Queens of the Cinema

The Queen is certainly great, and I thought Sheen was really good, in addition to everyone else. I also wasn't interested in the subject matter per se--I remember Diana's death, but I hadn't recalled anything about a controversy surrounding the response of the royals. The only weak thing in the movie is that dumb stag symbolism, but everything else is top notch.

I liked Marie Antoinette a lot, though I was somewhat let down by how suddenly it ended. Dunst is excellent, and it seemed apparent that she and Coppola were on the same page in trying to demonstrate what it might have been like for a young girl to grow up in the middle of that bizarro world.

The last time Hollywood indulged so readily and so often in dreary biopics and unwatchable historical epics was a period of decay and declining revenues (the early to mid 1960s). And of course the greatest stinker of the era (Cleopatra) managed to be both.

By 1967 more than one studio was on the verge of bankruptcy (Paramount famously [and in a delicious bit of symbolic coincidence] was within weeks of being sold to the cemetery across the street). And the fusion of desperation, technology, and invention (as well as the reinvention of certain forms) made the New Hollywood possible, if not inevitable.

But that part is obvious.

What isn't entirely obvious is whether there will be a new renaissance in American filmmaking, and if there is whether it will be national in theme (as the New Hollywood was), or multicultural.

There's that famous quote from Eudora Welty (I think): all great literature (or is it culture?) is regional. That's a half-truth. All great culture is regional, and national.

But what happens in a time of globalization, and the eroding primacy of the nation-state. Remember: you couldn't have Shakespeare until there was a myth of England, and you couldn't have a myth of England until there was an England (which for all intents and purposes didn't really exist as something separate from France until after the 100 Years' War; Norman French was still being spoken in English manor houses in the age of Elizabeth, even if Norman surnames had by then been anglicized all over the British Isles).

Film, like so much American business, has become radically internationalist in recent decades. Movies aren't just tested in Irvine and Des Moines anymore, but Bangalore and Santiago. This affects not only marketing, but content.

There have been some good films this decade, from Million Dollar Baby to LIE, The Royal Tenenbaums to Master and Commander. Some of the best films (Mystic River, Wes Anderson's movies) prove that you can make films that are both postmodern and on national themes, but - you know - "The Phantom Menace" is no "Empire Strikes Back" and "Chicago" is no "All that Jazz". Blockbusters become increasingly banal and lifeless, kept alive by the international and DVD market. Last year's Oscar picks were especially depressing (Brokeback might have been a great film if the surviving one had avenged his lover's death, then killed himself - Crash was a PC travesty with literally no esthetic merit). And speaking of esthetic merit: just who is lighting these films? You would think that with a record number of film school graduates they would at least be able to light in a room, but they look worse more of the time than national credit card ads on TV. And don't even get me started on the boring crap that passes for independent cinema these days. If you don't understand the basic principles of classical narrative by the time you start making movies (or how to mess with them in a compelling way) don't bother.

To be sure, there is a revolution in technology (and possibly distribution) on the horizon every bit as sweeping and important as the one that brought the great leap forward in special effects during the late 1960s and 1970s. It is of course digital technology, and while HDTV cameras (which are really the only ones that rival film) still cost as much or more than a good 35mm unit, and while few theatres have DVD projectors, the cost of a good digital camera comes down every year, and the number of venues with digital projection capabilities increases every year.

In real terms, this could be the long-awaited democratization of filmmaking. It is not inconceivable that some kids in Iowa could produce a great American film on a nothing budget in the near future, and even have a successful grassroots marketing campaign, getting it into local and regional theatres without a national distributor (the obstacle has always been the cost of the print; DVD changes that).

But even if they have the artistic talent I have to wonder whether in the era of eroding national borders and weakening central governments (!Viva Iraq!) they'll really be able to make those great American films. I have to wonder if the same kind of fragmentation taking place in politics and markets and music and so much else won't radically reduce the number of films of genuine national importance. I have to wonder if the next age of filmmaking won't be far less national in orientation and far more multicultural. The gays get their own films, the evangelicals theirs, the Mormons their own too. And so on.

I have to wonder if this isn't a sad thing.

Well, that was quite the incoherent rant...

"Brokeback might have been a great film if the surviving one had avenged his lover's death, then killed himself"

So they should have turned Heath Ledger's character into a cross between Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and Tatsuya Nakadai in Harakiri? Yeah, great idea.

Mormon cinema is already here.

Also, Steve Coogan is just great in every movie I've seen him in.

24 Hour Party People is such a great movie. I don't know that I've seen him in anything else.

Since Bush/Cheney stole the 2000 election, Unemployment went up from 4% to over 6%. During President Clinton's term, unemployment went down from 7% to 4%. Americans living under the Federal Poverty Level went up by almost 7 million from 2000 to 2006, while during President Clinton's term the number of impoverished Americans went down by 7.7 million.

Since Bush/Cheney stole the election in 2000, the share of income going to our poorest has gone down to all-time record levels and the percentage of income going to the richest 15% of Americans rose to all-time record levels. The average amount by which Americans fell below the poverty level also hit a record of $2,707. Experts don’t expect the trend to change unless Republican policys are reversed.

Over 1.5 million jobs were lost from early 2001 to late 2002. During President Clinton's term, more than 22 million jobs were gained. More than 2 million people were laid off in 2001 by Republican-owned companies such as Enron and Worldcom, and another 2 million layoffs occured in 2002, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

The percentage of MBA graduates in the top 30 U.S. business schools finding a job within 3 months of graduation went down from 97% in 2000 to 80% percent in 2002, according to Business Week.

Since Bush/Cheney stole the election in 2000, our American Budget Deficit has topped 6 Trillion dollars, after a Surplus of over 400 Billion dollars was generated by President Clinton.

Since Bush/Cheney stole the election in 2000, their disregard for international diplomacy and their go-it-alone invasion of Iraq has caused Iran and North Korea to develop nuclear wepons, yet Bush has repeatedly and entirely failed to link Hussein with the WTC attack on 911. Bush, Cheney, and dozens of other Republican leaders were willing to sacrifice 655,000 American, Iraqi, and many other nationals lives for their own personal business and political gain.

Since Bush/Cheney stole the election in 2000, Bush, Cheney and the Republicans created ill-will among many of our former allies overseas by breaking nuclear treaties and refusing to sign environmental pacts like the Kyoto Accords. How can we expect other countries to support us when we don’t support important global issues our international neighbors care about?

Since Bush/Cheney stole the elections in 2000, the Federal Government has desecrated our treasured National Parks for all time by putting oil wells in such places as Utah’s Arches Park.

Since Bush/Cheney stole the elections in 2000, the total number of Americans without health care increased to over 46 million, the largest increase in over 10 years, according to groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO. Bush/Cheney have done nothing to address the increase in the uninsured except to continually suggest that private faith-based groups should pick up their slack, and that the government should invest American's Social Security funds in the roller-coaster stock market.

Crimes besides those of the twice-unelected Bush/Cheney Republicans increased by 2% in 2001, according to the FBI, the first increase in more than a decade. Republicans care more about school children saying the Pledge of Allegiance than significantly increasing funding for education, especially lowering tuition and fees for Higher Education, which will do more to further our pledge "Liberty And Justice For All" than simply saying that pledge.

Since Bush/Cheney stole the elections in 2000, Republicans have cut and run from several dozen critical domestic programs to pay for an endless war against a concept to support their friends who own the oil and weapons corporations, causing the number of homeless Americans to continue to rise, and since Bush/Cheney stole the elections in 2000, our American Constitution, Civil Liberties, and the Great Writ of Habeus Corpus; the foundation of civilized Law itself, has been shredded as sheepishly intimidated Republican legislators push to create an American Police State in order to appease their criminal unelected GOP leaders.

Since Bush/Cheney stole the 2000 election in our Supreme Court itself, even more radical far-right wing judges who will stop our elections to tell us who won and make other undemocratic and unamerican decisions have been appointed to our Federal Courts. Dozens of Republican officials embroiled in scandal after scandal, many involving despicable sexual crimes against children, continue to blame President Clinton for everything that has gone wrong under this despotic GOP tyranny, making a total mockery of Republican claims to their exclusive notions of "morality" and "responsibility." Most government Republicans are liars or worse.

Nothing has been done to fix the "problems", fraud, and outright theft perpetrated by Diebold and other electronic machines instituted by Bush, Cheney, and the Republicans in 2000. Bush has taken more days of vacation than any American president in history, including the entire month of August 2001, when he had early warning of an impending terrorist attack. Bush then remained on vacation for the entire month, doing nothing about the warning he had.

SCMT, you should see Tristram Shandy and (at least) the Coogan-Molina segment of Coffee and Cigarettes. And you should do a meme somewhere.

Re: Norman French was still being spoken in English manor houses in the age of Elizabeth

Can you document this? French was dropped at Court by Edward III 200 years earlier. And by the time the Turdors came on the scene the old Norman nobility of England had torn itself to death in the Wars of the Roses, so that most of Elizabeth's noblemen were jumped-up bourgeois raised by her father and grandfather. The Tudors themselves came from very middle-middle origins, but just happened to have the good luck of a Plantagenet bastard great-grandmother.

"Can you document this?"

I imagine the historian and professor of history at Oxford * J.M. Roberts (to whom I can attribute that factoid, although I'm forgetting which of his books it came from) can.

* Roberts may have died by now (or it may have been some other major academic/popular historian I'm thinking of who died) in which case he would be a former professor of history at Oxford.

"...the Turdors came on the scene..."

Turdors indeed, or as we Yorkists (well, sort of anyhow; my 13th or 15th or whatever great-grandmother Mrs. Elizabeth Woodville looted the treasury on behalf of our family [which makes me think she was either really hot or really mean or both for Edward IV to put up with that shit]) might say: damn Welsh.

"Well, that was quite the incoherent rant..."

But I look stunning in a sarong. Some nights I prefer a mesh wrap. What about you?

"Yeah, great idea."

Yep.

There's a reason why Gatsby is a better work of fiction than Brokeback (or for that matter Easy Rider, which it most resembles), and it has nothing to do with the fact that one is a novel and the other a movie.

Like Easy Rider, Brokeback is a lovely written and directed and acted and photographed propaganda piece on behalf of the cultural warriors of the left. As a matter of fact, I don't believe the gay rights movement today is radical (and therefore interesting) enough, but politics is one thing, and art something else. Easy Rider and Brokeback both might easily have become revenge tragedies, but their writers and directors chose pathos over catharsis.

Kill Bill was a lazy, self-indulgent, cartoonish and uninspired revenge flick.

"lazy, self-indulgent, cartoonish and uninspired"

And you like Wes Anderson, huh

That a piece of art doesn't give you what you wanted it to often (maybe usually?) isn't the art's fault.

And dude, all Crash had going for it was its "esthetic merit". Good acting and pretty lighting, just like American Beauty, are enough to get me to enjoy a film even if it's not as profound as it thinks it is.

Just watched a 2005 movie Stay with MacGregor, Gosling, Watts. Good art movie. Scott Lemieux over at LGM is talking about Bicycle Thief. I watched 400 Blows, and Virgin Spring last week. I have no intention of seeing Queen or Marie Antoinette. Not excited about Brokeback Mountain:Linus is right, looks like bathos to me. Rather watch any Almodovar.

Big budgets make bad movies. I have really good luck with indies and foreign films. What, Linus wants a $100 million art film? Dream on. It wouldn't be art, by definition it would be product.

Is "Easy Rider" OK again, and no longer crap?

The Jacket Adrien Brody, Keira Knightly. Another arty "repetitive" indie I liked. Like Stay. Watched Cocteau's Orphee and Malle's Black Moon recently.

I want movies to break out of narrative. A lot of the best 60s and 70s directors were trying. Film is a visual, emotional medium, you should need narrative as little as painting needs representation or poetry needs rhyme. I am sick of our major art medium being stuck in the 19th century.

And narrative is politically repressive, which is why it endures.

oops. Easy Rider is ok with me. But saw Fonda's Hired Hand recently. Kids, get out of the theatres, stay home, watch cable or do some research and use Netflix. Hollywood totally sucks.

"Is "Easy Rider" OK again, and no longer crap?"

I think it was always very good, just not great. I also think Brokeback falls short of greatness in precisely the same way.

"And dude, all Crash had going for it was its "esthetic merit"."

Apparently we are having definitional differences. Crash would never cut muster in an intro screenwriting course at a 2nd tier film school. It is in the language of that world "didactic," a story that seems far more hellbent on impressing upon you how racist LA is than bringing a freshness to classical story conventions. If you want to make a documentary about racial tensions in LA make a documentary about racial tensions in LA; it could be great. If you want to make a documentary about anti-gay hate crimes make a documentary about anti-gay hate crimes (although at least Brokeback was a genuine and heartfelt story). But if you're going to make a multi-culti propaganda piece I wish they wouldn't shower you with awards.

There are multiple story forms appropriate for making a political point. Satire is the most obvious. It's possible to do tragedy or comedy with political overtones too. But Crash had no more artistic merit than Pay it Forward. It was the worst kind of manipulative. In another 100 years (and probably much less) it will look no better than all those unreadable temperance novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Is "Easy Rider" OK again, and no longer crap?

No, still crap.

"What, Linus wants a $100 million art film?"

No, no. Just great Hollywood pictures. If we could get one movie a year as good as any of the dozen or more great films that came out every year in the 1940s and 1970s then I might be content. I'm not sure anyone considers Key Largo or Chinatown or Singin in the Rain or the Godfather art films, but they were great American films. I'd like to see more of them.

Thank you for your agreement on Brokeback Bob. You are a gracious man.

Apparently we are having definitional differences.

Indeed. As I thought the rest of my post made clear, by "esthetic" I meant - and took you to mean, considering that you went on to talk about lighting - what it actually looked like.

And, yeah, Crash is ridiculously heavy-handed and I think your comparison to temperance novels isn't a bad one, but its heavy-handedness to me comes in the way that it piles on scene on top of another; what always struck me a little weird about people going off on how "unrealistic" Crash was is that most of the racist moments in the movie have either happened to me, or in my presence, or to people I know. Stringing them all together in an Altman ripoff where most of the character find redemption and it culminates in a cleansing snowfall is of course entirely unrealistic, but I don't think Haggis *wanted* realism, and it's his movie. For all that I agree that Crash isn't an insightful picture of how racism works in America, it's not exactly *wrong* on any given particular, either, and the hamfisted resolutions are part and parcel of Hollywood movie making going back for ever. Besides, if you want a great movie from 2005, look no further than The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Mystic River one of the best movies of the decade?! If you can't see all the things wrong with this film, then you have no clue about film. Yeah, and nobody knows how to light a film anymore, never mind that this is total bs - it also clashes with the inconvenient fact that the cameramen of many top movies are in their 50s to 70s now. Oh, and you don't understand the whole digital thing either.

I want movies to break out of narrative. A lot of the best 60s and 70s directors were trying. Film is a visual, emotional medium, you should need narrative as little as painting needs representation or poetry needs rhyme. I am sick of our major art medium being stuck in the 19th century.

Actually, Bob, this makes it sound like Marie Antoinette might be up your alley.

24 Hour Party People is such a great movie. I don't know that I've seen him in anything else.

Saxondale has just made it onto BBC America. Think 'aging rock roadie dealing with life after the band'. Very funny.

On royalty, the HBO/C4 co-prod Elizabeth I, with Helen Mirren starrying, is very good.

"Mystic River one of the best movies of the decade?! If you can't see all the things wrong with this film, then you have no clue about film."

Most good films are imperfect, but Brokeback is imperfect in ways more irritating than Mystic River.

"Yeah, and nobody knows how to light a film anymore, never mind that this is total bs - it also clashes with the inconvenient fact that the cameramen of many top movies are in their 50s to 70s now."

Cameramen don't light rooms.

"Oh, and you don't understand the whole digital thing either."

And I'm a jerk, and a meanie, and a dodo brain. But if you vote for me for class president I'll get pepsi in the drinking fountains.

"Mystic River" was dull and obvious (I'd like to talk Sean Penn back into retirement from acting) and "Million Dollar Baby" was duller and more obvious than "Mystic River".

"Singin' in the Rain" is, in fact, art.

Narrative isn't politically repressive.

Steve Coogan was funny in Tristram Shandy and not funny in "Around the World in 80 Days". (Rob Brydon was even funnier in Tristram Shandy. The joke "feel my teeth" is as funny a joke as I've heard in the movies in years. And it was a throwaway.)

"American Beauty" was a satire on all the people who thought "American Beauty" a good movie. It's the only way to think of it without going crazy. (It's actually an updating of "Our Town", but is ham-handed and tedious anyway.)

People shouldn't try to correct Eudora Welty without getting their horse laugh innoculations.

We need to find We The People and stop him.

""American Beauty" was a satire on all the people who thought "American Beauty" a good movie. It's the only way to think of it without going crazy."

Now that I know why I'm crazy, perhaps you could explain to me how I got so stupid too.

America: kinder, gentler!

Now that I know why I'm crazy, perhaps you could explain to me how I got so stupid too.

I'm going to guess that it's as the sgt in Goodbye to All That said, "With heffort."

I don't trust the opinion of any leftist on anything, including films. The left is an enemy of individual freedom (well, even more so than the right).

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Stringing them all together in an Altman ripoff where most of the character find redemption and it culminates in a cleansing snowfall is of course entirely unrealistic, but I don't think Haggis *wanted* realism, and it's his movie.

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I like very much the writings and pictures and explanations in your adress so I look forward to see your next writings. I congratulate you.

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