another maniacal Armond White review, this time "Fahrenheit 9/11"

what you think paganism represents in the film

yeah and the structure of the film purposely muddies this, I think? god i want to rewatch it right now so i can make sure. so smartly made, i remember thinking.

i mean purposely muddies the representational one-to-one-ness of the allegory.

yeah its actually a really difficult movie to read

for something that i thought was going to be a spanish kids movie when i bought my ticket

everyone in the movie is creating their own world

right and the captain's world revolves around violence and torture and martyrdom, blood sacrifice handed down through generations, etc. very roman catholic. the pagan world though makes the girl re-enact isaac and abraham, with the twist that the key is in her refusal to make the sacrifice rather than her willingness to. which i don't think makes the movie just anti-catholic (although it is, arguably) so much as anti-authoritarian at a fundamental level.

man i dunno max, i wanted it to be how yr describing but that reveal shot seemed to undercut it. Everyone else can affect their own reality except her, as a kid she's suffering under all these other forces, so it was like the story betrays her when they don't let her story stand on equal footing

i have to see it again

i mean if you're still throwing down confident pronouncements about a movie you haven't seen since 1996 it's hard to believe you're that interested in engaging with something which you've already decided

Yeah JD, I'm not interested in "engaging with it" bcz I made up my mind as a 30+ year old about said film and don't have time to rewatch blah stuff cuz it won Oscars and is worshiped by Coen cultists - life's too short.

deej, what I'm arguing is RaisAriz is funny and touching and Fargo ain't. The End.

the problem with Pan's Labyrinth was that the dude with eyes in his hands had less screen time than a stuttering freedom fighter. false advertising!

and no max, I'm not trying to act like a dick. When ppl say they saw 5 or 6 "great" American big-studio films this year, I just instinctively react Cheeee-rist, save that shit for ILM and albums. (normally I'd ask WHY IS IT GREAT, but ppl don't like to answer that)

Dunno why people putting a stock anti-fascist story and a stock "little girl's metaphor fantasy" story together would add up to a great movie.

It was better than Lives Of Others, though.

I mean, at least it didn't have to have five "2 years later" scenes to seek that all important happy ending.

Pan's Labryinth and "Armond White" don't belong on the same thread.

and im not sure why "power corrupts" and "people are cruel" are considered naive politics?

-- ryan, Friday, 18 January 2008 20:09 (Yesterday) Link

they're apolitical statements -- or, they lead, as in 'there will be blood', to Bad Emblematic Figures because the filmmakers are politically naive. so it's not capitalism, really, in 'dogville' or 'twbb', but mean people, not common economic exploitation that, in reality, is deemed acceptable, but (in 'dogville') really obvious and morally objectionable stuff that the bad people do. 'power corrupts' is kind of nihilistic; 'people are mean' -- yeah, if they get the chance, but these films don't get into that.

was sophocles politically naive? i mean, to argue ad absurdum, you can reduce the greeks and shakespeare to simpleminded thesis statements too. (stipulating that pta and lvt are not sophocles or shakespeare.) i agree that neither movie is as economically astute as something like ruby in paradise or the dardennes, but they're working on a different scale. dogville is in a social-fable tradition, brecht to arthur miller to whatever. twbb is in the american-tragedy tradition, dreiser to gatsby to kane etc. you could call both those traditions essentially naive if you wanted, but i wouldn't. and of course being in those traditions doesn't automatically make either movie good, although i think they both are -- because they are energetic and self-aware of their own traditions and imaginative in approaching them. (also because i was completely entertained by both of them.)

raising arizona is bullshit. dismissing fargo as "smug funny-accent travesty" and then riding for that garbage is psychotic

ethan I think it's time you switched to sanka

no the thing of shakespeare is, you can't do that, can't reduce things down to thesis positions. hard to bring him up without making the comparison, but plainview is not a full character the way shakespeare's were. obviously the mode of presentation is so different that the comparison is dicey anyway.

i would say 'dogville' is on about the same level, politically, as the dardennes -- ie pretty low. 'dogville' is probably better in that sense, in that it isn't vitiated by catholic mysticism. dardennes make films about poor people, but they don't have much in the way of socio-political insight. they make better films than LVT.

'kane' seems more politically smart (taking into account the circumstances it was made under) to me than 'twbb', 'gatsby' more psychologically true.

'raising arizona' is the coens' worst pre-'oh brother' film.

john goodman is pretty good as usual but yeeesh.

i like almost all the movies mentioned here except for raising arizona and dogville

i like food, it tastes good

"When ppl say they saw 5 or 6 "great" American big-studio films this year, I just instinctively react Cheeee-rist, save that shit for ILM and albums."

Yeah good job policing what folks like, Morbs. You stay on that.

I seriously have no idea what qualifies as being "great cinema" for you Morbs, but one thing I am completely clear on is that whatever elusive quality it may be it's not something that I give much of a shit about or would expect most other people to.

I don't read Morbs as taking issue with quality so much as quantity. Rather than reserving 'great' for something mind-blowing, it gets tacked on to a bunch of films (even when they might account for a fifth of what someone saw in a year) because they're reasonably well-made and because there's so much shit out there in general.

'kane' seems more politically smart (taking into account the circumstances it was made under) to me than 'twbb', 'gatsby' more psychologically true.

definitely. i'm just saying that's twbb's self-conscious lineage. he's playing with that form. and i know, i'm always suspicious of people saying things like "oh it's not meant to be xxxx" by way of excusing something for not being xxxx, BUT plainview is not exactly a character study. more like an archetype. so the lack of depth just didn't seem like an issue to me. he's a sort of monolithic game piece on a monumental board. the movie seems to me more about the force of his action than the nuances of his character. but that's a subjective thing; to me the movie was kind of like getting steamrolled or bulldozed, and that was exciting, i don't get bulldozed at movies very often. if you didn't feel bulldozed, or object to bulldozing on principle, it would be a different experience.

(and to take that a step further, pta's and ddl's bulldozing approach mirror plainview's; the movie's an example of what it's about)

"I don't read Morbs as taking issue with quality so much as quantity."

Yes, the fact that it's a semantic argument makes it a bunch better. . . wait no it doesn't and it doesn't change anything I said.

Except you were talking about the 'qualities of a great film' and what they are for Morbs.

And apparently one of those qualities is rarity. I can see how that really changes things a lot.

I mean what this really comes down to is Morbs feeling that overt enthusiasm is basically unseemly when talking about film and should be reserved only for the most magnificent of Spielberg's creations and not some crap churned out by David Fincher.

Imagine a world where every ILE film thread turns into a debate about the relative merits of Bamako, Offside and Away from Her.

what a snobbish thing to say. i haven't seen bamako, i loved offside (shouldn't it be "offsides"), and away from her felt stilted and unimaginative. it didn't move me.

offsides (plural) is hockey right? soccer is singular?

sures

re the "great" standard, that's a perpetual problem right? movies, records, books, whatever, people get very hung up on calling something great. (i had a related debate with some friends not long ago about the word "genius.") i'm cautious about it too, but maybe not as cautious as some. "great" seems like a pretty broad category itself -- there are forms and degrees of greatness. you can obviously have a great performance in an ok film, or a great film that still has some flaws. but if you have enough accumulated experience of movies or music or whatever, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to call things great if they strike you as great. great films and music are rare, but they're not like vanishingly rare; with the amount of stuff being produced every year, the likelihood that you'll see something great if you pay enough attention is really pretty good. (unless you're going to argue that there are fewer than one or two great movies made a year, in which case you'd be arguing that there are fewer than 100 or 200 great films period, which i just don't think is true at all.)

i have one friend who refuses to call anything "great" until it's had some time -- 10 or 20 years -- to prove its greatness. i guess that's one way to do it. otoh, my point to him is that a lot of stuff that ends up being considered great 10 or 20 years later -- or 50 or 75 -- is stuff that was also called great when it first appeared. and that the reputation it accrues as it goes is partly built on that initial enthusiasm. obv. not true for everything -- some things get hype and then fade (although often to be rediscovered later), some things aren't noticed much at first and then find champions later, etc. but none of that negates the critical project at the front end, it just means its part of an evolutionary process.

(it's, in that last sentence. sorry.)

although i do also think the passage of time provides interesting critical perspective, which is why some of my favorite criticism is of reissues or retrospectives.

out of the 50-100 non-random films i choose see annually, i am willing to bet that between 3-5 movies will be hands-down 'great' by the standards of any sane person.

of those 3-5, i will probably think 2 or 3 re great in a few years, but i will have upgraded the status of another 1 or 2, and also seen on video at least a few i would like to add to that (past) year's cinematic hall of fame.

+/-500 movies in the history of the art form is not really overenthusiastic, or undiscriminating.

indiscriminatory, even

i think 'indiscriminate' is what you're looking for

seventeen hours of my weekend have been devoted to editing, and yet i somehow manage to insert six typoes and three syntactical errors in a forty-word post. i need sleep. :(

unless you're going to argue that there are fewer than one or two great movies made a year, in which case you'd be arguing that there are fewer than 100 or 200 great films period, which i just don't think is true at all.

Unless I'm willing to argue that the Great Rate has slowed in recent years because the commercial (ie, anything that's exhibited for profit) narrative film is suffering from burnout/exhaustion/Everything's Been Sorta Done after a century. Which I might be! I think I could find 6-10 great films from every year in the '50s.

seventeen hours of my weekend have been devoted to editing, and yet i somehow manage to insert six typoes and three syntactical errors in a forty-word post. i need sleep. :(

-- remy bean, Sunday, January 20, 2008 11:13 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Link

He's started a new shitstorm!

Critical babble doesn’t talk about what matters, but it sustains Ten Current Film Culture Fallacies:

1)“The Three Amigos” Iñárritu, Cuarón and del Toro are Mexico’s greatest filmmakers while Julian Hernandez is ignored.

2) Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he’s really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger.

3) Documentaries ought to be partisan rather than reportorial or observational.

4) Chicago, Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls equal the great MGM musicals.

5) Paul Verhoeven’s social satire Showgirls was camp while Cronenberg’s campy melodramas are profound.

6) Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough while all other gay-themed movies were ignored.

7) Todd Haynes’ academic dullness is anything but.

8) Dogma was a legitimate film movement.

9) Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected.

10) Mumblecore matters.

http://daily.greencine.com/archives/005869.html

he can't even stick to his formal conceit

Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough while all other gay-themed movies were ignored.

Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected.

unless he's saying these statements are actually fallacies!

Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he’s really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger.

is this just a gay-bashing thing? apart from them being gay, what links these two? GVT is kind of minimalist when he's allowed to be. but for visconti not so much with the minimalism.

3) Documentaries ought to be partisan rather than reportorial or observational.

how is this a fallacy? since when? and what does it even mean?

I don't even understand what he's saying in 9). Stephen Chow's been rejected? In what world?

4) Chicago, Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls equal the great MGM musicals.

oscar voters != film culture

8) Dogma was a legitimate film movement.

ok this is a funny zing because dogme was probably the lamest film movement since the 'cinema du look', but to say it wasn't 'legitimate' begs some big questions.