Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Island of Lost Souls

It's become a bit of a fashion to bash Martin Scorsese, and that's understandable--in his films of the '70s (Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976) he was an exciting independent filmmaker who hurled his personal obsessions on the big screen; a breathtaking experience and, many of us thought, an essential one. The achievement wasn't so much the violence, which can be bloody, or the immediacy of style, which can be a head-rush thrill, but the self-confessional quality of his cinema, the sense that he's flashing us images of his soul. If we at all respond (and there are those that don't--that are in fact repelled by Scorsese's candor), his achievement becomes all the more extraordinary.

How do you top work like that? Scorsese tried; in Raging Bull (1980) he attempted to dissect the psychology of a violence-obsessed brute accursed with a thirst for redemption (come to think of it, Scorsese might have been prophesying the rise of Mel Gibson). In The King of Comedy (1982) he documented the queasy relationship between a battle-fatigued celebrity and his psychopath fan (think of it as Taxi Driver meets Network). In The Last Temptation of Christ (1989)--easily my favorite of his '80s work--he brought immediacy and angst to the ossified story of Jesus Christ (possibly the film's most iconic image for me was Judas half-dragging Jesus past a broken brick wall--Christ, on the mean streets of Jerusalem). This decade was a searching, a restlessness, a reaching out to various genres, time periods, subject matter; often the attempt and approach, the process by which he tried to explore chosen material, was at least as interesting as the end result.

In the '90s there was still some stretching (The Age of Innocence (1993) was an adaptation of Edith Wharton; Kundun (1997) his adaptation of the Dalai Lama's autobiography), but in key films you saw a concerted effort to pull back, to consolidate over familiar ground. Goodfellas (1990) returned to the genre he is best known for, the Mafia film--it became his most acclaimed picture since Raging Bull. Casino, made some five years later, is to my mind the more interesting work, taking actors from the previous production (Joe Pesci, Robert de Niro) and a similar milieu (the Mafia, this time operating in Vegas) and pitching it at the level and magnitude of opera.

This past decade is possibly his most problematic--he has become Martin Scorsese, America's most respected commercial filmmaker and a cinematic institution; he is able to raise a budget and set of expectations few other filmmaker can handle. Some say he can't--that he's fallen from grace, sold out, whored himself to Hollywood for thirty pieces of silver (or the modern Babylon's equivalent, in thousands of dollars). There's something to that argument--his budgets have become larger, he has come to tackle more conventional material, and the results are more decidedly mixed.

I think it's the mixed results that should clue us in to what he's doing--or at least trying to do. Gangs of New York is the Hollywood historical epic brought to seething life in the sets of Cinecitta; more than the plot (a simplistic one of a boy avenging his father), what possibly interested Scorsese was animating Herbert Asbury's nonfiction history, and juxtaposing the struggle of tiny human figures against the background of a city rising, as it were, from primordial mud (you saw that mud in most scenes, plus the wood four-by-fours sprouting like the citizens' mute aspirations out of the sodden earth). The Aviator (2004) was Scorsese's take on the Hollywood biopic; Hughes' life here not only paralleled the lives of contemporary power figures (a post-election George W. Bush, for one) but climaxed with an introverted life-death struggle: Hughes shutting himself in a room, to deal with his inner demons. The Departed (2006) is perhaps Scorsese's most conventional work--ironically it won him the long-coveted Academy Award for best director--but Scorsese manages to recast Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's thriller as an evolutionary struggle between two rival tribes (their tribal leaders, past breeding age, are identified as the source of both authority and corruption), the final shot revealing who is in the best position to eventually inherit the earth.

Scorsese's latest, Shutter Island (2010), an adaptation of Dennis Lahane's novel and, presumably, his take on the Hollywood psychological thriller, is both his least conventional and for many most problematic. The plot is ridiculous, the acting and atmosphere, overwrought. Easy enough to say this is deliberate, that Scorsese intentionally brought the film's emotional tone up to fever pitch, the better to say what he's trying to say--but what is he trying to say? It's difficult to pin down the theme of a Scorsese film; when he's at his best it's well nigh impossible. The best you can say--as with Goodfellas or Mean Streets or a Gangs of New York--is that he's aiming for an immersive experience, that he wants to fill you with the sights and sounds and emotions of a specific cultural milieu. 

This film alludes to Dachau, to abuses at mental institutions, to the Cold War and mind control experiments; the film also pays homage to, among others, Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor and Val Lewton's haunting mood pieces (I think it a disservice to call them 'horror films'). Critics complain that he's tossing out red herrings, he's referring to other films like a film geek (funny, Quentin Tarantino refers to other films in his latest movie, and not as many people pay mind). Perhaps they've lost patience with Scorsese; perhaps they feel that what he's doing has become tiresome, stale. I understand the sentiment.

Is the reasoning “at least he's directing” so disingenuous? I see him as taking one Hollywood genre after another, and undermining them by tossing out the plot, leaving in the conventions (at least most of them), and telling the story (and we know how little regard he gives story) his way--through the rush of imagery and music, like Michael Powell on amphetamines (and perhaps a few hallucinogens). Perhaps, and this I think is the most serious charge, he has moved away from the sources in his life that made his work such a charged experience--that feeling of stepping into a confessional to listen in every time we step into a movie theater with his name on the marquee. Possibly the well has run dry, and he's had to move on, taking up mainstream Hollywood as the source (monetary, anyway) of his inspiration. Perhaps all he has left is his ability, his skill at telling stories visually--is that such a little thing?

Of his later films, or at least of his visual style when doing the later features (I'm not even going to comment on his documentaries, which I think are tremendous, and a whole other ball of wax) the key film, I think, isn't any particular feature but an omnibus, the 1989 New York Stories, for which he directed the segment “Life Lessons,” an adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Gambler. The key moment there, the single crucial image with which Scorsese possibly identifies the most (still does, for all I know) is of Soho artist Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte) standing before a huge canvas, poised and breathless, as if about to dive in. His love life's a wreck, his woman has nothing but contempt for him, he's under pressure to deliver for an upcoming gallery show, he possibly suspects he's lost his soul (I know Scorsese constantly worries about this, and on the evidence of his recent work most critics must be wondering as well), he possibly hopes to regain it through work, and he's about to try--swiftly and spectacularly, in a symphony of flashing brushes, smearing fingers, spattering paint. Not an easy place to be, but I think it's the place Scorsese most wants to be, even if he has nothing to say, even if he has no one to say it to.

First published in Businessworld, 4.15.10

Mario O'Hara's masterpiece on DVD; Palito; New Dr. Who

Just had to put this out: Mario O'Hara's 1976 masterpiece Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God) is now available on DVD. Word is it's watchable (whatever that means); no mention of English subtitles, or extras of any kind. 

I'd be happier with just a print in good condition--if you ever have a chance to attend a screening (and not one of those 'projected video' horrors people are fond of having nowadays) then please go. 

Otherwise, if this is the only way you get to see the film...well...

The film, incidentally, has been included in Jaime Christley's blog Unexamined Essentials, basically a list of must-see films that deserve to be, well, seen. 

Also released on DVD by the same company is Lino Brocka's Bona (1980)--the selling point being these are two of actress Nora  Aunor's best-known roles. My article on the film can be found here.


Palito (1934 - 2010)

He gave pleasure; he harmed no one; he was totally unpretentious. We don't appreciate them enough, the Stan Laurels of this world (his comedy was predicated on a sweet passivity, as opposed to Oliver Hardy's petulant aggression), but they give their all anyway.


Dr. Who: The Eleventh Hour

A lot of ink and tears have been spilled over the passing of David Tennant's Doctor in The End of Time to which I nodded "yes, that's very  moving; yes, Tennant's very good; yes, he plays his final scene well," but in my heart of hearts kept thinking: "Screw this, when do we get to see the next Steve Moffat?"

They could cast Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor, for all I cared (Dr. Bean?); it was for the Moffat script that I waited, for over a year, and I was not disappointed. No, it wasn't another nail-biter like Blink (which I showed to my students recently, instantly converting most of them to rabid Whovians) no it wasn't a heartbreaker like The Girl in the Fireplace, no it didn't have the substance, the gravitas of his The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances (his best work in the series, in my opine), but it did have that distinct Moffat voice--quick-witted, eccentric, occasionally unsettling, with just that faint but never absent undertone of melancholy, the grief of people whose grasp of time is never firm, ever uncertain. 

At one point in the show (one of those behind-the-scenes TV spots) someone pointed out that Moffat's concept of science fiction is cracks in the wall, monsters under the bed, children in gas masks, weeping stone angels--in short, anything and everything you see around you, slightly skewed and not a little disturbing. It's everyday objects, in short, cast in a more malevolent light (for forty minutes of thrills, it's hard to top Blink--I've had hardened eighteen-year-old boys shriek like girls when the angels start reaching out and snarling). 

Moffat has this gift for running--no, not running, more like skating--across a wide range of emotional tones, turning on a dime from horror to comedy to horror to tragedy. Like when the Doctor (Matt Smith) climbs out of an upended TARDIS and meets Amelia (Caitlin Blackwood): the young girl informs him of a scary crack in the wall; he confesses to a hankering for apples. After the Doctor has sampled (and spat out in disgust) almost everything in Amelia's fridge, he finally settles on fish sticks in custard (ech), during which consumption Amelia informs him that she lives with her aunt, who's out working. 

"And she left you all alone?" the Doctor asks. 

"I'm not scared." 

"'Course you're not, look at you. Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of a box, man eats fish custard. And look at you, just sitting there. So you know what I think?"

"What?"

"Must be a hell of a scary crack in the wall." 

That's a typical Moffat moment--conversation that swirls in eccentric whorls and loops, suddenly swooping down on the point he'd been eyeing all along. Glad to have you back, sir; a  pleasure to once again listen to someone who actually knows how to write sharp dialogue.

And Matt Smith (who plays the Doctor) to his credit keeps up with Moffat's dialogue, his angular face every bit as lumpy and eccentric as the orbital course of that dialogue, his body wire-alert and fast on its feet (you do a lot of running in Dr.Who, but Moffat seems to promise more than the usual amount of sprinting). Karen Gillan as Amy (Amelia as a young woman) is a fiery, fresh-faced foil to Smith, every bit his equal when it comes to banter, at times even physically intimidating the Time Lord. I can't say Smith right off is the better Doctor; can't help but think Moffat's dialogue goes a long way towards making him such a smart, appealing character (Come to think of it, Tennant--and Christopher Eccleston before him--never sounded wittier or more intelligent than when they were mouthing Moffat's dialogue).
.
There's also a strong sexual frankness to this Doctor (not surprising, not if you've followed Moffat's hit comedy series Coupling). After spending most of the episode rushing about in David Tennant's outfit he finally takes the time to pick out new clothing, and strips his old threads. An offended young man asks Amy "Are you not going to turn your back?" "Nope," Amy replies, smiling, obviously checking the Doctor out. Moffat seems to be out to test the boundaries of Who's wholesomeness, and I for one welcome that.

The episode's unstated theme is trust; this is the story of a young girl--representing us, of course--learning to have faith in the apparently undependable Doctor, a total unknown who has the effrontery to capture our hearts, then leave us for years--maybe forever--without even a proper farewell. Moffat takes the basic storyline of The Girl in the Fireplace and inflicts it on a far less accepting girl; the Doctor finds himself forced to measure up to her expectations. 

Behind the comic banter and pratfalls and the rather ordinary villain (a keen disappointment, if it wasn't for the enigmatic and thankfully not overdone signs of more to come), there's the unspoken assumption of heartbreak. The Doctor has disappointed poor Amelia, time and time again; she's learned the harsh lesson most characters in Moffat scripts learn--that time is an insidious, unstable  ("timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly") thing, that our slow-moving, strictly linear consciousness will often conflict with or collide with or (as most often happens) slowly, painfully crumble away under the interminably corrosive influence of time. Moffat more than any other Whovian writer makes me laugh, but under the comedy you sense trauma, you sense sadness, you sense bitterly shed tears.

Not happy with much else: the corny logo ("DW" in the shape of the police box); the frenetic tumbling TARDIS; the overdistorted theme song; the goofy-looking alien ships (mainly eyeballs set into spinning snowflakes), the brightly orange new interior of the TARDIS (I liked the Victorian 'Nautilus' look of yore, all iron girders and amber lighting; this one looked like the inside of a scooped-out Halloween pumpkin)--the overall look of the new series doesn't grab me. But Moffat's scripts do, and how.

Clash of the Titans (Louis Leterrier, 2010)

 Harryhausen's big guy, meeting his blind date for the first time

Crap of the Titans

You'd think they'd get one thing right; you'd think they could take a so-so movie, Ray Harryhausen's 1981 valedictory opus Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davies is the director on record, but let's not kid ourselves--this is Harryhausen's baby all the way) and make a halfway decent picture out of it. Walking out of Louis Leterrier's 2010 remake, though, all I could think of was: “I miss Harryhausen.”

By no stretch of imagination was the original good, much less great--Harry Hamlin looked ridiculous in sandals and miniskirt, and the chemistry between him and starlet Judi Bowker was so underwhelming you kept looking sideways for the Marx Brothers to leap in and save the show. I remember Ursula Andress and Claire Bloom (beautiful actresses, both) being stiff as Greek statues; I remember thinking the mechanical owl was so blatant a rip-off of Artoo Deetoo the filmmakers ought to be sued (and later, when Artoo started taking to the air in ridiculously tiny rockets, wondering if maybe it was the other party that ought to be sued).

But, strange to say, the years have been kind to this Titans. Laurence Olivier's Zeus--who was so salty you could fry him in a pan, add coffee and come up with red-eye gravy--goosed the picture to life whenever he was onscreen. Olivier has his 'thespic' moments--even in a production where he's obviously there for the paycheck he never simply phones in the performance--he's constantly on and ebullient and chewing with much gusto on the badly designed scenery.

Then there are the creatures. Bubo has, finally, become charming (while Artoo through the years has become mean-spirited and annoying); the monstrous Calibo (Neil McCarthy) achieves a sort of tragic stature; Medusa slithers with gravid grace, and has a suitably evil glare; the Kraken, unmistakably modeled after the alien Ymir in Harryhausen's 1957 20 Million Miles to Earth, possesses a grandeur that gets grander every time I see him again (he looks as if he had swallowed an umbrella that snapped open at a moment of high emotion).

And that, for all the stillborn drama and cheesiness of the overall production, is what I remember about the movie--its considerable flaws now forgivable, its virtues considerable. I suppose what John Huston as Noah Cross once said still applies: “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” Harryhausen's Titans is an ugly old building whose time has apparently come.

Keith Phipps of the Onion A.V. Club wrote of the Leterrier remake: “If Clash were a meal, it would come in a paper bag and have some grease stains near the bottom.” I disagree; I don't think Mr. Phipps appreciates the virtues of a greasy burger, the fulsome flavor of properly charred meat on toasted buns, the juices (red from a medium-rare patty) oozing thickly out the sides and staining one corner of the bag. Harryhausen's Titans is a bar burger, a diner's special, a one-of-a-kind creation that's too fatty to be good for you, but makes for a satisfying snack; what Mr. Phipps must be thinking of is a McDonald's Happy Meal, which to my recollection has never stained the corner of anything--it's too dense and flavorless and dried out.

Yes, Leterrier uses the latest in CGI techniques, and yes both Medusa and Kraken move smoother than before--the Medusa skittering over rocks like a frightened gecko, the Kraken lifting his head (and for a while there you think he's nothing but head) out of the ocean, then baring an impressive set of ginzu knives. But Harryhausen's creatures for all their clunkiness had personality--the Medusa dragged her serpentine body painfully across the rocks, and her face held this look of aggrieved fury partly because, you think, she'd been thusly accursed (she almost didn't need that green glow of power emanating from her eyes, the expression was arresting enough). Leterrier's Medusa is a babe with snake hair, and the way she would slither here and there you wonder--why does she kill? If I had that much mobility I'd take a month off and backpack through the Amazon jungle, maybe visit Machu Picchu.

Then there's the Kraken (which, by the way, is Scandinavian, not Greek at all; I can understand the creature vacationing at the Greek Isles to get a tan, but why this sideline involving virgins?)--the Leterrier Kraken is an animal (a rather tasty-looking one at that; give me a lemon wedge and some tartar sauce and I'd be all over that creature), and presumably looks at Andromeda (Alexa Davalos, who to her credit actually manages to look more interested in her eventual fate than Bowker) strictly as food. Harryhausen's Kraken has the whiskers of an old man, the leer of a lecher, and tentacles to match; when he climbs out of the sea, you don't know exactly what will happen--dinner, or the most hideous date rape in recorded history?

And that's pretty much it except I might add that Liam Neeson, who plays Zeus, says the line “Release the Kraken!” as if he was hoping the command would slip by without anyone bothering to obey; fact of the matter is, he looks like he'd rather let the entire movie slip by without anyone bothering to notice he was there, that he'd rather be somewhere else altogether. Now why bother showing up to collect a paycheck if you can't get some kind of satisfaction out of said paycheck? Olivier knew better; if the picture was going to stink (his was like day-old fish; the remake was more like week-old fish--okay, I'm being unfair to week-old fish) then he was going to, if not save it, at least derive some kind of pleasure from it. He was going to have fun, Zeus damn it, and he'll give his equivalent line of dialogue a snap and roll and punch that Neeson would have been wise to emulate (“LET LOOSE THE KRAKKEN!!”). Not exactly great acting, but definitely great hamming.

First published in Businessworld 4.8.10

Altar vs. Avatar

Altar vs. Avatar

At first blush the two pictures couldn't be more different--one is a gigantic Hollywood production with a quarter of a billion dollar budget and fifteen-year development period (two months of which were devoted to live-action photography); the second is a tiny independent production with a thirty thousand dollar budget (barely enough to cover the cost of laundering the former's dirty underwear), two months pre-production period and eight days to actually shoot the movie.

Avatar's commercial run had all the impact of a detonated nuclear device--it's difficult to avoid the fallout from the promotional blitz that surrounded this picture, and as difficult to ignore the scavengers gathered round, picking on the corpses (winning all those Golden Doorstop© nominations won't make it any easier for the dust to dissipate, not for some time). Altar, safe to say, didn't make as much of a splash--a few theaters, a few favorable notices, a few film festivals, and the movie has since dropped from sight as thoroughly as its protagonist did from the outside world.

Avatar makes grand statements about the need to protect our environment (particularly our rain forests) and preserve our tribal cultures (Pandora is of course Earth, and the Na'vi are really our long-oppressed aboriginal tribes). It casts a blanket condemnation on large companies, particularly their security forces, and deliberately invites comparisons between RDA (the movie's rather blandly named villainous corporate entity) and private military contractors operating in Iraq like Blackwater (Not a little ironically one can also compare RDA to News Corp., Rupert Murdoch's anonymous-sounding multimedia conglomerate that in turn owns 20^th Century Fox, this picture's production company).

Altar--well, you can't be sure exactly what it says. That a man cannot escape his destiny (Anton starts the film in a small room, ends the film in a different small room); that love is a luxury few can afford; that moral responsibility begins with sacrifice, then eats away inside of you for a long time, perhaps all your life. Barely anything earth-shaking or consequential, just little observations that might apply to one's personal life.

The two are not as grotesquely mismatched as you may think. Both are digital films, both feature temperamentally passive protagonists (Jake (Sam Worthington) in Avatar, Anton (Zanjoe Marudo) in Altar) pitted against forces beyond their control, or comprehension. Avatar's director James Cameron is famous worldwide for his fascist directing style and outrageous temper tantrums; I haven't heard any horror stories about Altar's director Rico Ilarde--but then all directors must act like dictators if necessary to finish their films. Ilarde's a veteran of both the commercial and independent filmmaking scene; I'm sure he's had to raise his voice now and then.

Avatar is filmmaking on an epic scale; Cameron amassed an array of groundbreaking techniques (Cameron's recent work has often been accompanied by a number of patents, for inventions developed during the making of the picture) to create and shoot the images he throws on the big screen. The camera swoops and falls and dives, especially in the scenes where Jake rides a Toruk, a giant birdlike predator; the camera takes in impossibly huge images, like the craggy islands that float above the planet's surface, or the thousand-foot-high Hometree that the Omaticaya tribe live in. I've always suspected that Cameron's model for much of his action filmmaking was Akira Kurosawa, especially in the way he tries to keep crucial movements on-camera and within a single shot (the Terminator punching through a windshield; Coffey's sub surging after Brigman's; Harry hanging from a helicopter, grabbing Helen's hand as her limo dives into the sea; the camera making a sweep of the length of the Titanic as passengers run from one end of the ship to the other). To get that shot he will act like an emperor, not giving in an inch until he has what he wants. With the freedom of an almost completely virtual environment his style has changed; now the model he seems to be following is that of Robert Zemeckis, who in his version of Beowulf (2007) showed an utter disregard for the laws of gravity and physics, his camera arcing through the space between Beowulf and Grendel like a third character with its own set of superhuman abilities.

Ilarde with his more modest budget can't afford to express that kind of freedom. His is more of a resurrection of the camera style of Howard Hawks (by way perhaps of John Carpenter and Walter Hill) with his classically simple set ups, his refusal to go shaky-cam even with a relatively lightweight digital camera in hand, his precise editing rhythms. He does use digital software--some wire erasures, some smoke and dust clouds, a pair of glowing eyes--but chastely, like lightly applied makeup. Not to say that Altar is all anachronisms, a throwback--Ilarde's images, as I've noted in other articles, combine Hawksian mis-en-scene with J-horror atmosphere and a digital-indie clarity to depict a protagonist that is pure Filipino male. There's a playfulness to his filmmaking, as well as an edge--he's hungry, his films have never been an outright hit (though the commercial ones have made a respectable amount of money), he's out to prove something both as an artist and a commercial filmmaker. Again, another observation I've often made about Ilarde: he's too much fun, too in love with genres like action and comedy and horror (and too fond of mixing them up in bizarre combinations) to be a pure indie artist, the same time his filmmaking is too visually subtle, his material too esoteric, to relegate him to the commercial directors' pile; like his films, he's an oddball hybrid, a scrappy one.

Perhaps the crucial difference between Avatar and Altar is this: with all that money and technology at his employ, Cameron has finally broken the bonds of mere practicality and created action sequences that are, well, unsurprisingly weightless. The Na'vi are totally imagined? Then their massacre totally feels as if it doesn't matter. The Hometree's destruction is virtually rendered? Then the event is virtually free of tragedy. Cameron worked long and hard and expensively to create the tools that create his world (rendered in bright Day-Glo colors, with people dyed Toilet-Duck blue running about) forgetting to give that world emotional heft, a way to affect us as people, as fellow human beings. Ilarde has no other choice but to affect us--he has no other world to offer other than our own, inhabited by people recognizably sad and funny and sexy and afraid, like us.

It doesn't help matters that, for all of Avatar's one hundred and sixty minute running time it's surprisingly light on characterization (well, perhaps not that surprising--Hollywood megaproductions (Transformers 2, Sherlock Holmes) seem to go over the two hour mark nowadays, making one wonder: why are they taking more and more time to say less and less?). Hence the RDA gang, with Stephen Lang chomping on choice bits of scenery and Giovanni Ribisi spreading across the screen like the oiliest of smears--I'm no fan of the military, but even I find myself objecting to Cameron's treatment of his villains. To add insult to injury, RDA's game plan makes little sense--how can they even attempt a policy of “winning the hearts and minds of the natives” when they're bulldozing rain forest without the natives' permission? Why all the withering condescension towards the Na'vi when they know some of their own have defected to the other side, with knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses? Bad enough RDA security is revealed to be so racist--do they have to act retarded as well?

On the other hand the Na'vi are so pure, so noble, so in touch with nature you can't help but feel a little nauseated--they seem ready to zoom straight to heaven, pneumatically sucked up by the sheer force of their virtuousness. Their tactics make little sense either--why hide in a gigantic tree which, strategically speaking, is just one big fat target? Why if everything is interconnected worldwide is the Tree of Souls so important--can't they just go to another tree and plug in? Doesn't the biosystem employ multiple redundancies, for a more stable network?

(Actually, I can answer that last question: the Tree of Souls is important because the movie needs a vulnerable spot where the good guys can stage a “do or die” battle--yet another occasion where plausibility is sacrificed to corny effect)

And why (please skip this paragraph if you haven't seen Cameron's movie (which is unlikely) and plan to do so (which I don't recommend)) if Jake or his human friends are aware of the RDA security forces' strengths and capabilities, don't they plan for the possibility of losing? Which does basically happen. Which is only turned around at the last minute when the entire planet fights back--which, if you want an overall message, isn't exactly the positive one Cameron had in mind: never mind losing the immediate battle, Mother Nature is sure to step in and help win the war. How passive, how perfectly suited to the Na'vi's faux “child of nature / noble savage / guerrilla warrior” philosophy. Might add that another child of nature, Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Nausicaa, knew better; that a military victory meant hard choices, painful sacrifices, and doing less than admirable things to win (one notices Avatar's similarity not just to Miyazaki's Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, 1984), but to the filmmaker's Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997)--not that I think Cameron was canny enough to watch these films, but that Miyazaki's influence on environmental drama is so pervasive even the self-proclaimed King of the World can't avoid it).

Ilarde's characters by way of comparison are equally cartoonish but at a brief ninety minutes the shallowness isn't as grating--it's a horror / action / romantic comedy and pretends to be nothing more (no demands for golden statues, no claims to be a Big Event) and nothing less (no compromising with flashy filmmaking or elaborate digital effects).

That would be Altar's final virtue--its sense of proportion. Ilarde gives the film the right weight and heft, adds just enough of a subtext emphasizing a personal theme (the responsibilities of an able if modest Filipino) to give it a depth of flavor, an emotional sting, a touch of piquancy that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll. With Cameron sense of proportion is the first thing that flies out the window--he's a believer in Bigger is Better, the More the Merrier; a rather simpleminded philosophy. Does he deserve the billions of dollars in boxoffice, the dozens of honors bestowed upon him? Absolutely. It's what he wanted, it's fitting and proper that he gets it; good luck in the long run, when the buzz dies down and the next dozen multimillion dollar productions roll in, bringing their own turmoil and excitement.

By movie's end, Cameron's overblown video game has most audiences cheering for its heroes (they beat the bad guys after all, and Jake gets his girl). The conclusion to Ilarde's film leaves us in an altogether different mood: a little troubled, a little sad, a little sorry for our hapless, helpless hero--human-sized emotions allowed to take root and flourish in a relatively quiet, human-sized picture. Altar or Avatar? Given a choice, I'd take the former--it's more moving, after all. 

First published in the March 2010 issue of Rouge Magazine

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)

Phallus envy

Yes it is; that's what it's all about, really. You think not? Let me put it this way--

In 1997 James Cameron won the Best Director statuette for his two hundred million dollar superproduction Titanic--went up to the stage, thanked a few people, raised his gold-plated phallus symbol high in the air and declared “king of the world!” And he was right to feel that way--the movie still had to win Best Picture, earn a few hundred million more dollars to become the biggest boxoffice hit in history.

Fast forward to 2010. Cameron is again nominated, again for the biggest boxoffice hit in history, the quarter-billion-dollar Avatar. Against him this time, however, is ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, for her far smaller (a mere fifteen million dollars) Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker--probably the first time a divorced couple competed against each other for the prize, and only the fourth time ever a woman was nominated.

You could read the writing on the wall when the presenter strode onstage--Barbra Streisand, who has been nominated and won everything in sight except the award in question (come to think of it she has never even nominated). When she pulled out the card to read she remarked: “It's about time!” Cheers and adulation. Bigelow's, apparently, were bigger and hairier than Cameron's, and the proof was the gold-plated John Thomas she held in her slim hands.

People remark on how Cameron has created “a spectacular new world beyond our imagination,” how he “pushes every boundary for his vision.” All I see is a quarter billion dollars that could have funded sixteen pictures the size of Hurt Locker, spent instead on the manufacture of a shiny new paint brush (basically a phallus with hair at one end)--a brush that, in my book, Cameron hasn't even fully mastered.

Bigelow on the other hand deals mainly with the humdrum real world, only in her hands the world is hardly humdrum--it vibrates with menace. Bigelow's style here may evoke the Paul Greengrass school of action filmmaking--all shaky-cam, with ADHD editing--but when Guy Pearce in a brief walk-on cameo walks cautiously down the railroad track in his Kevlar-and-blast-plating-clad bomb suit with what seems like the entire Iraqi community watching, the filmmaker that comes to mind isn't Greengrass but Costa-Gavras, the political firebrand who in films like Z (1969) and State of Siege (1972) employed cinema-verite techniques to thrilling ends. You have the same immediacy, the same “you-are-there” gut feel--the shots of different people staring silently evokes the point of view of a man desperately trying to cover everyone from every direction, knowing it's impossible yet doing his level best anyway. Bigelow veers away from Costa-Gavras when the bomb actually detonates, opting for surreal details such as the earth leaping as if atop a pounded drum, the bomb suit falling forward in dreamy slow-motion (you can't help but notice that the hardened acrylic/polycarbonate laminated visor is spattered from the inside with blood).

I'm not equating Bigelow with Costa-Gavras; the latter wears his leftist politics proudly on his sleeve (and unlike Cameron, he doesn't seem to feel the need to overcompensate for any shortcomings), whereas you often wonder if Bigelow has any politics, even in this movie. It's pro-military in the sense that the soldiers rarely do anything less than heroic; it's anti-military in the sense that Bigelow seems to be trying undercut the main character's machismo by equating his wildman antics to that of a drug addict--but even then, one wonders. The picture is perhaps too thrilling, its seven setpieces (each a bomb or situation of increasing complexity and lethality) too effectively drive out rational thought in favor of the idea that at any moment, at any time, and for any reason, the person you happen to identify with most closely (Staff Sgt. William James, played with live-wire panache by Jeremy Renner) may be wiped off the face of the Earth (Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le salaire de la peur (Wages of Fear, 1953) anyone?).

The explosive climaxes in this picture are thuddingly real--no gasoline flames, only smoke and flying debris and a huge thump! as if a giant hand had shoved you hard in the chest. The bombs are often thoroughly phallic--huge cylinders impassive in their lethality; Sgt. James' struggle to master them is basically a pissing contest among Alpha males, his way of saying to the Iraqi bombmakers “mine are bigger and hairier than yours.”

Then there's the question of psychological realism--Sgt. James could not have become a veteran EOD (Explosives Ordnance Disposal) officer by being such a cowboy. As several actual members of the unit have noted, a vast majority of bomb disposal operations are carried out by robots--a man doing otherwise is either quickly demoted (for deviating from standard procedure), or blown to little pieces. A living, breathing Sgt. James shouldn't exist--he is , in effect, a walking contradiction. Renner does manage to invest his officer, implausibilities and all, with a charisma that helps sell the man to the audience, but that's Bigelow advancing her movie through style and sheer momentum rather than solid characterization. What style, though--easily some of the best of the year.

If Bigelow's is the biggest and the hairiest--if Bigelow is this year's 'Cock of the Walk'--allow me to point you back to the year 1949, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Small Back Room. Talk of twisted bomb disposal experts, Powell and Pressburger's World War II film has David Farrar, who possessed the most impressive pair of brows in all of cinema, tormenting himself for the loss of his leg (he wears a prosthetic); meantime the Nazis have been dropping strange black cylinders all over the countryside, killing people (children especially) when they pick up the devices. Eventually Farrar in his self-hating trajectory will encounter one of these cylinders, and may the hairiest, most potent phallus win.

Powell and Pressburger use realism with just that much dash of stylization to present their story; unlike Bigelow, their hero is a fully formed character--contradictory at times, but when all pieces are assembled, fully coherent. He makes sense, he makes you care for him despite his monstrous self-pity, and when he puts his life on the line on the sands of Chesil Beach, hands locked in mortal struggle with yet another of the Nazi black cylinders (the most sinister of the phalli yet mentioned), you may perhaps for the first time find yourself dwelling on the full significance of the word “breathless.” Highly recommended (and available on DVD), though Bigelow's The Hurt Locker isn't a bad alternative--in fact, the two would make for an interesting double feature. As for Cameron's oversized turkey--I'd be glad to tell him what he can do with the three decidedly minor gold-plated phalli he won last March 7, only this is a family-oriented newspaper. 

First published in Businessworld, 3.18.10

Book of Eli (Albert and Allan Hughes, 2009)

Hellbound hardbound

Albert and Allan Hughes' Book of Eli (2009) starts off interestingly enough--Denzel Washington as an enigmatic Mad Max figure, walking the desolate roads of post-apocalyptic America. Actually it's more than interesting--it's brilliant. Tall, laconic figure in trench coat and shades, crossing the length of a two-lane blacktop. How much more elemental, and intriguing, and evocative of introverted self-sufficiency can you get?

The Hughes Brothers actually sustain it, for a time. We first see Eli (Washington) lying quietly in wait for the chance to harpoon some cat creature--the camera moves from the cat (actually it resembles a rabid mutant chihuahua) across the silent forest floor to Eli and his ready crossbow. The tension, the mystery of the image is considerable, released only by the twang! of the crossbow.

Later Eli confronts some potential ambushers and the Hughes cut to a long shot of Eli under a bridge, in deep shadow, dispatching his attackers with a pair of long knives, or short swords (they resemble the Moro barung or barong, with holes punched out in the blade to streamline the cut--I suspect a Moro design, since Washington was trained in martial arts fighting techniques by Filipino-American master Dan Inosanto). It's a lovely image, the camera locked down while it gazes at Washington spinning and slashing his assailants--the static set-up and its implication of a pitiless observer watching combatants live or die remind one of Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata (1943) and of Park Chan-Wook's legendary corridor fight sequence in Oldboy (2003).

Even later we see Eli watching as a group of marauders attack a couple, whispering to himself that he will nto get involved. Again, an intriguing sidelight on the character--he may have a working system of moral beliefs, but he will not allow them to screw up his chances for survival. There are priorities, and a mission he must accomplish.

The movie pretty much tosses this sense of reserve and mystery by the roadside when Eli arrives at a small town; Carnegie (a scruffy Gary Oldman) rules this town with his brutal band of thugs. Eli confronts the thugs in a bar and manages to kill them all, and immediately one can see a problem: up front and personal, in broad daylight and not deep shadow the Hughes Brothers' action is frankly a mess--shots too close in for you to tell apart, shaky-cam incoherence, and just enough Inosanto-inspired knife action that you want to see matters clearly and are frustrated that you can't.

Not that I don't want to see Oldman's Carnegie--far from it. Oldman can always be depended on to be the scruffiest, most repulsive character in the room, and he does not disappoint here; his Carnegie is a hedonist, an intellectual, a tyrant, and each facet of his character grate against each other in all kinds of irritating ways. His intellectualism marks him as smarter than (and more contemptuous of) the rest, his tyrannical leadership style inspires terror in his minions, and his hedonism means he has a taste for helplessly beautiful women that (it's suggested) he enjoys in an unspecified kinky manner (What can you do with a blind mistress? Nothing appropriate that can be mentioned here, for starters). His appetites focus the movie's previously rambling plot into a laser-sharp point: he is looking for a book, he will not stop until he finds it, he will terrorize innocents including women in all sort of unpleasant ways. Unbeknownst to Carnegie that book, of course, happens to sit inside Eli's dusty backpack, and he's just as determined to defend the book as Carnegie is to possess it.

Welcome developments, at the same time unwelcome. What is that book--National Register of Army Depots? Nuclear Weapons Made Easy? Psychic Powers for Dummies? What kind of knowledge can that book posses that Carnegie should obsess about it? Turns out it's no great secret--it's the Bible, King James version, and while I admire that particular edition for the grandeur of its language, I can barely see the relevance to postapocalyptic America. This Carnegie fellow is nuts, I'm beginning to think, and Eli's just as nuts for thinking the same way. The Hughes Brothers may believe otherwise but for me the stakes have dropped precipitously.

At a certain point guns are pulled out, which is both welcome and unwelcome in a Hughes Brothers film--as they've shown in both Menace II Society (1993) and Dead Presidents (1995), the Hughes know guns, are more than familiar with the use of them, and know how to stage and shoot extended battles involving their deployment (that's why I wondered about Eli's two short swords--judging from their action sequences in the less-than-successful From Hell (2001), they aren't quite there yet with regards to blades). Unfortunately when guns are fired the bullets--well, either Carnegie's dumb enough to hire nearsighted morons for gunmen, or Eli enjoys some kind of low-level aura that deflects bullets. He just stands there looking around while Carnegie's men fire away to little effect.

What was that about? Do the Hughes Brothers mean to give Eli a more-than-mystical quality? If they mean to, they should take it all the way and perhaps take a moment to explain or prepare for it a bit beforehand; if they don't (which is hard to believe), then what on earth were they thinking?

The movie recovers in fits and starts--Michael Gambon puts in an memorable appearance along with Frances de la Tour as a pair of charming cannibals, Tom Waits is nicely grizzled as a store owner, and Malcolm McDowell pops up near the end as a relatively benign museum curator (that's where that book belongs in this world, actually--in a museum). The finale involves a series of revelations that don't really add to the story (let's just say the Hughes Brothers are unlike Hitchcock a bigger fan of surprises over suspense), and  elements of science-fiction classics as diverse as Isaac Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust and Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (a great book by the way--one of the best). Whatever; The Book of Eli actually isn't that bad, and any movie that champions the value of literature should be recommended, but I for one sure wish it was better.

First published in Businessworld, 3.18.10

Empire's Worst Movies, the Kraken remarkin, the dragon entered

Don't even want to talk about the kinkiness of this image, taken from Mel Gibson's snuff flick

Empire's 50 Worst Movies
 
Was going to talk about how the list has no historical perspective, that it focuses on big-budgeted Hollywood movies as usual, and so on and so forth.  

Wanted to disagree on some choices, assert that Heaven's Gate was more a great folly than a bad film (that rollerskating sequence cited is breathtaking), that Raimi in Spiderman 3 did a better job evoking a giant anthropoid loose on Manhattan than Peter Jackson ever did, and that the worst film ever made (and believe me the competition for this honor is fierce) is Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, whose many historical and biblical inaccuracies, and merits as a motion picture I talk about here. Then I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and realized--that list is right.

Oh, I disagree with a few titles here and there, would rearrange the whole thing, and would honor Gibson with not one but two entries (the second being his racist Apocalypto), but the list is good, excellent even--a first from a not very respectable, much less credible, source. In short, on the subject of the worse films ever made, for my money Empire is right on the money. 

Saw Clash of the Titans, have two things to say:

1) I miss Ray Harryhausen, now more than ever, and;

2) I think the movie would go better with a tub of tartar sauce and a lemon wedge*

* I'd first proposed this to Tony Rayns in Jeonju--that Filipinos are not fond of making monster movies (other than vampires, manananggal, and various other creatures depicted by stunt men in rubber suits) because they do not always have the desired effect.

Filipinos are a hungry people, food-crazy and startlingly adventurous; if a swarm of killer bees, or rabid dogs, or bloodthirsty piranhas, or marauding birds, or what-have-you ever got loose on the streets (or waterways) of Manila they wouldn't get very far without being clubbed down, sliced thin, and served up sizzling on a hot plate with a ramekin of soy sauce and fresh-squeezed kalamansi. Filipinos don't see the various giant creatures in classic Hollywood movies as monstrous, or a threat; they see them as bar chow. 

How to Train Your Dragon, Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders' animated version of the book by Cressida Cowell is in many ways a dumbed-down adaptation--reducing the thorny give-and-take between dragons and Vikings to a hunt-or-be-hunted situation, and Hiccup and Toothless' relationship into something altogether more sentimental, a Boy and His Dog bonding in vast forests.

All that said, it's surprisingly entertaining--the eponymous dragon is a sleek, black-scaled wonder that acts like a sleek, black Porsche 911 with the temperament of a puppy dog; Jay Baruchel's voice acting grounds the picture with its earthy line readings, its often funny hemming and hawing (he sounds like Woody Allen shot up full of hormones). Possibly its best ideas--know your enemy, he may have good reasons or might not even be an enemy--are taken from Hayao Miyazaki's Kaze no tani no Naushika (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, 1984), only without Miyazaki's philosophical rigor and moral complexity. 

Not bad--not on the level of Miyazaki, of course, but not bad. Prefer this over any of Pixar's recent offerings, or James Cameron's overblown jungle epic.

Christ almighty

For Easter, three old articles on Christ films:

Snuff flick vs. art flick: The Last Temptation of Christ, The Passion of the Christ

Questioning The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson and his publicists have repeatedly claimed that his The Passion of the Christ is the most historically accurate of all pictures made on Jesus.

Actually--no. Historians have pointed out various inaccuracies--that Jesus would have spoken to Pontius Pilate in Greek (the lingua franca of the time), not Latin, and so would the Roman soldiers (who were conscripts from various nearby regions, not actual Romans); that Jesus would have carried a crossbeam and not the entire cross (which weighed something like 350 pounds); that he would have been nailed through the wrist and not the palms (his weight would have pulled the nails through his palms); that his cross used a projecting seat and not a footrest to support him; that his fellow convicts should have been scourged, as is standard Roman practice, instead of him alone. Gibson in reply has said that he has read many accounts and that as they often conflicted with each other he felt free to choose a "middle way," so to speak. It's significant, though, that Gibson's choices are often consistent with classic depictions of Jesus and his passion, rather than with the latest archeological findings.

Accuracy isn't the only controversy associated with this picture; there is also the charge that Passion is anti-Semitic, that it promotes the old idea that the Jews as a race are responsible for killing Christ. Gibson's publicist Paul Lauer puts an ingenious spin to this accusation, saying that to call the movie anti-Semitic is "to call the New Testament Gospels anti-Semitic," implying along the way that the movie is a faithful adaptation from the New Testaments (the marketing campaign has also trumpeted the picture as being the most biblically accurate yet made).

Is it? I mean--is it historically and biblically accurate, and are the charges of anti-Semitism false? The answer to these questions, interestingly enough, seem interrelated.

Some elements in the picture are definitely not from the Bible--an androgynous Satan (in interviews Gibson refers to him as a "Satanic" figure) tempting Christ in the garden of Gethsemane and walking among the Jews who watch Jesus being whipped; an effeminate Herod, heavily rouged and eyelinered, mocking Jesus as he's brought before him (strange how few critics have noted the picture's homophobia); a Pilate and his wife, wringing their hands over the death of an innocent man.

To be fair, Gibson can't help but rearrange and insert extra scenes: the four Gospels offer varying, sometimes even contradictory, accounts, and their coverage of Jesus' final hours is sketchy when it comes to physical details about crucifixion and scourging. Sometimes when making a picture you have to add or make changes, for dramatic impact and narrative clarity.

But as Catholic teaching--or at least mainstream Catholic teaching--declares: "It is not sufficient for the producers of passion dramatizations to respond to responsible criticism simply by appealing to the notion that 'it's in the Bible.' One must account for one's selections" (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion, 1988).

Philip Cunningham, Executive Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College makes some interesting points in his article The Passion of the Christ: A Challenge to Catholic Teaching. He points out that in the movie's pivotal scene, Gibson selected a passage from the Gospel according to John where Pilate orders Jesus scourged, hoping to appease the crowd demanding his crucifixion. When this tactic fails, Pilate appeals to Jesus for help, to which Jesus replies "He who delivered me to you (Jewish high priest Caiaphas) has the greater sin."

Gibson then tacked on a passage from Matthew where Caiaphas calls out in Aramaic "Let his blood be on us and our children!" (Gibson's claim to have cut this scene is false; he merely removed the subtitles). Pilate then washes his hands (a scene found in Matthew), in effect absolving him of the whole affair, granting the Jewish crowd what they want--Jesus' crucifixion.

The net result of this joining of scenes from John (the scourging, the 'greater sin') and Matthew ('blood be on us and our children,' hand-washing) is to shift blame away from Pilate onto Caiaphas and the Jewish crowd; the net result is a depiction of Pilate as more compassionate and of the Jews as more determinedly bloodthirsty than is actually found in either John's or Matthew's Gospels. The net result is a heightening of Jewish guilt, and a relative exoneration of the Romans (of senior Roman officials, at that).

True, most of the passages cited can be found in the Bible and even taken separately they seem to indicate a common trend. Now is as good a time as any, then, to ask the question implicit in Lauer's earlier assertion: is the New Testament anti-Semitic?

Putting aside the anachronism of the question (the term 'anti-Semitism' was coined in the nineteenth century), it must be noted that the Gospels were originally oral traditions written from fifty to seventy years after Christ had died, and that they reflected the times of the writers as much as of Christ--times when the early Christians were struggling to reply to unbelieving Jews and reach out to the Romans. Bible historians and theologians know this, and what's more the Vatican (whose authority Gibson rejects) admits this as well, saying "The Gospels are the outcome of long and complicated editorial work…Hence it cannot be ruled out that some references hostile to the Jews have their historical context in conflicts between the nascent church and the Jewish community" (Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Teaching in the Roman Catholic Church, 1985).

Cunningham writes "Honesty demands the recognition that Christians have used (and abused) the New Testament over the centuries to claim that 'the Jews' were cursed for rejecting and crucifying Jesus." He notes that from the late middle ages onwards, passion plays much like the one Gibson has adapted (with additions) to the big screen were performed every Holy Week, and that these plays "regularly inspired violence against Jews." Rabbi David Fox Sandmel, leader of Chicago's KAM-Isaiah Israel Congregation reminds us that Adolf Hitler praised the Passion Play at Oberammergau, declaring it "vital that it be continued…for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans" (the play was revised several years ago, with the help of Jewish advisers).

Catholic teaching warns that "Jews should not be portrayed as avaricious; blood thirsty (e.g., in certain depiction's of Jesus' appearances before the Temple priesthood or before Pilate); or implacable enemies of Christ (e.g., by changing the small "crowd" at the governor's palace into a teeming mob)" (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion, 1988). It stresses the "overriding preoccupation to bring out explicitly the meaning of the (Gospel) text while taking scriptural studies into account" (Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, 1974). To, in other words, consider what today's biblical scholars have to say as well and not read the Bible too literally, as Gibson's movie has done.

How then is one--in this case, Gibson--to "account for one's selections?" Granted Gibson is of a Traditionalist sect that refuses to recognize the authority of the pope in Rome (which makes his trumpeting of said pope's endorsement of his movie--since withdrawn--all the more disingenuous) and the validity of Vatican ll; the idea is still sound, whether you believe in the Vatican's authority or not. One must be responsible for the choices one makes in telling a story, and must be able to give good reasons as to why they were made, especially when said choices can come together to create a false and harmful image.

Actually, Gibson is perfectly capable of accounting for his choices; he just doesn't seem at all eager or even willing to do so. As Cunningham puts it, "Gibson has actually created a cinematic version not so much of the Gospels but of Anne Catherine Emmerich’s purported visions of the death of Jesus."

Anne Catherine Emmerich was a 19th century Augustinian nun known for her visions of the life of Christ. The German Romantic poet, Clemens Brentano, offered to write down her visions and the result was The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ after the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich, published in 1833.

The book was internationally renowned, as much for its violent, rather exaggerated imagery of Christ's suffering as for being full of closely observed details of Palestine that (as some readers who visited the country noted) a simple German nun could not have possibly imagined. The question arose, however, whether the visions are truly Catherine's or embellished by Brentano; when German experts sifted through his papers after his death, their general conclusion was--after finding travel literature and biblical apocrypha amongst his papers--that only a small portion of the text is Emmerich's.

Emmerich's name was submitted for beatification in 1892; the process was halted in 1928 because of the questions on her visions' authenticity. The process was resumed in 1979, but with the explicit provision that her writings be excluded. Father John O'Malley, SJ, in his article A Movie, a Mystic, and a Spiritual Tradition: Anne Catherine Emmerich & the Passion of the Christ tells us: " The official opinion on the writings has thus for a long time been sober and even skeptical." He adds: " I would not recommend it to anybody today. It is anti-Semitic to the degree (sometimes considerable) that virtually all nineteenth-century retellings of the Passion, whether by Catholics or Protestants, were anti-Semitic."

Here's a sample of one of her visions: "The soul of the old Jewess Meyr told me on the way that it was true that in former times the Jews, both in our country and elsewhere, had strangled many Christians, principally children, and used their blood for all sort of superstitious and diabolical practices. She had once believed it lawful; but she now knew that it was abominable murder. They still follow such practices in this country and in others more distant; but very secretly, because they are obliged to have commercial intercourse with Christians" (The Life and Revelations of Anne Catherine Emmerich).

Cunningham asserts in his article that Gibson owes many of his non-biblical images (Jesus thrown off a bridge, Pilate admonishing the Jews on their abuse of Jesus, an effeminate Herod, Pilate's wife giving Jesus' mother cloth to wipe away his blood, Jesus falling seven times, Christ's arm dislocated to fit holes drilled into the cross) and even the ordering and selection of scenes from the Gospels to Emmerich (John joined with Matthew to form Christ and Pilate's meeting). Gibson has reportedly denied using Emmerich as a source and does not consider her anti-Semitic (!); in a February 16 television interview, however, he said Emmerich "supplied me with stuff I never would have thought of," and admitted to carrying what he thinks is a relic of her.

It's possible that Gibson doesn't believe himself anti-Semitic and probable that he didn't intend his picture to be such. For his picture, unfortunately, Gibson has chosen to translate onscreen an old theatrical form known to have inspired hatred for Jews; has chosen scenes from the Gospels in a way that heightens Jewish guilt; has tried to polarize debate so that anyone not for his movie is against Christianity and the Bible.

He may not be consciously anti-Semitic but by pointedly ignoring the principles set by orthodox Catholic teachings on dramatizations of Jesus' passion and by depending instead on the visions of an outspokenly anti-Semitic nun, Gibson has created a movie remarkably open to abuse by anti-Semitics, much as the Gospels themselves have been abused in the past, providing justification for the persecution of Jews.

Putting aside, the question of anti-Semitism, is the movie still to be recommended, theologically? Cunningham says the picture promotes the view that "God had to be satisfied or appeased for the countless sins of humanity by subjecting his son to unspeakable torments," which isn't the case--Christ's crucifixion is meaningless without his resurrection; it's the whole reason for his suffering. Gibson's movie upends this emphasis, focuses on Christ's physical sufferings (including much that was added thanks to Emmerich), and confines the resurrection to a few quick moments onscreen. Fr. O'Malley points out that this emphasis and at times overemphasis of the crucifixion and of Christ's suffering are a trend of recent centuries, and that "The reforms of the Easter triduum that began with Pius XII and were continued with the liturgical changes during and after Vatican II were, among other things, an attempt to redress the balance."

So what can be done about this picture? I don't believe in censorship, or outright banning, and I doubt if the Movie and Television Ratings and Classification Board (MTRCB) will ban it either (I expect glowing praise of the movie on the copy of their decision posted outside theater gates). Rumor has it that they will give the picture a rating of PG 13--which would be awful; bringing anyone younger than sixteen into this movie is, I think, tantamount to cruel child abuse.

Rabbi Sandmel may have the most sensible answer--he proposes converting the movie into a "teachable moment" for Christians and Jews (Catholics here in Manila), to watch the picture, be aware of its errors, understand both the context in which the movie was made, and the proper context in which Jesus' Passion should be seen and understood.

(With thanks to Philip Cunningham, Executive Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College for permission to quote extensively from his article The Passion of the Christ: A Challenge to Catholic Teaching;

to Fr. John O'Malley for his article A Movie, a Mystic, and a Spiritual Tradition: Anne Catherine Emmerich & the Passion of the Christ.

To compare Gibson's movie with Emmerich's visions, read The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ)

First published in Businessworld, 3/19/04

********************
The perversion of Christ

In a previous article I wrote about how Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ was historically and biblically inaccurate, how it may not have been intended to be anti-Semitic but is open to abuse by those who are, and how Gibson's true source for the movie isn't so much the Bible as he claims, but the anti-Semitic writings of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a 19th century nun and "visionary," and German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, who compiled her "visions" in a series of books (Brentano possibly fabricated the bulk of Emmerich's writings). But how is it as a film? As a work of cinema?

It looks handsome enough; say what you will, Gibson did have one genuine artist in his employ--Caleb Deschanel, the tremendous cinematographer of such beautifully photographed films as The Black Stallion and The Right Stuff. Gibson in interviews mentioned how he wanted to evoke the paintings of Michelangelo Caravaggio, and Deschanel obtains it for him, especially Caravaggio's use of dramatic chiaroscuro--the deep shadows, the bright highlights.

But filmmaking is more than beautiful photography and lighting: it's editing, writing, acting, and, above all, that difficult-to-define skill of storytelling through, as much as possible, the use of moving images, cut in patterned sequences. Gibson's movie is easy to nitpick--his editing stitches together Deschanel's lovely footage with all the skill of a thumbless tailor; he doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word "restraint" when it comes to slow motion (I'm guessing a full ten to twenty minutes could be lopped off if every shot ran at normal speed); his sets and costumes are sumptuous, but sadly remind you of the kind of overproduced extravaganzas Hollywood used to make, like The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Gibson's notions on violence aren't much better. He's clearly working out some personal demons--torture is common to almost all his films, from impromptu electroshock therapy in the first Lethal Weapon movie to evisceration in his self-directed Braveheart. Gibson seems to want to punish himself for private wrongs in as public a manner as possible--he wants us all to suffer for his sins, in effect--and I suppose we can relate to that; there are some guilt-obsessed filmmakers who make a career out of visualizing the blood and violence inherent in the Christian faith: John Woo, Abel Ferrara, Martin Scorsese, to name a few.

Unlike the above filmmakers, however, Gibson doesn't seem to understand that violence should be used sparingly, to keep viewers from becoming numb; it has to be mixed in with other elements (like a sense of irony, or better yet a coherent story), and sprung on the audience at the precise moment when they are off-balance. Worse of all Gibson's violence doesn't seem to possess a distinct identity--it doesn't have Woo's sense of rhythm, which turns violence into a choreographed dance; doesn't have Ferrara's cool eye, which gazes on violence with unsettling serenity; doesn't have Scorsese's restless intelligence, which pares away unnecessary footage like so much fat. Gibson's Passion, with its endless images of scourgings and stumbles (seven of them, mostly shot in excruciatingly slow motion) on the long shuffle to Golgotha is clumsy, self-absorbed, flabby with extraneous detail--not just numbing in its obsession with violence, but boring.

These criticisms, however, are strictly small fry; most of Gibson's storytelling sins can be traced to his decision to focus almost entirely on the last twelve hours of Jesus' life (other sins too--Gibson's movie is essentially an adaptation of the passion play filtered through the sensibilities of Emmerich and Brentano, and passion plays were traditionally used to fan the flames of anti-Semitism). By filming the climax and not the rest of the story, we never learn why Jesus was condemned and crucified (for all you know, they pulled him off the street). Certainly Christians would know, but this makes the picture more exclusive than inclusive, strictly for the baptized only; Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists and the rest need not watch.

The lack of context also means Caiaphas is largely unmotivated--we don't know why he wants Jesus dead, and it's easy to think "maybe because Jews are just evil;" the actor playing Caiaphas, Mattia Sbragia, is reduced to playing a stereotype Evil Jew. We don't learn of Jesus' more provocative acts, like the whipping of the moneylenders in the temple, or the entrance into Jerusalem riding an ass in blasphemous (at least to Jewish authorities) fulfillment of scriptures; we don't have the crucial scene of Jesus revealing himself to his disciples as the Son of God--his primary reason for doing the things he did. The question has been long debated, who's responsible for the death of Jesus--Judas, Caiaphas or Pilate? There's actually a fourth possibility: Jesus himself, not as a suicide but as a man on a mission to redeem souls. But you never see that in this picture.

You never get to see Jesus' other sides either--the intellectual and theologian, the revolutionary leader ("I bring not peace but the sword"). Jim Cavaziel, who plays Jesus, does well enough with the physical suffering but essentially has no character to play--his Jesus is a passive, rather uneloquent lamb led to slaughter. My personal opinion, but a film on Jesus needs to be more, needs to engage mind and heart, intelligence and faith; it needs to focus less on drawing out and magnifying the beatings, to better relish the pain. That's the technique not of an artist, but a pornographer--he stretches out the money shots, gives his viewers the opportunity to "get their rocks off," the only difference being that Gibson peddles violence, not sex (I prefer the latter kind of porn, myself).

Another point: Gibson's emphasis on physical torture gives short shrift to inward, psychological torture; the beatings, the scourging, the pounded nails, they're nothing compared to what Jesus must have felt inside. Gibson's movie gives us little hint of Jesus' humiliation and despair, his sense of being abandoned by friends, disciples and, worst of all, God.

That's another difference between Gibson and Woo, Ferrara, Scorsese--for Gibson the depiction of violence is its own end; for these filmmakers it's a means of suggesting inner torment. Despite all the bloodletting you see in films like Woo's The Killer and Hard Boiled, Ferrara's The Bad Lieutenant, Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, these filmmakers managed to portray protagonists whose interior suffering dwarfed their exterior pain. Arguably the most fascinating aspect to Raging Bull's Jake La Motta was the suggestion that he entered the boxing ring and allowed his face to be beaten to a bloody pulp because it made him feel better, relieved his inner pain--compared to La Motta, the sufferings of Gibson's Jesus are strictly skin-deep.

A final thought: Gibson's movie has made hundreds of millions of dollars in boxoffice revenues, thanks to a publicity campaign that exploited both the fears of the Jewish community and the gullibility of Christian conservatives who thought they were getting a Hollywood superstar's faithful adaptation of the Bible. Gibson wanted to exploit Pope John Paul II as well--the same Pope whose authority his Traditionalist sect doesn't recognize and who he privately (according to his father) calls an "ass"--but thanks to luck (or perhaps the grace of God) the Pope withheld his endorsement.

No reason to believe Gibson can't repeat his success in Manila, though--the Archbishop has given his approval, and already testimonials to the movie's artistry and holiness are popping up in papers all over the city; I assume Academy Awards are only a matter of months away.

We need to remember that in 1915 D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation was also a great boxoffice success, and that President Woodrow Wilson gave it his ringing endorsement--"history writ with lightning," he said; the voices raised in objection to its monstrous depiction of blacks were largely ignored. Years later, admiration for Griffith's filmmaking has not diminished, but recognition of its intense racism and gross historical distortions has grown, accompanying the film like its own dark shadow. Gibson's movie is nowhere near as good as Griffith's of course, but with time and a little luck, hopefully people will begin to recognize The Passion of the Christ for what it is--a crude, anti-Semitic snuff flick, cynically marketed and blindly embraced, all in the name of Jesus Christ.

It's the latter that's so galling. Gibson wraps righteousness round his self like a cloak of invincible holiness, when you just know that the one thing Jesus hated above all else was religious hypocrisy. This movie isn't just bad, it's evil; it's the voice of a false prophet, magnified and sanctified by the sound of cash registers ringing several hundred million dollars' worth of boxoffice gross*. The Hollywood producers who spurned Gibson when he was making his picture must be looking on with envy.

* Matthew 16:26 "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" To which Robert Bolt's Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons gives an interesting variation: "It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…but for Wales!"

First published in Businessworld, 4/2/04 

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The straightest stories ever told

It's Easter season and just fresh from the controversies of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, so a quick rundown of different Christ pictures through film history might be appropriate, starting with movies that tell the story in a (more or less) straightforward and direct manner.

Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings (1927) is not perhaps the earliest screen depiction of Jesus, but it's one of the biggest and most popular. DeMille gives us his signature mix of hedonism and sanctimoniousness: an extravagant Mary Magdalene (Dorothy Cumming) wrapping elaborately designed capes round her near-naked body while riding a chariot pulled by zebras; a recognizably Caucasian Christ (H.B. Warner) striking endless poses with a gently concerned expression on his face. Judas (Joseph Schildkraut) is a former lover of Mary and a recognizably upper-class dandy; Caiaphas (Rudolph Schildkraut, Joseph's father) is an old-fashioned silent-screen villain.

Interestingly enough, the portrayal of Caiaphas plus certain scenes (including one where the Jews are paid to yell for Jesus' blood) gave rise to cries of anti-Semitism, which prompted DeMille to insert various titles, the most crucial of which has Caiaphas blaming himself, and not his people, for the death of Christ.

George Steven's The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) is perhaps the representative Christ epic--long, slow, with improbably huge sets and an intelligent if glossy visual style (word has it that David Lean directed a few scenes).

What makes the movie such fun despite the ponderous, holier-than-thou filmmaking is the hilarious Hollywood casting: Donald Pleasance as Satan, Robert Blake as Simon the Zealot, Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate (shaved his head for the role and kept it shaven ever since), Charlton Heston bellowing about apes--sorry, about repentance--as John the Baptist. In the background are the unique landscapes of Death Valley, California, and Utah, and lo and behold, you spot the Duke himself, drawling "Truly, this is the Son o' Gawd…"

What works, though, is Von Sydow as Christ. He flashes his laser-beam stare and bellows in his stentorian voice, and you can't help but think: "I can follow this guy." He's eerily effective when delivering dark prophecies like "Behold, the days are coming in which they shall say 'Blessed are the barren'…say to the mountains 'fall on us'"--this is, after all, the medieval knight who played chess against Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961) features a more bloodless Christ in Jeffrey Hunter, whose chest was shaved because preview audiences objected to the body hair. More interesting (thanks to writer Philip Yordan) is a parallel subplot, where Harry Guardino as Jesus Barabbas struggles to free the Jews from Roman tyranny. Barabbas acts as a sort of political doppelganger to Christ (it's noted that they have the same first name), and the two struggle for the soul of an indecisive Judas (Rip Torn!). Ray keeps the drama more human-sized than Stevens, yet manages several striking setpieces: a Sermon on the Mount staged and shot (as filmmaker Martin Scorsese points out) like an impromptu press conference; a camera strapped to the top of the cross looking down, so we can follow it as it ascends to the sky (Scorsese borrows this shot for his own film).

Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977) puts in a rather benign Robert Powell as Christ, and follows Steven's style of Hollywood casting: an improbably young Olivia Hussey as the Virgin Mary, a hammy Rod Steiger as Pontius Pilate, an unconvincingly bestial Michael York as John the Baptist. More interesting than Zefferelli's rather flat directing is Anthony Burgess' literate script, which supposes interesting relationships among characters (Pilate talks of mercy to Jesus just to needle the Jewish priests; Judas, as in King of Kings, is a political innocent out to save Jesus from himself) and attempts to show the political and social tensions of the time. Burgess would later use the script as basis for his novel Man of Nazareth which interpolates, among other things, a Jesus who married during his hidden thirty years.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) does the story of Christ, or at least Matthew's account of him, in a way no one seems to have thought of before, or since: as simply as possible.

Oh, Pasolini adds touches--a soundtrack with Mozart, Bach, and blues music--but by and large he took his cue from the way Enrique Irazoqui, the Catalan Economics student who plays Christ, walks across the screen: straightforward, direct, with no hesitation whatsoever. Easily the most beautiful, most cinematic, most faithful and "straight" of Christ movies--which is ironic, since the director is an outspoken homosexual, atheist and Communist.

The strangest stories ever told

There are the straight Christ movies like Jesus of Nazareth or Gospel According to Matthew; then there are the stranger versions of Christ's stories: the New Testament plus a little something else. A sample few:

Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ, Superstar (1973) was pretty controversial when it came out in Broadway--what, Christ singing rock?! Nowadays, though, you hear "I Don't Know How to Love Him" in many a '70s compilation discs (it used to be sung at masses).

It turns out to be a pretty reverential take, with less-than-brilliant lyrics and only hints and rumblings of a modern consciousness in Ted Neely's rock-star Christ (at one point he worries people will forget him ten minutes after he's dead); it's also an extremely dated movie, with the camera constantly zooming in and out, presumably to "open up" the picture. What stays with you is Carl Anderson's passionate Judas, and the rock beat clearing away all the musty familiarity in your head. 

The picture was also charged with anti-Semitism, and I suppose you can see traces of a negative Jewish stereotype in the movie's Caiaphas (Bob Bingham). To the picture's credit it depicts some of Christ's more provocative acts against the Jewish orthodoxy, and gives us a sense of what his mission's all about (to die on the cross, be resurrected, redeem our sins), giving Caiaphas' hostility some context.

So sue me, I think Monty Python's The Life of Brian (1979) is easily the most sensible of all Christ films--mainly because it puts everything in perspective. With all the hoopla about religious faith, and the violence and chaos such faith inspires, what really matters (the picture seems to say) is that you have a bit of fun with a good Jewish girl, be kind to one another, and whistle cheerfully when you're hanging on a cross.

For those unfamiliar with the film it's Python's way of sending up--not Christ per se, the Pythoners think he's a decent chap--but the religious fanaticism and hypocrisy surrounding the man and his teachings, something I suspect he would appreciate if he were alive today. Small sidenote: the film was banned in Norway for eight years, after which it was marketed in Sweden as the film "so funny it was banned in Norway."

I cannot tell a lie; despite all the controversy about sex and New York accents, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, based on the equally controversial book by Nikos Kazantzakis, is my personal favorite of the genre (Pasolini's might come in second, with Monty Python's third). If anything, I love that everyone speaks like they come from Brooklyn and the Bronx; it feels like Scorsese's way of personalizing a familiar story and telling it his way, in his voice and language, and showing us that the whole thing still works, nevertheless.

It does--at least, I think it does, thanks to Scorsese's inimitable visual style (he takes his cue from the desert landscape's apparitions and heat mirages, and turns Morocco into one of the most desolately beautiful settings one can have for a struggle over human spirituality); Willem Dafoe's ferocious Christ (Dafoe is rumored to be one of the best-endowed men in Hollywood, and somehow I like the idea of Christ speaking softly and wielding a very big stick); Paul Schrader's plainspoken screenplay (he pares away much of Kazantzakis' rather purplish prose); and Peter Gabriel's eclectic (he combines elements from, among others, symphonic, Egyptian and African music) rock score.

It's easily the most accurate, with Scorsese drawing details of Jewish life and Roman crucifixion practices from such sources as Michael Grant's The History of Ancient Israel and The Biblical Archaeological Review. It's also the most moving, I think, the one that speculates most thoroughly (and courageously) on the psychological and spiritual aspects of being Christ--on the inner suffering Christ must have undergone.

At 300 million dollars in boxoffice at the time of this writing and counting, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004) is easily the most commercially successful Christ movie ever made. It's also, despite Gibson's claims of biblical fidelity, as much a piece of fantasy as Scorsese's Last Temptation, being closely based on the visions of one Anne Catherine Emmerich, a 19th century Augustinian nun and anti-Semite, and Clemens Brentano, the German Romantic poet who compiled her writings (and, it is suspected, added to them considerably).

Gibson's film is violent, it's true (in a crudely dull and repetitive way), and as such upends what Christ is all about--not that he died and was resurrected but that he endured superhuman torture for his sins (as if God were some kind of old school deity demanding blood payment). Besides being questionable theology, it's bad art--Gibson dwells so much on physical suffering that the sense of abandonment Christ must have felt is left unexpressed. It's also, thanks to Emmerich, virulently anti-Semitic (the Jews are malevolent for no apparent reason).

(First published in Menzone Magazine, April, 2004)