Kojack Variety

A Crooner’s Soul

Elvis Costello’s ‘Kojck Variety’ (it’s not just his variety; music legends like James Burton, Marc Ribot, Jim Keltner, Jerry Scheff, Larry Knechtel, and Pete Thomas all play on the album) acts as the softest punch to a listener in the face of music history. It’s like an Irish kiss but made American through the art of covering a song (to perfection, I might say) of what I like to call classic b tunes. In this case, the most romantic—the best pop songs ever written. EC acts as a guide for the listener to show them roads that they may have never explored before. His young listeners will most likely be bewildered and upset upon listening to it because EC doesn’t appear to be angry anymore. They will say he’s mellowed which is the worst term you could tag onto him. Can’t they hear the anger in a song like “Must You Throw Dirt in My Face”? What they don’t realize is that by singing the song in a quieter, more beautiful fashion EC has healed himself in the process. These are not just merely cover songs. EC goes back to the tunes he must have been listening to in his younger supposedly angrier years; he most likely believed more in these songs then the punk movement of the late 70’s. He was really a crooner in the end and now he truly admits it. He’s transcending himself by not taking credit for the whole thing—by not writing any of the lyrics.

There’s a song on this album called “Remove This Doubt” which I will always have with me. It’s stuck in my somnambulistic state. The whole album feels as if it was sung in the wee hours when no one was paying attention. He’s still a great rocker, too, and songs like “Strange”, “Leave My Kitten Alone” and “Payday” are proof of that. However, it is really the ballads that get to me. They’re devout pop songs all about how a woman specifically broke the singer’s heart. He’s obsessed with a woman that he can’t come into possession of. They are very well written songs because of the specifics. That’s something that pop music has forgotten all about these days. Wouldn’t you like it if Chet Baker (who EC reminds me of) sang a Bob Dylan song or Little Richards’ “Bama Lama Bama Loo”? EC is, if anything, more original here than ever.

Jackie Brown

Funky Willingness

Jackie Brown begins with the title character moving on an airport walkway. While she’s standing and moving at the same time, the song Across 110^th Street is playing, not in the background, but in the foreground. It’s pressed right against our ears just as all the rest of the music in the film is. The music acts as the characters’ motivation—it’s their walking music. While Jackie continues to move on that belt, the titles for the film appear over her in true black exploitation style. The difference here is not just that Pam Grier has gotten older (she still looks great) but that this is an exploitation scene done by a white man.

It makes sense then that the director who’s pulling this off is none other than Quentin Tarantino. I think that an audience might be baffled during this opening credits movement mainly because the question pops up, when has Tarantino ever been this pro-feminine? If anything, I was feeling confused since I felt that Tarantino was great at being pro-male and macho. In Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, it seemed that he had mastered a cheap art—the threatening man picture. He made those movies with real grit. That’s something that really has never been done before, or at least not to the extent at which Tarantino tackled it. Nonetheless, these were very male pictures. I at first could not believe the opening for Jackie Brown. Then I thought back to Pulp Fiction and his choice for casting Bunny in the heist sequence. Amanda Plummer was his choice. This actress is a very mature woman who also appears to be a little crazy in all her roles. That’s her brilliance—she’s a little bit more real than most actresses. A truly scary performer who also happens to be brilliant, she fit in perfectly in Pulp Fiction. I got the title sequence at that point since it then seemed to me that Tarantino really does understand women. I also got why he chose this sequence for his opening—it was shocking not just for the audience but also for his fans.

Jackie Brown marks a turning point in Quentin’s career. Not only does he sustain this energetic womanly feeling throughout the whole film, but he has also stepped into new ground. This is his first mature movie. And I do not mean that the young audience will not get it; I just feel that not only does he understand women but he understands grown- ups as well. These characters become exciting on the screen, just like the characters in Bonnie and Clyde and Dog Day Afternoon became exciting. This is a heist movie in the best sense. That grittiness that helped Tarantino on his first two features, most likely helped him tremendously to adapt Elmore Lenord’s Rum Punch to the screen. He not only goes into this world of characters and brings them to the screen—he embellishes and makes them his own.

The change of the main characters race shows a wild embellishment; Jackie Brown is a black airline stewardess who doesn’t make a whole lot of money. The fact that the character is changed from a white woman (the way it was done in the book) into a black woman, was most likely for the reason of casting Pam Grier. Quentin has wanted to work with her for years. However, I think there is more to this decision then most fans of the book may realize. By changing the characters race, perhaps Quentin felt that she would be more interesting then if a white actress were used. Besides, it would bring some life to the piece that a regular white noir story might not have. I know it sounds shallow, but I think it’s a brilliant type of shallow that only movies can posses. Movies are the one form of art where adaptation is a key to its survival. Screenwriters run out of ideas fairly quickly; they need books to fuel their art. That doesn’t mean that that writer will faithfully follow the plot elements from the book that he is adapting. Jackie Brown does not suffer from changing the main characters race. I think it’s actually a rarity; this act does not take anything away from the book, but at the same time flaws are apparent in the conception.

Pam Grier is better here then she has been in years. You can see that she feels young and alive playing this part. Certain scenes stay in the mind: Jackie with Max (Robert Forrester), her bail bondsman who also becomes a friend, when they are in her small dinky house; it’s a quirky black woman’s place decorated like it was situated in the seventies. The rarity in Jackie’s comment about Max’s coffee that she is making, “Might be a little black.” is such a nice detail. That line, both the way it’s written and delivered will always stay in my mind.

Jackie with Ordell, (Samuel L. Jackson), her person that she delivers cocaine to so he can then deliver it to someone else, meet in a distinctive bar called the Cockatoo Lounge. He finds out from her that she’s messing up his original plan of getting half a million dollars in a deal. She went to the ATF after they picked her up from shipping some of Ordell’s cocaine. She complied with their wishes and told them that not only was it Ordell that gave her the cocaine, but also that he has half a million coming in and that she will be picking up at the Del Amo Mall. The new plan Jackie tells Ordell, is that she will tell the two detectives who plan to get him that they will do a test run where only 10,000 dollars will be given to a woman in a shopping mall bag. By doing this they can see how Ordell usually gets his money, so when the real time comes—the half a million is being given to that same girl—then the ATF will follow her to Ordell. Meanwhile, Jackie will give the real money (the other bag is a fake) to another one of Ordell’s women. It seems that Ordell has a regular harem around. What’s so right in the scene of Jackie explaining her plan is that Ordell keeps his cool. You think this menace would be pissed having a woman tell him what to do. Instead, he goes along with the plan but not before asking her if she gets in on the deal. She feels she should get at least 15 percent since she is his manager. He says she’s only going to get 10 percent and after much arguing about the subject, she agrees. I think if it were not for Sam Jackson and the way he responds to her orders, we would never believe that Pam Grier is his manager. He makes her respond in a way where you hear her jive talk come out. He really gets her mad for a second or two. It’s her funky willingness to survive that makes her respond so strongly. This scene really works between the two players; actually all the scenes between Sam Jackson and Pam Grier work well since two black talents are coming together. It’s like putting two of the same atoms together—they understand each other all too well. In one scene in Jackie’s place, she’s yelling her orders at Ordell. No one can get away at yelling at a threatening man the way Pam Grier can. When she starts giving her orders, memories of her past roles come to mind. You remember how much fun she gave you. Even if you were a white person, you dug her authority. You could even laugh at it in joy.

The problem with the performance is the moment when you realize that you miss the old Pam Grier. Even though the movies were worse then this one, she was stronger. Maybe the trash elements helped her performance in more ways than we can imagine. She really gave you the spooks and you loved her. Tarantino, casting a very well written part for Grier has gotten rid of the trash elements—it’s all in order to make her performance better, yet we’re missing what made her so much fun. When Jackie tells Max her real plan, to really give the fake bag to Ordell so she can keep the money (she plans to get Max involved by giving him the real money) air seems to go out of the movie. Jackie’s gazing into the camera when she says her true feelings—her real plan—makes you want to cringe. Besides, why would she want to get involved with Max anyway? He’s such a bore. Robert Forrester is being acclaimed in the press; everyone’s saying how he comes away with the best performance. I don’t believe that. He’s definitely a sweet guy in this movie; his willingness to help Jackie is touching. But he always reminds me of that other supposed “great” actor Gregory Peck. These are always the actors who play the true characters; the ones who are always the up standing citizens. They always have to be perfect. It’s not that Forrester’s performance is bad; neither was Peck’s in most of his pictures. It’s that he has to be so passively perfect, as if passivity were the right characteristic for a person. Jackie sure isn’t passive; she tells her plan to anyone who will listen and we like her more for it. Robert Forrester’s balding spot is his saving grace.

The images in the film are brilliant, when they seem planned. At one point, Ordell is giving Melanie, one of his girls played by Bridget Fonda, his menacing look telling her that she has to answer his phone. The beach that is shown behind him is so beautiful, it’s made tactile. Other images are not so lucky. Especially the ones around Jackie, where you feel that the camera is a dead weight around her. Maybe this was a way for Quentin to try to make Grier look stunning, but there was no need for that—she’s already supplying the looks. There are also problems of construction, but these are understandable. They are the complicated plot points, made so formidable that you are not allowed to laugh at them. There’s only one moment when Tarantino allows you to—the first money exchange section is titled Money Exchange—trial run. When the real exchange happens, the title for the section is Money Exchange—for real this time.

Despite those defects, the rest of the movie is a triumph. Tarantino has a real great troupe of actors working for him here. You can see how excited all of them are to be in a Tarantino movie, saying Tarantino lines. But I don’t think I got as much surprise from the other actors as I did from De Niro. This is not to say that his is the best performance in the film (and it’s not) but the surprise of seeing him come through in this way was for me exciting. De Niro really has not come through in at least a decade. I think I know why. His passivity in the 80’s and 90’s was different from Robert Forrester’s. He took great joy in being passive; an actors type of exhilaration. He would craft “great” performances, in parts of him playing depressed, dispirited characters. He got so much into these roles that not only did we become depressed watching him, he also became dispirited. He was running out of breath. That doesn’t mean that he’s not breathing heavily in this picture (At one point Melanie offers him a hit off her bong, when he accepts, he smokes it and then starts coughing and panting; afterwards he says to her that he’s getting old.), he just doesn’t take it as seriously. His poor white man red neck role is perfected here; he’s allowing us to laugh at him, which he did not let us do in Jackknife. You’re allowed to laugh at his method acting. There’s a tribute to Taxi Driver, and a De Palma split screen effect is used. As usual, we see Tarantino’s love for 70’s movies. But what makes him original is he’s using that love for his 90’s essay. When the title appears Del Amo Mall—Torrance California—largest indoor mall in the world, and as your reading it you hear the bland mall music in the background, you know he’s using that title mockingly. He’s looking down on all those people who spend all day at the mall and shop like mad. But Tarantino also loves the 90’s and he respects those shoppers. When the trial run happens and Max watches the money like a hawk, his amusement and thrill at seeing that the plan could work is then amplified by the mall music. The music becomes louder and we actually like what we’re listening to; the part that’s used anyway. It’s a brilliantly worked out series of shots; it shows the fun that can be had at a mall. Tarantino also loves the 90’s surfer girl Melanie. Bridget Fonda is the funky white woman. Tarantino infuses her with a lot of quirky attributes. Fonda also helps. She plays the evil white woman with real deviltry. She may not be Amanda Plummer, that scary/brilliant performer, but that’s ok.

There should be more of Michael Keaton. He plays one of the detectives on Ordell’s tail. His baffled sort of disappointed look (which is probably what much of the audience gets when they watch this picture. I definitely heard groans) is so great that you want more of it. Same goes for the other detective played by Micheal Bowen. He provides some nice touches to his role including his sharp chin which looks a lot like Tarantino’s. The best performance that comes out of this picture is Samuel Jackson’s and that’s no shock. He is an actor that always comes up with the best performances when he is at his blackest. Ordell is the perfect role for him. What makes Ordell so interesting to an audience is how funny he is. There’s more to the laughter; an audience loves to fear him. What’s so great about Samuel Jackson in Jackie Brown is the fact that he becomes scarier as the picture moves along. He intensifies and blows the rest of the stars away, both literally and figuratively. He’s a menace. The young actor Chris Tucker also gives the film good vibes. I always felt that he was Eddie Murphy done better; here he proves it. When Sam Jackson and Chris Tucker talk, their banter may seem offensive. There’s a lot of the use of the n- word here. There is justification for it since its two black men saying it to each other. Who are they trying to offend? More then that, Tarantino likes the way they talk. He’s anything but a racist. When at one point Jackson and Tucker go to a car and Jackson hands him a gun to point at some guys, Tucker’s response made me laugh out loud so hard I almost fell out of my chair. His response is, “You catch your n- off guard with this s-!”

The outrageousness probably offends some people (it shouldn’t), but why don’t the offended admit that there was not a whole lot of violence in this picture—it’s hidden. At the same time the violence is shocking. Maybe George Lucas can learn a thing or two about not showing blood. The violence that is in this picture is a brilliant use of trash. Its such good trash that you don’t want anymore of it. Although I do want more trash in general in the movie. Not the violent forms, but the funny lines and shots and ideas. Yes, there are a boat load of them, but not like in Pulp Fiction which was a cornucopia of trash. The movie needs more of that; that’s why sometimes Pam Grier seems so smug in the film.

You can feel the energy that went into the cinematography. The film was shot by Guillermo Navarro, and parts of the movie, like when Jackie at the beginning walks through the airport that she works at, have a real soiled look. The film has basically the same look as From Dusk Till Dawn, which was shot by the same cinematographer, but this film’s different. This material is not the pulp that From Dusk Till Dawn was. That movie was trash taken overboard. Still I wanted more trash. Maybe this is why the audience is so confused. They don’t know what they want from a Tarantino movie anymore; it either has to be a grown up movie or a trashy movie; it can’t be both. I wish they learned that both elements con co-exist in a work, because they are missing out on a brilliant film.

They’re even missing out on the best sustained sequence that Tarantino has ever filmed. This is the Money Exchange—for real this time section which really gets an audience member enthralled while watching. The great R and B song Street Life is being played while Jackie and Max (going in separate cars) are meeting up at the mall. The camera shots showing them in profile complement their looks. Not only that, but it also heightens Forrester and Pam. They become living marquee-billboard stars. Ordell does not have that satisfaction. While the song is spelling out Jackie’s character, we in the audience do not have time to the think about that—we’re just watching a beautiful aging goddess and loving her and the shots she’s in. Then the section has its scarier side to it. Once Jackie switches the money, she walks out of the dress department that she was in, and walks in a panic. We’re reminded of an earlier scene with Jackie and Max when Jackie said that she wasn’t afraid of Ordell. That was a lie. She’s running in fear, knowing that Ordell could be right behind her, and as the music in the foreground is playing the score to Coffy, we share her fear. Ordell will always be there.

Roxy Music

For Your Pleasure

Roxy Music was a band that conveyed moods of incredibly strange luxuriousness; something that wasn’t really happening music-wise in the 70’s. Especially in America, all a listener at that time heard was ambiguously stupid lyrics, or was it just plain bad equivocal singing? It sounded like those country accents were faked and if I may be so blunt, the most you gained from 70’s tunes was an in depth look inside a pickup truck—the Eagles for example. Or the listener came by faked mysticism like Led Zeppelin; bands so spiritual that their incense candles burnt their minds. This was not intelligent music by any means. England was also having its problems with the pop scene. Mod had at that time gone out and there was nothing left to replace it ,except for some incredible fashion, or in other words Roxy Music—just one band. I think Bowie picked it up from them and made a whole type of scene out of it. Glam rock. Many people listening to Roxy Music now rightly feel that no matter how good Bowie was (he was damn good) he still was not as multi dimensional and great as Roxy Music. Maybe that band was too satisfactory and adept at what they did because their tunes were not really being listened to in America. Bowie’s were. I see the glam rock movement as being a type of war, albeit a calm one, in the pop arena known as music. Think of it as if it were the space race but replace Russia with England; America wanted to be one up on them. Roxy Music would be perfect to listen to in space. Their anomalous sound could be heard anywhere, it was so transient. It was a great commodity created by several people. An androgynous keyboardist named Brian Eno, a guitar player named Phil Manzanera who came up with languorous sounds, a bass player named John Porter (there seemed to always be a new bass player), the sexy sax sound of Andrew MaKay, the spiked drumming of Paul Thompson (complete with electronic overdubs), and the singer Bryan Ferry.

The album I am about to describe is titled For Your Pleasure. It was the second Roxy Music album and I feel it was their best effort. It really is glorious and a beautiful listen. I’ am going to try to describe it in some detail (no, not the production stories behind the work of art); bear with me because it’s going to be a bumpy ride full of meanderings inspired by the band.

The album begins with a note that sounds obliterating, but the song then comes into fruition and it’s full of life. The whole album takes off from this example; the singer Bryan Ferry knows that he has to entrance the listener because the songs always start off so bleakly. Here’s a singer that looks just like a lounge lizard and yet sings like a fish underwater. You can hear the gurgling through bubbles in his voice.

The tune Do the Strand is quirky as hell (what else can you make out of a line like “weary of the waltz and mashed potato schmaltz” except for the fact that it’s a great funny line) and contains a myriad amount of sex scenes. Visuals like people doing indescribable acts on the top of tables are mentioned throughout the song, comfortably—it was the seventies after all. The tune is about all the new dance crazes and how they do not work—the band’s saying here’s one that does. The line “tired of the tango” refers to why the band exists—to bring a new feeling into music and culture.

The next song on the album is so glitzy, how can you not love it? Its title is Beauty Queen and it epitomizes a literate form of glitziness, where you don’t have to see it; you can only imagine it from the lyrics. It also seems to be more of a representation of the cover art than any of the other songs. The cover depicts a sultry woman dressed in black leather, of course with stiletto shoes and of course having a black leopard as a pet. The animal is so dark that you can hardly see him in the inkiness, save for his bright eyes and sharp teeth. There’s a lot of sensual menace on the poster and plastered behind them is Las Vegas—these creatures were presumably homegrown there. This is the only hometown that could incorporate them. You can see Bryan Ferry in the distance in his car and he looks excited. Who could blame him?

The next song is titled Strictly Confidential, and it’s a passionate tune that could have possibly taken place a long time ago—no one wrote letters like this in the seventies—but there were many disposed sad souls during that time and I think Bryan was one of them. However, he doesn’t quite divulge his feelings and that’s good. He shows us his most romantic thoughts—his most purple prose—and the band is traveling with him in the subterranean Lawentian atmosphere—it must have been arduous and easy at the same time for them.

The next song Editions of You is a hell of a lot fun. The man is strolling the streets. This particular song and the album shows the plus and negative sides of being engrossed with pleasure—not so much with one girl. The duality with having a creative life full of expression—writing and singing songs—and getting the reaps of benefits. Is Eno trying to sound the alarm on the keyboard on this one? The guitarist Phil Manzanera calms and consoles him. It’s a leading down tunnels song—maybe showing the creative Ferry process. It’s uncle Ferry’s advice to his nephews.

The next song on the album is called In Every Dream Home a Heartache. Talk about singing in an imperturbable sang-froid like state. The man knows everything about what goes on into making a house. Every room is an experience full of insight and loss. An essay on the band and the themes of luxury and how it leads down terrifying roads, appears to be the band's thesis statement here if there is any. The terror is comfortable and lively—the doll in the song may indeed be alive—this tune is the anti Comfortably Numb. The band then losses control. When Ferry sings, “dream of heartache,” it sounds like the other line he says is alcoholic but I could be wrong—either way you get the point—the man is obsessed and addicted—he’s making a style out of it like Al Pacino.

Lawrence would have been proud of The Bogus Man which is the next song on the album. This tune is all about a man trying to control his emotions—they are turbulent. Roxy Music says fuck that smoothly—spine tingling like out of a lacquered horror movie—there have been no good ones so far in my mind. I have no idea of what Bryan is doing at the end of the song, but it’s definitely insolent. It is also just a sound effect.

Grey Lagoons is the next one. Listening to the song makes you feel that the band wants to make their own grey lagoons type of horror movie, full of classiness and thrilling aspects and not to mention humor. However, they don’t actually want grey lagoons to be in their back yards. They want classy movie theatres like the Roxy to still exist—they don’t. The band also wants to show that they can get real lowdown (for instance Ferry’s harmonica in the number) and not just play artsy palatial rock palaces-like music. Even though the band is experimental in terms of their style, they want to show that they can find other means of pleasure. (They would sell out years later in the 80’s with Avalon.)

Speaking of pleasure, For Your Pleasure is a song that has the same main idea as the last tune, but its a better conveyed song. The disharmonious aspect (the chant like singing in the song) is part of the comedy of the album—it’s not meant to be taken seriously. It’s a work full of five tempestuous young men who are expressing their flipped out emotions. Many other young kids were doing the same thing during that time, but the difference here is that Roxy’s emotions were furnished and carpeted.

Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind

Taking Beautiful Chances

There’s speed and dexterity in Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s the type of movie where you know you’re being manipulated and you love it. I think some of the mysteriousness that comes out of one’s viewing is trying to figure out what you have been manipulated from. Gondry knows how to make a movie; every scene works perfectly for an audiences delectation. You might as well call it a delight, yet it’s not that simple. It’s not an easy to like film simply because you can see the themes coming right at you. When the characters yell, you know we're meant to take that as a sign of their loneliness and sob!, abandonment. Yet the movie never goes soft—when Jim Carrey’s character Joel Barish is running away from the oncoming doom of his mind being erased of all traces of his love Clementine (Kate Winslet), you never for a moment think he was a fool even though he got himself in this mess.

This crazy movie begins with Joel getting up from his deep slumber. Joel is one of those usual movie archetypes of the boring man with an unspecified job. (Usually in movies jobs are made so wearisome that they feel unspecified to us; here the joke is it isn’t even mentioned.) Joel is a listless human being, yet he’s not tiresome. He may be tired but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have all this pent-up energy in him. You wish women saw him the way we see him. That’s the reason we’re so apprehensive toward Clementine; why does she like him so much? Joel shares the audiences view—that’s why they break up. They’re so perfect for each other that it’s a relationship that was never meant to last.

Joel is heartbroken when he finds out that she has gotten all her memories of him erased. He wants to repeat the process for himself and enlists the help of Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), the doctor that originally performed the process on Clementine. This dubious operation involves Joel getting rid of every object he has that has some association with her. By the time the procedure starts, Joel is seeing red colors and experiencing severe deja-vu, almost as if he went through this procedure before. This human drama is anything but pedestrian.

The reason the movie works so well is because everyone is so grown-up. At least almost everyone; the two technicians working on the erasing process are Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) and they’re comic inept fools. Why are they working on this deadly procedure? You learn that Patrick is actually dating Clementine and he’s using all of Joel’s adroit techniques in courting Clem. On the other side of the table, Stan is seeing the receptionist for Dr. Mierzwiak. They have an affair were pot and deep thoughts about life are a part of the mix. At this point the operation is going on in Joel’s apartment and it’s a funny image to see these two zonked-out love birds dancing on Joel’s bed. Of course he’s on the bed also; he’s positioned in between the fever dance. It seems that this comical section is merely in the background so the more serious story involving real love can shine, but the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman pulls a twist. He has it so human drama also happens to the young receptionist Mary. Mary is played by Kirsten Dunst and she gives the film a velvety kind of feeling. She’s the total opposite of the indurate Clem.

Clem is the type of woman where you don’t know what she will do next. An update of Catherine from Jules and Jim, Clementine shows her true feelings by the differing color dyes in her hair. She is that type of unstable woman where one minute you don’t want anything more to do with her and the next minute you can’t bear to see her go. Weeks after you see the movie, you can’t help but remember that smile that Kate Winslet lets shine throughout the film. Clementine (perfect name) is a wonderful part for Winslet to play because she’s a controlled calm actress playing an unstable person. Winslet tones down Clementine’s raging emotions and she makes it possible for us to care about her.

Carrey’s a totally different actor but not in this movie. A genius at shifting moods and a multitude of other things, Carrey lets loose in his own way. You feel at first that you wished he did the types of things he used to be famous for doing; almost as if he tired of doing them because everyone expected it of him. Joel Barish is a crying whimpering sort of person and I don’t think the director had much input in the way Carrey plays him. However, he does get to cut loose in certain scenes and perplex you. If he was laugh out loud funny, you probably wouldn’t have any real insight into his character. Then at some point, it’s almost as if Carrey got tired of the way he was playing Joel and lunged himself forward. You see it in the shot of him waiting for the bus to take him to his boring job and then deciding to go in the opposite direction to Montauk. It seems that his character has a subnormality all of a sudden. Carrey realized that he could take a risk and get to the same destination. When at one point in the middle of the film Joel in his subconscious state tries to hide Clementine in a place where the mind erasers can’t get to her—they go to his childhood—there’s a scene with Carrey thinking he’s a little boy and he’s taking a bath in a giant sink. Carrey takes another risk; he’s now laugh out loud funny.

I have to mention the awesome cinematography by Ellen Kuras. The lighting here really makes the movie. Most of the time a searchlight is following Joel in his subconscious. I think it’s the dusky look of the film that makes it so romantic. It’s probably what our dreams look like. This is one of the best uses of surrealism that has come about in a movie in some time. Gondry has a lot to do with this. Originally a music video director, he knows how to follow a scene through. He keeps it short and tight so as not to upset the viewer if the scene at some point goes south. A lot of the time you don’t have time to dwell on it. If we lose something in the process—a proper length to flesh out the story—we gain in not having our hopes ruined. Gondry is a filmmaker who (God bless him) believes in taking risks.

Kaufman in my opinion is a screenwriter who doesn’t. He sticks with abnormal scripts that are strange in terms of plot but nothing new is being explored here. The concept is really not that exciting. I thought that Being John Malcovich was imbued with Kaufman’s way with a story, and that’s why the movie was so wittily phlegmatic. John Cusack’s character constantly looked like he had the flu and it wasn’t funny. What’s new here is the aesthetic quality administered to the material. I think this movie has great wit in terms of its images. Gondry and Kuras give us beautiful shots like Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet lying on the cracked ice so it looks like broken glass and then taking it away from us through a quick edit, so it evaporates from our minds. The filmmakers are pulling the carpet out from under us; they’re taking away our memories.

Wordsworth

A Belief in Pleasure and Passion

The new poetic ideas and directions that Wordsworth proposed in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, stemmed from his first off defining what exactly a poet is. A poet, in Wordsworth’s estimation was someone who, “…is a man speaking to men…(who’s) pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him.” A poet is a man who writes in the mindset of constant pleasure, because if he did not do so he would have a condemnatory view on life. Wordsworth believed that poetry, unlike other job occupations, was simply the recording of life, with passionate realistic observation applied to the process. In order to do this, several criteria had to be administered in the poet’s writing.

One of the criteria that Wordsworth believed the poet should uphold is that they should only write about situations from common life, opposed to situations dealing with nobility or the upper class. Also, the poet should write in the same language as common man. The reason why Wordsworth felt that the poet should primarily concentrate on the common man was because he felt that the common man spoke in a, “…plainer and more emphatic language,” and that that form of language is the true exemplar of passion. That form of language contained “greater simplicity,” which consequently resulted in “more accurately contemplated” thought on the part of the common man and on the part of the poet. The common man, “more forcibly communicated” their thoughts, opposed to the upper class that used their fancy gussied up language as a barrier from passion; these flawed men were typically the men of the urban sensibility. They were, “…men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident.” Wordsworth’s point was that beauty is all around us, and we don’t have to strive to find it. If we as a society build structures in order to enhance the beauty of nature, we consequently become depressed and sluggish. These urban men in a sense, without realizing it, are putting down life by trying to enhance it.

The great attribute of the common man is that, “…in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature,” consequently resulting in, “…the primary laws of our nature.” Wordsworth felt that poetry written in the tone of the common man was the most philosophic language imaginable. Philosophy really, in Wordsworth’s estimation and I agree with him, is the discovery of what gives us as a society pleasure; the discovery of why we do the things that we do. Wordsworth’s discovery in poetry, the most philosophic form of language, is that poetry matters; that it has a great impact on society because it excites us to discover the beauties in ourselves. This should be done away from, “…the influence of social vanity,” where the vain believe that art is simply a negligent form of entertainment. That art is “deep” and technically sound without any purpose.

Purpose is the key in Wordsworth’s opinion for the poet to write good poetry. He believed that without good poetry, gross superficial art would have a pernicious negative impact on society. If the artwork itself is superficially negative, if it’s “deep” art, and if artwork itself is indeed a reflection of reality, then the purveyor of that work will have a negative view on life. Hence, the need to show the pleasures in life, which is a more realistic point of view anyway. Wordsworth felt that, “…All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;” feelings that would in the end hopefully give the reader a “strengthened and purified” feeling about themselves and about life. This prime fact concerning poetry can never be forgotten in Wordsworth’s estimation, and yet he’s worried throughout this essay that it will be.

In order for a writer to have purpose in their writing, the poet must give, “…importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.” In other words, the poet must not let technical competence trump the subject matter or the prose. Now, this doesn’t mean that there should be a separation of prose from metrical composition, but rather that, “…the poet’s words should (never) be incommensurate with the passion,” or the reality of the situation that the poet is writing about. Wordsworth describes the complexity in common speech and in good poetry as, “similitude in dissimilitude.” Dissimilitude is meter while similitude is prose.

There are many revolutionary concepts in this essay. One of them, which relates to the notion of there being complexity in supposed simplicity, is that, “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity.” The key word in that sentence is faint. The person writing or reading the poetry doesn’t have to be a cultural savant or anything. Really, the parameters for good sound poetry are very simple in Wordsworth’s opinion. People who make art out to be something “complex” that only a few very gifted people can appreciate are in themselves simple.

Wordsworth’s poetry exemplifies his feelings in Preface to Lyrical Ballads. One key poem that shows his beliefs in what a poem should do is entitled Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. Lines is an example of how Wordsworth believed that good poetry is philosophic in nature, and that, “…poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” (It makes sense that there’s a contradiction in that sentence. Wordsworth’s essay deals constantly in contradiction: similitude in dissimilitude, and prose and metrical composition all being prime ideas in Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In Wordsworth’s estimation, contradictions lead to complexity.) That is the prime basis for Lines; in the poem Wordsworth is recollecting on happier times while strolling through his favorite spot of nature. This area keeps his mind occupied away from decaying society; the same idle vain society that believes in superficial art that Wordsworth presumably writes about in his essay. The place is an affirmation of life, and so is the poem. These qualities suffice Wordsworth by the end of the poem with feelings of strength and purity, which are qualities that Wordsworth says all of society should possess in Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

Another revolutionary concept on Wordsworth’s part, which relates with representing reality in an accurate way, is that the poet should basically keep himself out of what he is writing about; he shouldn’t intrude upon the subject matter with fancy structurally sound style, which is simply an indication of the poet’s personality; of his trying to show off. It’s a disservice to the poet’s subject matter. Consequently, personification was left out of Wordsworth’s writing, as well as “poetic diction,” and general terms or phrases and figures of speech that made up the, “…common inheritance of poets.” If one adds copious amounts of style and shoves them in the crevices of reality, basically the statement that emanates from that work of art is that life is dull. Life needs adding onto. Good poetry has nothing to do with specialized notions of “good artistic sense.” As if artistic meant that you the writer were more important than the subject you were writing about. The writer is simply a translator; he cannot add onto life because life is all-encompassing.

Chinatown and Double Indemnity

The Dispelling of Myths in Relation to Double Indemnity and Chinatown

The reasons why Double Indemnity and Chinatown are so different have to do with the fact that they were made during two different time periods. Chinatown is a film that states to the audience that society is inherently evil, and the morally upstanding person who tries to fight the system ultimately cannot do so because the problem is too vast for them to comprehend. This negative implication on the filmmakers’ part has to primarily do with the time period that the film was made in, which was the 1970’s. This was the time when Americans had deep distrust of their government due to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and Watergate. People wanted to fight the system and question their government, but how? There were so many problems to fight, and they were so complex to figure out due to cove ups and due to the vastness of the problem. There’s a hopelessness in many seventies films, that deals with the idea that the system is so corrupt that the solutions to solving the problems of corruption can never be adequately solved. The problem is just too vast for an individual to handle. The only way filmmakers thought to comment on this situation was through distrusting the myths of the past; so they made subversive films. Even though many of these films took place in the setting and the particular genre that they belonged to, these films subverted the ideology of those particular past films. Chinatown is considered a subversive genre film. Polanski’s statement in Chinatown is that: what’s the point of fighting corruption? The fighting extends the problem even further. Hence, the derision that the film Chinatown has towards the film noir myth of one male figure being able to fight the system. However, a man coming back from war during the 1940’s would want to if anything rebel against the system, even if it were not corrupt, in order to have some say and in order to fight through the sterility of such concepts as family values and working at a nondescript job for a living, which were greatly emphasized throughout that time period. However, the filmmakers of Double Indemnity feel that that myth of transgressing the system is not only heinous but an impossible dream. If Double Indemnity is the quintessential film noir film, than the ideology in that film is the quintessential film noir myth. The cultural myth in Double Indemnity—that society is not inherently evil but rather that individuals that try to transgress society are—is dispelled in the film Chinatown. If anything there is a reversal of ideological perspective; hence the film’s complexity in relation to Double Indemnity.

The John G. Cawelti reading entitled Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films is very important in regards to how Chinatown differs to a great extent in comparison with other Noir movies. One of the striking passages in the reading is in regards to the style of the film. Cawelti writes that, “…there is something not quite right, something disturbingly off about it (Chinatown). In this case, it is the color. The world of the hard-boiled myth is preeminently a world of black and white. Its ambiance is that compound of angular light and shadow enmeshed in webs of fog that grew out of the visual legacy of German expressionism…Polanski carefully controls his spectrum of hue and tone in order to give it the feel of film noir, but it is nonetheless color with occasional moments of rich golden light.” In other words, the look of the film is more complex, than the look of practically any other film noir film.

What the writer doesn’t mention is that the film is also shot in widescreen, which makes objects in the frame in the case of Chinatown far less distinct than they are in Double Indemnity. For example, in the scene when Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) first sees Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), his point of view is very much concentrated on her and the full screen format makes this easier for the character to do so because there are far less distractions around the frame. Phyllis is shot with a key lighting halo effect. This notion of Walter being madly obsessed with Phyllis is a very important concept, because the film is about masculine impairment and how men who are so fall into a femme fatale like Phyllis Dietrichson’s trap. While in Chinatown, the first time J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) meets Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), she is almost in the far right corner of the widescreen frame. Mulwray is the interruption of Jake’s “great” joke. She’s the downer of the moment, while Phyllis is the highlight of Neff’s dull existence. The bright light on her is very much in contrast with the dark lighting throughout the film. Neff wants to enter into that light; he wants to rebel against the system with her. Gittes wants nothing to do with Mulwray, and Mulwray especially wants nothing to do with him; in the scene, she’s threatening to sue Gittes. Mulwray is shot very darkly and her body is not shot in an objective manner, but rather merely in close-up. Her body is not showcased the way Dietrichson’s is. Chinatown is a film all about how Gittes searching for the truth leads to even more dire consequences because the truth is so vast. This flaw in his character tragically results in Evelyn’s death. It’s all felt in that widescreen format, where Gittes view is never concentrated on the right object.

This concept of Jake’s misguided viewpoint is very apparent in the scene early in the film with the gardener. The widescreen shot for the most part never pinpoints the pond with the glasses as the center of the frame. The center of the frame is for the most part the gardener. Michael Eaton, the author of the BFI book on Chinatown, writes about this when he states that, “In parodying the gardener’s accent—‘very bad for the glass’—Gittes is nearer to the truth than he can realize. He spots something in the pond, a clue which could lead to the solution of the entire mystery right now. Once again, the detective is seeing without seeing, he doesn’t get what is right before his eyes.” Walter Neff always keeps Dietrichson, who is the key to the whole movie, because she is the person who makes Neff rebel against the system, in the center of the frame i.e. the center of his focus. Going back to the Gittes scene, it is a very deceivingly brightly lit scene, almost as if there is no threat of any kind, and almost as if the scene itself is not a particularly important key scene. Besides the opening moment with Phyllis, there are no deceivingly brightly lit scenes in Double Indemnity. The audience knows that they are watching a distrust worthy woman in the film. Chinatown, in the fact that it misleads the viewer and the main character throughout the film, is therefore a more complex film in terms of its look and design. This idea of complexity, and of Gittes misplaced focus, is in relation to the film’s ideology that society is a vast problem to combat. It’s so vast for Gittes that he plays right into society’s trap, which in the context of this subversive film noir film, is immoral. This is interesting if one compares this with Double Indemnity’s having Neff fall into Phyllis trap. One film depicts the main character as becoming immoral by trying to transgress society, while the more modern film depicts the main character as becoming immoral by working within society’s confines.

In reference again to Chinatown being shot in color and to its lighting, surely the message that Polanski is trying to convey to the audience is that the film noir terrain is more complex than how it was depicted in the past. This is very apparent if a viewer compared the scene towards the end of Double Indemnity when Walter Neff kills Phyllis, with the scene towards the end of Chinatown when Gittes beats Evelyn in order to get the truth about the whole situation out of her. In the scene in Double Indemnity, the dark moody Expressionistic lighting conveys the feeling that these two lovers are becoming more and more corrupt and more and more malign in nature, all the way up to their deaths. This is an example of the cultural myth in Double Indemnity, which really is that black and white. In Chinatown, the situation is more complex than merely having to do with individuals trying to transgress society being evil. Evil in Chinatown is represented by the system i.e. Noah Cross. It could be argued that as more and more of the grissly facts are brought to the surface in Chinatown, the picture ironically enough becomes even sunnier and brighter, which is very different from the style in Double Indemnity. Basically, the corruption is ingrained in the land. Noah Cross (John Huston) is trying to illegally build a water system that redirects much of L.A.'s water supply to a certain part of land that he owns, in order to dramatically increase the property value of that land. (Wikipedia article on Chinatown). There’s no way for Gittes to fight this pervasiveness of corruption. Neff can’t fight the system either, but he basically realizes this by the end of the film while Gittes is still lost and confused by the end of Chinatown. It’s such a complex problem to fight that Gittes is constantly looking in the wrong direction (i.e. playing right into corrupt society’s hands), which results in tragic consequences. This is prefigured in the daughter/sister scene. Gittes, unlike Neff, probably never heard of common courtesy before especially in regards to women. Even though Neff is violent in that last scene, throughout the film Neff is enraptured with Dietrichson. He has fallen for the femme fatale’s trap; by the end of the film he goes back to her spider’s web and gets shot in the process. However, Neff has his own reasons besides falling for Dietrichson. He says this in his narration when he states that, “You get to thinking how you could crook the house, yourself.” Gittes certainly doesn’t feel the same way. He wants to fight the system, not in order to take part in illicit behavior, but rather to end illicit behavior. Gittes determinism is very false. His initial plan of finding out the truth and protecting Mulwray eventually becomes replaced by his untrustworthiness of Mulwray. He calls the cops over to her place, because he’s so certain that she did kill her husband. This is an example of Gittes wrong-headed attitude; in his trying to work within the system in order to be a diligent individual. This basically gets Mulwray killed at the end of the film.

The final scene between Neff and Dietrichson has that familiar Noir Venetian blind shade look, where the outlines of the blinds are shown on the characters faces and on the surface of the room. The sister daughter scene in Chinatown is shot more realistically and is not Expressionistic at all in terms of the lighting. Rather, there are golden hues in the scene. Mulwray’s apartment in general is a less threatening environment than Dietrichson’s, which gives a sense of realism and complexity to the scene. The Dietrichson scene is shot from many different camera angles, while the Mulwray scene is simply shot in an over the shoulder shot of Gittes trying to obtain information out of Mulwray, with very few cuts to Gittes reaction shots. This depicts Gittes false determinism, which is really simple-mindedness on his part; his lack of empathy towards Mulwray causes more problems rather than solves the problem. The key lighting on Phyllis’ face in the scene in Double Indemnity shows her emotions and her planning to do Neff in at that moment. She’s very evil and all-knowing in that chair; almost as if she didn’t have to move in order to dominate the action. On the other hand, Mulwray is shot in a very realistic natural way—in order to depict her plight and in order to give the audience sympathy towards her. The audience rarely sees Jake’s reactions towards what he’s doing to her, which is a depiction of his lack of empathy, while the audience feels Walter’s pain upon getting shot because the audience can see how his body reacts. The audience also sees how Mulwray’s body reacts towards getting beaten, but the audience cannot see how Dietrichson reacts upon dying. All the audience can see is her facial reaction because she is shot in a close up. The audience cannot see how her body reacts to the sudden violence, and this is a way of making Dietrichson almost inhuman, hence the evil quality given to the character which depicts the ideology of the film in relation to transgressing society.

The fact that the audience doesn’t see except for one or two shots Gittes reaction towards his beating up Mulwray is an example of his false determinism. He wrongly sees Mulwray as the femme fatale, and this misdirection ultimately gets her killed. This is reflected in the slapping of Mulwray which is totally unnecessary on Gittes part. Gittes, in his own sad way is masculinely impaired. An important aspect of Gittes character is his masculine impairment which is reflected by, “…an impotence symbolized earlier in the film by the slashing of the nose and the large comic bandage he wears throughout much of the action.” Neff is also masculinely impaired, but in a much different way. It’s because of his love with Phyllis that the man is impaired; he’s not impaired sexually but rather very much in love with the femme fatale. He loves her so much that he will kill in order to be with her.

The love scenes in both films are very interesting in how different they are stylistically. The Double Indemnity scene is very romantically done. It is lit in a very shadowed and full and very richly dark romantic way. The rain adds to that atmosphere of romanticism. When Phyllis comes in the room, and the door opens, the brightness from the hallway gives a sense of Phyllis being the light in Neff’s life. As the scene goes on, the lighting from the lamp, as if the lamp were the only illumination in the room, gives the scene a very heated sexual look. There are many long shots objectifying Dietrichson’s body, and there are also very tightly shot close-ups, depicting the complicit relationship between Neff and Dietrichson and the intensity that they have for one another. The scene in Chinatown is very different. It’s a less objectifying sexual scene, considering that this film was made in the 1970’s and graphic sex scenes were being shown throughout that time period. Here there’s barely any nudity, and the only indication that the two characters had sex is that they are in bed together and that Gittes cigarette is starting to wither down. It’s a very plainly done scene, not really consisting of any heated sexual moments between the two. That white light in the bathroom when the two are kissing is very bright and sobering, and the scene itself ends very abruptly. This style is supposed to depict Jake’s and Mulwray’s evasiveness about their past, which really gets in the way of their relationship. These two can’t really connect, because Jake is so determined to find out the truth about Mulwray. He in a sense is sexually inadequate. Neff knows that he is masculinely impaired, and in the thrall of Phyllis Dietrichson, and this is apparent because of the narration in the film, and yet he can’t help himself. He has to transgress the system. Gittes is hardly aware of the damage he is doing, nor of his masculine impairment, nor of any of the pertinent facts of the corruption in L.A. until it’s basically too late. It’s because of Jake’s lack of empathy towards Mulwray that she gets killed. Both masculinely impaired characters are doomed by the end of both films, yet they both are for two different reasons, hence the ideological differences between both movies.

Masculine impairment is a very important concept to consider for both films because they are the reason for the flaws in the two male characters that results in the tragic elements in both stories. Spicer writes that, “The male victim is the most pervasive character type in film noir, showing what Krutnik describes as noir’s fascination with the spectacle of the passive or emasculated man. The main type of male victim is the dupe of the femme fatale which derives from the two James M. Cain adaptations, Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, middleclass professional and working class drifter respectively. This figure is not admirable or innocent but morally weak, apparently helpless in the throes of desire and attempting to escape the frustrations of his existing life. As has been shown, Cain’s victims have a compulsion to tell their stories, to explain if not excuse their actions, and there is a powerful element of masochism, of self-loathing in their make-up along with their passivity.” If anything, the more modern male film noir character, which is what Gittes is, the one character who tries his hardest to uphold justice and tries to do the right thing for the first time in his life, the one man who actually tries to protect the innocent in a corrupt land, is even worse. Spicer writes about Kiss Me Deadly but he could just as well be writing about Chinatown when he states that, “Ralph Meeker plays Hammer as rudderless modern man, emotionally and sexually repressed, and without the leavening dead-pan humour of his predecessors and their worldly knowledgeability…He has the tough guy’s muscles and quick reflexes, but is oddly uninvolved even in the violence of his trade. He has become an empty, catatonic icon in a self-destructive world.” This sounds very similar to Cawelti’s description of Gittes:

“Nicholson also portrays, at least early on, a character who is not quite what he seems. His attempt to be the tough, cynical, and humorous private eye is undercut on all sides; he is terribly inept as a wit, as his attempt to tell his assistants the Chinese joke makes clear. Nor is he the tough, marginal man of professional honor he pretends to be at the beginning…By the middle of the film Gittes is determined to expose the political conspiracy that he senses beneath the surface, and also to resolve the question of the guilt or innocence of the woman to whom he has been so strongly attracted. Thus far, the situation closely resembles that of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. It is at this point, however, that the action again takes a vast departure from that of traditional hard-boiled story. Instead of demonstrating his ability to expose and punish the guilty, Gittes steadily finds himself confronting a depth of evil and chaos so great that he is unable to control it. In relation to the social and personal depravity represented by Noah Cross and the world in which he can so successfully operate, the toughness, moral concern, and professional skill of Gittes not only seem ineffectual, but lead to ends that are the very opposite of those intended.”

It seems that as corruption grows more and more throughout film noir films throughout the years, the men who have to combat this become less and less corrupted and more and more ineffectual. The fault has to be blamed on society and not on the individual, because society is the problem that is so vast that it makes the individual ineffectual. This subversive idea on the filmmakers’ part, that individuals that try to transgress society are not inherently evil but rather that society is, is in ideological opposition to the film noir myth. Who do you prefer: the man who doesn’t fight the evil malign corruption until it is too late, (Neff) or the man who is too inefficient to fight that corruption (Gittes)?

Even though both films end tragically, the two endings are very different. When Walter tries his best to get away from Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), and tries to leave the insurance office, in a sense transgressing the system, he doesn’t make it past the door and knows full well by the end of the film that he’s probably going to the gas chamber for doing what he did. At the end of Chinatown, Gittes inadvertently gets Mulwray killed, and stands next to the other cops that killed her. This shows his complicity with the system, and the fact that by his not transgressing society, he gets other innocent people killed. Both characters are masculinely impaired, and yet Neff saves the innocent people in Double Indemnity; Lola and her boyfriend. His masculine impairment is not as ineffectual as the law-abiding Gittes is. This is the ultimate example of how playing within the system can make someone more impaired than if they transgressed the system; the ultimate example of the subversive quality of Chinatown in relation to Double Indemnity.

We Own the Night

Movie melodramas these days have an incredibly hard time balancing the artistic intentions of the filmmaker who made them, and satisfying the audiences’ expectations. In We Own the Night, maintaining that populist sense of pleasing the audience doesn’t happen. Instead, the film is relentlessly negative and depressing, which is a quality that one doesn’t associate with mainstream movie making. It’s a moralistic cop melodrama, so of course the film’s style is unpleasant and jarring. I think the movie is affective up to a point, and does indeed “reach” the audience, but in a particularly domineering and oppressively ugly manner, which is appropriate for the genre that these filmmakers are working in. That doesn’t mean that you have to like the movie.

This film is primarily a drama about how it’s very hard to be part of a family, while keeping your individuality in the process. The story deals with two brothers who represent the different spectrums of the nightlife. There’s Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg), a cop on the force whose latest efforts have been concentrated on trying to stop the Russian Mafia from their drug deals. There’s Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix), a nightclub owner who ironically enough is friends with some of those drug dealers. Their father, by the name of Burt (Robert Duvall), is the chief of police. The interconnectedness of this family ultimately results in an unrelenting drama, involving the Russian mafia. Bobby finally realizes that he should never have strayed away from his family, and should never have been as irresponsible as he has in the past.

The family conflict in the movie is just as intense as the violence that we as an audience watch. The reason for this is because of the way the film is constructed. In the earlier scenes, Joaquin Phoenix’s character is in direct opposition to the members of his family. At one point in the film, he says to his Latino girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes) that his family is comprised of a bunch of stiffs. When the audience sees both Joseph and Burt in the same shot, they do look like ghosts on the screen. Anyone would look that way if they were compared to a heated up stallion, which is what Bobby is. He just wants to enjoy the nightlife of late 80’s New York. He doesn’t realize that mixing with the wrong crowd can have dire consequences. Basically, the enjoyably fun early scenes in the film, the 80’s nostalgia trip with Joaquin Phoenix as the audience’s guide, are examples of how Bobby was not being loyal to his family. His having fun with Amada, so to speak, is viewed as immoral and wrong by the filmmakers. Once the drama ensues, she becomes the consoling girlfriend to Bobby; she’s even dressed in white. This is basically a slap in the face to the audience. I enjoyed the earlier parts of the film. There were even great dramatic moments, like when the cops bust Bobby’s club in order to begin moving against the Russians who were making some drug deals there. It’s dramatic when Bobby looks at his brother while being shoved to the ground by the police. If this is the way for Bobby to be reprimanded by his family, isn’t their method a little harsh? All of these emotions can be read on Joaquin Phoenix’s face.

The fights between the two brothers are also very realistic and excitingly intense. Why did the filmmakers stop the film in mid stream and make We Own the Night somber and cold to the touch? The unrelenting sense of doom that pervades this family is depressing to watch. I don’t want to give any of the plot away, but what happens in the film is really all just one big reprimand towards Bobby’s character. It’s a very literal movie; the movie makers punish Bobby because he strayed away from the family. We Own the Night is really very similar to an old fashioned social context picture; it’s also not very enjoyable. The whole movie, starting from the moment when the dire chain of events start, is in memoriam. That’s why the audience can see what’s going to happen from a mile away.

I’ve talked with fans of the film who say that the sensationalized violence in the movie is realistic, because that was the way New York was back then. It’s not so much the violence that I have a problem with; my concerns are more along the lines of the motive of the filmmakers. The declaration that writer director James Gray makes to the audience is that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and that it’s moral and just to do so. My question is: even when he’s pressured by his family? We Own the Night is very deceptive along these lines, because Fate is the reason for why Bobby comes to his senses and becomes “moral”, when it’s easily apparent that it’s his family that forces him. It’s not the Russian Mafia that makes Bobby want to become a cop, it’s his father’s doing, and Grey cleverly tries to subvert this. Also, Bobby’s and the police forces way of dealing with the Russians (one cop at one point says that they should just wipe out the Russian Mafia: this is the only joke in the movie) is not so much an aspect of New York, as it is an example of the filmmakers’ consciousness. The film is more Conservatism in tone than anything else. We Own the Night is basically like an old “complex” moralistic movie, like Shane, except that it’s more violent. The villain in the film, played by Alex Veadov, is simply the villain and that’s all. The character doesn’t have any other dimensions to him, and this adds to the tone of the film, which is utter desperation.

We Own the Night is very well made, but in a calculating way, which is not necessarily a bad thing. This manipulative style actually adds to the suspenseful moments. Scenes like Bobby being snared in a barrage of bullets, and Bobby following a car in a devastating chase, are so excruciatingly suspenseful, that they are beautifully executed. It’s ironic that these scenes all involve brutality, but that’s the genre that Gray is working within.

Even though We Own the Night has the same moralistic tendencies as Shane, that film didn’t have the performances that this film has. Even though the filmmakers misuse Eva Malone, she’s a great presence on the screen. She’s beautiful to watch, and can alternate moods. She plays both naughty and nice in this film. Robert Duvall, that all-seasoned pro, is perfect at playing the domineering father figure. He knows how to act in a scene where he’s angry with his son; he conveys anger through silence. Duvall can also play a consoling caring person, which gives dimensionality to this one-note character. Mark Wahlberg is basically playing the same cop that he did in The Departed. The difference is that Joseph is more disassociated from everyone and emotionally removed. That’s exactly the way Wahlberg plays him, and gives a very unfussy performance. He mixes these emotions with ones of anger towards his brother in the early scenes. It’s not like he doesn’t have passion in him.

Speaking of passion, Phoenix gives an intensely ardent performance. That’s the difference between Bobby and the rest of his family; he’s passionate while they are not. Phoenix’s performance is the main reason for why this particular cop melodrama feels different. No one has ever seen this type of actor in a movie like this before. However, his performance is consistent with other Phoenix roles. He’s very good at playing someone in desperation, while at the same time being depressed. This conflict of emotion was apparent in his roles in both Gladiator, and Walk the Line. He’s always the saving grace for the movies that he’s in. His hooded look of despair when he’s interrogating someone, for instance, saves the dumb scene that he appears in, makes it a worthwhile scene. Phoenix looks like he came out of the late 80’s with his dark black bedraggled hair: in the early scenes he has a lacerated look on his face, while at the same time being amiable. This fits the characterization of Bobby, because he can’t stand the fact that his family constantly puts him down for having fun. Later on, that smile goes from his face, yet he still retains that torn look. Phoenix gives the film different shades of complexity.

The movie needs Phoenix’s performance because it’s sensationalistic and rather basic. For example, the film is very unrealistic once Bobby decides to be a member of the police force. Throughout the movie Bobby has a body guard watching after him the whole time, due to the threats against his life. Have you ever seen a cop chasing a person while at the same time being followed by a body guard? Because the film is primal in tone, it lacks a social context. Isn’t that offensive? Especially considering that the filmmakers make us care about Bobby, without giving him a sense of intelligence. The actor provides those emotions. The fact that the character becomes a vigilante and joins the police force in order to get revenge, instead of grieving in the proper way, is irritating. The filmmakers say to the audience, in effect, that that’s the proper thing for a man to do.

on Wall Street

Wall Street is an approximation of the 80’s alright, but it’s also to quote Richard III a grim visaged view, where Michael Douglas’ character has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and where the rookie stock trader played by Charlie Sheen, who in a sense works for the devil, realizes that he has been performing evil deeds, only after his father is laid off because of his actions. Couldn’t he have realized that what he was doing beforehand was wrong as well, or is a person being laid off who isn’t related to you a good thing? This is the negative stance of the 80’s, where greed begets greed to the point where even the main hero of the piece is naive up until almost the very end, and where he needs to use his knowledge of ruining company’s (he has very good experience) to ultimately ruin his surrogate father’s business. He even goes to jail in the end to learn from his mistakes; he’s all for it. At that time, did Reaganittis and Thatcher’s conservatism really seep into the culture that much? I don’t think so, but this is the ultimate 80’s movie so it has to show these types of things to the 10^th degree, (there’s nothing else in this movie to show but greed) so that people watching the movie today could feel how terrible it was to live in the 80’s; to warn us all that we could become greedy any minute (as if success was a bad thing; there’s a difference between being successful and greedy). As if we didn’t have the commonsense to not be greedy ourselves. Wall Street is a case of 80’s conservatism infusing with the moviemaking itself.

Wall Street is not the only case of this, and the reason that for the most part moviemakers didn’t take chances on their work (this still appears to be the case) was because the businessman took over from the artist in this particular field. Narrative chances were bylined by commercial considerations for the profit value. Wouldn’t it be really audacious if the filmmakers agreed with what Michael Douglas meant when he said in Wall Street; Greed is Good. It would be even more risky if the audience liked the movie. However, this almost anarchistic tendency would give Wall Street some energy that it desperately needed. This kind of thing happened all the time in movies; an example being that the greatest woman director of all time was a Nazi, and her name was Leni Riefenstahl. 30’s film nourished the idea of impudence. It’s what sustains art in my opinion. Maybe the problem with the 80’s wasn’t so much the greediness that was being propagated at that time (greed will always exist) but rather that the selling out of personal vision was going on all the time. Sheen will still not have a personal vision after the movie’s over (he probably had more original ideas when he was corrupt) because we have no indication that he could be capable of handling other forms of business, and yet Stone shows him to be the perfect role model.

The Western and the Importance of Complexity

Many action films today take the stereotypes of the Western, but yet miss the whole point of the genre. An example of this mistaken notion is that the filmmakers continually show more and more action and violence in their films. The Western was, in its day, the form of folklore and epic storytelling for movie audiences, much in the same way that the older generation heard tall tales or read about them. If a person would want to go even farther back then that in history, in order to see where the Western form stems from, they would have to go back to ancient mythology when epics where told to children. These epics actually have more of a relation to the Western than the actual West being portrayed in those films. The Western was never summarized in a better fashion than by film critic Pauline Kael when she stated that, “The original Stagecoach had a mixture of reverie and reverence about the American past that made the picture seem almost folk art; we wanted to believe it even if we didn’t.” It’s that sense of escapism, mixed in with the social connotations of the films, which makes them still classics till this day.

The Western helped spread a cultural representative norm of America to foreign cultures, as well as people who lived in America as well. What made these films so “American” was the fact that they always dealt with a certain main character archetype. This archetype involved, “…the doomed hero—the man without a future because the way of life is changing, the frontier is vanishing, and the sheriff and the schoolteacher are representatives of progress and a new order. The hero is the living antique who represents the best of the old order just as it is disappearing.” Typically this hero was played by John Wayne, and his robust strapping swagger set the standard for the ways in which actors played cowboy heroes. Also, the convention of the lawless land, and of how someone has to set things straight in his town by getting the job done himself, was a convention that seemed to stick whenever foreign cultures viewed how America operated.

The problem with the Western form was the fact that after awhile the films became repetitious, and the once ingenious ideas in the Western genre became merely conventions. How many times can an audience watch the same old movie that merely has a new film crew working on it? After awhile, the mythology of the classic Western hero can look pretty tiresome, especially if he’s played by the same person i.e John Wayne or whomever. It wasn’t particularly consoling considering that the setting never changed as well. Also, the later Westerns became a sort of bastardization of the old “classic” westerns which had a beautiful simplistic purity to them. These newer Westerns even had the same stars as the old ones, and yet the films were more rotten to the core. For example, a classic Western actor like Kirk Douglas now changed in characterization in order to fit in with the lousiness of the particular movie that he was starring in. Pauline Kael gave an example when she stated that, “Douglas in The War Wagon has metamorphosed back into his post-World War II character—the heel. He’s now the too smart Westerner, mercenary and untrustworthy in a way the audience is supposed to like. His Westerner is a swinger—a wisecracking fancy talker with intentionally anachronistic modern attitudes.” Also, filmmakers like John Ford were getting too old to adequately film their movies. The once beautiful landscapes of the American West had to be transposed with indoor locations because Ford was becoming too old to film outdoors; a perfect example of this is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Even John Wayne was beginning to show his age.

These flaws in later Westerns ultimately inadvertently helped end the genre.

If it weren’t for certain maverick films, or at least maverick at the time, like Yojimbo and The Wild Bunch then the Western may have ended in a much earlier period than it ultimately did. What makes these two particular movies so distinctive, and so vital, is the fact that they used the Western conventions and then purposefully stood them on their head, and actually added complexity to the depleted genre. A filmmaker like Kurosawa had to have had an abundant amount of effrontery in him in order to make a film like Yojimbo. He would also have to have a certain amount of impudence in him in order to shoot a scene like the one in Yojimbo when Toshiro Mifune is up on the tower watching the two factions ruling the town fight each other, and laughing in the process. This scene would be a normal one in any other Western; the assumption would be that Mifune is the villain in the film, but the fact that he is the main character is quite startling. The fact that the location of this particular Western is Japan may have something to do with this role reversal.

The fact that this film has a different location setting opposed to the American West is why Yojimbo is so refreshing upon first viewing. Also, the whole comic situation and the way the story is constructed, is much more complex than say a typical Western would be; the movie is highly ambiguous. Tshiro Mifune is a loner type who used to be a Feudal Samurai, but now is without a master. That’s ok with him though; this man likes his freedom because now he can choose his own way in which to make a profit. Once he walks into a deserted lawless town, which is being fought for by two illicit clans, he decides to play both groups against each other. How this man attempts to do this is by working for both of the clans in different intervals and giving them false information that will ultimately benefit him because he makes a profit while they kill each other. This Westerner hero is very different from the ones in American movies, and this is because he only looks out for himself. Consequently, he’s more realistic and comical. The audience can actually laugh at his actions, rather than be in awe at the way that he administers violence. In the American Western films, this violence assumes the gross improbable construction of justice. Toshiro Mifune’s character does not suffer fools easily, and neither does the filmmaker Kurosawa. Pauline Kael wrote about this in her review of Yojimbo when she stated that, “Kurosawa slashes the screen with action, and liberates us from the pretensions of our ‘serious’ Westerns. After all those long, lean-hipped walks across the screen with Cooper or Fonda (the man who knows how to use a gun is, by movie convention, the man without an ass), we are restored to sanity by Mifune’s heroic personal characteristic—a titanic shoulder twitch.”

What’s ironic about Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is the fact that, yes the conventions of the Western have been altered and enhanced like in Yojimbo, except that in this movie the murderous outlaws have the same heroic grandeur that the Western hero of the early “classics” of the genre had. Peckinpah’s sociological point, no matter how controversial it may seem, actually proves fairly cogent. The film’s thesis is that if the “heroic” character of the “classic” Western is allowed to be depicted in a heroic vein, so should the outlaw because that Westerner hero of the past also killed people outside of the jurisdiction of the law.

The Wild Bunch is a very conflicted film for mainly two reasons. The first is that the criminals and killers in the movie, otherwise known as Pike’s group, are treated with reverence throughout the film. It would be presumed that many would be outraged by this, but for the most part this fact seems to slip past audience’s perceptions. This audience response is fascinating because they accept the view of the film without question. Maybe audiences always resented the “classic” Western heroes of the past without fully realizing it. After all, how could a man who killed people almost as if it were sport in duel after duel (the only reason the character is “heroic” is because he didn’t terrorize the town, and he didn’t shoot his opponent in the back; he would always ask them to a duel), be viewed as a virtuous considerate man? Peckinpah’s switching of convention actually proves to make more sense than say if he merely showed the outlaw as being a virtuous considerate man. Instead, Pike and the rest of the Wild Bunch are anything but considerate, and yet they are heroic because they stick by their principles and stay together as a group, without betraying or sacrificing or forgetting about one another, until their very end. Peckinpah is not stating to the audience that the Bunch in his film were good, but merely that we as people have reverences that we were not aware of towards the criminal. Peckinpah wants his film audience to own up to their responses, and this is why the film is so shocking.

The violence in the film is the second example of conflict in The Wild Bunch. The movie is very violent, and yet that violence has a purpose. It is that audiences do relish violence without realizing it. Peckinpah wanted to explore this in his film, so he made the violence that appears in The Wild Bunch, along with the action sequences, highly virtuosic and beautiful. Certain scenes like the beginning robbery and the scene when Thornton and his gang, which goes after Pike’s gang, are tricked into believing that the criminals are on a bridge, when in reality bombs are planted that make that bridge collapse, almost feel like ballet because they are executed in slow motion. These particular scenes are beautiful and are made to contrast with the violent ending sequence, when the audience is resentful of their own responses to the earlier scenes. Peckinpah makes the audience ashamed that they ever relished violence to begin with. The violence in the film is what made The Wild Bunch so controversial, and yet the violence works hand in hand with the sociological comments that I stated earlier, and it’s ironic that many don’t realize this. They merely attack the violence and not the controversial statements in the film. It’s also ironic, and somewhat terrifying, that many do not realize that the film is an attack on violence, rather than being a glorification of it.

The conclusion that I have come to is that the only way for the Western genre to continue, for any genre to continue, is to make films that conflict with the notions of the genre. Complexity is the only way for any genre to prosper, and this is why the western has been so non-existent for many years now. There are new Westerns, but they are very falsely complex and very negative in spirit. They are not as rich as they are made out to appear; not as rich as a Yojimbo or a Wild Bunch. In other words, a filmmaker should make a different kind of movie from say a Wild Bunch, because the audaciousness of that film has already been done and can never be repeated. There have to be other ways to continue the folklore and tradition of the genre.

The one thing that has to remain constant in order for the American Western to prosper is that the films have to have heroic grandeur. Without that quality there is simply negativity, which is what occurs in No Country For Old Men.