Saturday, July 15, 2006
When Meryl Streep appears on screen for a brief moment she is herself, we see her face, and we identify it. In the next blink of an eye she is gone and the Editor-in-Chief of "Runway," Miranda Priestly has arrived, precise in her movements, severe in her tone, and utterly intriguing in her mean manner. I watched unconsciously waiting for her to break character, to flash a smile or give some semblance of sympathy. That longing is directly linked to her character Miranda herself. She is all business, insatiably, cunning and cold; she is the mold from which any sadistic executive is born, the extreme example of a boss with a superiority complex. I guess it's not that I was waiting for Streep to break away from this character more so than it was my hope to see Miranda relax, go easy on her endearing assistant Andy (Anne Hathaway) and make us notice her as a person.
The hope for Andy is that, despite her smarts and over-qualifications for the position, she will prove to Mirada that she's dependable, consistent and trustworthy, enough so that she'll become at most a friend, at least a confidant. She introduces herself in the interview as "Andy," her real name is Andrea but her "friends call her Andy." For the first act of the movie Miranda calls her "Emily," the first assistant in command. Later, to the shock of Andy and dismay of Emily, Miranda summons her to her office with a cool chime, Andrea, and she's off on another thankless errand. Now that she's been acknowledged Miranda must like her. She smiles more, she looks happy picking up Starbucks for a living. Of course, it never hurts when she gets to take home a $1900 Marc Jacobs purse, leftovers from Miranda. But she laid out the parameters of their Executive-Assistant relationship in her introduction, her "friends" call her Andy, a title Miranda avoids like the "lumpy" blue sweater Andy wears to her first day of work.
Outside of Streep's performance the best thing about The Devil Wears Prada is the honest way it portrays this high-fashion industry without the slightest condescension. It shows it for what it is, a money-making, trend-setting business that effects everyone living in modern society. For better or worst, the garments Miranda and her staff choose and promote as the materials that epitomize the times, truly are works of art. The ruthless and materialistic personalities at "Runway" magazine are the villains, and are not mistaken for the fancy duds that anyone would be proud to model, if only they had the credit limit to acquire them. As an insider of this industry Andy sacrifices her character and career aspirations for a sleek Chanel outfit, and it's easy to. The fashion itself is not the culprit of her compromise, but a symbol of it, and one that is easily confused with her crude coworkers who live solely for it.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
An Inconvenient Truth - 2006 - Film
Thursday, July 13, 2006
There isn't anything cinematic about An Inconvenient Truth, because it is essentially a filmed lecture and Power Point presentation. Toss Al Gore into it, have him narrate a brief environmental history of America, however, and it suddenly has more weight as a film. But it still isn't. Don't let Gore's fantastic presence fool you. It ain't a movie. It's more of a "projected class lecture," but an inspiring one. Gore fell off the radar, save a few SNL appearances, after the shame of the 2000 election, and those of us who cheered for him then are delighted to see him rallying once again.
As soon as the movie started I saw that its heart wasn't into using a recongizable aesthetic to tell Gore's story, so I let that go immediately, sat back, and pretended I was back in a college classroom taking notes on the day's lecture. In this respect An Inconvenient Truth did not let me down; it's an urgent reminder to stay conscious of how our day-to-day functions effect the globe now, and later. Gore gives us hard facts about the state of the environment, which predicts doom for earth and humanity in a frightening length of time if our earth-unfriendly lifestyle doesn't change.
The movie can't be classified as a piece of political propaganda, because Gore has a remove from current politics that give him the freedom to discuss controversial topics unrestrained. Now he doesn't have to worry about offending certain demographics, now he can educate a mass audience on a topic that's near to his heart. Sure, there are a few mentions of the current presidential administration's outright ignorance on the topic of the environment, but you can't blame Gore for having just a little resentment towards Bush after the mess that was the 2000 Election. So I'll let those those juicy jabs at W. and Co. slide.
Nor is the movie a kind of scare tactic meant to cause hysteria. There was a moment of speechless silence as the end credits concluded the movie. I saw it at a theater on the Upper-West side of Manhattan where folks glee in speaking about a film as they file through the rows of seats and out the theater door. But they were silent. It was a meditative and calculated quiet that patrons kept inside themselves, a rational calm meant to preserve the gravity of the lecture they just saw. Gore's message is clear: we have to imagine the change in our daily lives; we must demand more energy efficient public transportation; new sources of energy must be utilized; cars and fossil fuels have to be used less; we cannot depend on the lifestyle we lead now to bring us into a healthy and progressive future.
There are a lot of people who think this business about the damaged state of the environment is a hoax. Most of them hang around the Fox network newsroom. But I digress. To be fair, it must be hard for Fox employees to rationalize complex topics and scientific facts with all of that hot air floating around. Whatever. Point is, the facts are there. All you really have to do is look at any city skyline and see the hazy smog that clogs it. Even if one might think these smoky skylines have no long-term effect on the environment (though they do, e.g. melted glaciers), that dirty air certainly has a short-term effect: it stinks.
As a film, An Inconvenient Truth doesn't exist. There's just no artistic aesthetic to prove it. But, in a way, it's lack of cinematic style makes Gore's message more urgent. He's imposing himself on the movies, one of our greatest respites for fantasy, only to give us reality.
There isn't anything cinematic about An Inconvenient Truth, because it is essentially a filmed lecture and Power Point presentation. Toss Al Gore into it, have him narrate a brief environmental history of America, however, and it suddenly has more weight as a film. But it still isn't. Don't let Gore's fantastic presence fool you. It ain't a movie. It's more of a "projected class lecture," but an inspiring one. Gore fell off the radar, save a few SNL appearances, after the shame of the 2000 election, and those of us who cheered for him then are delighted to see him rallying once again.
As soon as the movie started I saw that its heart wasn't into using a recongizable aesthetic to tell Gore's story, so I let that go immediately, sat back, and pretended I was back in a college classroom taking notes on the day's lecture. In this respect An Inconvenient Truth did not let me down; it's an urgent reminder to stay conscious of how our day-to-day functions effect the globe now, and later. Gore gives us hard facts about the state of the environment, which predicts doom for earth and humanity in a frightening length of time if our earth-unfriendly lifestyle doesn't change.
The movie can't be classified as a piece of political propaganda, because Gore has a remove from current politics that give him the freedom to discuss controversial topics unrestrained. Now he doesn't have to worry about offending certain demographics, now he can educate a mass audience on a topic that's near to his heart. Sure, there are a few mentions of the current presidential administration's outright ignorance on the topic of the environment, but you can't blame Gore for having just a little resentment towards Bush after the mess that was the 2000 Election. So I'll let those those juicy jabs at W. and Co. slide.
Nor is the movie a kind of scare tactic meant to cause hysteria. There was a moment of speechless silence as the end credits concluded the movie. I saw it at a theater on the Upper-West side of Manhattan where folks glee in speaking about a film as they file through the rows of seats and out the theater door. But they were silent. It was a meditative and calculated quiet that patrons kept inside themselves, a rational calm meant to preserve the gravity of the lecture they just saw. Gore's message is clear: we have to imagine the change in our daily lives; we must demand more energy efficient public transportation; new sources of energy must be utilized; cars and fossil fuels have to be used less; we cannot depend on the lifestyle we lead now to bring us into a healthy and progressive future.
There are a lot of people who think this business about the damaged state of the environment is a hoax. Most of them hang around the Fox network newsroom. But I digress. To be fair, it must be hard for Fox employees to rationalize complex topics and scientific facts with all of that hot air floating around. Whatever. Point is, the facts are there. All you really have to do is look at any city skyline and see the hazy smog that clogs it. Even if one might think these smoky skylines have no long-term effect on the environment (though they do, e.g. melted glaciers), that dirty air certainly has a short-term effect: it stinks.
As a film, An Inconvenient Truth doesn't exist. There's just no artistic aesthetic to prove it. But, in a way, it's lack of cinematic style makes Gore's message more urgent. He's imposing himself on the movies, one of our greatest respites for fantasy, only to give us reality.
Sunday, July 9, 2006
A Scanner Darkly - 2006 - Film
Friday, July 7, 2006
What made Waking Life (2001) fantastic and lively was that the physical characters and their dialogues were a montage of of-the-moment thoughts and movements, stream-of-consciousness art where the characters speak and grow into their voice by virtue of the action itself. The animation, which was painted over human actors on the film stock, bubbled and popped with color and contrast, always moving and growing, and never settling on a flat, static image. The animation work on A Scanner Darkly follows the same style of Linklater's former film, but projects a story much hazier in purpose and fuction. A Scanner Darkly, rather, is content to replay the form of Waking Life but bogs itself down in frustrated rhetoric about the future. The result is a film that contradicts itself: at the same time that the animation twists and squirms to life, the characters are forced through a gauntlet of delusory conversations that have no inspired beginning or end.
Substance D is the narcotic that drugs the characters into long non-conversations about simple things turned complex. A topic about nothing (e.g. the number of gears on a bike) is leaden with with language straight out of the thesaurus. The drugs make them hallucinate, become numb to the reality of their surroundings. James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) babbles out philosophical analogies and polysyllabic words so frequently that his language loses meaning, too. Everything they say and do is removed from reality and morphed into a nightmare like the kind you have when you are only half-asleep. They know they are physically bound to their settings, but the images they see are mere hints of what's really there, and even those are obscured and bloated out of form. Bob Arcter (Keanu Reeves) is an agent who inadvertently gets addicted to Substance D during his time undercover as a doped-up burn-out with James and his cohorts. But the funny thing is, even when he's out-of-cover back at his office he's forced to wear a "scatter suit," a cloak that shifts from endless different faces, profiles and bodies, all moving and changing simultaneously, so that his true identity is never clear.
In the times that Bob plays himself as the agent at work, not undercover and under the influence, his body is a rainbow collage of faces and color, as are his couterparts. From his perspective it's never clear who is observing who. He's ill a ease and D is the only thing that helps him find reality, or rather, an escape. The meandering D-dictated conversations lead endlessly with no hopeful light at the end of the tunnel, they can't see, they're lost in the dark. A Scanner Darkly is a bleak social picture of today if we are indeed wandering in the dark without aim or purpose, if the potential energy and wonder of life is squelched by imposed powers of a higher institution; hopefully it is not true that, as the film's tagline reads, "everything is not going to be ok," hopefully there remain things inspiring in the spontaneous, and even mundane of life that punctures this pessimistic prediction.
What made Waking Life (2001) fantastic and lively was that the physical characters and their dialogues were a montage of of-the-moment thoughts and movements, stream-of-consciousness art where the characters speak and grow into their voice by virtue of the action itself. The animation, which was painted over human actors on the film stock, bubbled and popped with color and contrast, always moving and growing, and never settling on a flat, static image. The animation work on A Scanner Darkly follows the same style of Linklater's former film, but projects a story much hazier in purpose and fuction. A Scanner Darkly, rather, is content to replay the form of Waking Life but bogs itself down in frustrated rhetoric about the future. The result is a film that contradicts itself: at the same time that the animation twists and squirms to life, the characters are forced through a gauntlet of delusory conversations that have no inspired beginning or end.
Substance D is the narcotic that drugs the characters into long non-conversations about simple things turned complex. A topic about nothing (e.g. the number of gears on a bike) is leaden with with language straight out of the thesaurus. The drugs make them hallucinate, become numb to the reality of their surroundings. James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) babbles out philosophical analogies and polysyllabic words so frequently that his language loses meaning, too. Everything they say and do is removed from reality and morphed into a nightmare like the kind you have when you are only half-asleep. They know they are physically bound to their settings, but the images they see are mere hints of what's really there, and even those are obscured and bloated out of form. Bob Arcter (Keanu Reeves) is an agent who inadvertently gets addicted to Substance D during his time undercover as a doped-up burn-out with James and his cohorts. But the funny thing is, even when he's out-of-cover back at his office he's forced to wear a "scatter suit," a cloak that shifts from endless different faces, profiles and bodies, all moving and changing simultaneously, so that his true identity is never clear.
In the times that Bob plays himself as the agent at work, not undercover and under the influence, his body is a rainbow collage of faces and color, as are his couterparts. From his perspective it's never clear who is observing who. He's ill a ease and D is the only thing that helps him find reality, or rather, an escape. The meandering D-dictated conversations lead endlessly with no hopeful light at the end of the tunnel, they can't see, they're lost in the dark. A Scanner Darkly is a bleak social picture of today if we are indeed wandering in the dark without aim or purpose, if the potential energy and wonder of life is squelched by imposed powers of a higher institution; hopefully it is not true that, as the film's tagline reads, "everything is not going to be ok," hopefully there remain things inspiring in the spontaneous, and even mundane of life that punctures this pessimistic prediction.