but he's almost inarguably the greatest mass-audience filmmaker of all-time. He's the auteur of the people. One thing Spielberg is fantastic at, even when everything else is going wrong, is making his audience (i.e.: everyone) feel the magic. There's a scene in Hook when the adult Peter first encounters the Lost Boys, and they refuse to believe he's their former leader. Peter doesn't believe it himself, until one particularly young Lost Boy dares to look past the obvious and find the extraordinary. 

Everything about this scene works. The lighting, the incredibly subtle and powerfully nostalgic John Williams score that envelops us in crashing emotion at just the right moment, the silly-putty ability of Robin Williams' face and the look of confusion in his eyes, and the excitement on the faces of the rest of the Lost Boys as they receive their first indication that maybe this really is Peter Pan. I have seen this scene dozens and dozens of times--I just watched it another three times while writing this--and it has never failed to give me goosebumps. But something that took me a long time to realize is that it's not the story that's giving me goosebumps. Even as a child, it wasn't my desire to believe in Peter Pan that was having a physical reaction on my arms and the back of my neck. It was the filmmaking. This is just a marvelously executed moment that figures out how to sell the viewer on a world of magic without actually showing or mentioning any. 

Hook has a handful of moments like this. Dustin Hoffman, for however bad the bulk of his performance is (and to be fair to him, it's a terribly written part that he had no way to save) still manages to give one of the film's best moments. When Hook is first confronted with an adult Peter Pan that doesn't remember who he is, Hoffman gets very close to him, slowly pulls down his glasses, and in an exaggerated voice that sounds like half-southern drawl and half-British aristocracy, calmly says "Can it really be you, my great and worthy opponent?" Spielberg's camera is so close to the faces in this moment that we're basically analyzing the rings on their cheeks to determine age, and Hoffman draws out the word "opponent" as though he's trying to fill up the time quota in high school speech class. And it works. It's another mini-moment of magic. 

In Roger Ebert's list of the best movies of 2005, he wrote of King Kong, "If movies like this didn't delight us with the magic of cinema, we'd never start going in the first place." That quote has stuck with me because I'm fascinated by the origins of ideas. Loving certain disciplines and fields might be something that we're biologically predisposed to do (maybe), but even if that's the case, the predisposition still has to get fertilized. Maybe the genetic raw matter swirling about my head suggests that I was likely to fall in love with film as an art form, but something still had to trigger it into action. I've always told people that my two film Eureka! moments were seeing Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption in theaters when I was thirteen, and that those two movies awakened in me my love and appreciation for cinema. But I realize now that's only a partial truth. After all, if something in me hadn't already been awakened, then I wouldn't have been seeking out movies like that as a thirteen-year old. The more and more the idea marinates in my head, I think Hook might have been my Eureka! movie. Even if I now see it as a movie whose flaws heavily outweigh its attributes, its still those attributes that speak loudest to me. Amidst everything Spielberg did wrong in Hook, his natural talent for selling the magic of cinema found ways to shine through. 

About two thirds of the way through, there's a truly awful extended sequence of Captain Hook teaching the other pirates how to play baseball, to try and win sway over Pan's son. Every time I watch the movie, I just want the scene to end. Nothing about it works. But the ending of that scene directly leads to Peter's own Eureka! moment, when he remembers who he is. This is where Robin Williams is at his best. I re-watched Hook most recently the day after Williams died, and it was this scene that most struck me. Hook is both the best and worst role of Williams' career. On the one hand, it's perfect for him, because he plays a character that's supposed to be an eternal child. On the other hand, this specific movie saddles him with being a boring adult for the vast majority of the run time. It's sort of meta, because the viewer is trapped with Williams' fake/bad adulthood as much as the character of Peter Pan is. But it's also a waste of his strengths as an entertainer. When Peter finally seizes back his youthful identity, we see all over Williams' face how much he seems to have found his true self. It's another transcendent moment, and Spielberg nails it. Just as Williams is lost in his newfound childhood, Spielberg is visually drunk on his ability to create it. 

Of course this high can't last. Just minutes later we see the Lost Boys "armor up" for the big war, and it's easily the worst sequence of the movie. It's so bad that watching it as an adult makes you want to reach back through time and slap yourself in the face for not realizing how bad it was when you were a kid. But whatever. By that point, the movie has already won. You're still watching because the isolated moments of true greatness have permeated so deep into your desire to see high seas adventure that you can no longer be discerning about the form in which it manifests. It doesn't matter that the rest of the movie is bad, because you're still high on the moment where it briefly became everything you wanted it to be. I remember watching that scene with my mom once back when I was a kid, and I told her I didn't understand how Peter was suddenly wearing his green tights just because he remembered how to fly. My mom laughed and basically told me not to worry about it, and that characters can just do things like that in movies. I still think about that plot hole every time I watch it, and then I still heed my mom's advice and stop worrying about it. Even though they're everywhere in Hook, the flaws aren't the point. They just make the few great parts even better. 

Guardians of the Galaxy and the New Marvel Business Model

Guardians of the Galaxy is the tenth movie to come from Marvel Studios. The first nine were adaptations of Iron Man (three times), Thor (twice), Captain America (twice), The Avengers, and The Incredible Hulk, all of which are household name properties that have been continuously published in the comic book industry for over fifty years. The Guardians of the Galaxy, conversely, once had a comic book series in the 1990's reach 62 consecutive issues (which is a little over five years), and that seemed borderline miraculous at the time. And that series was about completely different characters than this new movie. The Guardians property was created by Marvel in the late 60's, appeared sporadically throughout the 70's in several different titles, laid dormant for the entirety of the 80's, got their own series in the 90's during the comic boom, went dormant again for another several years, was rebooted with new characters in the 00's (a series that lasted all of 25 issues), and then was inexplicably green-lit for a movie a few years ago. That movie has now made over 500 million dollars, making it the highest grossing film of the year, and one of the highest grossing comic book adaptations ever. 

Okay, let's get this out of the way: the movie is good. You probably know that, because like most of the country, you've probably seen it. It's fun, ridiculous, stupid, deceptively poignant, ironic, hip to it's own irony, post-ironic-to-its-ironic-hipness, funny, adventurous, and in on the joke. (All of them.) It combines the every-man adventure and deep mythology of the original Star Wars with a much greater awareness of its ability to be fun. Not only does it want you laughing at the joke, but it wants to then draw attention both to your laughing at the joke, and the very presence of the joke itself. It's a movie that screams from the rooftops like Maximus that it wants you to be entertained. 

I picked the above image out of many dozens of possibilities very intentionally. These are the posters for a major summer tentpole that have to introduce you to its characters. There they are, named on the posters. the first trailer of the movie did the same thing, with a set-piece line-up scene where someone tells the viewer who each character is. It should go without saying, but The Avengers did not need to do this. 

Hollywood is a place where every success and every failure generates a hundred lessons that should not have been learned. But Guardians of the Galaxy is that rare movie where we should be learning more than we seem to. Since X-Men launched the modern comic-book-to-movie era in 2000, we've been waiting for the moment when Marvel and DC ran out of A-List properties to adapt to the big screen. It was never a surprise that good and successful movies could be made out of Batman, Spider-Man, and The Avengers. But it was a great "what if" game to play about what happened after those franchises had run their courses, but the public's appetite for super-hero movies had not. Could Marvel or DC manage to turn any of their lesser characters into movie franchises? Would we ever see a trilogy of movies based on, for example, Blue Beetle or Firestorm, the Nuclear Man? It seemed doubtful. But then, so did a movie starring Rocket Raccoon, a forgotten joke character from Marvel's "throw everything at the wall" era of the 1970's. 

The difference between Marvel and DC here is absolutely fascinating. While DC can't even figure out how to turn major properties like Wonder Woman, The Flash, and The Justice League into big screen franchises, Marvel is making stars out of their D-List. You have to admire the business model. When Marvel knew it had run out of A-list characters to adapt a few years ago, they chose a different route than just traveling the same linear path down the list. they could have moved on to the B-list with Dr. Strange and Namor, then the C-list with Iron Fist and Moon Knight, and on down, constantly depressing their trajectory with every move. But instead they went straight for the bottom of the barrel, almost as if it was a dare. It's like they knew they couldn't stay on a straight path or it wouldn't lead anywhere, so they experimented with creating their own map. 

There's really a lot to admire here, even if you don't like the movie. First off, Marvel has figured out how to create the feeling of a brand you know with a property you don't. This is every bit as wild, cosmic, and big as The Avengers, but it stars a smiling tree with a three word vocabulary. It's a summer blockbuster that manages to sort of be an auteur movie from two different sources at once: its studio and its director. It frees itself from every possible snag of mistreating the source material because no one knows the source material. That, actually, may be the most amazing thing of all. One of the biggest problems in making movies about comic book icons is how many people you risk pissing off in the process. But Guardians doesn't take that risk, because the characters had no fans in the first place. But now here we are, with a genuine franchise created out of the ether. And DC doesn't think anyone would go see a Wonder Woman movie. Maybe the real problem is that no one would go see the Wonder Woman movie that they'd make, because all of their business decisions show such misguided judgement. 

What's really exciting about Guardians of the Galaxy is the inescapable feeling that its ground zero of a new thing. Ten years from now, when we might be getting a tentpole sequel of a Doop movie, we'll know that Guardians paved the way. The business model of movie franchises adapted from comic book franchises was always a finite one. What Marvel has shown with Guardians of the Galaxy is an ability to create new franchises, perhaps in perpetuity, based on a few simple guidelines: have fun, trust talented people with enough freedom to access their talent, know that your audience wants to be entertained, and remember that there's no shame in making a comic book movie that looks and feels like it only could have come from a comic book. 

Song of the Day: The Rolling Stones - Saint Of Me (1997)

The Stones haven't released a great album since Tattoo You, which was 33 years ago. But they have a knack for still tapping into greatness a few times per album, like a once-great pitcher towards the end of his career that can still summon up an 11K/3-hit shutout once or twice a season. The best example of this, in my mind, is this track, from the 1997 album Bridges to Babylon.

Back in '09, Mark Harris wrote a great piece for Entertainment Weekly about the real power of "movie stars." He was specifically writing about Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and he argued that when Pitt shows up towards the end of the film as a teenager, the reason that moment carries so much emotional resonance is because the audience remembers what Pitt looked like in A River Runs Through It, and that history that we carry with us of remembering a star throughout their career really comes into play in moments like this. I think the same idea applies here.

Had any other band written and recorded this song in '97, it still might have been good (it is catchy, after all), but it wouldn't have had the same resonance as it does coming from Mick and Keith, who were 35 years into their recording career at the time. Hearing Mick and Keith, rock's all-time greatest married couple and most never-say-die rebels, defiantly declare that we'll never make a saint of them, really does carry a history of emotion with it that few artists are ever around long enough to take advantage of. They've been a part of the establishment for decades now, but they still retain their aura of coolness and swagger just enough to pull off a song this good.

The ultimate irony, though, is that even if Mick and Keith haven't been made saints (yet), Mick did become a Knight in the British Empire just five years later. Sigh.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 25, 2014

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Song of the Day: Cat Power - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (2000)

Cat Power is probably my favorite contemporary female artist, and I think she has one of the best voices in modern music. It's this great meeting point between soulful, husky, subtle, delicate, ethereal, and imperfect, and she uses a nice mix of original material and covers to showcase it. I actually think her 2012 album, Sun, was her best yet, and its lead single, "Ruin," was my favorite song of that year. 

But the song that first made me love Cat Power was this one. I didn't hear it when it came out, and it wasn't until my original  Music Sensei, Kevin Groom, put it on a mix CD for me in 2004 that I was finally introduced to her. But ten years later, this is absolutely in my pantheon of 5-10 favorite covers ever. I'm a big believer that great covers have to alter the original in some fundamental way that puts a new artistic stamp on it, and this certainly does that. Not only does Cat Power strip the song down to just vocals and spare single guitar, but she also makes the fascinating choice of only singing the verses and never going into the chorus, which almost adds this mysterious, secretive element to the recording. A lot of people that hear the song for the first time know they know it, but have trouble placing it. I just love the way she stretches out the lyric "baby, baby, baby, come back," which sounds even more desperate and pleading than Jagger's original vocal. Great stuff.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 24, 2014

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Song of the Day: Fela Kuti - Lady (1972)

I've had a basic awareness of who Fela was for a long time now; I knew he was considered one of the greatest musicians in African history, and that he was extremely influential to Western artists that began incorporating African rhythms into their work in the 1980's, most notably Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and The Clash. But I had never actually heard Fela's music for the first time until just a few months ago, when I took a flyer on a compilation called The Best of the Black President, figuring that, at worst, it would be interesting to hear.

Well, that "at worst" scenario isn't what played out. Holy shit, this guy is amazing. I've since bought The Best of the Black President Part II, and I can't stop listening to both. It's like the best of James Brown's long early 70's funk freak outs, but instead of Brown's singing, the lead is replaced with Bitches Brew-era Miles-ish trumpet work and cool African tribal singing. It's like nothing I've ever heard, and yet somehow, the music all sounds instantaneously recognizable, like it's ingrained through osmosis. "Lady" is the first track on The Best of the Black President, and it's pretty representative of what his work sounds like. If you like James Brown, Miles Davis, Santana, and Sly Stone from the late 60's/early 70's, then this is for you.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 23, 2014

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Song of the Day: TV On The Radio - Second Song (2011)

TV On The Radio released their new single today, from their forthcoming November release, and it's phenomenal. But instead of writing about that song, which I still need to absorb a bit more, we'll take a look back at what I think is their best song, the opening track from their previous album. 

TV On The Radio remind me of an evolutionary version of Sly & The Family Stone: they're a mixed racial band that draws equally from the histories of white and black music, and seems to fit well into the contemporary trajectories of both. If you have to peg them, I guess they're Indie rock, but that feels pretty short-sighted a description. 

Have you ever played the game where you fantasize about what sounds could have been created if only artist X and artist Y had joined forces in year Z? While, I'm that nerd, and I do that all the time. My favorite fantasy collaboration has always been Bowie and Prince in the early 1980's, and the reason I love thinking about it so much is because it probably would have sounded like this. 

I love the way this song builds, the way it explodes into a chorus via a "Ooh ooh ooh ooh" bridge in a Prince-like falsetto, and the first lyric of said chorus, "Every lover on a mission, shift your known position into the light." I love the way the horns slowly come in so you don't even notice them at first, but then the outré of the song leaves only the horns to fend for themselves. They handle themselves quite well, leaving the perfect aftertaste for a song that you want to linger for as long as possible. 

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Song of the Day: Stevie Wonder - Uptight (Everything's Alright) (1965)

Of every fact in the entire history of recorded music, this is the one that makes me feel the most creatively inadequate: Stevie Wonder wrote and recorded this song when he was 15 years old. Fifteen!!! When I was fifteen, I was still playing with Magic cards and figuring out ways to sneak peaks at my mom's boyfriend's Playboys. But I guess you don't get the last name "Wonder" for nothing.

Anyway, this is my favorite Motown single (narrowly edging The Four Tops' "Reach Out (I'll Be There)"), and in my top 10-15 favorite singles of all-time. It's just so goddamn joyous and infectious, I find it literally impossible to listen to without cranking it up and playing air-everything--drums, horns, guitars, Stevie's head-bob, etc. If the title of "Happiest Song Ever" were to be bestowed upon something, this track would be a prime contender.

Stevie's recordings from the seventies, when he gained total creative control of his output and started writing about social issues, are critically considered the cornerstone of his legacy, and I won't argue with that. But personally, I prefer his Motown assembly hits from the mid-to-late 60's, because at their best, they sound like this.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 22, 2014

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Boyhood, True Detective, and the Blurring of the Film/Television Divides

As recently as last year, the differences between cinema and television felt reasonably clear. Cinema told stories by a single creative voice or team, filmed in a relatively contained time span. Television told much larger stories by vastly (r)evolving sets of creators, spanning years and years. But 2014 may go down in history as the year those divisions became murkier than we ever thought possible, to the extent that divisions may not even exist in the near future. Two works are primarily responsible for this, The HBO show True Detective, which aired in the first three months of the year, and the Richard Linklater film Boyhood, which is in theaters now.

True Detective was aired on television, but it was really an eight-hour movie. It was written by one screenwriter, filmed by one director, starred movie stars, and has no plans to continue the stories of any of its characters. Boyhood is a three hour film, but it was created and filmed over the course of twelve years, watching its actors age in real time, and each year's worth of shooting script was created at that time, based on where the creators wanted the story to travel each year of their collaboration. All of these elements of both projects are either relatively rare and risky for their medium, or complete innovations that we've never seen before. Both projects were viewed as huge risks with potentially crazy business models. Both projects yielded amazing results that could change their industries for years and decades to come.

Boyhood is the year's best film thus far, and is a mortal lock to remain towards the top of that list. It's not simply about watching a person grow and evolve over the entirety of their adolescence, but really about watching what life is at its core. When I've described the film to people and urged them to see it, they've sometimes asked me what the point of it is. Ultimately, I think the point of the film for each individual viewer will be whatever that person thinks the point of life is. As you watch a life unfold, and seemingly random, unimportant days and conversations slowly shape a person into who he will be, it provokes a self-reflection of value and purpose. What is the point of it all? How and why am I who I am? What moments happened when I was eight, or ten, or thirteen, that fundamentally created the person I am now?

A lot of great cinema has provoked these questions before; that's nothing new in and of itself. But the method is. Boyhood is occasionally being compared to Michael Apted's Up documentaries, which set out to interview the same group of people every seven years to see how their lives and goals changed over time. But while those films did allow us to see the same people at seven-years old, fourteen-years old, and so on, we had to (initially) wait seven years and watch a different film to see each age. Boyhood is a (kind of) complete life experience in one sitting.

True Detective wasn't as thematically ambitious, but it's business model of having a continuing show where each season has no characters or settings in common with the previous one is pretty radical. Yes, American Horror Story beat True Detective to the punch in this regard by a little over a year, but the key difference is in how each show used this model. American Horror Story did so almost secretively, while True Detective shouted it from the rooftops. True Detective wanted you to know that each season was its own thing, and would not be continued. It wanted you to understand that it was able to sign on A-List movie stars because of its very ability to not require an actor to be locked in for several seasons. It wanted you to know that you didn't have to commit to some five-plus-season-long meandering vision, that this was an eight-week deal, so you needn't worry about getting attached to some saga that will take five years to answer any of your questions. Everything that American Horror Story did almost incidentally, True Detective heavily advertised as key reasons to tune in.

It needs to be pointed out that this is the exact opposite of how television financially banked on itself in the past. What made successful television over the last six decades was the assurance of relative perpetuity; the idea that something was being created which could then be counted on for stable financial gain over a very long period of time. Television had always been in the real estate business. The great television shows used to be like Stan Lee's manifesto for Marvel Comics: give only the illusion of change, while actually creating a status quo that can theoretically exist forever. Of course prestige shows have been hacking that model to death for years now. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and their ilk have thrived on actual change far more than any illusion of such, but the key continuance has been the show itself. We still tune in, year in and year out, to see where these characters will go, and the networks that control them know we will. But with True Detective, whether or not we tune in again next year doesn't have anything to do with seeing where any of it will go. It's gone. That story was told, and next year will be a different one. It's television officially turning into a cinematic business model: give people something they'll pay to see, and worry about the next source of income later.

So what does all this mean? What does it mean that one of the best television shows of the year gave us a singular eight-hour experience that won't be returned to, and that one of the year's best films gave us a decades-spanning experience that was created over the same span of time as it portrays? Well, it means a lot. For television, it means that the steady branding networks have depended on for success since the dawn of television might not be important anymore in the near future. It means that instead of trying to sell talented people on the idea of signing in to projects that they'll be chained to for years, those same creative people can now be sold on the idea of creating an eight hour movie, where their "vision" doesn't have to be burdened by the realities of how long an audience is willing to sit still in a theater. Why have top tier filmmakers historically never gone to television (with the occasional exceptions of a Martin Scorsese or David Fincher directing a pilot episode, and then scaling back to however hands off "executive producer" allows them to be)? Because why would they? That would just be signing up for creative stagnancy instead of the ability to follow their muse in any given year. But the True Detective model (as it will inevitably be called) will allow for that. It will allow for their muse to be followed, with a greater freedom of depth than a standard film run-time allows for. We've already seen it again now with Steven Soderbergh and Cinemax's The Knick, which he quickly filmed like a ten hour movie. This is about to start happening very frequently, and five years from now, it may be the new norm.

With Boyhood, the major miracle is in the green light. A lot of business models require funding and investment that won't be returned for more than ten years. Good scotch, for example. But film has never been one of those. Think about this in financial terms: someone ponied up millions of dollars for an art-house director to film the same core set of four people over the course of twelve years, and then release a three-hour film with no plot at the end of those dozen years. It required beginning with a six-year old, banking that this person will grow up in a vaguely normal way, stay heathy, stay interested, and basically that nothing will go wrong. Because, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to depend on a six-year old for, and to risk millions of dollars over. But… it worked (!). Boyhood is a hit. Audiences are melting over it. Critics are running out of laudatory adjectives. Personally, I haven't begged this many people to see a movie since probably The Social Network in 2010, when I spent months workshopping different ways to tell people over the age of forty that, "it's not really about Facebook." What began over twelve years ago as an asinine financial risk looks today like one of the best investments in creative vision that a Hollywood producer has ever doled out.

I don't know if the "Boyhood model" will become a thing quite as obviously as the True Detective model will. Even though it took television roughly seventy years to figure this out, it's already clear how and why the True Detective model will quickly become the new norm. The future for projects like Boyhood is much hazier. The financial risk of fronting money for something that can't earn a dime for over a decade will never become un-risky. Banking on actors--a profession where people notoriously don't stay sane and normal for long periods of time--to dependably create something over years and years without courting disaster might not ever become a common-place thing. But the business lesson of Boyhood doesn't have to be in creating a new norm--just a new possibility. That's what great art does; it keeps breaking through with new possibility.

Song of the Day: James Brown - Down and Out In New York City (1973)

The biggest change in my taste over the last five years is undoubtedly how much more soul/blues/jazz/rap I listen to now, or for lack of a better term, black music. I had always liked soul, with Otis Redding and Sam & Dave having been amongst my favorites since my early-20s, but I hadn't fully gotten into James Brown until more recently. Sure, I owned Live at the Apollo and a hits compilation, because those are mandatory if you love pop music, but I didn't start fully immersing myself into his catalogue until the last few years, and now I just can't get enough. He's absolutely my all-time favorite African-American artist now, and I've amassed a pretty substantial collection of his music. To be fair, a lot of Brown's music is startlingly similar. He basically had three phases of his career: the early soul years, the years from about '65-'70 when he pretty much invented the future trajectory of black music, and then everything since, which mostly held to the formula. But Brown is one of those artists for which digging through the stacks and dustbins of his recorded output will always yield a lot of rewards, because he recorded so much material, and maintained such a consistently high standard of quality. 

Down and Out in New York City is my favorite Brown discovery of the last few years, a song so good that I still can't fathom why it appears on so few of his Best Of compilations. It was recorded for the soundtrack of the film Black Caesar in 1973, which was one of a handful of hugely successful Blaxploitation soundtracks from that era (with Shaft and Superfly being the two most notable). It actually sounds somewhat dissimilar from a lot of Brown's other work at the time, probably because he didn't write this song (a major rarity for him), and it's more of a pure soul song for the era. But Brown still adds just enough funk to make it clearly his own, and the result is stunning. That someone can release a four disc box set of his best work, and this song didn't even make the cut, will forever amaze me. For those of you hearing it for the first time, I hope it blows your mind just as much as it did mine.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 21, 2014

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Song of the Day: The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (1971)

Yesterday was Pete Townshend's birthday, and there were a million Facebook tributes to him, so here's one more.

The Who were the first non-contemporary-to-myself musical artist that I truly obsessed over, and they were my favorite artist ever for a solid 3-4 years before my Springsteen love went into overdrive. They were definitely the first artist that I accumulated 10 or more CDs by (a statement that now describes MANY artists). I loved how they kept reinventing themselves and pushing what they were, from the early days of mod/punk/garage/ "maximum R&B" to the rock operas to virtually inventing classic rock, Townshend could never artistically sit still. 

I don't know if Who's Next is my favorite version of the band anymore, but it certainly was for a long time, and nothing represents that better than the epic album closer, Won't Get Fooled Again. Most of my favorite songs always have a moment where the music and the aural experience becomes truly transcendent to me, and I think this is the song that first made me realize that was something I look for. The long synth solo that builds to an explosion of drums at the 7:30 mark, which then culminates with rock and roll's greatest ever scream at the 7:45 mark, is about as orgasmic as rock music can get. It doesn't mean as much to me now as it did when I was 16 (when rock music was still the only place I could look to for orgasms) but it's still damn great.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 20, 2014

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Song of the Day: The Kinks - Powerman (1970)

I recently re-watched Wes Anderson's wonderful The Darjeeling Limited (which, for my money, is his second best film after The Royal Tenenbaums), and I was reminded how well Anderson uses three different songs from the 1970 Kinks album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround in the film. The sequences using these Kinks songs each feature slow motion movement of the characters, no dialogue or diegetic sound, and showcase the three most important moments in the film. Anderson has used pop songs like this in several of his films, and occasionally takes criticism for being too hipster in the doing, but the sequences almost always work for me. 

Powerman is the best of the three Kinks songs he uses here, and it soundtracks the film's iconic moment where the three Whitman brothers literally (and figuratively) shed their father's baggage (seen at the 3:23 moment of the included video). That this song wasn't a single, doesn't appear on Kinks' Best Of compilations, and isn't likely to be heard on the radio is apropos. Somehow, the Kinks just never quite made it in America, where they're almost regarded as a three-hit-wonder (with You Really Got Me, Lola, and Come Dancing being the three "hits"). But in England, they were probably the fourth biggest band of the 60's, and virtually everything they released from 1964-1971 is outstanding. The conventional wisdom suggests they were "too English" to make it in America, and that's a shame. They recorded dozens and dozens of songs this good during their peak, and they're all worth checking out. Powerman is nothing more than an effective example of what they did all the time.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 19, 2014

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