Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal

The 1985 documentary, Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal, provides an overview of the career of the famed animator, producer, director, writer and stop-motion pioneer as simply as it possibly can: It shows archival interviews with Pal, brief snippets of praise from both peers and acolytes and loads of scenes from his movies. In other words, it goals are modest, it's subject straightforward and it has no concerns with breaking new ground in documentary film making. Simply put, it's object is to show a lot of clips while giving the viewer the understanding that much of fantasy and science fiction of the sixties onward was heavily influenced by Mr. Pal. This isn't a documentary for fans of Ken Burns or Errol Morris. Fans of Barbara Kopple, don't bother. This documentary isn't about finding profound meanings hidden in the nooks or exploring the central core of Pal's being. It's about how cool the movies were that he made and how much they changed the landscape of fantasy/science fiction.

The point is made early, as in right in the opening scene, which isn't from a Pal movie at all, but Gremlins. This is followed by shots of E.T.,the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters and the message is immediately clear: Pal paved the way for the fantasy/sci-fi of today. But in watching the documentary one also gets the impression that his legacy may also be that a kind, gentle and generous person can actually succeed in Hollywood.

It's expected in a documentary of this sort that no one interviewed will have anything bad to say ("I hated that bastard!") but the sheer volume of praise from the wide variety of actors (Russ Tamblyn, Charlton Heston, Tony Curtis, Rod Taylor, Janet Leigh, etc) and the sincerity with which they give it makes one feel an immediate affection for Pal. All of them talk about the confidence he had in them, the exuberance, the sheer unswerving optimism, all from a man who fled Nazi Germany (unlike Veit Harlan) and then, seven years later, had to flee again (he had fled to Holland then left for the United States just before Germany invaded). He saw how bad the world could get but always knew it could be better.

And hard working? They don't make 'em as hard working as George Pal anymore. He built his career around the success of his stop-motion animation, later to become his famous Puppetoons, only it wasn't claymation, it was replacement animation! That means every time a character changed expression, or walked, or waved their hand or freaking blinked(!), a new puppet figure had to be inserted. His charts and storyboards for this were so detailed it made the operation schematics for the construction of the atomic bomb look like a recipe for boiling water. This fascination with detail and the nuts and bolts of things is what contributed to his greatest successes in live action when the time came.

Ray Bradbury comments, correctly, that Destination Moon was the first sci-fi film all about the science. It's all about how the rocket works and the journey there that matters, not actually being on the moon. And it was Pal's interest in solving problems that led him to provide efficient ways to communicate the science to the audience, like having the scientists show a Woody Woodpecker cartoon to potential investors to explain how the process of getting to the moon works. This technique was used again years later by Steven Spielberg in Jurassic Park when John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) shows everyone a cartoon to explain how the dinosaurs have been created.

It's true, his movies are not masterpieces. The acting and writing seem unrefined at times and the budgets ran on the low side but, as stated again by Ray Bradbury, he did something very important for science fiction film: He made it respectable. Before Destination Moon, science fiction seemed entirely silly to most of Hollywood and most adult moviegoers but after Destination Moon, it proved it could take itself seriously and rake in the big bucks. It also helped that he hired the best artists and designers in the game, from the great matte artist Chesley Bonestell to model designer Albert Nozaki who created the iconic Martian spaceships for War of the Worlds.


George Pal continued to have success in film, most notably The Time Machine, with Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux in 1960, but it's his fifties sci-fi work that is most remembered today and clearly the most influential to future generations of sci-fi film makers. The pacing, style and action of today's sci-fi comes a variety of influences and directors such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron but the idea that it could be something more than cheap serial fare came from Pal, and it's an idea I'm glad he didn't keep to himself.

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This has been a contribution post to the Steven Spielberg Blogathon hosted by Ryan Kelly and Adam Zanzie.

Harlan – In the Shadow of Jew Süss

Harlan - In the Shadow of Jew Süss is a 2008 documentary by Felix Moeller that examines the director of the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film, Jew Süss, Veit Harlan, by interviewing the many members of his extended family. The documentary is a captivating, incisive look into his life as seen from a distance by family members desperately trying to come to terms with being related to the only German director tried for war crimes, not once, but twice. Both times he was acquitted.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels is enthusiastically greeted by director Veit Harlan
The family tree of Harlan is a large one and director Moeller wisely has Harlan's granddaughter, Alice, map out the family tree on poster board for the audience, lest we fall into utter confusion. Each of the family members, from sons and daughter to grandsons and granddaughters to nieces and nephews, all, understandably revile the film that made the Harlan name infamous in Germany after the war. This is not surprising and had the documentary simply been about their denouncement of Veit Harlan's work it would have been a rather mundane affair. Instead, Moeller has latched onto something quite interesting here and, in the midst of so many talking heads all related in one way or another going on about their familial shame, something perhaps overlooked upon its release. Essentially, what one ends up with is a cross-section of Germany and it's reaction to its own complicity in one of the greatest crimes in human history. Having watched it twice now, I can say this is, I believe, what Moeller is going for and he succeeds.

Harlan married three times, had five children and these five produced more children, from multiple marriages until finally, even Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane, is in the mix, being one of the nieces. Some of the children married into Jewish families after the war and one daughter, Susanne, even converted to Judaism after marrying Claude Jacoby, who escaped Germany and fled to America in 1938. Harlan himself married a Jewish woman in the twenties, his first wife, Dora Gershon. In 1943, Gershon perished at Auschwitz. The contradictions and complications of the Harlan family tree allow for a deeper look into their collective psyche and it is not long into the film that we realize that Moeller isn't really interested in Harlan's motivations but, rather, what his family thinks those motivations were. That is to say, and not to belabor the point, it's the reaction and coping of those indirectly involved that provide the insight into the reactions and copings of many Germans after the war.

The youngest of the family members, three granddaughters who appear to be in their teens and twenties, find the film repulsive morally but also dull and, in the words of one, "cheesy." It is in their history classes that they are gaining a fuller understanding of what it all meant. We see them first, and this makes perfect sense, because they represent the Germany of today. They know of the past horrors but it's all second and third hand to them and school provides their primary association with their own familial complicity. Gradually Moeller introduces others, nieces and nephews, who speak of a more direct guilt by association and finally, Harlan's children themselves, who run the gamut from something pretty close to outright dismissal of any wrongdoing by their father to overt guilt and gnawing feelings of responsibility.

One son, Kristian, takes the attitude that any thoughts he has about his father are his alone, understandable enough. But then he goes on to defend his father, using the argument that Harlan was forced to make the film even though he didn't believe in it. Still, he can't understand why his father made it so good. Harlan's other son, Thomas, supported his father when he was a teenager but as he grew older and learned more, he turned against him, something Kristian doesn't understand and feels caused Harlan unnecessary torment until his death in 1964 on the Isle of Capri.

Dorothea (Kristina Söderbaum) commits suicide after sexual coercion by Joseph Suss Oppenheimer.
But Thomas defends his views well, and spent his life making art films and aiding in the hunt for Nazi war criminals. His decision to do so came in 1952, after his father was acquitted a second time for crimes against humanity. Thomas describes Jew Süss, rightfully I think, as a murder weapon and says:

The judge, Dr. Tyrolf, who found him innocent on two occasions had, during the war, had Ukrainian women beheaded for the theft of a headscarf during an air raid. And the thought that my father had been found innocent amongst and by such people was abhorrent to me. That was it! I thought, this is a world I want no further dealings with. I must entirely distance myself from it.

Thomas doesn't believe his father was coerced into making the movie but made it of his own free will. Harlan was undeniably in the service of Goebbels but had he been forced to make something he considered evil, Thomas asks, would he have involved his wife, Kristina Söderbaum, in the production? Of course, she was a big star so Thomas' logic doesn't entirely work. Goebbels would have insisted, most likely, that Kristina be involved. But to the question of why he made the film so well, it could be because he believed in the film or, pulling a Colonel Nicholson, simply felt he should do the best job he could no matter what the subject. That explanation is a little thornier and a lot less believable.

One thing that makes the issue tricky for all involved is the question no one wants to ask and, in fact, never does: Why didn't Harlan leave Germany like the scores of other German filmmakers and actors? And what about his third and final wife, Kristina Söderbaum? In 1935, while others were fleeing Germany, she was moving there from Sweden to try and break into German films . The two, viewed through archival footage, including an interview with her conducted in the sixties, honestly don't ever seem very troubled about being the two biggest names in the Nazi film industry. Her archival interviews are all about the bad rap they got, not, "Oh my God! We made films for Nazis! I was directly involved in propaganda designed to incite the murder of anyone of Jewish descent. My God, my God, what have I done?" Nope, nothing like that. In fact, in what can only be described as extraordinary while fully acknowledging that the word "extraordinary" doesn't even come close to doing it justice, Kristina says in her sixties interview:

It [the film Jew Süss] ruined our lives. That's what it did. Like that. And at that point, you simply couldn't have guessed this. That it could be used in such a way. That it, that it could simply wreck a person's life.

"That it could be used in such a way." Not, in such a way as to incite the murder of Jews. No, that it could be used to wreck her life. And by saying, "used", she implies that, at face value, the film shouldn't wreck anyone's life but they twisted it and used it to stab her in the back. And, oh yeah, I guess some Jews died too but that's nothing compared to having to live out your life on massive German estates and the Isle of Capri knowing people didn't like your hate film. Poor thing.

After that, Thomas' theories gain credibility and the delusions of Kristian seem like nothing more than revisionism.

Veit Harlan and Kristina Söderbaum
Throughout the documentary, Moeller keeps the camera focused on the family, mixing in only occasional footage of Harlan and Söderbaum and the hateful Jew Süss. His intent is getting them to write the history, getting them to accept, deny or revise that which so horribly happened. He does it across generations, with Germans both Jewish and Gentile, directly and indirectly involved and, in the process, gets to the very soul of Germany and it's own tormented and conflicted feelings with its recent past. Jessica Jacoby, daughter of Susanne, gets to the very core of the matter when she notes that her grandfather on her mother's side, Veit Harlan, made films for the Nazis while her other grandparents, on her father's side, were killed by the Nazis in Minsk. What her one grandfather did, she says, her other grandparents "paid for with their lives." It's that bizarre counterpoint that Kristian won't look in the eye and from which Thomas cannot look away. The documentary provides no answers to any one question, one way or the other, but in many ways, examines Nazi Germany more thoroughly than most historic documentaries ever do.

Upstream (d. Ford, 1927): An Archives Experience

The Movie
When Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and Farran Smith Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren held a blogathon fundraiser for the National Film Preservation Foundation earlier this year, I never thought I'd have the opportunity to see one of the films preserved on the big screen with original musical accompaniment but that's just what happened recently. Of the 75 American films from the silent period that were discovered in a New Zealand film archive in 2009, the one that garnered the most attention was an early John Ford backstage comedy, Upstream, and last week it was shown at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

As I now work for the National Archives, it was my honor to attend and meet Eric Schwartz, one of the co-founders of the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) and Brian Meacham, Short Film Preservationist at the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Both were more than familiar with the blogathon and Brian even told me he had just finished work doing the commentary for The Better Man (1912), one of the films that our blogathon specifically helped restore (the other was The Sergeant (1910)).

Upstream was presented with an original score composed by Michael Mortilla and performed by Mortilla on piano and Nicole Garcia on violin. An excellent score, it captured the essence of the film by providing the perfect counterpoint to what was happening up on the screen while never detracting from the experience by calling attention to itself.

As for the film, it's quite entertaining even if nothing more than a lark, but a very well done lark, to be sure. Primarily, it shows Ford had an early flair for the kind of pacing that comedy demands, and it's a pacing that would serve him well in his later dramas and westerns. It also celebrates the kind of communal existence evident in so many later Ford films, from the migrant workers in The Grapes of Wrath and the coal mining community of How Green was My Valley to the ragtag collection of brothers-in-arms in Stagecoach and The Searchers.

The film takes place in a boarding house for performers: actors, dancers, knife-throwers and other barrel-bottom-scraping followers of the footlights. The story concentrates on Jack La Velle (Grant Withers), knife thrower, Gertie (Nancy Nash), his assistant and object of his affection and Eric Brashingham (Earle Fox), his rival in love. Brashingham is, as his name suggests, a brash, ham actor from a famous acting family (insert "Barrymore" here) who gets pegged to play Hamlet in London simply because his name is Brashingham. John Barrymore Hamlet and profile jokes ensue with little relent. After some coaching by another boarder, Mandare (Emile Chautard), Brashingham becomes a hit in London, despite everyone's expectations of his outright failure. He returns to America an acting idol and finds Jack and Gertie have married, much to his chagrin.

There's not much more plot than that but there doesn't need to be. Upstream throws more jokes at the screen than a feces hurling howler monkey imitating Mel Brooks on a three day joke-writing bender. Not two seconds pass in this movie without a new joke and if that one doesn't work, don't worry, here comes another. It's this perpetual motion machine brand of comedy that makes the thin plot work and Ford never lingers on a shot for too long, lest the pace be broken. I found myself quite surprised both by how quick the film was and how well the audience responded to it, which is to say, there was plenty of laughter.

In the end, while it may be an entertaining movie for anyone who enjoys good farcical comedy, it is of particular interest to cinephiles who can see John Ford steadying his hand and becoming his own director. The lighting is a little different for Ford, making use of tinting and harsh lighting effects, although a little haphazardly(Murnau and German Expressionism were mentioned in the discussion but, perhaps because I have watched Murnau again so recently, I found little similarity between the two). Ford doesn't do a lot with the camera, it's true (most of the film is medium distance, center framed, stationary camera all the way), but when Ford does move in on something; a close-up of a skull-fashioned salt shaker or the expression of Gertie as Brashingham ruins her wedding day, it has a purpose and confidence. Besides, Ford didn't need to do much because the supporting cast of oddball boarders are entertaining enough that to dolly around them too much would have detracted from their compulsive energy.

What really made the film a great experience to watch was seeing it on the big screen with live musical accompaniment. I really can't emphasize strongly enough how important it is to take in silent films on the big screen whenever possible. Just last year, viewing The Crowd at the AFI Silver Theatre with an organist playing the original score, took it from being an excellent movie in my mind to being a truly great one. More than any other type of film, a silent film comes alive on the big screen like nothing one would expect. The difference between seeing one on DVD and seeing one in a theatre could be measured by factors of ten. If you see Upstream on DVD (it will be released as the next set of DVDs by the National Film Preservation Foundation) you will enjoy it but if you can see one of the too few theatrical presentations of it being escorted about the country by Brian Meacham, you will have a wonderful filmgoing experience that will stay with you for years.

The Restoration

Brian Meacham and Eric Schwartz spoke to the audience before and after the presentation, with Brian Meacham revealing the incredible story of how the discovery came about and how the restoration took place. In 2009, Brian and his wife were set to take a vacation to New Zealand and Brian, as he does before any trip, e-mailed the local film archives in New Zealand and asked if a tour would be possible when he arrived. He was given the green light and received an e-mail back detailing all the American films in their archives. From John Ford to Mabel Normand, big names popped out and arrangements were made to select 75 shorts, trailers and features to be restored and returned to the United States.

The reason the American films were in New Zealand in the first place is quite mundane, really, having to do with, of all things, shipping costs and rental cycles. As it turns out, New Zealand was usually at the end of the rental cycles for film prints from Hollywood making their way around the world. By the time they were done the American studios had little desire to pay exorbitant shipping costs for movies they'd never show again. Besides, the prints at that point were pretty worn so the studios gave the go ahead to junk the films. Thing is, many theatre owners kept them rather than toss them into the garbage and eventually they made their way into the New Zealand Film Archives. In 2009, they made their way back home, finally.

Because of the deteriorated condition of the nitrate film, the decision was made to restore Upstream in New Zealand and then ship it to the United States. The process was lengthy and costly but fortunately, Fox Studios picked up the tab knowing there was no real prospect of making any money off the venture. Good for them, and us.

One final note: the title. Why exactly is a farcical comedy about an eclectic group of performers all living together in a boarding house called Upstream? In the movie, there is one belabored moment that doesn't fit at all, where Mandare is telling Brashingham, about to leave for London, to "go upstream to your success!" And, indeed, the word is bolded and italicized just like I have it here because they're clearly trying to tell you, "This is where the title comes from." Only, who in the hell would say that and even if they did, why make that one word, from that one isolated line, the title? The real answer, provided by Brian Meacham, was all business.

Back in 1927 the studios not only churned out movies like Model T's coming off an assembly line but also owned the theatres in which they were shown, the better to keep the line moving smoothly. This meant programs, information, placards and posters were sent out well in advance to populate the lobbies and let moviegoers know what was coming next. Sometimes, plans changed in the middle of the process. After sending out all the info for a Dolores Del Rio film, Upstream, the production fell through and eventually went to MGM where it was released in 1928 as The Trail of '98. Meanwhile, Fox Pictures had just wrapped up a comedy directed by John Ford called The Public Idol. Since no advertising had gone out on it yet, and everyone was expecting a film called Upstream they inserted a new title card, threw in the intertitle delivered by Mandare quoted above and Upstream was born. Somehow, after all it's been through to finally return home in good condition, the title at long last seems apt.

Watch the Great Illusion Drown

This is a reposting of a review I wrote for the Claude Chabrol blogathon hosted by Ray Young of Flickhead in June of 2009.

It is tempting when writing about a film called The Bridesmaid to go with the easy post title of "Always a Bridesmaid" or "Never a Bride" or some other quick and easy take on that old saying. But when reviewing a film by Claude Chabrol why go with the obvious? In a piece on Chabrol in The New Yorker Terrence Rafferty accurately wrote (specifically of The Bridesmaid but it could apply to any number of his films) that Chabrol's film doesn't thrill but instead prefers "to unsettle, to disorient, to unnerve and to create the sort of apprehension that cannot finally be resolved." The Bridesmaid isn't a roller coaster ride. It doesn't hurtle down the tracks to a foregone conclusion. It creeps and crawls and finally surrenders to the impulses of madness.

It is also tempting to provide a plot summary for The Bridesmaid, to pull the reader into the twist and turns of the plot without revealing the ending, but then, what would that do? In a film that fools the viewer into believing it is a thriller before revealing itself to be an examination of two shared madnesses, one psychotic and the other obsessive, the plot summary would fool the reader as well. It would lead the reader down the path of misdirection in an attempt to lure them into watching it knowing that a film that does not provide the traditional payoff sometimes needs misdirection to gain an audience. But Chabrol doesn't care about that so why should I?

The characters of Phillipe and Senta, man and woman, lovers and neurotics, are both mad, it is true, but only one appears to be to the outside world. Phillipe hides his madness behind a veneer of societal responsibility, a responsibility to his job and his family. Underneath that veneer is a burning passion for an ideal woman, a woman that only exists in the stony form of a bust of a goddess named Flora, intended for display in a garden. Senta's madness is visible. She's "odd" and "a bit weird" and quite possibly lies any chance she gets. She believes taking someone's life for someone you love is the same as writing a poem for them. She has no veneer and doesn't see any reasons for one. Senta has no illusions propped up and on display for the world around her. She may tell lies but she presents herself as is, openly and without reservation.

It is this sense of the visible and invisible, of two shared madnesses coalescing as one that Chabrol observes with patience and reserve, building dread until the story reaches a point where both characters must reveal the full scope of their madness to the other, and accept it. The audience may want more but the attentive viewer will realize that's all there is to show. A climactic showdown or chase or confrontation between the law and the lovers, between society and the fringe, would be too obvious, too rote, too expected. Chabrol gives us instead a declaration of love that could or could not mean something else altogether. The Bridesmaid asks the viewer to study madness in the guise of a thriller. Some of the same cliches are there (the ominous questioning by the police, the final walk through the old abandoned house - or at least the upstairs portion of it) but in the end Chabrol doesn't want to thrill his viewer but to engage him in something richer, more full of life. As the credits roll and Flora gazes back on us, unquestioning and unblinking, we wonder, did we just watch a love story or a psychodrama? And then we laugh and realize, "What's the difference?"

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This review of The Bridesmaid is a part of Ten Days Wonder, the Claude Chabrol Blogathon hosted by Flickhead.

Overlord (1975)

In the summer of 1975 Overlord took home a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and then promptly disappeared for almost thirty years. It resurfaced at the Telluride Film Festival in 2004 and had its U.S. premiere shortly after at the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland, as well as the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, Illinois. Its director, Stuart Cooper, used archival footage for over one quarter of the film, footage he had pored over for some three years at the British War Museum in London, and it is that footage that gives Overlord its power and, in the end, its greatness.*



Stuart Cooper has done little else with theatrical film. After only three feature length theatrical outings, none of which I have seen, he directed for television exclusively until his retirement in 2000. But with Overlord he achieved something special, something unique. He created a film whose fictional aspects only work as setups for the non-fictional archival footage and whose impact comes from knowing exactly where the fictional story is going. It's a clever cyclical trick that Cooper pulls off quite well. Neither the fictional story nor the actual footage would work without the other.

The story follows Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner) as he leaves his parents home in London to begin basic training after being called to duty in the midst of the greatest destructive event in world history, World War II. The plot is simply that:
Tom going through his training for battle as well as meeting a girl. The training is monotonous and tedious and Cooper intercuts it with stunning archival footage of the war that at once illustrates the different worlds Tom and the war inhabit and how, inevitably, they will be brought together. When they do finally meet, the outcome has already been telegraphed from the first moments of the film onwards. While there is little emotional impact to the ending, simply because the audience is never allowed to go too deeply into Tom's psyche, it has a structural power because Cooper has been informing us all along that this is how it will end. Tom has enough visions of his own death, and early on, that to not know his character will die in the Normandy invasion (Operation Overlord, hence the title) is to be either delusional or exceptionally lazy as an observer. Cooper wants you to know, or at least strongly sense, that Tom's ticket out of this world has already been purchased from the moment he says goodbye to his parents. Because the tragedy is that this young man will spend the last days or weeks or months of his life doing nothing meaningful. As each tedious training routine goes on we want Tom to do something else. Write a poem, compose a sonata, paint a landscape, anything! Don't you know you're going to die? Stop being reticent with that girl. Make passionate love to her, woo her, marry her!

Instead, Tom does his duty. He even writes a letter home letting his parents know, in advance, that he believes he's going to die, to prepare them. And as he trains the war draws closer, the battle footage grimmer, the damage more devastating. They eventually start training on a beach and Cooper intercuts extraordinary archival footage of massive cutting and whirring and rolling machines that drive home the point even further that Tom, indeed all his comrades in arms, are part of a larger machine, one so massive that none of them can see it or even intuit what their part of it is, only that they have a part, and a necessary one.

Overlord is a triumph of design. It is one of the best, if not the best, combination of real and archival footage I have ever seen. What it lacks in emotional resonance it more than makes up for in what one could call "steel trap story structure," that is, sharp, tight and strong. It leaves nothing unresolved while drawing power from the fact that nothing that happens is, alas, unexpected.
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*It should be noted that the film's Director of Photography was longtime Stanley Kubrick collaborator John Alcott, who provides the film fictional sections with a beautiful greyness to match the archival footage. He worked with Cooper on Cooper's other theatrical films as well. Please visit Unexplained Cinema for a series of posts on the look of the film.

A Foreign Affair(1948, d. Billy Wilder)

Recently here at Cinema Styles Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair came up in the comment section and having never seen it was excited to find out it was playing at the A.F.I. Silver as a part of the Jean Arthur Retrospective that wraps up this week. My wife and I took advantage the opportunity to see this lesser known Wilder and were more than pleased with the result.


The story takes place in post-war Berlin as a group of United States Senators and Representatives visit the bombed out city to assess the morale of the occupation troops. One of those representatives is Phoebe Frost, played by Jean Arthur, a stalwart Republican from Iowa, clean, prudish and repressed. Obviously, just her read her name again. Upon arriving Frost meets Captain John Pringle, played by John Lund, and quickly makes him her liaison to the seamy side of Berlin so she can blow the roof off of the whole occupation, one she views as being knee deep in black markets and fraternization with ex-Nazi women. And, she's right. Problem is, Captain Pringle is the biggest black market wheeler and dealer out there and happens to be having an affair with a former Nazi seductress, Erika Von Schluetow, played by the magnificent Marlene Dietrich. Trying to keep his illegal activities a secret from Frost while keeping Von Schluetow out of the labor camps becomes the new 24 hour job of Pringle. It's a job made more complicated by his growing feelings for Frost, feelings easier to succumb to when further information is uncovered that Von Schluetow may have fraternized all the way up to Hitler.


Coming into theaters in 1948 this is delicate material to say the least and it's probably true that the only way one could have presented post-war Berlin (much of the movie was actually shot there) so soon after the war was in a romantic comedy so as not to recall too many painful memories for the audiences. It's a tightrope walk at which Wilder succeeds, lightening the mood just when talk of Nazis and Hitler and concentration camps is getting a little too heavy. And what must it have been like for Dietrich doing a scene with actors made up to look like Goebbels and Hitler? Whatever the feelings were during the production, the three leads produce excellent work throughout. Jean Arthur is probably the least of the three only because she succumbs to heavy-handed comic pantomime and borderline silent movie expressions while the other two leads remain restrained in their approach. Still, she makes her character strong and sympathetic, not an easy job considering it's the one character in the whole thing that approaches caricature. If there is any blame to be levelled here it is at Wilder for making Frost so out of sync with the rest of the characters. Making her character a little less prudish, and a lot less easily bowled over by romance, would have made both the character and the movie much stronger.

John Lund on the other hand is perfectly cast. There was some discussion in the comments here as to whether his casting was a mistake or not and I have to say it was dead-on accurate. Captain John Pringle isn't Clark Gable, Captain John Pringle is an American soldier working the black market and bedding ex-Nazis who likes to think he's Clark Gable. His Gable moustache combined with his average-to-good looks work perfectly in a kind of "big fish in a small pond" way. As far as the bombed out refugees are concerned, especially ex-Nazis like Von Schluetow who needs someone she can use to keep her out of the labor camps, this guy is the best thing going. Back home he'd be just another poser, but here he's a hot property. A Bulova in a display full of Cartier's may not look too impressive but on the counter at the local convenience store next to a row of Timexes, it looks a lot better.


But no matter how good Arthur and Lund are it is Marlene that steals every scene, every frame, hell, the whole movie. Marlene Dietrich is a personal favorite and this movie does nothing to change that. There is an intelligence behind the way Dietrich speaks her lines that always makes me feel like she's the smartest person on the set, even when Orson Welles is hanging around. I'm not saying I think Lund and Arthur were unintelligent people, or anyone else Dietrich worked with, just that Dietrich had something, a knowingness that she couldn't hide. It's on display here in all it's glory and if Billy Wilder ever achieved a moment of perfection in casting, it's here. Von Schluetow needs a mixture of intellect and sexual energy to keep herself out of prison and Dietrich makes you believe that this ex-Nazi could successfully convince an officer in the United States Army to manipulate her files and cover up the truth.

A Foreign Affair is not a well known Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett collaboration and is not available on DVD but it should be better known than it is. It portrays a post-war occupation army in Berlin probably much closer to reality than any serious drama of the time would have done. Showing soldiers taking advantage of desperate locals on the black market, consorting with ex-Nazis and breaking curfew to engage in illicit activities around the clock would most likely have caused an outrage had it been presented in a dramatic, expose kind of a way. But as a comedy, it seems acceptable. And quite enjoyable.

Out on Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese's latest effort, Shutter Island, has people talking, mainly about the solution to the mystery introduced in the opening scenes, a solution some see coming while others don't, judging from conversations I've read online so far. I'd say the ending doesn't matter as much as the film itself but that the film itself isn't good enough to carry the weight of an ending that doesn't matter as much. And it's not because Scorsese does a bad job of directing, in fact, I'd say he does an excellent job. Robert Richardson does an superb job framing the shots Scorsese wants and Thelma Schoonmaker does her usual level best at editing it all together in a quickly paced but not frenetic fashion. The performances are solid as well with everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, as the two Federal Marshalls investigating the mystery, to Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow, as doctors at the island psychiatric hospital, turning in good, strong work. The problem, I think, is in the screenplay. There's simply too much of it.

Brevity, the old adage says, is the soul of wit. I would argue that, in a roundabout way, it's the soul of mystery too. It's not because if a mystery takes too long the audience starts looking for solutions, that's a part of the fun. It's because in a mystery there isn't much in the way of character development or story. Dramas have story, mysteries have plotting. A drama, like The Godfather, is about a character, Michael, and his story. It can go on for hours and multiple movies because the point isn't to figure out a solution, or have one revealed, but to delve deep into Michael's soul, or lack thereof. In a mystery, like Witness for the Prosecution, the point isn't to learn all about Sir Wilfred Robarts, but see if he can solve the mystery, or have it revealed to him. So if the plotting in a mystery, along with the requisite red herrings, goes on too long it starts to feel like just so much padding. The mistake of Shutter Island is that it thinks it's a drama instead of a mystery. I have even read reviews and comments in which it is stated that perhaps Scorsese didn't even care if the solution is let out of the bag early. If so then that lends support to my theory that this movie is mistaking what it is and what it's supposed to be.



Still, that confusion does not produce a bad movie. Visually striking and expertly paced it is, in fact, a very good movie. But for a mystery to examine character like a drama the mystery has to subvert itself to the character. Take Vertigo for example. It's a classic example of a drama that explores the psychological depths of its protagonist, John "Scotty" Ferguson as played by Jimmy Stewart, by involving him in a mystery. He is involved in the mystery by simply following a woman (Kim Novak) around and eventually starting up a relationship with her. The mystery is merely a way into Scotty's obsessions, which is the real subject at hand much like Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about Roy Neary's (Richard Dreyfuss) quest for meaning in his life and finding his place in the universe. That drama's "way in" is alien visitation. But Shutter Island has no such mission for its main character and thus, in continuing on and on with excessive plotting, starts to drain the life out of all the good things that are there. Let's use Vertigo once again to go at this from a different angle.

Imagine Vertigo starting at the point where Scotty has his nervous breakdown after the woman he was following falls to her death at the mission tower. Further imagine the movie runs for two and half hours from that point on as Scotty tries to solve the mystery of this new woman, Judy, who seems like a ghost from his past. And all of the buildup before the breakdown of knowing Scotty and who he is and his search for a connection to another wanderer? All of that, all of what came before, will simply be told in flashback at the end for five minutes. If you've seen Shutter Island that will make sense to you and if not, sorry for the confusion.



Martin Scorsese knows direction like geese know migration - it's in his blood, in his genes, it's who he is. There's never a point in Shutter Island where the viewer feels there is an unsteady hand at the helm and Scorsese draws us in quickly and efficiently. His skill continues to hold us there for quite some time but soon, even with all of his talent, we start to see the same trees, the same footprints, the same broken twigs and realize we're going in circles. From the opening shot of a ferry emerging from the mist there is a heavy sense of a story and characters moving relentlessly towards a doomed inevitability. By the end we're relieved that the doom has finally arrived but only in the abstract. Only because it has taken so long to get there with little in the way of anything about the characters developing into anything more than pieces of a puzzle. It wants to be a drama and a mystery and spends so much time trying to meld the two it ends up being neither. In the end, I half-heartedly recommend it but only for those interested in seeing the technical virtuosity of a now seasoned master of the cinema. Outside of that, I'd say you're better off staying on the mainland.

Easy Living(1937, d. Mitchell Leisen)

Saturday night my wife and I and the youngest took in Easy Living at the A.F.I. as a part of their tribute to Jean Arthur this February. Made in 1937 it was written by Preston Sturges who was still more than a couple of years away from directing his scripts and so directing duties fell to renowned Hollywood director Mitchell Leisen, director of such films as Death Takes a Holiday, To Each His Own and Captain Carey, U.S.A. among many, many others. And while the three of us enjoyed ourselves and the movie, it did leave me asking the question, "Can a comedy be too screwball?"

Apropos of the finest tradition of screwball comedy the plot is absurd in the extreme. Edward Arnold plays J.B. Ball, a wealthy banker whose son, John Ball, Jr., played by Ray Milland, doesn't want to be idly rich but instead work and earn his money so he stomps out on breakfast with his father after explaining this and we don't see him again until halfway through the movie excepting that in the meantime J.B.'s wife buys a $58,000 mink coat without asking and J.B. throws another of her coats out the window which lands on Mary's head (Jean Arthur) who tries to give it back but instead he buys her a fur hat and everyone thinks they're having an affair and then a hotel J.B.'s about to foreclose on puts her up as a guest thinking he won't foreclose if his mistress lives there and then she meets John working at the automat and he gets fired trying to give her free food and then somewhere, somehow, J.B.'s stocks crumble because Mary gets asked about steel and asks John and... (takes in deep breath)... Oh Christ, I don't know. Frankly, it's no more absurd than Libeled Lady or My Man Godfrey or The Awful Truth but it feels more absurd, or at least more frantic.

There's a breathlessness to the film that's expected from a screwball comedy but Mitchell Leisen makes the mistake of keeping the pitch at fever level from opening frame to last, not just in pace but in attitude. There's nary a moment in the film when the characters aren't yelling their lines and at least 50 percent of the film's total screentime involves pratfalls. I'm not kidding, at least half the movie involves long sequences of falls and foodfights and tumbles down stairs. Everyone falls all the time and when they're not falling, they're yelling about falling, or yelling that someone else yelled that they yelled about falling. You get the point. Yelling and falling. They're in ample supply throughout.

All the Preston Sturges trademarks are here, including a little sex, as well as character actors like William Demarest in a brief two minute role a couple of years before he would become a Sturges standby in the forties. What's not here is Preston Sturges the director, pulling on the reins tightly. Sturges movies were barely contained free-for-alls but they were contained. This one is just a free-for-all. Think about Sullivan's Travels or The Lady Eve and think about all the craziness that's broken up by all the non-craziness. In Sullivan's Travels there's the poolside scene, several moments on the bus, McCrea and Lake in Shantytown, at the diner and so on. Each wacky scene is broken up by three or four sedate scenes to draw the audience back into the story. But here there is one sedate scene that I recall, and only one. A brief scene in Mary's suite where she and John talk about life and work. For a couple of minutes. Then it's back to yelling and falling.

It seems strange to think Sturges would have made a difference as a director with the same script he himself wrote but bear with me. There are many scenes in the film that should be played sedately and aren't. There are scenes between J.B. and his wife Jenny (Mary Nash), in his office, or with his secretary in his office, that could've and should've been played straight but Leisen has them yell their lines throughout. I don't think Sturges would have made that choice and I think it was the direction of his scripts by people like Leisen that prompted Sturges to give a shot at directing himself. I believe Leisen was under the mistaken conclusion that for screwball to work it had to be played at the top of one's lungs. Sturges understood you have to pull it in so that the audience relaxes at which point you uncork the dam again and drown your audience in fits of laughter.

As for the acting, Jean Arthur walks away with the whole film, even though she appears in only roughly half of it (and Arnold's character the other half). Unlike Arnold and Milland and Nash, fine actors all who do fine work here as well, Arthur's character is the only one that doesn't yell very much and is given the time develop, at least a little bit, while everyone else bulges their eyes and busts their prats.

In the end, the three of us enjoyed it for what it was and certainly couldn't fault it on pacing or length. We had a nice night taking in a movie and a late dinner (pizza, for the curious) but I have a feeling the movie portion of our evening would have delighted us more had Mr. Sturges been behind the wheel. Maybe that's the mark of a great director, when all you can think about is how much better it would have been with him in charge. Leisen was a skilled and talented director no doubt, but the best director for a Sturges script, it turns out, is Sturges. Certainly something to talk about at least. Just don't yell.

The Godless Girl (1928, d. Cecil B. DeMille)

I went into The Godless Girl with a bit of trepidation. After all, it was made in 1928 so I wasn't expecting to find a fair, even-handed assessment of the rejection of religion and belief in God, specifically Christianity. If anything, I was expecting to find the demonization of atheism and pretty much that's what I got, up to a point. The Godless Girl is to atheism what Reefer Madness is to marijuana, that is to say, a ridiculously wrong-headed portrayal of the subject at hand.* But two things mitigate this portrayal of atheism. One, the portrayal of Christianity is just as bad so the film seems oddly balanced, and two, this is a Cecil B. DeMille film, not a liturgical one. As to the first, it is a great irony that the way the good, religious types are portrayed in this film is exactly how a filmmaker today portrays religious types when he wants to ridicule them. All intolerant caricature and no depth. As to the second, that this is a Cecil B. DeMille film, the meaning there should be clear to any student of film history. DeMille wasn't interested in a theological dialectic, he was interest in spectacle. To put it another way, by reworking Clint Eastwood's famous line from Unforgiven: Religion's got nothing to do with it. This film is about atheism like Psycho is about a secretary stealing $40,000. Sure, that's a part of the story and it definitely gets things rolling but it's dropped faster than an "H" at the Doolittle family reunion and before you can say "'Enry 'Iggins" the story becomes a combination Romeo and Juliet/prison break movie.

Lina Basquette plays Judy, the Godless girl of the title, who holds Godless Society meetings at the high school she attends. The school wants her pamphlets for the club stopped and Bob (Tom Keene), president of the Student Body, volunteers for the task. It's during one of the Godless Society meetings that Bob shows up with hordes of religious students and all hell... oh, I'm not going to say it. A riot starts in the stairwell and in the incredible sequence that follows one of the members of the Godless Society falls to her death. After this Judy and Bob are sentenced on manslaughter charges and sent to juvenile prison along with "Bozo" (Eddie Quillan), the comic relief of the story and the character that caused the girl to fall after he was pushed into her.

The main thrust of the film, if you haven't guessed by now, is the burgeoning romance between Judy and Bob, separated by an electric fence at the juvenile prison (would it surprise you if I told you at one point Judy touches the electrified fence and crosses are burned into her hands? I didn't think so.). It's not long before the film becomes a tract against the inhumanity of juvenile prisons complete with the well-worn cliche (or was it fresh in 1928?) of the brutal guards being worse than the prisoners. This being a DeMille film there are more riots, jail breaks, nudity and a final prison fire that is a wonder to behold. Quite frankly, this is one hell of an entertainment. With the exception of an overlong introduction of the characters to the prison, the movie moves along swiftly and never loses the viewers' interest.

The story itself is rather banal, it's true, but the actors keep the story interesting regardless. Lena Basquette and Tom Keene do a fine job in the leads and, this being the tail-end of the silent era, keep the over-emotive pantomime to a minimum. Eddie Quillan provides comic relief without feeling obnoxious and in her short time onscreen, Mary Jane Irving, as the stairwell victim, gives a performance that evokes both terror and surrender in equal measure and ends up genuinely moving.

But the real star is Cecil B. DeMille. Watching this last silent film of his (but not his last fully silent as two short sound sequences were added to try and rescue it at the box office) one is reminded of how exciting a filmmaker DeMille was before the elephantine epics of the late forties and early fifties cemented his fame for successive generations who would grow up unfamiliar with the silent career of this master. From the stairwell riot and death to the prison break chase scene to the final raging fire and last second rescue this is a master class in how to make action sequences work and how to edit a two hour movie so it feels like an hour and a half. DeMille never regained the assuredness of his silent era works, and certainly not the vigor, and it's a shame that such a well-known filmmaker has so much of his best work unknown to the general populace, even among cinephiles. Hopefully that will change thanks to the restoration of this film by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

The restoration of The Godless Girl allows cinephiles everywhere to witness the last great gasp of a director in the silent era before sound slowed him down. The print is beautiful, pristine and sharp, looking as good if not better than when it was originally shown in the theater. It has been given a new piano score as well, composed by Martin Marks that is both perfectly matched to the action and unobtrusive to the experience. I would like to thank the National Film Preservation Foundation for sending me the DVD of The Godless Girl, as well as other shorts and films I will highlight this week here and at Unexplained Cinema, and giving me this opportunity to take part in this fund-raising blogathon.

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This review has been a part of the For the Love of Film Blogathon, hosted by Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren and sponsored by The National Film Preservation Foundation.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Make your donation now. Thank you.

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*I think my favorite intertitle in the whole movie is, "I'll teach you to tell my kid sister there isn't any God!"

UP is the new Z

The Oscar nominations are out. Up received nominations in both Best Animated Picture and Best Picture, much like Z in 1969 received noms in both Foreign and Best Picture as well. The full list of nominations follows.

Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

As for acting the expected winners were all nominated - Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltz, Mo'Nique - and the two front runners for Director, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, got their expected nods as well.

But let's get back to Up for a moment. I have a longstanding disdain for Pixar's movies and have learned to bite my tongue on the subject. However, Up has now received nominations in both and I want to at least air my views on it since it now has the whiff of distinction about it.

I consistently find myself less enamored than everyone else of Pixar's insufferable whimsy. I find most of their films good to very good as children's films but not very good as films overall whereas I would rank something like Carol Ballard's Black Stallion as an excellent children's film and an excellent film overall. And of course I do like several Pixar efforts, from Toy Story to Finding Nemo. Around that point, after the release of Finding Nemo, they started to believe their own press and started injecting their childhood fantasies with adult sentiments, producing for me an uneasy mix. And now, against my better judgment, I will let loose.

I have often heard full grown adults speak in reverent tones of Ratatouille and Wall-E, saying things like, "It's really about this," or "really about that." In other words, if one disdains the story of a rat wanting to be a chef one gets, "Oh, but it's really about being honest with yourself and ..." blah, blah, blah. They say this as if for the first time in cinematic history Pixar is delivering messages with its movies and thus is better. I always follow up by asking if other children's classics, from Snow White to 101 Dalmatians, aren't also "really about" something else. Of course they are. All children's movies, books, television shows and all other forms of media are about lessons. Pixar is not new in this. What they are new at is trying to package the lesson for the adult viewer and then having the great mass of unsophisticated adult viewers lap it up.

"Oh, that final statement by the food critic about where art can come from... it was just so amazing, wasn't it?"

Oh, Christ! That pretentious pie-hole speech in that goddamn high-on-itself movie makes me squirm in my seat. The only thing that could have made it bearable for me was if the filmmakers had been honest and before Peter O'Toole's character delivers it, put up a title card that read, "Attention: The movie you have been watching, about a rat that can control a human's movements by pulling on his hair, will now make a faux-serious statement about art so that critics and fans can claim this is a great movie. We sincerely hope you are gullible enough to shovel it down your throat and ask for more. Thank you for your time. Enjoy."

Okay, that's going a little too far but damn, it felt pretty good to type that. I have felt this way from Ratatouille to Wall-E to Up. This need to inject some kind of adult statement into the mix to signal it's more than "just a kid's movie" which, in my book, implies kid's movies aren't worthy enough on their own and so I would propose Pixar is the enemy of the kid's movie. Take the "Baby Mine" scene from Dumbo. It does what a kid's movie should do, it plays on sentiment that children can understand. That often comes off as too cutesy or sentimental to the adult in the audience but too goddamn bad, the movie's made for your kid not you. But not anymore. Now they want to get the money of the teens and the twenty-somethings so they inject a little pseudo-adult dialogue into the mix, plenty of wry humor and the kid's movie more and more recedes into the history books. And the children suffer for it. Having four children who grew up with Pixar changing the landscape I can tell you that I have heard far more praise for Ratatouille and Wall-E from adults than I ever got from my kids. My eight year old watched both, once. She can watch an animated movie a hundred times if she likes it. She watched them once. Of course, she watches TCM with my wife and I and when she requests a movie for Friday movie night it either has Cary Grant or Boris Karloff in it so she's probably not the best example in the world I can offer of a child's taste for children's movies. And goddamn am I proud of that!

The latest Pixar release was Up, the movie that started this whole post. I haven't been pleased with other Pixar releases but Up bothered me more than most. One of the things most discussed by those lavishing praise on it is the montage of our lead character and his wife as they go through their lives together leading up to her death, including the indication that they cannot have children. I found this montage not Dumbo-like in its sentimental heart-string tugging but entirely too self-aware of its importance as a set piece. And I then wondered why others didn't view it that way. Like the Ratatouille speech it should come with a title card explaining its true purpose is not exposition but wowing the critics to help hype the movie. It's not a bad way to provide exposition, in fact it's a very good way to do so, but the movie makes too much of it, takes too long with it so enamored is it of itself. Imagine the breakfast table montage in Citizen Kane, showing the deterioration of Kane's marriage, stretched out to ten minutes. Where's the restraint anymore?

But it's the actual story that bothered me most. Carl Fredericksen watches newsreels as a boy of a great adventurer, Charles Muntz, who, after going to Paradise Falls in South America, returns with the skeleton of a great exotic bird that the experts say is a fake, and that Muntz is a fraud. Muntz vows to go back to Paradise Falls and not return until he has a live bird to prove it. Carl meets Ellie, another Muntz admirer, and the two promise to go to Paradise Falls together one day but never do. They spend their lives together until her death when Carl is left alone. At which point he decides to fulfill Ellie's wishes and go to Paradise Falls.

NOPE! I just made that last sentence up! That's not what happens. What happens is that Carl has run afoul of developers who want to buy his house for urban development. The construction people are very nice to him and always friendly. He does not at any point in the movie seem to notice this. Instead, when one of them tries to fix his mailbox that he and Ellie made after accidentally hitting it, he is attacked by Carl who whacks him with his walker, cutting open his forehead. After this Carl is prosecuted and ordered to sell his house so that he can be put into nursing home care, which seems like a real stretch. But we go with it because that's what the movie says. Truth is, when one person blocks major urban development cities invoke the right of Eminent Domain and simply buy the person out whether that person wants it or not. But again, the movie goes with the judgment against Carl as their story route so we go with it. And then on the day he is to be taken away, Carl (who has somehow attached thousands of balloons to his house without being noticed - he sold balloons at the zoo his adult life) releases the balloons and, supported by strings, they lift the house off its foundation and he's on his way to Paradise Falls. NOT because of Ellie, RATHER to evade the court-ordered judgment. The message for kids being, I suppose, that if you ever break the law and the courts pass down a judgment you should flee before it can be carried out.

Now that he is traveling to Paradise Falls we realize he has a charming kid in tow to be his humorous sidekick throughout. All kid's movies have to have a sidekick and Russell, the kid, suffices well enough. Then they arrive at Paradise Falls and come across dogs with special collars that allow them to speak. Whimsy overload warning! They also come across that magical bird, drawn to Russell's chocolate. And then, lo and behold, they come across Charles Muntz, still there, still holding to his promise to not return until he had a live specimen. And for his troubles the movie promptly makes him the villain. That's right. The old guy who never did what he promised Ellie until he had to escape prosecution is the hero. The old guy who stuck by his word for all these years is the bad guy. To writer Thomas McCarthy and writer-directors Bob Peterson and Pete Docter, may I just offer up a healthy and hearty "fuck you."

And it gets worse. They turn Muntz into a homicidal maniac because... well, I don't know why quite honestly. For whatever reason this noble adventurer now kills people who come to Paradise Falls. Was he killing people before if he thought they were stealing his glory? I don't know but he sure does now. And how did he make the talking-dog-collars? Couldn't he sell that, make billions (hell trillions - can you imagine if people could buy a collar and then actually talk to their dog!) and then fund a MASSIVE expedition to prove he was right? Anyway, he doesn't. He just hangs out and kills people and here's the worst sin: He wants to... oh my God. It's so horrible I dare not type it.

I'll try again.

He wants to... no, no I can't, it's too horrifying.

Okay, one last try.

He wants to... take the bird back alive. Not kill it or harm it in any way. Just take it back alive, like all those animals in the zoo Carl worked at that Carl never had a problem with. There, I said it. That's what he wants to do. He wants to have something to show for seventy years of searching. And this, we are told explicitly by the actions of the movie, is an unforgivable evil. And he must die. And he does die. And we are made to feel happy that this evil man is now dead. And I don't care if I just spoiled it for you. Maybe now you won't put any money into this movie's pocket.

I know this movie received top flight reviews from some of the best out there. I know many of my most trusted comrades online liked it, hell, loved it. I am, of course, immeasurably disappointed by this but what can I do? Sometimes people just see things differently and I see Pixar in a vastly different light than do most others. Hopefully though, I have provided some evidence as to why. And so I find myself depressed that Up not only received nomination in the "Best Animated" category, and has the support of so many, but also in the "Best Picture" category, giving it a distinction that I sincerely and profoundly do not believe it deserves. And frankly, that just gets my ire... up.

I See You: The Road to Avatar

When one walks into a movie like Avatar, with all the advance hype and two camps, one of worshippers and one of haters, seemingly pitted against each other, one definitely wants to have a strong opinion of it. And as that nominal one I can tell you I certainly wanted to have a strong visceral reaction, one way or the other. I wanted to either hate it and let everyone know why and how wrong they were if they loved it or I wanted to love it and admit that the bashing is just so much senseless backlash. The last thing I wanted was to have the closing titles emerge to a feeling of overwhelming indifference and yet, here we are. While it's true I am rather stunned anyone could be very impressed with it I'm also a little stunned at anyone truly hating it. But all of this requires much more elaboration than that so let us begin.

Avatar is James Cameron's latest science fiction film after years away from the genre and his first sci-fi done in 3-D which, I must agree with Jim Emerson, looks simply like multi-planing and, for me at least, simply recesses into the background after the first fifteen or twenty minutes. I forgot it was even in 3-D enough of the time to make me question why anyone would or should go to the trouble of filming it in 3-D in the first place. I can honestly say that I believe a new viewer would be better off seeing the 2-D version and that James Cameron's movie would be better off without the needless P.T. Barnum hucksterism inherent in hyping a technical process as the main attraction to get asses in the seats, to quote Joel Silver.

As for the story it involves a security group of former Marines and assorted military types (think Blackwater), the corporation they work for, a far away moon named Pandora and that moon's indigenous people with whom the corporation has been trying, futilely, to negotiate in order to get mining rights to a precious ore. The indigenous people, the Na'vi, are also the subject of study by a group of scientists headed up by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) who want peaceful relations with them. She runs the Avatar program which allows human users like Augustine and paraplegic Marine veteran Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) to mentally enter the bodies of the lab-grown Na'vi, bodies that have been made expressly for this purpose. The user goes to sleep and enters into the avatar, not in a dreamlike state but literally having their thoughts and movements transplanted to the avatar. This is done, presumably, for better relations with the Na'vi except that, one, the Na'vi know they're just avatars (they call them "dreamwalkers") and, two, the users headed up by Augustine seem to have no concern for going all the way with fitting into the Na'vi culture because they make sure their avatars wear safari shorts, tee-shirts and baseball caps. It's a bit like doing a movie about a group of people wanting to make peaceful relations with a village under Sharia law and making sure the women cover their head with a veil only to have them also wear mini-skirts, fishnets and spike heels.

And the first observation, that the Na'vi know the humans are just walking around in fake Na'vi bodies, is not a minor nitpick but a central flaw of the logic in the film. The idea of two cultures meeting and exchanging ideas revolves around just that, exchange, not pretending to look and act like the other one. But more importantly if the humans simply go as they are, in their own bodies (and why not since the Na'vi aren't fooled by the avatars), then they never have to fall into a stupor anytime they wake up. Allow me to explain: Because the humans only inhabit the avatars when they are asleep, the avatars are likewise comatose whenever the human users are awake. And so at several points in the movie, always of course when an important point is about to be made or physical danger is imminent, Jake Sully is awakened and his avatar collapses into a limp pile of jello. Now, what science team wishing to improve relations with another culture would devise a plan in which at any given moment all diplomatic progress could be halted or reversed because your avatar collapses into an immovable silent stupor?

But avatar comas aside I also question the very reality of a scenario such as the one devised here taking place in 2154.* 150 years into the future the human race can travel across light years of space in hibernation, transport millions of tons of heavy machinery, aircraft and military ordinance, grow alien bodies whole and then have the extraordinary ability to mentally link up to them and remotely use them while asleep but - BUT - they cannot mine an ore beneath the surface of the Na'vi village without all-out genocidal destruction. What? As famously described by Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood by using a milkshake analogy, men have possessed the ability to tunnel under and drain from an area far away from the starting point as far back as at least the 1920's but we're supposed to believe that 150 years into the future the only way this unobtainable ore (and yes, it is named unobtanium) can be had is by destroying a massive village that lays on top of it. I kept thinking, "Surely with their stunningly advanced technology they could just mine it out from a few hundred miles away and replace it with granite or some other solid substance that would maintain the support of the structures above it." That's not something we could do now, easily at least, but in 150 years?

In the end of course, the ore is nothing but a MacGuffin so I suppose it's more important to understand and discuss the characters and indeed it is. Problem is, there's not much to the characters. James Cameron provides no interesting or insightful dialogue from which to understand the characters on anything but a surface level. And as many others have already noted, Cameron relies heavily upon cliche in his dialogue. From "you're not in Kansas anymore" to "let's do this, people!" to at least four instances by my count where someone pumped their fist and said "Yeah!" or "Woooo-Hoooo" or "Whoa!" much of what the Avatar viewer must sit through in terms of character expression are truly cringe-worthy. Also, when the Na'vi ask Sully his name and he says, "Jake Sully" you just know they're going to call him by his full name for the whole movie, and not to disappoint, they do. As for the rest of the Na'vi dialogue, it is almost entirely extracted from fortune cookies or some heretofore unknown book entitled Chicken Soup for the Na'vi Soul in which every phrase that drops from their feline pie-holes is encrusted with pearls of wisdom. I'm afraid I must confess that my eyes rolled dozens of times during the showing I attended. And their method of greeting friends and loved ones, "I see you", is a bit too cloying for this viewer. If Dances with Wolves, it's closest cinematic relative, turned the Lakota Sioux into cuddly Native American plush dolls then Avatar ups the ante and turns the Na'vi into angelic tree elves who kill wild wolf-like creatures to save themselves or others from being eaten alive and then mourn the death of the animal they just killed. You know, the animal that just tried to kill them. Goddamn do they respect life!

But all of this is moot because Cameron is a visual storyteller so that's where the attention should be focused. And this is the area in which I seem to disagree with most people, even the film's detractors. I've read several reviews, Jim Emerson and Larry Aydlette excluded because they didn't seem very impressed with the look either, that say even if the film's story isn't that great at least it looks great. Well, not to me unfortunately. The Na'vi, after two hours and forty minutes, never looked like anything more than CGI creations, and this bothered me. Why? Because it was and is wholly unnecessary to use CGI in the first place. With the exception of their faces, skin color, tails and height, the Na'vi look like humans which means the facial features, tails and skin color could have easily been taken care of with the age-old Hollywood craft of makeup which would have instantly Made. Them. Real. And if one wants to use CGI then fine, use it to increase the height next to humans but this is only even apparent in the very few scenes in which the two species share the same space onscreen. So what we're left with is the fact that, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum's famous declaration from Jurassic Park, James Cameron was so thrilled with the idea that he could create CGI Na'vi that he never stopped and asked himself if he should create CGI Na'vi. Really, if you've seen it, or hell, even if you haven't and have only seen the stills, ask yourself, "Wouldn't it look so much better with real actors being filmed with makeup instead of using barely updated versions of Jar Jar Binks?"

Despite all of this, Avatar does have several things going for it as well. For one, Stephen Lang is quite good as the former Marine Colonel Miles Quaritch despite being given nothing but standard issue dialogue to spout. When it comes to acting I'm always a little sensitive having spent years acting myself, so when I read statements like "the acting is terrible across the boards" I know this is not true and it irks me. No one in the film gives anything near a great performance but given the dialogue I'd say almost everyone acquits him or herself quite admirably. Lang is the best but even Weaver and Worthington are fairly good. Zoe Saldana, although never actually seen behind the deluge of CGI artwork, probably gives the most fully realized performance in the film, if not the most charismatic (again, that goes to Lang).

The action sequences are also a high point of the movie with Cameron handling them deftly and confidently. He manages to do so without resorting to any of the hackneyed gimmicks employed by most action directors today in which it is thought, for some unknown and bizarre reason, that making the action on the screen blurred and visually indecipherable makes it more exciting. Hacks like Michael Bay could learn a thing or two from James Cameron about how to handle an action sequence that keeps the audience engaged by, horrors(!), allowing them to see the action. Several times during the final battle sequence the camera follows the central figure from point A to point B without furiously cutting away and only twice did I notice any form of ramping and even then, when Jake battles Quaritch, it was quite graceful compared to the ramping jolts of a Zach Snyder.

Finally, the politics did not match any of my worst-case scenario expectations. I walked in thinking I was going to be seeing a mindless Hollywood anti-American screed and realized soon enough that its politics most resembled Aliens updated. Cameron's military group is a group of guns for hire working for the main villain which very much resembles the "Company" of Aliens. It's easy to build up an enemy in faceless corporate greed even as we all patronize corporations daily and reap the benefits of their success with our indulgent lifestyles (and I don't imagine Cameron lives in a grass hut using only windpower himself). Nothing earth-shattering going on here, just Cameron putting white and black hats on the characters and pointing the finger, as have so many sci-fi writers before him, at humanity and its abuse of nature. Sure, the ore could stand in for, and in Cameron's mind I'm sure it does, the oil in Iraq but the political message of the film is so incompetently handled (once or twice the word "terrorist" is used in case you're not getting it) and put on a backburner to the whole "we humans just don't understand and respect nature" routine that it's final result is one of impotence.

And so I exit Avatar with neither disgust nor adoration but an existential shrug of the shoulders. I truly don't mean to come off as flippant when I say that I genuinely don't know where the worship came from, or the hatred (not the pre-judging kind, I mean the kind after seeing the movie). I walked away from Avatar thinking it was an at times enjoyable, at times sluggish, and at all times mediocre sci-fi adventure. True, I am a bit more bewildered at the praise from some critics than the condemnations if only because anyone who has taken in their fair share of the world's cinematic treasures, which I would fully expect, nay, demand of a film critic, and still thinks Avatar is very impressive makes me wonder just how much they understand about film. Avatar is average, standard stuff. I wish I could say more, or less, but I'm afraid it didn't impact me either way with any substantial weight. I'd recommend Avatar only to hard-core sci-fi fans for a decent two and a half hours but would suggest seeing the 2-D version or just watching it on the home theater setup in a few months. For everyone else I'd steer clear. There simply isn't much to offer in the film and no way to describe it honestly except as a mildly successful entertainment for viewers not expecting much in the first place.

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*Another mild nitpick is that Sigourney Weaver smokes. I mean, it's 2154. We all know how impossible it's becoming to be a smoker in 2010 so I found a character 150 years into the future puffing on smokes about as believable as a teen flick made today where all the high schoolers have snuffboxes.