The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

The lower depths

There's David O. Russell's approximation of a Martin Scorsese film, and then there's the original. The Wolf of Wall Street is everything American Hustle is-- sexy, funny, fluid, profane-- and more: disgusting, despairing, demented, in both a good and bad way.

Films of 2023

List of 2023

Not everything I've seen for the year but everything I think deserves to be noted, for good or bad. More mainstream than I'd like but life happens. I do try note films I've seen but not newly released in 2023, and why I thought them worth talking about. 

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)

Once upon a time in America

(Warning: story and finale discussed in explicit detail)

Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon is three and a half hours long-- deal with it. Folks complain when a film's runtime ticks past the hundred minute mark or its pacing slows to a deliberate crawl; they seem to want more of the standard-issue Disney/Marvel fare either sequel or prequel or reboot with regular helpings of superpowered action, the usual cast of likable characters, the ironclad promise of state-of-the-art digitals. Amusement park rides, Scorsese once called them as opposed to cinema, and he isn't far wrong: even the twists and turns of plot are comfortingly familiar, recycled ad nauseam. Scorsese likes to challenge the status quo: his films, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, are steak to be chewed thoroughly and digested-- not tapioca pudding that can be gummed without effort. 

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

Mean streets

Call The Last Temptation of Christ my favorite Martin Scorsese film-- not perhaps his best or most ambitious, just my favorite. Grew up Catholic, saw many of the classic Jesus movies, liked most of them with little contextual knowledge or sense of discernment. By '88 I'd seen and enjoyed Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, After Hours; the idea of Scorsese tackling the life of Jesus-- knowing he wasn't shy about using Catholic imagery, or about putting personal beliefs and feelings about his faith on the big screen-- seemed like an especially interesting idea.

That was the theory; in practice I arrived at the movie theater with a picket line blocking the entranceway, folks waving signs like 'SCORSESE PRINCE OF LIES' and 'LEW WASSERMAN CAUSING JEW HATE' (Wasserman was chairman of MCA, Universal Studio's parent company). "Would you like to know the real story of Christ?" a cleancut young man in a necktie asked me, waving a bible. "I read it," I told him, stepping into the theater. 

Best films of the 2010s

The best of the past ten 

A grim decade, grimmer now in its passing. Not a lot of comedies on my list, and what laughs are available often die strangled in the throat. Do the films reflect that grimness?  

In ascending order:

The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)

I heard you make movies

In The Irishman (2019) someone puts a question to Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), the same question that is title of Charles Brandt's 2004 book--the same question one might ask of Martin Scorsese with the same innocuousness, and just the hint of something more.

Joker (Todd Philips, 2019)

No kidding

You'd think the director of The Hangover movies doing an aggressively somber adaptation of an iconic comic-book character was a joke but no. You'd think the movie being given an 8-minute standing ovation then a Golden Lion at the 76th Venice Festival was meant to be an elaborate prank but apparently not.

Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016)

And the rest is

(Warning: story and ending discussed in explicit detail)

The film begins with the sound of cicadas whirring rhythmically over a black background. The sound drops out, the film title (simple white letters) flashes onscreen. Cut to a vision of hell: a guard cloaked in steam stands beside a wood shelf topped with severed heads. We are at the volcanic springs of Unzen, near Nagasaki, where friars are strung up on crosses and longhandled ladles with holes sprinkle boiling water, delicately poaching their skin (Today of course the springs are a popular vacation resort). 

Welcome to Martin Scorsese's idea of heaven: his thirty-years-in-the-making version of Shusaku Endo's Silence, completed at last and screened to near-universal acclaim (and near-empty theaters) in 2016.

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)

Bronx Othello

Properly speaking Scorsese in what is arguably his masterpiece should have introduced the lean La Motta (Robert de Niro) to us first let us get used to him then revealed the overweight figure later on-- but no; Scorsese wasn’t interested in easy dramatic strategies. He immediately has us confront the later man in all his fleshy glory complete with piggy eyes and wheezing breath delivering his nightclub monologue, a mix of highbrow quote (“a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse!”) and lowbrow aside (“haven’t had a winner in six months”) in the same gag. We are bemused, if slightly repelled by the man; he looks like the kind of close relative you hide silverware from when visiting. He ends his spiel with arms flung wide declaring “That’s entertainment!” repeats the line thoughtfully looking at his cigar (his lost virility?). The film cuts back to a boxing ring in 1941

and the young La Motta leaping into the camera frame. Trim loose-limbed taut-muscled (you can’t help but gasp at the sheer physical difference) he shakes off Jimmy Reeves' blows like raindrops. He is told he’s behind on points and has to knock Reeves out; down in the ringside seats a woman screams as a fight breaks out in the audience.

The Messiah (Roberto Rossellini, 1975)

(Plot discussed in detail--though it's hard to imagine anyone unfamiliar with this story. Film is not available on Netflix or Amazon in DVD form, but is available on youtube (though I don't feel I should include a link))

Promised man

"In the beginning was the Word," so began the Gospel of John, and so begins Rossellini's treatment on Christ, his last narrative feature--only I remember when I first saw the film it began so far back in biblical history I had to check the title again to make sure. 

Rossellini starts a thousand years before, with the Israelites' arrival in Canaan, all sunbleached vistas and dusty tents (the sand-and-rock palette providing a subdued background against which the occasional red cloak or robe pops out of the screen). A child digs a hole in the ground with a stick and pisses in it; a shadow looms over him and he turns; a Philistine soldier whirls his sling, cuts loose--the child cries "No!"--and Rossellini cuts to a shot of the child lying on the ground, the blood on his forehead as startling a scarlet as any we've seen in this desolate landscape. 

Rossellini cuts to a meeting of tribal elders, in front of their tents. He zooms out (to establish location), glides around (as if trying to find the best vantage point), zooms in (to focus on this or that speaker). 

The camera pulls back in a flat arc from an anguished elder declaring: "We want a king, Samuel, as all nations, a king to judge us and lead us!" Continuing its arc the camera catches an old man--Samuel--rising to his feet. "My brothers, there is no king for our people...no king for Israel, because the king of Israel is the Eternal, Who freed us from slavery."

The Israelites insist however, which is how the country got to anoint its first king: Saul, a bellowing tyrant hard on his countrymen and even harder on their cattle, at one point whacking a bull in the head with an oversized mallet (What did Joseph de Maistre once say? "Every nation gets the government it deserves"). Rossellini establishes the style and demeanor of Israeli kings to better contrast with the style and demeanor of the coming king, but establishes at the same time the historical and political context from which the line of rulers arose: the Israelites demanded a king, a military dictator, in effect, because they wanted the safety and relative stability of such a king--which wasn't quite what happened (Samuel: "You shall know what meaneth to be subject to a king's will!"). They may have also prayed centuries for a messiah, but wasn't prepared for when he finally came, or what he had to offer.

It's startling to realize just how much Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ borrowed from Rossellini--the baptism (with its shallow stream surrounded by rocky bluffs) could have been rear projected directly into Scorsese's picture (all that's needed is for Andre Gregory to do a walk-on cameo). A hut of straw and tree branches standing behind Christ (Pier Maria Rossi) as he tells the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds might have been dismantled right after shooting, then reassembled fourteen years later for Willem Dafoe's honeymoon with his not-so-blushing bride. The camera follows closely as a cup is passed from Rossi's Christ to disciple after disciple after disciple, and with a little judicious splicing might pass right back to Dafoe's Christ. 

Scorsese is an admitted admirer of Rossellini, but doesn't overtly adopt (despite all the borrowed images) much of the filmmaker's visual style. You often catch Scorsese indulging in visual flash--gold coins spinning in the sky; a recreation of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross; a camera lashed to the top of the cross as it's lifted up into the air (a tribute if you like to a similar shot in Nicholas Ray's King of Kings). 

Rossellini's film might have influenced Scorsese and was probably influenced in turn (to cite yet another brother-in-Christ) by Pier Paolo Pasolini's earlier The Gospel According to Matthew--like Rossellini's film a low-budget feature and an angry rebuke towards Hollywood-style Christ extravaganzas. No name stars, no elaborate sets or costumes, no production values whatsoever--there isn't even any color. Pasolini took a page from neorealism (of which Rossellini was an establishing master), but did it his way: edgy editing, casual handheld shots that on occasion shoved the lens in the actor's face, a high-contrast black-and-white palette. His soundtrack is eclectic--Mozart; Bach; a traditional African-American spiritual. A leper's misshapen nose bulges into the big screen as he whispers "make me clean;" Christ (a no-nonsense Enrique Irazoqui) declares: "you are clean" and Gloria from the Missa Luba blares out from the soundtrack.  

Rossellini doesn't use much music; a kind of suspenseful shiver here, there (the child's murder, Herod's death), developing into a honest-to-goodness if modest melody in the film's final two minutes. His editing is anything but aggressive; instead he pieces together sinuous long takes that come close enough to the characters to register as medium shots (but otherwise keep a discreet distance). Unlike Pasolini he doesn't forsake color; he seems to acknowledge that color is a part of a man's normal view, that black-and-white is (especially nowadays) an extreme form of stylization. Where Pasolini is severe Rossellini is chaste; where the former denies himself the pleasures of period filmmaking the latter shows reluctance, a sense of restraint--the difference, I think, being mainly in attitude and tone.

I've tried describing Rossellini's style before, and was unhappy with the results; possibly it's easier to describe what he's not instead of what he is. He's not into displays of virtuosity like Scorsese, though there are shots that betray the pure craft of a master--a group of children chanting and clapping, for example, the camera climbing up to follow soldiers marching the ramparts of a high wall, then pulling back and arriving at Christ transfixed on his cross (the contrast between the children's singing and Mary Magdalene's soft sobbing being more emotionally devastating than anything in, say, Mel Gibson's laughably overheated Passion of the Christ). His film's austere, but not in the in-your-face manner of Pasolini; he doesn't use Pasolini's alienating manner of having Christ lecture to us, profile head-on and free of frills or music or movement or lighting effect of any kind (save the setting sun, and the occasional lightning flash)--daring us to stay focused on the words' inherent wisdom and the image's flinty beauty (not to mention Irazoqui's piercing eyes), despite our faltering, all-too-human interest. 

Rossellini for his part does something more audience-friendly, yet interesting on its own terms. His Christ is busy repairing one of the apostles' fishing boats--he's about to send them on their own teaching missions. A disciple asks "what should we bring with us?" the camera coming up close as if to better hear his reply (and along the way underline the importance of his reply). Christ answers: not much--just what you have. "Behold the birds of the air," he points out, noting that they do nothing to provide for themselves yet are somehow cared for; at which point the camera pulls out--as if it was us the audience taking this insight and carrying it in our hearts and looking at the world through a new attitude, through differing eyes--the camera frame restlessly framing and re-framing to juxtapose image to questions and questions to answers in a sustained visual conversation.  

And--for me the breathtaking part--Christ runs with the idea, or rather his people do. Rossellini cuts to one disciple, then another repeating Christ's parables (said parables--stories with a philosophical point--being easier to remember and understand for these mostly uneducated men and women). It's not all about him, Rossellini seems to be saying; Christ won't save the world all by himself--he's using them (and by extension us) to put words into others' ears, and into practice in everyday life (in a way Rossellini's suggesting a sequel to his mid-career masterpiece, The Flowers of St. Francis, where at film's end the master orders his disciples to spin around till they stumble, then go in the direction they've fallen to spread the word). He's using communal effort--a key concept of communism if you like (and remember that Rossellini's politics leaned decidedly to the left)--to scatter his ideas abroad. 

It's not as if the film were totally bereft of humor--there's funny here, if you look carefully. Or perhaps you didn't need care; a quick glance at the Pharisees and you see their ridiculous horns, the bizarre little cube of wood sprouting out of their foreheads. The Pharisees may represent established authority, or entrenched hypocrisy, or the interests of the powers that be (which may include Hollywood and its equivalent in Italian cinema); Rossellini has about as little respect for any of them as Christ does, mercilessly depicting them as helpless in the face of radicalism, till they concoct a cowardly plot to accuse Christ of political conspiracy against the Romans (a massive misunderstanding--he's subversive, but not in that sense). 

It's not as if Rossellini's film is determinedly secular--there are miracles but (unlike in say Pasolini's) they're even further de-emphasized, we don't actually see him performing them (though we do on occasion see the aftereffects, as in the miracle of the loaves of bread). The miracles aren't Christ's strongest selling point, Rossellini seems to suggest, or at least he seems to feel they're mostly gimmicks that distract from Christ's ideas, and can safely be relegated offscreen.

It's not as if Rossellini's film is bereft of lyricism either, or visual poetry: one of the loveliest passages in the film is of Rossellini's camera lingering over this man or that hard at work, then zooming in on Christ hammering on what looks like a partly assembled plow (unlike most other onscreen Christs, Rossellini's seems to be  busy plying his trade). He talks of who will or will not enter the Kingdom of God, asks what is the Kingdom of God--

--whereupon Mary takes over, explaining to a child that the Kingdom is where "milk and honey will flow," stressing that this Kingdom will come about when everyone works for its coming--

--and Rossellini's camera moves away from Mary to wander among people sweeping, cooking, milking, bricklaying, and so forth. Mary might talk of a heaven to come, but Rossellini seems to suggest that heaven might already be here in the form of a worker's paradise, if we so choose to recognize it. 

At one point Christ is asked a blunt question: how to gain eternal life? His reply is equally blunt: love God, and each other--the two sentences clarifying and simplifying and above all distilling thousands of years of Jewish theology (or at least that's how Catholics feel about it). In a way it's what Rossellini seems to be doing--to have done: clarify and simplify and above all distill the Christ of the Gospels (in particular Luke) in a single hundred and forty minute film, as cogent a case of form following content as is humanly possible, from a master of Italian--of human--cinema. 

Easter Sunday, 4.20.14

The best of 2013

Counting down, the in my book best films of 2013:

10. Post Tenebras Lux, Carlos Reygadas, 2012

Not a big fan of the distortion effect used around the edges of the frame in the exterior scenes (Gerardo de Leon did the same thing in his Banawe, and it felt and still is a silly gimmick that obscures otherwise gorgeous images) but Carlos Reygadas' semi-autobiographical film told in the style of Luis Bunuel with a generous helping of David Lynch is a fascinating anti-narrative. It does speak of patriarchal anger and spousal passivity and how one enables the other (demonstrated in an erotic interlude that takes place in a sauna, where the rooms are named after artists and philosophers) and of children's dreams portending quiet apocalypses (cows surround a little girl, lowing; the sky literally rains blood) but to pin Reygadas' work down to anything more definite is to risk looking silly, even wrong; this is a Rorschach blot of a film that you interpret at your peril. 

9. The Search for Weng Weng, Andrew Leavold, 2007

No one loves a film more than a cinephile, and few love Philippine cinema more, apparently, than Andrew Leavold, owner of the late Trash Video (it's closed since), an Australian specialty store that traded in cult and bizarre titles. Leavold called his establishment 'Trash,' but that's to entice his customers; it's clear from his debut documentary that he really means 'treasure,' and he treasures few films as he does Eddie Nicart's For Y'ur Height Only (1981), featuring the one and only Weng Weng, a 2' 9” actor reportedly named after a Filipino drink--so much so Leavold spent seven years to bring his film to the (big, small, video) screen.

Mind you, For Y'ur Height Only isn't in the tradition of Lino Brocka or Ishmael Bernal; the movie was meant to parody the James Bond flicks and was produced on a budget tinier than its diminutive star. But what Leavold reveals in his prodigiously affectionate piece of cinejournalism is that there are arcane pleasures to be found in this more disreputable branch of Philippine cinema (among others, that Weng Weng was a pretty good martial artist who consistently delivered a vicious roundhouse kick, and that he wooed onscreen some of the more beautiful actresses in the industry, in various stages of undress), not to mention drama and pathos galore (Weng Weng was never properly paid for the millions he made his producers, and died in relative obscurity). It's as if Leavold were practicing a paraphrase of Jean-Luc Godard's dictum: the best way to pay tribute to a beloved movie (and the wild and rollicking cinema behind it) is, in effect, to make another movie.

8. Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler, 2013

Coogler's docudrama, about Oscar Grant lll's very last day before he is shot by the San Francisco transit police on New Years' Day, 2009, may be manipulative--it adds details that help soften the outlines of the youth's hard-luck life--but it's still powerful testament to the fragility of a young black man's life in modern America.

7. To the Wonder, Terence Malick, 2012

Not as expansive in scope and intense in feeling as his Tree of Life (2011) and he still hasn't found the sense of humor he lost not long after making Badlands (1973), but Malick's latest does inspire the film's eponymous emotion, if you don't happen to insist on straightforward narratives and clear character motivations. Gorgeous cinematography and vague voiceovers are par for Malick's works, of course, but here the vagueness hints at people who are unhappy and can't express exactly why they're unhappy--and this lack of eloquence, this inability to communicate may be key to their dilemma. Easy to label this as a pretty picture with pretentious ambitions, but the sight of Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem aching to reach out to each other and failing to make contact is a sight a touch too disturbing to simply dismiss. Not major Malick, but better than most Hollywood productions out there.

6. American Hustle, David O. Russell, 2013

Not as gritty as his The Fighter, or as imaginatively idiosyncratic as his I Heart Huckabees (in my opinion his best work to date), but David O. Russell's semi-fictional take on the Abscam affair is funny, sexy, and not a little poignant: the character sketch of a con man (Christian Bale)--his physically and morally repugnant aspects as well as his somewhat mystifying appeal--is worth the price of admission. Shot in Russell's signature hand-held style (with thankfully minimum shakiness) and stitched together to Russell's distinctively nervy rhythms, the film includes Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Renner in star turns, and Amy Adams as Bale's faux English aristocrat mistress (my favorite performance in the picture). It's lightweight Russell that resembles too closely Scorsese back in the '70s but still worth the watch.

5. Iskalawags, Keith Deligero, 2013

Taking a page off of Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct and possibly Mario O'Hara's Pangarap ng Puso (Demons), Deligero's bildungsroman has something of their experimental, freewheeling spirit. A group of youths embarks on a series of often hilarious, usually profane, sometimes sensual escapades, and along the way Deligero unleashes a barrage of cinematic no-budget tricks and surreal images--an impromptu re-enactment of a Filipino action sequence; a chicken massacre; a blackboard covered with spermatozoa--giving us one of the most exciting and original films of the year.

4. The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese, 2013

Call it Scorsese's Inferno: on the surface a three-hour celebration of the excesses of the '90s--sex, drugs, and money rolls--ramped up to 11 by the addictive camera and editing style, the film (thanks to the director's unrelenting need to resist doing the predictable or even acceptable thing) makes its slow dive into perdition and ruin so gradually you're almost convinced the slide began at the very start, when he was a dewy newbie in Wall Street, and that it was in Jordan Belfort's very nature that he rise high and then lose it all (or lose as much as a formerly all-powerful white male in America can possibly lose and still clinch a book deal and movie of his life's story). All of Scorsese's films are acts of penance in their way (for him or his surrogate protagonists), and this one is no different: go, sin no more.

3. The Grandmaster, Wong Kar Wai

Call Wong's latest a corrective to Ashes of Time: the fight sequences here are gorgeously shot and edited and coherent, where the fight sequences in the previous work are sheer confusion. Sadly, many of the filmmaker's devotees have deserted him for selling out and delivering a halfway conventional biopic, of legendary martial arts master (and trainer of Bruce Lee) Yip Kai-man (also known as Ip Man). I see it differently, as Wong's most radical film yet: a monstrous chimera of a creature that starts out as straightforward biopic, then evolves into something more wayward, more volatile, more inimitably Wong--in effect, a film to confound both ordinary viewers and Wong's own fans.

2. Philomena, Stephen Frears

It's an odd-couple comedy: retired nurse Philomena Lee teams up with journalist/author/disgraced civil service officer Martin Sixsmith in a quixotic search for her son, which she was coerced by nuns to give up for adoption years ago (it's also yet another true story, making this a year stuffed with based-on-real-life adaptations). Judi Dench and Steve Coogan score points off of Philomena's relative guilelessness and Sixsmith's grating snobbishness, and otherwise put up an entertaining enough comic act to let us relax our guard--and then dive in for the dramatic kill. There is some question as to the ethics of resurrecting one nun to be the target of the film's very clear scorn (though the accusations leveled at her and her fellow sisters are, according to Sixsmith, true), but the real question in my mind is: will the Church allow this to be screened in Manila? Because Philomena's faith is real, and the way she struggles to maintain that faith in the face of her Church's abuses is to my mind an issue we all should face, and struggle with as well. Far and away the best thing Frears has ever done. 

1. Norte, the End of History, Lav Diaz

Some might consider Lav Diaz's latest at four hours a compromised condensation (his usual films run from six to eight hours, and are based on his own scripts--this is his first attempt at translating someone else's writing to the big screen); instead it's his most visually gorgeous work--incidentally his first in color since, oh I don't know when--and his most overtly Dostoevskian, a transposition of Crime and Punishment to Filipino society. It's also the most richly humane, most rounded film I've seen in 2013, an unflinching view of both existential evil and uncomplaining good, though Diaz's attitude to either quality is actually more complexly ambivalent than I've suggested. In terms of ambition and uncompromising art, the film of the year.

Postscript:

Didn't do a 'Best of 2012;' frankly speaking, after the loss of various major film artists of Philippine cinema that year, I couldn't muster the enthusiasm to celebrate anything, much less draw up a list. 

This represents what I believe to be the best of what I've managed to see in 2013, whether released in Manila or elsewhere; if they haven't reached local theaters they will soon, or will be released in DVD or online, in which case I hope this can serve as a guide to what might be worth watching in the coming months. Sadly, my year-long fast meant I failed to write about or note what I considered the finest film of the past few years, and Lav Diaz's strongest work to date: Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, about a young woman suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (the answer as to why she should suffer from what is basically an aging boxer's disease is the source of much of the film's unsettling power). Against that massive tragedy, all else--Hollywood or otherwise--seemed puny in comparison.

First published in Businessworld, 1.9.14

American Hustle; The Wolf of Wall Street; Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee); The Time of the Doctor (Jamie Payne; Dr. Who Christmas Special)

(Warning: plot twists of the various titles mentioned are discussed in close and explicit detail)

Do the hustle

Call it the Year of True-Life Movies:  American Hustle is David O. Russell's take on the Abscam scandals, some of which, he cagily admits in an opening title, "actually happened." The succeeding events at most provide a rough outline on which Russell hangs a series of sexy, funny, occasionally poignant encounters between memorably sleazy characters, played by some very smart (and smart-looking) actors, filmed in the director's distinct adrenaline-rush style (frenetic cutting and handheld camerawork that somehow retains visual coherence), perhaps channeling filmmaker Martin Scorsese more than usual what with the outrageous '70s outfits and tremendous '70s hair. Bradley Cooper's Jheri Curls, Christian Bale's swollen belly, and Jennifer Lawrence's blonde fizziness got the most favorable notices from critics, but it's Amy Adam's faux English mistress--juggling her attraction to both Bale's swindler and Cooper's FBI agent and countering the threat of Lawrence's housewife--that feels more and more like the film's true heart: her and her comic struggle to remain true to a tangle of loyalties.

Some of Russell and co-writer Eric Singer's story choices are puzzling--I can see the need to depict mistrust of government, but is the Mafia that much more trustworthy, or effective? Is Russell saying you can cut a straight deal with gangsters sooner than with government, or that gangsters are so lethally effective it's better to screw the government? And granted the real-life equivalent of Bale's swindler really liked the real-life equivalent of Jeremy Renner's Camden mayor, did they really have to gloss over the fact that the latter was not as innocent as depicted onscreen?

Not perhaps as drenched in gritty pathos as Russell's The Fighter, or as stubbornly, imaginatively idiosyncratic as his I Heart Huckabees (in my book his masterpiece), but still a fine entertainment, and any excuse to watch Russell flex his considerable filmmaking muscles is in my book a perfectly valid excuse. Good hustle, sir.

The lower depths

There's Russell's vivid approximation of a Martin Scorsese film, and then there's the original. The Wolf of Wall Street is everything American Hustle is--sexy, funny, fluid, profane--and more: disgusting, despairing, demented, in both a good and bad way. 

Why watch a hundred and sixty plus minutes of Leonardo DiCaprio sniffing and screwing and screaming when Ray Liotta had done all that back in '90 and Robert De Niro had done it best (in my book, anyway) in '95? Because, well, no one does it quite the way Scorsese does, and I suppose if anyone has to repeat himself--switching the milieu from '70s Brooklyn to '70s Vegas to '90s Wall Street--Scorsese's earned the privilege, charting the grotesque rise (through violence, through business, through deceit) and ignominious fall (through violence, through hubris, through sheer accident) of a white male in American society yet again. It's a story so vast and broad (if not exactly profound) it could stand being repeated twice, the volume cranked up louder with each retelling--or at least that was what Scorsese must have thought when he did this film.

Christina McDowell makes a compelling case that the story shouldn't be told at all; that if anything Scorsese has done us a disservice telling Belfort's story with such cinematic brio. It's a heartfelt, harrowing letter, and should give the viewer pause; Scorsese does much in the picture but one thing he doesn't do is tell the victim's side of the story.

Hard to see Scorsese doing that, though. He rarely editorializes--simply tells the tale, whether it's Jordan Belfort's or Henry Hill's or Jake LaMotta's; shows us the glamor and dirt, then shows us the fall. The most he'll give us by way of message is that the man--any man--gets his, eventually. Scorsese practically insists on this point--even Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ is punished for wanting an ordinary life. We see Belfort snort up mountains of coke; we also see him struggle to his Ferrari, barely able to crawl because he's overdosed on 'luudes. We see him fucking everything in sight; we also see him atop his wife in one particularly excruciating scene, where she clearly doesn't want him there (I personally don't think Margot Robbie got near enough the credit she deserved).

And is all that high life--the booze, drugs, naked girls--necessary? Scorsese doesn't quite sell the decadence: you see what's happening, you get loud rock on the soundtrack, but he doesn't linger; the excess comes at you in a rush much the way you imagine it came at Belfort, or at least the way Scorsese imagines it must have come at Belfort. Scorsese's acting as anthropologist here, a cool observer with maybe a bit of inside information on the effects of being high (and other less pretty symptoms). He shows us the arc of Belfort's addiction (not to drugs--when he's compelled to quit he does so without much struggle--but to money and the power that money brings) in a way that's fascinating, almost addictive. We crave the high of Scorsese's style, the way Belfort--and Hill, and Rothstein, and LaMotta--crave the high of their respective vices. 

If Scorsese is guilty of excusing or prettifying any of the facts, it's in suggesting that Belfort victimized mostly the rich (a lot of small business entrepreneurs got hurt); Belfort himself claims to have turned a new leaf (debatable) and has announced plans to hand over the profits from book and film to victims.*

*Possibly a moot point, as the film is doing disappointing business. Which leads one to ask: the film is encouraging what? Glorifying what? Seems to me the general audience understood well enough what critics didn't: that Scorsese's picture is less an entertainment than an ordeal, one we don't sit through so much as suffer, the way Catholics suffer through Lent.

Will Belfort's proposed generosity become reality? Frankly I think Belfort hasn't stopped hustling. But the biggest disservice Scorsese may have done is to call attention to flashier predators, instead of the real criminals living quieter, more respectable lives. 

But a film that probes into big-time financial corruption probably needs a different director with a different (more sober?) approach; even then you wonder if he (the theoretical filmmaker and his proposed work) could attract enough financing--or audience--to make a difference. 

Meanwhile we've got this, Scorsese's latest, and what he does manage to do--while hardly his best work--is pretty damned good, I'd say.
 

Brain freeze

Give the filmmakers of Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee) some credit: they take the standard-issue Disney princess and tinker with her a bit, make her more kickbutt, more assertive, less dependent on her Prince Charming (in this case a Danish lunkhead named Kristoff). In place of insensitive parents (they're killed off early) a troubled sister; in place of sneering villain, a smooth charmer. 

There's effort made in the digital animation department too, and when not being sandbagged by the inane songs one can marvel at the way the digital snow clumps and falls, or the way the digital ice gleams in the chill air (filled with digital flakes that seem suspended in silence, a nice little digital effect). 

But alas, movie, thy studio is Disney, and before long stupidity takes over. Enter an annoyingly cheerful snowman sidekick; notice the inordinate amount of time spent on extreme snow sports (sledding, tobogganing, ice sliding, etc.); marvel at the standard-issue happy ending, complete with lunkhead by the heroine's side (couldn't she opt to be single with her sister, or--better yet--shack up with a Danish hottie named Kristine instead?). 

After The Wolf of Wall Street I thought I knew something about disgust, and revulsion, and overwhelming nausea. Pfui--just had to sit through this and found myself wanting to see the Scorsese again, to wash away the thick taste of treacle coating my tongue.

Worse of all is the end credits, which reveal that the story was based on one of Hans Christian Andersen's greatest stories, The Snow Queen: about a brother, subverted into evil by a shard of glass in the heart, who runs away from home, and the loving sister who sets out to bring him back. It's a tale full of subtle psychological subtext (the brother might be undergoing the painful transitions and traumas of adolescence) and harrowing drama (the sister moves heaven and hell to find him), and really deserves a proper adaptation--by Studio Ghibli, perhaps? Certainly something far better than this mouse dropping of a movie.

Time to die

Not much I can say about director Jamie Payne and writer Steven Moffat's The Time of the Doctor except that Moffat tries to cram too much material into the hour and fifteen minutes allotted to him--though to be fair I'd say this is a far better problem to have than too little spread out over the same period of time. 

Oh, and while Moffat seems to have tied all loose ends into a more or less tight knot, the accomplishment hardly seems as significant as the special's real achievement: celebrating Matt Smith's tenure as The Eleventh Doctor before he hands the reins over to the upcoming Thirteenth, played by Peter Capaldi. 

Why, after ranging all of time and space, should Eleven waste the rest of his natural lifespan defending a piddling little town (named Christmas, of all things!) occupied by a mere few hundred lifeforms? More to the point, why waste so much of the episode's precious running time delineating Eleven's growing bond with the townsfolk, when we could instead watch the growing antagonism between Eleven and his countless foes?  

Because Eleven as Matt Smith has played and developed him through the years isn't really about foes, or fighting (or the First Question, or The Silence, or Gallifrey, or all the other piddling little subplots smaller minds have worried about all this time); Eleven as Matt Smith has played him is about the people--kids in particular--he's come to know, and who have come to know him. Smith loves the fans--the Whovians--and is loved in return, and that's what the episode's really all about.

So the premise is a bit silly--a town called Christmas, to be defended against the rising hordes--so what? It's a charming little town locked in an endless White Christmas, with a brief sunrise and sunset for variety; not a grand setting or even a logical setting for Eleven's final days, but a poetic one, a--yes--living Hallmark Holiday Card, with Daleks and The Silence and the odd wooden Cyberman hovering about the margins to add a bit of tension, a bit of cool.

And against this background Smith rallies the people; takes a moment to speak to young Barnable (Jack Hollington)--from his very first episode he's always had good rapport with children--and yes, dons rubbery age makeup that fools no one, only there's something comfortingly paternal about Smith despite his age (he's the youngest actor to ever play the Doctor), and the makeup brings this out. Do the scenes of Smith as an old man crimp his manic energy? Perhaps, but they complete him, or our image of him, filling out the portrait in our heads of his entire unnaturally long life, from moment of arrival to moment of departure (added bonus that when he's re-energized--wrinkled and feeble and bowed, suddenly bellowing at the top of his voice--it's a mighty moment). 

Eleven's final scenes are blessedly brief--no extended bathos a la Russell T. Davis' sendoff of David Tennant--but no less finely written. Actually Moffat's suffered a lot of (to my mind undeserved) grief over his plotting (complex, to put it kindly) and characterization (eccentric, says fans; shallow and annoyingly cute, says non-fans), but I say he's at least master of the brief vignette that drives a barbed hook to the heart, and here manages two such scenes: Clara's grandmother's anecdote ("I wanted everything to stop.") and Handle's passing (which channels both Castaway and, weirdly, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia). 

"I will not forget one line of this; not one day," Smith promises, and we believe him--at that moment man and character seems to have perfectly fused, in intent, in feeling, in our feelings for him. Moffat allows Eleven a glimpse of "the first face this face saw," a kind of circling back or return, not to mention discarding (the bow tie falling to the floor), and then--zap. New face, moved on. We're caught off-guard but that's Moffat for you: never quite doing the expected thing. Farewell, Mr. Smith; we will miss you.

1.2.14

Best of 2011

(Updated 1/22/12)

Was the year so bad? It had its moments. Film availability was so erratic you never knew what would be suddenly available, or what needed a wait of weeks or months. Foreign and Filipino films continued to be hard to obtain and slow in coming, and for the first time I found myself going online regularly to watch what I needed to see. Frustrating and fascinating, sometimes both at the same time; at least a few heroes (O'Hara, Hellman, Carpenter) managed to work. 

Some 2010 titles I include because most people saw them much later, usually on DVD (and they deserve to be seen).

Some interesting runner-ups (in alphabetical order):

The Adventures of Tintin - Steven Spielberg's gaudy Christmas ornament of a picture, a breathlessly paced action-adventure that can barely afford the time to pause and regard itself, much less generate human interest. Easily one of Spielberg's most kinetically complex works, if not exactly his most involving. 

Anatomiya ng Korupsyon (Anatomy of Corruption) - Dennis Marasigan's beautifully understated adaptation of Malou Jacob's play captures the atmosphere and dynamics of a Filipino white-collar workplace better than any filmmaker I can think of since Ishmael Bernal (Working Girls, 1984), down to the secretary operating a cigarettes-and-candy store literally under the table. In Maricar Reyes' fresh new lawyer we see the near-fanatic idealism of the truly innocent, the strength that allows them to defy pressure for so long, that makes their eventual descent such  compelling drama. With Sid Lucero, terrific as Reyes' kindly, reasonable, fully implicated immediate superior.

Animal Kingdom - Would be a disservice to call David Michod's gangster picture an Outback The Godfather; it's more interesting than that, a crime noir with a strong sense of place and family dynamics, a bleak spirit appropriate to the bleak desert setting.

Cars 2 - Now this is more Pixar's speed: action and comedy served up with few pretenses (leave 'heart' to people who actually know something about it like, say, Studio Ghibli). Larry the Cable Guy is inoffensive as the voice of the movie's putative hero; Michael Caine steals the show playing an Aston Martin too cool to be a fool. My vote for Pixar's best feature to date--which isn't saying much, but there you are.

Casino Jack and the United States of Money - Alex Gibney's documentary doesn't have interviews of the man  to work on, and Gibney himself isn't enough like Michael Moore to give the picture the larger-than-life clown protagonist it needs to laugh with (or at), but the eponymous subject (superlobbyist Jack Abramoff) is so compellingly bizarre you keep watching anyway.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams - As beautiful a documentary as anything Herzog has done, with the cave's contours (and Herzog's gliding handheld lamps) bringing the thirty thousand year old artworks back to eerie, startling life. Did not see the 3D version, unfortunately, which is said to go a long way towards justifying the use of the gimmick.

Contagion - Outbreak for the intelligent. Steven Soderbergh directs his always smart sensibility at the disaster movie and produces (with help from experts) the most persuasive and scientifically accurate depiction of a deadly plague--and a government's reasonably swift response to it--yet made (we're talking best-case scenario here, though). Don't cough while watching with others: the sense of paranoia generated can be catching.

The Debt - No handheld shots; no chop-suey editing. John Madden's thriller, about three Israeli intelligence operatives who capture an infamous Nazi officer--is so old-fashioned it's refreshing. Of course the Nazi steals the show with the slyest, funniest performance in the picture.

The Descendants - Alexander Payne doing a novel by Kaui Hart Hemming. The plot is secondary--something about a man discovering his wife is unfaithful--to the opportunity to know a family, its fairly dysfunctional dynamics, and the weird way they warp and bend to the stresses imposed the novel's plot. Wonderfully performed, subtly told.

Drive - Nicolas Refn's first American feature has an embarrassingly awkward love story written into the heart of it and both Cary Mulligan and Ron Perlman are criminally underused, but Albert Brooks is a hoot as an amiable sociopathic gangster, and Refns in the various chase and action sequences proves himself to be a more skillful filmmaker than Quentin Tarantino (not saying much again, I know).

Exit Through The Gift Shop - Artistic terrorist Banksy's debut film is partially a hoax, not as elaborate as Welles' F is for Fake, but elaborate enough to impress. As a small bonus the film is also a brief survey of the best and most striking contemporary street art, circa 2010. 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Noomi Rapace is sorely missed as the eponymous girl (Rooney Mara is a far softer alternative), but otherwise David Fincher successfully evokes with a visual style all his own the obsessive determination of a pair of sleuths hunting down a serial killer. 

The Green Hornet - Not a big fan of the original show (other than Bruce Lee); not a fan of Seth Rogen's whiny self-centered schtick; not a fan of Michel Gondry's non-Charles Kaufman work--but I am a (somewhat surprised, somewhat reluctant, somewhat stunned) fan of this. A deconstruction of the superhero movie flick that leaves no headstone unturned, no latex underwear unstained.

Hall Pass - Bob and Peter Farelly's take on the need for the overgrown male child to "just grow up and get on with it" isn't quite like Judd Apatow's--and thank God for that. Not their best--that would be the scathingly funny Kingpin--but not bad, for an overgrown male child comedy.

Happy Feet 2 - George Miller's sequel to his epic penguin movie is, like the original, a touch too wholesome. But one senses something visionary about the whole enterprise, and the sight of community action on both a grand and plankton scale is inspiring indeed.

The Illusionist - Sylvain Chomet's realization of Jacques Tati's unproduced script doesn't have the wit or grace or timing of Tati, but it does have the gorgeous colors and Gallic despair of a Chomet animated feature (a lesser thing, true, but not negligible).

Immortals - Tarsem Singh's retelling of Theseus' myth should have been yet another Clash of the Titans ripoff; instead I found a stylish (if severely underwritten) adventure epic ingeniously staged, intensely shot and edited.

J. Edgar - Clint Eastwood's Hoover biopic is a skillfully rendered production, written by Dustin Lance Black (Milk, 2008) as an unacknowledged love story between Hoover and his longtime companion Clyde Tolson. Well done for what it is, but one has to question if Hoover deserves this kind of treatment, or if Eastwood should have put the man's career in a broader, clearer context (in short: one of the most terrorizing, corrupting influences in 20th century American politics).

Meek's Cutoff - Kelly Reichardt's fascinatingly elliptical drama takes a historically true event (a guide named Stephen Meek did lead a group of settlers off of the Oregon Trail, and they did meet a Native American) and turns it into an allegorical / metaphysical drama on the uncertainty of life, the inscrutability of others (or Others).

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - Brad Bird's first live-action feature is fun, more fun in fact than Steven Spielberg's first foray into animated feature filmmaking (see above). Spielberg is the incomparably more talented filmmaker (his fight and chase sequences are lucid and beautifully staged, while Bird's are a handheld mess), but Bird does seem to possess the funnier, more inventive script (despite Spielberg having Dr. Who head writer Steven Moffat on his side), the funnier, more inventive cast (Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg).

Moneyball - Bennett Miller's true-life drama is easily the best sports movie I've seen in years, mainly because of what it is and what it isn't. It isn't an underdog-team-makes-good story; it isn't a low comedy about players' hi-jinks; it is the story of a statistical tactic that somehow upends all thinking about the game of baseball. Any time smarts trumps sports jocks, I'm so there. 

My Paranormal Romance - Victor Villanueva's supernatural rom-com is a delight, though not effortlessly so. It's the story of a girl who inherits the ability to see dead people and the various men who desire her abilities, her self, her whatever. Too long by about twenty minutes, but it has energy and imagination to spare (perhaps too much so), not to mention evidence of a warmly beating heart.

Never Let Me Go - Mark Romanek's adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel is understated to the point of somnolence--at least that's how some people might take this little drama; for others it's an oblique trip into heartbreak. With excellent performances by Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan.

Rango - Johnny Depp proves to be as nimble verbally as he is physically; the tone, a mix of mildly bizarre humor and American frontier tall-tale telling, is sustained for the length of the picture--not an easy feat. Undoubtedly Gore Verbinski's masterpiece which, yet again, isn't saying much.

Road to Nowhere - Monte Hellman's first feature in twenty years, about a film production doing the story of a fraud and possible double-suicide crime case, is as metaphysically slippery as anything anyone's ever done. The film eventually gathers hypnotic force and drama, but not before leading you through a mirror maze of misleading imagery and narrative ambiguities (Is the lead actress involved in the actual case? Who died and who's still alive? Which scenes are of the movie production and which of the real-life case?).

13 Assassins - Takashi Miike's take on the jidai-geki genre features one of the most baroquely memorable villains this side of Richard Widmark, and a massive climax staged and executed with what-the-fuck flair. Not quite the clarity and complexity of Seven Samurai, but it'll do till something better comes along.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - Tomas Alfredson moves away from vampires towards something far more sinister: espionage agents wading through the murk of '70s geopolitics. The production doesn't have the room to let John le Carre's classic spy thriller breathe properly, and Gary Oldman at best captures an echo of Alec Guinness' definitive interpretation of George Smiley (the master spy brought out of retirement to uncover a mole). But Alfredson does give the picture a beautiful stone-and-iron color palette, and at certain moments achieves the kind of airless silence that goes a long way towards enhancing the film's sense of paranoia.

War Horse - Spielberg again, this time galloping in the opposite direction with the more leisurely told, more emotionally direct story of a horse wandering through the battlefields of World War I. The material is sticky enough without the director trying to whack us over the head with the poignancy of it all; one is moved, but eventually, after a struggle. Think what Carroll Ballard could have done with this.

The Ward - John Carpenter's supposed feature comeback wasn't what everyone hoped for, but it wasn't total garbage either--mostly a master of modern American horror playing the postmodern game his way, with a tiny budget and even less pretensions.

You Don't Know Jack - A hushed look at Jack Kevorkian (a.k.a. Dr. Death, outspoken champion of assisted suicides). The film presents Kevorkian's many facets: the honesty, the stubbornness, even the hubris that eventually brought him down. Easily both Al Pacino and Barry Levinson's best work in years.

Zombadings 1: Patayin sa shokot si Remington (Rough translation: Scare Remington to death) - Director Jade Castro and screenwriter-producer Michiko Yamamoto's horror parody takes its inspiration from Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, and does it one better: instead of Eternal Damnation we're threatened with Eternal Pansification, and it's the film's conceit that This May Not Be an Entirely Bad Thing. Like My Paranormal Romance it suffers from one idea too many, and the narrative line can at times be obscured by the punchline, but personally I prefer this surfeit (of ideas, of gags, of energy) to its opposite...

Plus six titles that I thought were especially fine (in ascending order):

Tree of Life - Easily one of the most ambitious, most breathlessly beautiful films this year, in parts. The creation sequence has sweep and grandeur; the brief dinosaur sequence mystery and an elusive poignancy. The family sequences are intensely felt drama--one suspects Malick brought a lot of his personal life into these scenes. I feel the two halves belong in entirely different films, however; Malick hasn't even halfway bothered to integrate them. Then there's that beach scene, which plays like Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, only without the rueful irony (you suspect Malick for all his talent is missing a few key hues on his palette). Ultimately a failure, but what a failure!

Hugo - To paraphrase what film critic David Ehrenstein said, Mean Streets and Goodfellas was what Scorsese saw around him when he was young; Hugo was what he felt inside. An intricate clockwork of a movie that spins and shudders, chimes and chatters, striking a brassy bell for the cult of cinephilia. Martin Scorsese's film is possibly one of the most exuberant, most charming pictures of the year, and arguably the best use of digital 3D I've seen to date.

Ka Oryang - Sari Lluch Dalena's harrowing work presents in full what Lino Brocka, Mike De Leon, Mario O'Hara could only deal with tangentially in their films: the incarceration, interrogation, and torture of women during the Marcos era. Only Dalena tells the story through her inimitable experimental filmmaker's sensibility, with brief forays into surrealism and the occasional striking image.

Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay - And I thought Hugo was the most spirited, most exuberant, most cinephilic film of the year! Antoinette Jadaone's mockumentary follows veteran character actress Lilia Cuntapay (star of such Filipino horror classics as Aswang (Vampire); Shake, Rattle and Roll Part III; Shake, Rattle and Roll Part IV; Shake, Rattle and Roll Part V, and Pangarap ng Puso (Demons)) as she immerses herself Methodically in her bit parts and polishes endlessly her acceptance speech for the first-ever acting award nomination in her long and varied career. Pathos and hilarity ensue.

Certified Copy - Abbas Kiarostami's latest feature--his first to be shot outside of Iran--is a perfectly mysterious little gem, about a man and a woman wandering through the streets of Tuscany. Are they newly met acquaintances? Long-separated husband and wife? Acquaintances who have suddenly assumed the role of husband and wife? One hurries after them, trying to puzzle both the film and their relationship out while Kiarostami sits back and keeps the entire bewildering affair whirring on the palm of his confident hand. 

Poetry - Lee Chang Dong's film follows a grandmother as she attempts to belatedly learn how to write poetry, and as she attempts to deal with a possible rape conviction for her grandson. Lee's achievement is to make both storylines not just complementary, but compelling; as with the very best poetry, every detail carries more than its own weight in meaning. One of the best films not just of the year, but of several years.

Sa Ngalan ng Ina (In the Name of the Mother) - My vote for best of the year goes not to a movie but to a TV mini-series; not just any mini-series but a teleserye--a TV soap. Mario O'Hara and Jon Red's take on Philippine politics of the last thirty or so years is by turns hilarious, thrilling, shameless, and sad; in effect, exactly like Philippine politics of the last thirty years. With an understated yet ultimately monumental turn from Nora Aunor, the literal face of Philippine cinema.

1.14.12