Prince: For You (1978)

Before Prince Rogers Nelson turned 20 years old, he cut his teeth in a funk group where he soon eclipsed peer and mentor alike, got himself an astonishingly generous record deal from a major label (including publishing rights for all his work), and released his solo debut with the proud boast of having been entirely "produced, arranged, composed and performed" by its maker. Never mind the misleading half-truths of that claim: For You's artistic credit sent a message of intent and announced a musician of ambition and creative drive. Indeed, Prince may well have been less satisfied with the impressiveness of his accomplishments at such a young age than he was irritated by the two interminable years it took to turn his demo into a full-fledged, official product.

Adding to the sense of For You as more an announcement of what was to come, the opening title track unfurls as a layered a cappella choir of Prince's cooing vocals soothingly telling the listener, "All of this and more is for you./With love, sincerity, and deepest care,/My life with you I share." To call this a precursor to Prince's musical openness would be inaccurate, as even at his most soulful and vulnerable, Prince throws up emotional walls to shield himself. Nevertheless, its quasi-spiritual overtones, especially when juxtaposed with the sex-drenched disco that dominates the rest of the record, offer an insight into dialectical forces that would soon propel Prince to superstardom.

(ParaNorman, Sam Fell & Chris Butler, 2012)

The stop-motion animation studio Laika follows up their superlative work on Henry Selick's 2009 Coraline with another adventure-horror film that offers material challenging not merely for its emotional darkness but for its moral complexity. Certainly no other kids' film that comes to mind begins within a cheap zombie film in Academy ratio, complete with sight gags like the doomed woman finding sexual poses in which to scream in mortal terror and a boom mic that casually floats into frame. When the camera pulls out to show the young boy watching this flick, however, his banal choice of brain-draining entertainment soon reveals itself to be the least unorthodox aspect of ParaNorman.

Norman chats with his grandmother about the shoddy film he watches on an old TV, but when Norman goes to his dad to ask him to turn up the heat for her, the whole family's stunned, angry response reveals the grandmother to be dead for some time. But Norman can still see and communicate with her, just as he can see and converse with all the other incorporeal spirits of the dead who dwell in the town of Blithe Hollow. This leads to several intriguing setups and amusing gags in its own right—especially the sight of a ghost bird flapping around still gagging with a six-pack ring still 'round its spectral throat—but soon Norman finds himself thrust into a situation that forces the bullied, outcast child to reevaluate some of his own behavior toward others, all while genre tropes get a clever, but still family-friendly, tweak.

Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)

Life, and Nothing More... undercut Where Is the Friend's Home? by acknowledging the falseness of its diegetic reality as it added another layer of verisimilitudinous falsity to the narrative. Through the Olive Trees takes this simple elevation from one dimension of diegesis to another and fractures it into a thousand pieces; the film's opening image is of a man who introduces himself, "I'm Mohamed Ali Keshavarz, the actor who plays the director." With these 10 words, Kiarostami sets off the largest meditation on the thin line between reality and fiction of his self-reflexive career. That sentence serves as a warning shot for the rest of the movie, making it practically impossible to distinguish between what particular plane of "reality" the film is on at any one time. So perplexing is its Gordian knot that even cutting the thing by acknowledging the fictionality of the whole piece cannot successfully unravel its complexity.

But as with Close-Up, Certified Copy or any of the director's examinations of confused diegetic reality, Through the Olive Trees never loses its emotional resonance amidst its metatextual fun. The primary focus of the film is a pair of people who existed in the background of the previous movie. Late in Life, and Nothing More..., the lead actor (who is playing the director, but not the director who introduced himself at the start of this movie, because he is the "director" of Life) meets a young couple who elected to marry despite losing nearly all their family the earthquake that ravaged the region. Kiarostami aligns the focus of this film onto that couple. Well, the actors who played that couple, at least.

Side By Side (Christopher Kenneally, 2012)

Side By Side is, thankfully, not merely a mere account of aesthetic differences between film and digital. Instead, it asks serious questions about what technological change will mean for not only the process of filmmaking but a new rulebook for movies. Engagingly led along by Keanu Reeves, Side By Side lets directors and cinematographers draw battle lines and, occasionally, wade among the No Man's Land between them. Though there are some surprising omissions—it is almost silly to document the way digital is changing movies without talking to Michael Mann, who has done more than anyone in the American mainstream to stake a new digital style—but Side By Side is nevertheless a solid introduction into an issue that should concern, but also excite, cinephiles everywhere.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

The Top 10 Steven Soderbergh Films

[This is my August entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon.]

Steven Soderbergh operates so far under the radar that, for all his auteurist tics and varied filmography, I never thought to rate him among my favorite filmmakers until I took a step back one day and realized how many great films bore his credit. Sometimes it seems as if the film industry looks at him the same way. Soderbergh primarily operates as a workman, though he balances out commercial properties with a series of experimental works that often get folded back into his mainstream gigs, making him ever more idiosyncratic even as he gets trusted with bigger projects.

Soderbergh jump-started the Miramax era of the American indie with his Palme D’Or-winning feature debut sex, lies, and videotape, a film about a man who can only achieve any kind of arousal by watching recorded tapes of others detailing their own sexual desires and experiences. In a way, it is prophetic of his entire canon, in which action unfolds only through its own deconstruction and process becomes the driving force and the principal agent of subverted expectations. This fixation has made the director a member of the digital vanguard, the literal programming of visual information well-suited to his entire approach to storytelling.

Amazingly, he has applied this anti-narrative style to commercially successful properties. What other director in Hollywood today can so routinely boast massive casts populated entirely by A-listers without reducing them to wan rom-com drivel à la New Year’s Eve? And if anyone else could compare to Soderbergh in that respect, how many of them could turn around and make something like Bubble? A studio hand for the postmodern era, Soderbergh has made many fine works, but none better than these 10:

50 Book Pledge #16: Laurent Binet—HHhH: A Novel

If two things in this world have been done to death they are the WWII historical novel and glib, self-referential postmodernism that sidesteps narrative for telling the audience how hard it is to write a narrative. But by God, Laurent Binet managed to throw these things together and wind up with the best new book I've read in years. Binet's digressions, though routinely amusing and occasionally a bit grating, add to the overall effect of Binet's attempt to lionize the Czech and Slovak assassins who killed Reinhard Heydritch, possibly the most dangerous Nazi under Hitler and the true architect of the Holocaust. Binet manages to turn all of his story-interrupting tics into reflections of our continuing (possibly endless) quest to make sense of the horror of Nazi policy, and he also increases the tension of the stranger-than-fiction events he recounts with his interruptions and tics. Translated with terrific informality by Sam Taylor, HHhH is a fleet but unexpectedly powerful account of one of the few tales of WWII not covered to death, despite it being one of the most crucial events of the whole war.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #15: James Joyce—Finnegans Wake

Regular readers might remember my original plans to offer regular updates on my trek through Joyce's final and most abstruse work, Finnegans Wake. But as soon as I set to work on that, the book dove so deeply into incomprehensibility that to even attempt to summarize what I'd read would consist of nothing more than Skeleton Key summaries. Unlike Ulysses, with its connected but distinct chapters offering unique perspectives and pleasures at every turn, the Wake varied as its sections are, flow together with such abandon that I got nowhere trying to parse individual elements of the book/

It was only when I stopped trying to get a handle on the book, to even get a basic footing of where I was, that I even began to get into the Wake. Around that time, however, the book started to make some kind of sense. Based around Viconian cycles, the Wake is, narratively speaking, easy to figure out. After all, Joyce repeats the story ad nauseam, of the protagonist's social rise and subsequent fall from grace over a lewd encounter in a park and his irrepressible guilt. The same characters appear to reenact the basics over and over, each time as new figures with new, gnarlier paths to the same outlet. And in HCE's all-pervasive sense of guilt is the guilt of Ireland past and present, an anthropomorphic realization of the suffocating cloud of Catholicism that hovers over Joyce's ex-pat recreation of his homeland. The only deliverance comes through the water form of HCE's wife, ALP, whose mysterious letter has the power to wash away her husband's sins (or her husband entirely). But ALP, like Joyce's best women characters—Molly Bloom, Gretta Conroy—exists outside her husband's hopeless encasement in Ireland's moral carbon monoxide. ALP's chapter, filled with river names and the constant burbling of water imagery, is perhaps the most poetic, liberated passage Joyce ever wrote.