Saturday, January 21, 2006
Movie Club
I just finished reading Slate's movie club from 2005, here are my three favorite quotes.
From Scott Foundas
something wonderful the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami once said to me in an interview: "I make one film as a filmmaker, but the audience, based on that film, makes 100 movies in their minds. Every audience member can make his own movie. This is what I strive for. Sometimes, when my audiences tell me about the mental movies they have made based on my movie, I am surprised, and I become the audience for their movies as they are describing them to me." I think that's true of what the majority of the most interesting filmmakers hope to achieve with their work, whether or not they could articulate it as eloquently as Kiarostami.
I like this quote just cause it makes me feel better for not getting out of movies what all the other much smarter people around me get out of movies.
From David Edelstein.
I'm stunned to see among your top 10 Woody Allen's Match Point, which on a second viewing seemed even more gratingly superficial and out-of-joint than I'd thought the first time through—when I enjoyed the change of venue (to England) and was delighted to hear a Woody Allen protagonist (played by Jonathan Rhys-Myers) who did not sound remotely like Woody Allen. This time around it occurred to me that he did not sound like any human, full stop. I mean, period. See, writing with an English accent does wonders for one's rhythms. Myers plays a former professional tennis player of modest means who totes around a copy of Crime and Punishment and bonds with the wealthy aristocrats over his love of opera … only in Woody World. For a change, Allen doesn't indulge in showy long takes, and he even manages to generate some suspense. But a Crimes and Misdemeanors transplant in which a character says, in effect, "If I commit a crime and am not punished, this is proof of the nonexistence of God" makes me want to grab his chicken neck and throw him on a plane to Darfur with Nick Kristof and Bill O'Reilly. Why doesn't Allen adapt a good novel or, better yet, direct someone else's script? He has surprises left in him as a director, but not as a human being.
This quote crystallizes some of my problems with Match Point. The character of Chris Wilton really just didn't seem like anyone I know, or even all that real to me.
From Scott Foundas
David opened the floor to suggestions of the year's worst movies, and Crash is certainly a good starting point for me. Admittedly, Paul Haggis' directorial debut wasn't one of those so-bad-it's-mesmerizing debacles, like Town & Country or The Bonfire of the Vanities, that Tony so lovingly remembered a few weeks back in the Times—if it had been, it wouldn't have made my blood boil nearly as much. No, Crash is an Important Film About the Times in Which We Live, which is another way of saying that it's one of those self-congratulatory liberal jerk-off movies that rolls around every once in a while to remind us of how white people suffer too, how nobody is without his prejudices, and how, when the going gets tough, even the white supremacist cop who gets his kicks from sexually harassing innocent black motorists is capable of rising to the occasion. How touching. Haggis is trafficking in much the same territory here as Michael Haneke is in Caché, only he lacks the guts to pull out his paring knife and fillet his bourgeois characters with the mercilessness they deserve. (Instead, when Sandra Bullock's pampered Brentwood housewife accuses a Mexican-American locksmith of copying her keys for illicit purposes, Haggis doesn't condemn her reprehensible behavior so much as he sympathizes with it.) People who say that Crash is an insightful portrait of life in Los Angeles clearly don't live in the same town I do. Watching it, I wondered if Haggis hadn't sat down with a copy of Thom Andersen's brilliant essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself and deliberately written a script that reinforces every bogus assumption about life in the city—from the thesis that the only way people in L.A. connect with one another is by getting into car crashes to the depiction of the untold dangers of driving south of the 10 Freeway—that Andersen so skillfully shoots down. And in a year that brought many (and in some cases justified) accusations of racial insensitivity against movies from King Kong to Memoirs of a Geisha, it was Crash that gave us Larenz Tate and Ludacris as carjackers who view their actions as a form of civilized protest, and Terrence Howard as creepy embodiment of emasculated African-American yuppiedom. Not since Spanglish—which, alas, wasn't that long ago—has a movie been so chock-a-block with risible minority caricatures or done such a handy job of sanctioning the very stereotypes it ostensibly debunks. Welcome to the best movie of the year for people who like to say, "A lot of my best friends are black."
I thought this bit on Crash was interesting. I agree with him that there were a lot of caricatures in Crash. I also agree with his sense that the movie was heavy handed and full of race movie cliches. But I don't know in the end (to use a cliche myself), I felt like that whole was greater than the sum of the parts. I do not know who Scoot Foundas interacts with, but it seems that at the end of the day, the movie rings true because race is such a big deal in our society. I have never met a person who does not hold racial stereotypes. My least favorite current stereotype are those who criticize people who don't act like their race, (asian people who act "white," white people who act "black," black people who act "white"), or alternately criticism of people who spend too much time with another race, you always hear of people calling white guys who hang out with Asians all the time as having some sort of fetish. I find this idea that we should always hang out with large groups of our own race really upsetting. I think a movie like crash being as main stream as it was, made me think about this for the 5th millionth time, and that is a good thing.
From Scott Foundas
something wonderful the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami once said to me in an interview: "I make one film as a filmmaker, but the audience, based on that film, makes 100 movies in their minds. Every audience member can make his own movie. This is what I strive for. Sometimes, when my audiences tell me about the mental movies they have made based on my movie, I am surprised, and I become the audience for their movies as they are describing them to me." I think that's true of what the majority of the most interesting filmmakers hope to achieve with their work, whether or not they could articulate it as eloquently as Kiarostami.
I like this quote just cause it makes me feel better for not getting out of movies what all the other much smarter people around me get out of movies.
From David Edelstein.
I'm stunned to see among your top 10 Woody Allen's Match Point, which on a second viewing seemed even more gratingly superficial and out-of-joint than I'd thought the first time through—when I enjoyed the change of venue (to England) and was delighted to hear a Woody Allen protagonist (played by Jonathan Rhys-Myers) who did not sound remotely like Woody Allen. This time around it occurred to me that he did not sound like any human, full stop. I mean, period. See, writing with an English accent does wonders for one's rhythms. Myers plays a former professional tennis player of modest means who totes around a copy of Crime and Punishment and bonds with the wealthy aristocrats over his love of opera … only in Woody World. For a change, Allen doesn't indulge in showy long takes, and he even manages to generate some suspense. But a Crimes and Misdemeanors transplant in which a character says, in effect, "If I commit a crime and am not punished, this is proof of the nonexistence of God" makes me want to grab his chicken neck and throw him on a plane to Darfur with Nick Kristof and Bill O'Reilly. Why doesn't Allen adapt a good novel or, better yet, direct someone else's script? He has surprises left in him as a director, but not as a human being.
This quote crystallizes some of my problems with Match Point. The character of Chris Wilton really just didn't seem like anyone I know, or even all that real to me.
From Scott Foundas
David opened the floor to suggestions of the year's worst movies, and Crash is certainly a good starting point for me. Admittedly, Paul Haggis' directorial debut wasn't one of those so-bad-it's-mesmerizing debacles, like Town & Country or The Bonfire of the Vanities, that Tony so lovingly remembered a few weeks back in the Times—if it had been, it wouldn't have made my blood boil nearly as much. No, Crash is an Important Film About the Times in Which We Live, which is another way of saying that it's one of those self-congratulatory liberal jerk-off movies that rolls around every once in a while to remind us of how white people suffer too, how nobody is without his prejudices, and how, when the going gets tough, even the white supremacist cop who gets his kicks from sexually harassing innocent black motorists is capable of rising to the occasion. How touching. Haggis is trafficking in much the same territory here as Michael Haneke is in Caché, only he lacks the guts to pull out his paring knife and fillet his bourgeois characters with the mercilessness they deserve. (Instead, when Sandra Bullock's pampered Brentwood housewife accuses a Mexican-American locksmith of copying her keys for illicit purposes, Haggis doesn't condemn her reprehensible behavior so much as he sympathizes with it.) People who say that Crash is an insightful portrait of life in Los Angeles clearly don't live in the same town I do. Watching it, I wondered if Haggis hadn't sat down with a copy of Thom Andersen's brilliant essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself and deliberately written a script that reinforces every bogus assumption about life in the city—from the thesis that the only way people in L.A. connect with one another is by getting into car crashes to the depiction of the untold dangers of driving south of the 10 Freeway—that Andersen so skillfully shoots down. And in a year that brought many (and in some cases justified) accusations of racial insensitivity against movies from King Kong to Memoirs of a Geisha, it was Crash that gave us Larenz Tate and Ludacris as carjackers who view their actions as a form of civilized protest, and Terrence Howard as creepy embodiment of emasculated African-American yuppiedom. Not since Spanglish—which, alas, wasn't that long ago—has a movie been so chock-a-block with risible minority caricatures or done such a handy job of sanctioning the very stereotypes it ostensibly debunks. Welcome to the best movie of the year for people who like to say, "A lot of my best friends are black."
I thought this bit on Crash was interesting. I agree with him that there were a lot of caricatures in Crash. I also agree with his sense that the movie was heavy handed and full of race movie cliches. But I don't know in the end (to use a cliche myself), I felt like that whole was greater than the sum of the parts. I do not know who Scoot Foundas interacts with, but it seems that at the end of the day, the movie rings true because race is such a big deal in our society. I have never met a person who does not hold racial stereotypes. My least favorite current stereotype are those who criticize people who don't act like their race, (asian people who act "white," white people who act "black," black people who act "white"), or alternately criticism of people who spend too much time with another race, you always hear of people calling white guys who hang out with Asians all the time as having some sort of fetish. I find this idea that we should always hang out with large groups of our own race really upsetting. I think a movie like crash being as main stream as it was, made me think about this for the 5th millionth time, and that is a good thing.
# posted by Julia @ 11:29 AM 
