Step Up: Revolution

I Tumbl'ed about Step Up: Revolution, which I enjoyed as the back-half of a recent (and rare) cinematic weekend:

To be sure, Step Up was never going to mount a critique in the spirit of Occupy since it’s a product (literally) of the forces against which the Occupiers were/are protesting against. The movie takes pains to generally promote a sanitized version of performance/protest art that wouldn’t run afoul of corporatist authorities — the Mob (the main crew of the film) leaves a signature behind each of its performances courtesy of a street artist in the film named Mercury, but unlike, say, Banksy, or Shepard Fairey, the tagging is always temporary and removable, steering well clear of anything that authorities might call vandalism, anything that might devalue property. What’s more, the film resolves in a way that depends entirely on the whims of neoliberal noblesse oblige — the Mob doesn’t aim so much to empower the citizenry as it does to affect the sentiment of the real estate developers intent on converting the crew’s preferred hangouts into a hub of renewed (read: gentrified) economic activity.

And:

[This] film is about the dance, and though I don’t think that any of the big set pieces reach the dionysian ecstasy of the SYTYCD performance, they’re all arresting in their own ways. Far and away the best is the museum number, whose dappled psychedelia is wonderfully disorienting, at once expressionistic and introspective.

I don't mention in the post, but aside from Kathryn (whose acquits herself quite well, I think, though I'm not a fan of demonstrative acting in the first place), Twitch, Tony Bellissimo, and Chbeeb, other SYTYCD alums who appear in the film include Billy Bell, Twitch, Brandon Mitchell (though really, if you blink (as I did) you'll miss him), and Mia Michaels. (Danielle "Bacon Girl" Dominguez also shows up and gets slightly more screen time than Billy.)

And for hipsters: M83 and Radiohead (ok, a remix of Radiohead) (also, Radiohead suck!!!! lolomgwtf!) both make appearances as well.

Shut Up and Dance: Step Up 3D and The LXD

To state get the obvious and expected out of the way, Step Up 3D has an utterly disposable story that fills up the time between some brain-melting dancing. So first, the griping: both of the male leads, if the plot occurred in the real world, are selfish pricks. Luke, the main character, is the supposedly steadfast leader of the Pirates, his ragtag-yet-appealing (whodathunkit) crew, but he actually is an insecure and flighty narcissist who seeks validation to avoid wallowing in pity. Case in point: he keeps calling on Moose (the other male lead and an incoming college freshman) with little regard for the latter's engagements and responsibilities (e.g. exams and the like) because dammit the Pirates need the new kid, which all comes to a head when Luke goes to a swank soiree to track down a love interest who suddenly and without explanation left the crew. He all but forces Moose to tag along for no obvious reason other than the fact that Luke needs someone to go with him, which obviously causes Moose to stand up his BFF-but-you-know-she's-really-his-true-love Camille.

And that's not to cast Moose as an innocent, here, because his involvement with Luke's crew comes at the expense of his relationship with Camille for no good reason; the movie starts off with Moose's parents telling him that he should focus on being an engineering student and forget about that dance stuff, but when he falls back into dance, whom does he keep his dancing from? His parents? No... well, I mean, yes, because his parents have fallen out of the movie by that point, but he doesn't even tell his supposed BFF Camille about it even as he keeps blowing off their appointments and nearly irreparably alienates her. But even when he lets her in on his double life, he still treats her as an afterthought -- when the Pirates need some extra dancers to fill out their ranks right before the big dance, Moose recruits his old crew (presumably from his high school days) which includes Camille, and as he introduces them (Harry Shum is the man with no bones, Christopher Scott is the popping tapper, etc.), he completely ignores Camille. Jerk.

But none of that matters, because the dancing in the film is, like I said, insanity-inducing. The finale is epic, an orgiastic spectacle of B-A-N-A-N-A-S proportions. The other routines, aside from a couple relative duds (one-and-a-half of the battles leading up to the big showdown, and a tango performance which is wtf and executed with mediocrity, if the indiscreet editing is anything to judge by) have standout moments as well (I puked with envy when the little kids started b-boying and b-girling), but the one other number that sticks out in my mind is a delightful routine with Moose and Camille invoking Fred and Ginger with a hip-hop flavor.

This little segment is so charming that, along with the smattering of parkour and capoeira -- I found myself wishing very hard that the film could've dispensed with narrative niceties and instead have everything occur in a slightly surreal world where people breaking out into dance doesn't need to be motivated by real-world concerns, which is the topic that's really on my mind. Obviously, the film's draw is its dancing, and everything else only needs to be barely functional to make seeing Step Up 3D worthwhile. However, every time the main stars had to deliver hackneyed dialogue as they dealt with another plot contrivance passing itself off as conflict, I kept wishing that this film and musicals in general could shake off the constraints of story to a far greater degree, to take a cue from the silent era or avant garde/non-narrative film or even ballet and prune back plot to its barest essentials in favor of the spectacle of dance. Of course, I'm being idealistic (pretentious might be a better word) since a wide release like Step Up 3D is financially obliged to conventional storytelling and characterization and clearly isn't the right venue to satisfy my middle-brow aestheticism.

That venue happens to be occupied by The LXD, though. Or at least it could be. Sure, the web series is a lot more stylized in its narrative than Step Up -- when a couple of b-boys, one good, the other evil, battle, the loser actually dies -- but more often, it plays by the typical conventions of movie musicals, where people suddenly break out into song or dance but eventually get back to regular life. This attachment to conventionality, which is an unfortunate but understandable aspect of musicals, tethers The LXD to okayness and the feeling of a missed opportunity, because the one episode where it shakes off the persistence of the quotidian is when it's close to brilliant.

The third and best episode -- "Robot Lovestory" -- dispenses with spoken dialogue for the most part (it does have brief subtitles that are superimposed onscreen obtrusively to mimic comic-book dialogue balloons, which I think is unnecessary but whatevs) and concentrates on stylized storytelling. It's not wall-to-wall dancing, but it avoids the usual weaknesses of recent musicals and, as something that future installments should aim for, uses visual storytelling to paint a lovely and heartfelt and at times awesome episode, which culminates with the female lead's solo at the end.

Seriously, she is awesome, because, as it turns out, she is PANDORA, who has become a cult heroine for SYTYCD fans who remember her awesome audition during season 2 but whom we've not seen or heard on the show since, leaving us wondering what's happened to her, and the answer is SHE GOT EVEN BETTER. I suppose I didn't recognize her because she got her braces off (considering her audition would've happened around 2005, it's about time too).

And oh hey, in the first battle between crews in Step Up 3D, which is kind of forgettable at first (even though Dave Scott's in the middle of it), this popper comes in like a secret weapon and saves the day:

...which, if you've been keeping track, is what got me to watch the film in the first place. Although the 3D-ness has really lost its novelty by this point in the film (I stopped being impressed the fifth time a scene is set up with dancers coming directly at the camera), her hand tutting is so murderous that it had me calling her Queen Tut and alone raised the quality of the battle. And oh, hey, THAT'S PANDORA TOO WTF SHE'S GOTTEN EVEN BETTER. Also, I suppose I didn't recognize her because of the angry makeup and the fact that she didn't have braces.

And I might as well recap the SYTYCD alums, of which Twitch is the only one who gets a meaty role with more than a couple throwaway lines. Joshua has a few lines as does Legacy, but neither of them get that much camera time (or, I think, dancing in Josh's case), while Ashley Nino says a few words and disappears off and on. I've read that Tony Bellisimo is in it but I didn't notice him. Ivan's in it, too, but I don't remember him at all, and Musa's in it though I'm not at all sure if he got to dance.

Finally, blink and you'll miss Bendy Girl from the Step Up performance on SYTYCD -- she figures into the final showdown but doesn't get a featured role in the routine.

Inception

My official stance on the movie is that it was diverting but judging Inception within Christopher Nolan's oeuvre, I'd rank this around The Prestige or Insomnia. In stories that create their own worlds from scratch, if they create their physics and rules arbitrarily, then viewers will arbitrarily find rules to question as inauthentic or inorganic, as I did with the Limbo idea which seems like an inelegant exception to and cheap way of creating tension out of the "You just wake up if you die in a dream" rule.

That said, some of the film's detractors complain about how its overly crisp depiction of dreamworlds doesn't resemble real-life dreams, a complaint that I find fairly weak because Inception is only ostensibly and superficially about dreams -- at its heart, it's about watching film.

The line I'm drawing from dream to film spectatorship isn't that radical of a leap in the context of psychoanalytic film theory, which is founded on Lacan's post-structural take on Freud. Dreams are obviously within the realm of psychoanalysis, but psychoanalytic film theory puts its critical stamp by arguing that watching film is particularly akin to dreaming. This argument begins on a basic level -- film and dreams typically occur in a darkened space that suppresses most of the subject's senses as it envelopes them in audio/video stimulation -- before it heads off into the esoteric stuff (see the mirror stage, suturing), which I'll leave alone for the real critics (and because as far as Lacan goes, I'm petty bourgeois).

However, the main point I want to bring to emphasize is that in psychoanalytic theory (in both its literary (read: Freudian) and film strains), the entire text is the unconscious dream. If the text is the unconscious, then the individual characters within the text aren't the subjects of the dream, they're simply projections, if you will, of the text's unconscious desire -- which is echoed in the "people" that populate the dreamscapes in Inception and are called, you guessed it, projections. (Apologies if I'm mangling Lacan, my excuse is that it's hard, I didn't do the reading, and slept through the lectures.)

Keeping all of this in mind, "Is the whole movie a dream?" isn't the question to ask -- rather, we ought to ask, "Is the whole movie a movie?" in which case we know the answer (if we want to get cute, maybe we could say it's a dream with a movie -- within a movie). As a result, complaining about the staircases (that it's "pointless," or because they only work "if you're not actually on the staircase" is beside the point. It's not for the sake of the characters that the staircase is there; the it's for the sake of the film viewer to laying bare the dream-like, involuted Möbius loop of film-watching and indeed all of narrative itself.

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To leave theory aside for the moment, another reason why I find the "it's not like real dreams" complaint to be trifling criticism is because real dreams are boring and incoherent. They might seem engrossing while or immediately after dreaming, but when you scrutinize them dramaturgically, they lose their engrossing qualities because they probably were never there. It's the Stoner's Paradox -- what someone finds captivating when they're not sober or conscious often turns out be unremarkable when they're sober or conscious. (Also, the blogger's complaint that Inception is almost entirely composed of montages? That seemed to serve the Soviet montagists fine.)

But that particular blog is based in the UK, and I recall that Lacan isn't terribly en vogue there (or anywhere besides America -- USA! USA!).

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As to the question we shouldn't ask -- "Is the whole thing a dream?" -- I would say yes, since all the shots we see of Cobb's kids are all shown with in the same "memory effect" style, and that includes when Cobb is reunited with them.

The Secret of Kells

I'm an enormous Pixar apologist, but I have to say, The Secret of Kells is better than Up.

The Secret of Kells is inspired by The Book of Kells, which is a gorgeous illuminated manuscript of the four gospels from the New Testament (and which, incidentally, plays a part in Finnegans Wake), that, you'll read elsewhere, is one of the most important artifacts in Irish history. And... well, I don't know what else to say in terms of synopsis, because the film left me breathless. From the opening pre-credits sequence -- a lot of which is in the official US trailer -- The Secret of Kells completely ravished me with its visual splendor, the sinuous vitality that lives and breathes onscreen; every frame has some beautiful detail that I lost myself in. Or I would've if the plot had been an afterthought; to be honest, you could argue that the plot is just an excuse for the majority of the visuals (it certainly doesn't push too far beyond any Proppian prototypes -- it's basically a coming-of-age story of an artist), but the final sequence is the emotional crescendo of the film and had me in tears. (Which isn't itself a singular accomplishment, as I've cried or been choked up while watching Spirited Away, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, and The Iron Giant (still Vin Diesel's best work).)

Film of the year.

Indie rating: This Mortal Coil - "Song to the Siren"

Oscar Thoughts 2010

Didn't actually watch it, but that's not going to stop me from bloviating.

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I was rooting for Lee Daniels to win Best Director. Why? Because there's no solidarity like Lee solidarity, even if some of them only spell the name with two E's.

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I was rooting against Carey Mulligan winning Best Actress, because if she had won, she'd would've priced herself out of a return to Doctor Who and hey presto, no more Sally Sparrow.

She looks great with the pixie cut, though!

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Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish David Lynch?

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Wow, Helen Mirren is beautiful.

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I'm pretty sure I saw Travis Wall, and possibly Kathryn McCormick. Didn't see Legacy, though.

Indie rating: The Shangri-Las – "Remember (Walking In The Sand)"

Oscars and Grouches

When the Academy Awards announced that they'd be nominating 10 films for Best Picture starting this year, I generally approved. My main rationale is pretty specific: it'd give the annual Pixar film a chance to leave the Best Animated Feature kids' table and potentially be recognized as, simply, great filmmaking. Neal Gabler of the LA Times has a different take:

By letting more films compete for the top trophy, the academy is merely following where others have led. Call it "cultural inflation": a growing number of opportunities for the less deserving to get a taste of ultimate victory, as part of a growing aversion to disappointing anyone.

For children, this manifests itself in giving every member of the soccer team a trophy regardless of how well he or she or the team performs. And just as some have concluded that such an exercise in building self-esteem may teach an unrealistic lesson about real-world winners and losers, so may cultural inflation mislead us about what is good or bad, and even change the standard.

...

Yet cultural inflation is not only a function of money. It is equally a function of modern democracy. Put simply, people in a democratic society such as ours don't understand why they can't always get what they want. The culture obliges by pandering, which is what the Oscars are doing by expanding the field. It is a form of cultural demagoguery that doesn't dare disappoint people -- the adult equivalent of those children's soccer trophies. In effect, we live in a "panderocracy."

Basically, Gabler fears that "the motion picture academy may risk tarnishing the Oscar, especially if votes are split and an outlier wins." Of course, he needn't worry because under the five-nominee format, we've already been blighted by such Best Picture winners as The English Patient, Titanic, and above all (or should that be below all?), Crash.

But let's pretend that the Academy represents an entity that generates reputable critical consensus -- it's in a position to refine or redefine the parameters of quality pictures by becoming a force of positivism rather than negationist. It's a sign of greater aesthetic maturity to like a lot of things than to like very few. To put the matter another way, our tastes should be defined by what we like, as opposed to what we don't like. (For example, I don't like most performances on SYTYCD, because my taste in dance is still pretty immature. On the other hand, I'm liable to bump universally reviled R&B or African folk music at any given time, so I'd consider my taste in music to be relatively mature.)

Likewise, then, an expanded shortlist of Best Picture nominees isn't a sign of coarsening cultural values, it's a chance for films that don't fit the prescribed Oscar-bait formula (a dour drama that grapples facilely with middlebrow ideas) to get time in the sun, as I mentioned above about Pixar films. Furthermore, any opportunity for people to reassess the artistic validity of different genres is an overall win, in my book, and the Oscars is as wide a venue as you can get in this regard.

And a digression that people who aren't interested in sports can safely ignore: Gabler also mentions baseball as one analogous example to the Academy's lowered standards. It used to be that "major league baseball teams had to win their league championship over the course of a long season to qualify for the World Series." Leaving aside the fact that teams still have to win their leagues to move onto the World Series, he overstates how much the expanded playoffs have diluted the quality of World Series teams. Since the institution of the wild card and the divisional round, the team with the better record has won its series 54% of the time. Hardly better than a tossup! Why, in the good old days, when baseball had only one round of playoffs before the World Series, the better team won a mighty 60% of the time! This 6% difference is stark and outrageous! (I computed both percentages -- based on Baseball-Reference.com -- in a raw, dirty way </sexy stats talk>. A more thorough approach would consider Pythagorean winning percentage instead of actual winning percentage, but I'm not an actual SABR nerd.)

Not only is his baseball example wrong, but in the context of the other sports he mentions (college hoops and football, the NFL), the MLB remains the most exclusivist league in terms of allowing teams into post-season play (8 per year out of 30 teams).

The Hurt Locker (2009)

Alyssa has a post up about District 9, which I haven't seen (I know, what kind of nerd am I) and The Hurt Locker, which I have seen: "I also thought both movies did well in wedding the viewer to protagonists who were, to one extent or another, unlikeable." Read the whole post for more goodness.

Unfortunately, The Hurt Locker was pretty far from my favorite film I saw in theaters for 2009 (that'd be Up, or, I don't know, Inglorious Basterds) -- read why (with spoilers) after the jump.

Everyone's Doing Decade Lists, Film Version

1. Wall-E
   So Tati-esque -- the use of minimal sound to create heart-aching loneliness. I love you, little robot.
2. Legally Blonde
   The best live-action American film this decade. Read some Lacan to find out why, muah haha hah hahah.
3. Batman Begins/The Dark Knight
   I would marry Batman.
4. Spirited Away
   An opulent menagerie of gods, with some of the most potent film-making I've had the pleasure of crying to.
5. Ratatouille
   The moment when SPOILER Anton Ego flashes back to childhood END SPOILER is unbeatable.
6. Children of Men
   I try to remain skeptical about displays of technical virtuosity (polite term for indulgent wank, which itself is less polite term I use for "acting"), but damn if all of Alfonso Cuarón's single-take set pieces didn't draw me into the visceral Bourne-style dystopia.
7. Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain
   Movies have taught me one thing: my true love is a Frenchwoman (ok, Francophone-woman) with chic brown hair. She alights like an apparition once a decade into the light and shadows of film. In the '90s, her name was Valentine Dussault; she reappeared as Amélie Poulain in 2001.
8. The Incredibles
   Wall-E and Ratatouille are in a class by themselves -- but being the best of the rest of Pixar's oeuvre is no small potatoes.
9. Bend It Like Beckham
   Girl power forever!
10. Secretary
    A sado-masochistic fairy tale whose main character is named Lee. How can I not go for it?

Conclusions: I am a 12-year-old girl. Michael Caine is the actor of the decade.

Indie rating: Goldfrapp - "Fly Me Away"

Shall We Dance?

I watched the original Japanese version of Shall We Dance, and aside from a couple tedious parts, I quite enjoyed it on the level of a modern fairy tale. However, when it tries to anchor the story in some modestly modern psychological terrain, the movie drags and becomes less enchanting; I thought the principal characters, Mai and Mr. Sugiyama, start off selfishly and don't grow much beyond that starting point, even if they connect or reconnect with some aspect of their lives that had previously been missing. Still, as long as it stays within the fairy tale mode and concentrates on the dancing, the film is especially charming.

The Japanese trailer (I did find an English-language trailer, but the voiceover is really annoying and the one I'm embedding actually gets across the gist of the scenes, I think, which shows that the visual storytelling of the film is really strong):



Some miscellaneous thoughts:

1. I wonder how current or accurate are the film's generality about Japan's cultural dislike for ballroom dance, since I get the impression from SYTYCD that ballroom has a decent foothold in Japan now. Digging around a little, this interview with one of the stars of the film mentions that Shall We Dance sparked an apparently enduring social dance craze.

2. The character of Mai is supposed to be a champion-level ballroom dancer, and she is played by Tamiyo Kusakari, an actual dancer. The thing is, she's a star ballet dancer, which begs the question, How good are the ballroom performances?

3. People who were turned off by Ashleigh's face-pulling in season 6 should check out this dude:



Guy is an absolute fright on the dance floor. (Pro dancers don't gurn and gasp like he does, do they?)

Indie rating: Josie and the Pussycats – "Shapeshifter"

Opsimath, Logorrhea, Cabotinage, Heleoplankton...

Or, Big Exciting Me Watched Spellbound The Other Night, thus completing the Documentaries About Words duology (see also: Wordplay), in which Spellbound is clearly the awesomer of the two, and closer to being universally appealing to film viewers, not just because if focuses on precocious grade school/junior high school kids who muse about are "wary" about their differences with their "peers" (and I was quite charmed by April, a self-described pessimist -- her word! -- and though I should probably worry about self-esteem, seeing someone her age being so neurotically self-aware was in its own way funny), Spellbound also features some beautiful filmmaking: the coda at the end culminating around the announcement of the winner is poetry.

Spellbound also doesn't, errr, bind itself exclusively to its stated subject and actually portrays some fascinating dynamics of America-ness -- the promiscuity of our bastard language is what makes the very idea of a spelling bee possible and/or compelling, for starters. Then there's the background of the first speller we meet in the film; she is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant working as a ranch hand who crossed the border illegally 20 years ago, and whose employers talk about how he's one of the good Mexicans.

The real meat of the film, though, lies in how it portrays the different forms that American competitiveness takes, which I sorted into two main camps, or to be clever, two main classes. On the one side of the tracks are kids from sufficiently affluent families who can turn Bee preparation into a process that's professional in all but name, that decide one year not to bring the au pair to the National Spelling Bee so that they can make the trip a real family affair, and that can hire private language tutors (not the plural!) for the etymologically trickier words. Furthermore, in true American fashion, we see an immigrant family (belonging to Neil Kadakia) bring its own twist to this privileged environment by routinizing the Bee preparation to a frighteningly mechanized, infinitely reproducible and quantifiable degree (though I guess in the end it's nothing that Henry Ford didn't already invent, or else his dad is a hardcore management science guy). These kids embody American exceptionalism; in crude terms, they're great because they have been built to be great because they can afford to be great.

On the other side of the tracks are kids who come from no more than lower-middle class. They've exhausted the basic public infrastructure of schools and supportive but out-of-their-depth families and thus have to rely on their own brilliant and innate gifts and rapacious work ethic -- in short, these kids are the bootstrappers of classic American myth.

Being the contrarian LOLMarxist that I am, I naturally rooted for the kids of modest means -- my stance, of course, wasn't really that contrarian because of the implicit underdog appeal that's embedded in humble circumstances, i.e. the typically American valorization of the "working class" complemented by the suspicions of privileged elites (au pairs!).

Of course, this being America, Spellbound in its last third introduces one more genus of spelling bee contender: the homeschooled child whose success is all thanks to his "trust in Jesus" (which was how he signed his autographs), though he comes on as something of an interloper because he doesn't get the in-depth interview treatment.

Anyway, if you were wondering:
opsimath: someone who learns late in life
logorrhea: diarrhea of the mouth
cabitonage (Update: DING! "cabotinage"): hammy overacting
heleoplankton: a plankton that lives in small bodies of still fresh water

Indie rating: Apparat - "Useless Information"

Big Exciting Me Watched "Wordplay" The Other Night

If you don't already enjoy crossword puzzles, then Wordplay is a documentary you can probably skip because it doesn't offer much in terms of film-making to rope in casual viewers; Wordplay is no Spellbound (which I haven't seen yet -- it's in the queue).

In my case, I do enjoy crossword puzzles, but having no experience of them beyond the narrow role of amateur solver, the movie is enormously informative. For starters, it shows how a crossword puzzle is constructed: we see one constructor, Merl Reagle, create a puzzle from scratch by first coming up with a theme, then positioning the theme words in a blank grid, and lastly filling out words and black squares around those theme words. For something so rigorously structured -- not just the grid, but the rules and conventions passed down from the NY Times' first crossword editor Margaret Farrar forbidding the use of words like "urine" and the orthographically seductive "enema" -- a crossword puzzle is borne out of a tremendous act of intuition that requires a Nabokovian facility and playfulness with words.

(A personal note: the puzzle that Reagle composes virtually on camera is one that I vaguely remember doing, based mostly on my fuzzy recollection that one of the answers was "CROSSSWORDS" -- you don't forget a thing like that triple-S -- even though the centerpiece of the puzzle was "WORD*PLAY.")

The other draw that Wordplay offers is its focus on four or five champion-level solvers, and once again, seeing these people perform smacks my gob. Because of constraints on my time, I don't do Monday through Saturday puzzles anymore (the Sunday Times puzzle is my weekly indulgence), but back when I did, I solved them at an exceptionally leisurely pace. Then, I watch this film and some of the tournament people, as warm up, solve a random puzzle in under in less than 3 minutes. AND THEN, at the final championship round of the 2005 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (apologies for linking to such an unattractive site), watching the top three tournament contestants blaze through a puzzle whose first word is "ZOLAESQUE" in under 15 minutes (I take the whole week to do a Sunday puzzle) staggers my mind.

As cause for self-reflection, I've realized that I'm overly cautious when I do my puzzles -- my gridless marginalia can get pretty extensive -- and most of the time plunging ahead with an educated guess works out for not just the tournament-level solvers, but amateur (if celebrity) fans featured in the film like Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton (!), and Stanford/Yankee scumbag Mike Mussina (I kid, he's probably a surprisingly tolerable douchebag) (aside from Clinton, though, the celebrity factor isn't that interesting). Really, the boldest thing about my crossword game is that I do puzzles in ink, but that's only because pencil and newsprint aren't a good combination, but after watching the film, I've resolved to be a little more aggressive, starting with the current Sunday puzzle called "Ahead of the Curve," googling which has led me to the Wordplay blog of the Times.

Indie rating: Julien Neto - "I (One)"

Kiki's Delivery Service

Or, if I had my way, Jiji's Delivery Service, because that is the most awesome cat that doesn't host a reality program.

(Of course, I refer to the Japanese audio track of the film -- nothing against Phil Hartman or any of the other voice talents, but I refuse dubbed films because dubbed voice work inevitably sounds stilted compared to original language. I think this is the reason I didn't like Howl's Moving Castle, and why I haven't seen Ponyo yet.)

This is the second of the Miyazaki films that I got from Netflix recently, the first being My Neighbor Totoro which, unfortunately, I found too dramatically inert to enjoy outside of Catbus. Kiki wins mightily, though, with its potent cuteness (see: Jiji).

Image-heavy cuteness (and spoilers), after the jump!

The worst part about Public Enemies is that it stars Johnny Depp...

... and thus attracts a particularly unsophisticated type of viewer, a couple of whom talked through the whole film and gasped whenever Johnny took some damage. At one point, a train was speeding toward the camera, and these two viewers ducked.

Anyway, it's half of a boring but gorgeous film -- Michael Mann loves those deep, oblique angles off of people, cars, buildings -- and half a grippingly existential crime picture, which has sort of become Mann's MO of late, all combined into a single film, and that final scene where... well, I'll leave that for after the jump (spoilers, etc.).


The scene where he dies outside of the movie theater is absolutely stunning, in part because of how crisp and luscious the deep-focus digital video looked -- I daresay some of the most viscerally aesthetic thing he's ever done -- and also that classically doomed Mann protagonist when Dillinger sees his would-be killers, moves as if he's going to draw the gun in his pocket, then turns around to wait to go out like the mythic folk hero he became.

That scene is, I think, emotionally set up by all of those tight oblique shots -- there are hardly any establishing shots, and the shots are generally such tight close-ups that for a lot of the film, I felt claustrophobic. But when we get to the end, when Mann does that again, it feels absolutely liberating, even as Dillinger succumbs to fate.
Indie rating: Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-la-la Band with Choir – "Sow Some Lonesome Corners So Many Flowers Bloom"