The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

My love of the handful of Jane Campion works I've seen inexplicably failed to get me to watch The Piano with any speed. Happily, I finally got the chance to rectify my error for Spectrum Culture, and now I'm kicking myself even harder for waiting so long. Like all the other Campion movies I've seen, this is fantastic, feminocentric yet universal in its scope and emotional resonance. Her direction should rank her among the all-time greats, and her marginalization post-Piano is outrageous. The Piano in particular turns the period piece on its ear, breaking up convention at every turn with her idiosyncratic, singular camera. Its anti-male gaze distance ironically affected me more than the usual intimate, forced wringing of emotional response. It's not my favorite Campion film, but I can see why it won the Palme D'Or.

My full thoughts are over at Spectrum Culture.

Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)

None of James L. Brooks' films condense his sitcom sensibilities better than Broadcast News. Where so many of his movies feel treacly and thin, Broadcast News offers a well-rounded portrait of fully realized characters whose story does not overstay its welcome. That's the other thing: were it any longer, or were it a television series instead of a one-off movie, the archetypes Holly Hunter, William Hurt and Albert Brooks embody might have consumed them and left only two-dimensional cut-outs for easy humor that turned stale in short order. Somehow, Brooks positions the film perfectly in the middle, clearly drawing upon his television outlook but making something uniquely filmic out of the material.

Using his stint as an CBS News writer as the basis for the film, Brooks casts a spotlight on the news industry in flux. Television has become the dominant means of news communication, and Brooks looks into the medium shortly before the likes of CNN completely altered the format from individual news programs to a 24-hour machine. At times, though, one can hardly tell that the characters only produce news for an hour-long (if that) block of programming, as the Washington newsroom bustles at all times with people desperately trying to get segments finished on-time and watching playbacks with fervent hope that the lead anchor up in New York, a godly presence appropriately played by Jack Nicholson, will give even the slightest indication of approval.

The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004)

One of the stranger aspects of animation is how production studios tend to be viewed in auteurist terms. Mention Disney, Studio Ghibli or Pixar and people can get an instant image in their heads despite the disparities of style and content between movies produced by various directors and various animation teams all getting their paycheck at the same place. Brad Bird, however, is one of the few animators who enjoys any singular auterist cred, carrying pet themes across projects and displaying a love for a chic past with styles based off old advertisements.

Following the release of his magnificent retro sci-fi picture The Iron Giant, Bird hooked up with old pal and Pixar head John Lasseter and pitched a superhero movie for the studio. Yet despite the swap from traditional animation (with some digital elements) to 3-D CGI, The Incredibles looks like a logical stylistic continuation of Bird's retro style and love of isolated heroes. When I first saw it as a 15-year-old, The Incredibles instantly became my favorite Pixar movie, only to go years without watching it. Using the new Blu-Ray release as an excuse to rediscover the film, I approached it with nostalgia, but also reminders of some of the criticisms I'd read since I last watched it a few years ago.

Steven Spielberg: Always

Considering what an omnipresent force Steven Spielberg has been in the cinema since he broke through with Jaws in 1975, the relative anonymity of his 1989 romance Always engenders concern before one even pops it in the DVD player. There are underrated Spielberg films, sure, but unseen ones? The only Spielberg movie post-Jaws that I had not seen before this retrospective, Always was both my most eagerly anticipated watched and my most feared.

The film itself deserves neither reaction. Though my initial response in the film's early minutes bordered on total revulsion with its sub-1941 humor, Always pulls itself out of its tailspin ironically as its protagonist dies in a plane crash of his own. The pilot, Pete (Richard Dreyfuss), flies a converted A-26 bomber designed hold water for putting out forest fires that seem to rage every day in the same area. He's the best, and most reckless, flier in the squad, and invariably he returns to base to find his pilot wife, Dorinda (Holly Hunter), thrilled that he made it back alive and pissed that he seemingly does his best to do the opposite.

Their relationship is playful but deep, like two best friends who finally realized how right they were for each other. Pete constantly cracks funny jokes to make up for his somewhat boorish nature, while Dorinda's endless stream of corny one-liners balance a tough but bubbly personality. Pete can make a big show of her birthday despite getting the day wrong, mounting an increasingly impressive set of gestures that would only piss Dorinda off more. And then she can turn around and forgive him when he gets her a sparkling white dress -- "Girl clothes!" she says with her mouth so wide open in joy that whatever dirt she might have had left on her from the day rolls off her face. While much of the quasi-slapstick of the first act falls flat, Dreyfuss and Hunter convey such chemistry that they distract from a number of huge flaws around them. They're just so damn goofy that their adorable quality wins out.

A harrowing crash-landing that opens the film -- a misplaced scene that generates no tension -- Dorinda and the couple's friend Al (John Goodman, who inexplicably serves as a pilot of a plane with a cockpit he could never fit into) encourage Pete to give up this dangerous gig and take up a cozy position over in Flat Rock teaching the pilots who will eventually be sent to put out this incessant conflagration. The moment Dorinda, back home with Pete, launches into a monologue so intense and prophetic it may as well be a soliloquy delivered past her husband instead of to him, the film turns from its weak comedy to something more serious. So sudden is her change that Pete looked as stunned as I felt, and his cavalier attitude breaks in the face of her overwhelming fear. Then, of course, comes one last run, an emergency situation that requires Pete's skill.

For all the pyrotechnics involved, Pete's last flight feels oddly serene, an initially incongruous mood that works when Pete dives his plane over Al's to drop his payload on Al's burning engine and winds up setting his own plane on fire. Pete's last look is, as ever, lighthearted, a "What, me worry?" grin that disappears in a fireball. In a flash, Pete is gone, cutting his life short just as he was getting worthy of the audience's attention.

Ah, but when Pete shuffled off his mortal coil, it appears to have stuck to the bottom of his shoe like a rogue strand of toilet paper. He comes to in a strangely lush and untouched area of the charred forest where a old but beautiful woman (Audrey Hepburn, in her final big-screen part) waits and even cuts Pete's hair -- his first words after he fully comes to terms with his death are "Keep the sideburns." The woman, Hap, informs Pete that she was his guardian angel, and that he shall now counsel others, speaking around the next generation of pilots as the nagging voice in the back of their heads that advises them. Turns out he's going to be that instructor after all.

Here, Always fully picks up. Pete, rascal that he is, heads to Little Rock to guide the pilots, discovering Al has taken the open slot he wanted Pete to fill. He proves as impish in death as he was in life, shouting suggestions for pranks into the ears of those in his vicinity. At last, the comedy in this movie becomes funny, and even if the film suddenly suffers a severe lack of direction, the performances and dialogue ramps up and makes the proceedings tolerable.

To quickly bring together the various plot elements so as to avoid further summary and simply to cut through the meandering, the rest of the film plays thusly: Pete settles on being the angel for an ambitious young stud, Ted (Brad Johnson, who looks a bit like Josh Brolin only without that pesky talent), who appeared earlier in the film when all the pilots wanted to dance with Dorinda and he stared with that lovesick look in his eyes. Dorinda, Ted and Al end up in the same place, and Dorinda slowly starts a relationship with Ted. Pete has to watch this, because apparently one must be tortured into giving up one's vestiges of life before entering heaven. Or maybe God just likes cuckold porn.

OK, OK, I'm simplifying, but Always is such a vexing film. For everything it does right, something else drags, misfires or fails to find any concrete tone. Certain touches have a cleverness, even grace to them -- Pete and Dorinda classing it up by drinking their beer from champagne glasses, incorporeal Pete tricking Al into smearing his face with oil, Dorinda starting to write a "d" at the end of "Peter" so Ted's name appears in her husband's -- and the earnestness of both its romances are touching. But it's trying to be so many movies Spielberg loved as a kid that Always has all the structure of Jell-O. By the same token, Jell-O never falls apart, and the same holds true for the film.

If any one aspect of Spielberg's filmmaking has most caught my eye in this retrospective, it's the director's gift for lighting. When Dorinda jolts awake after having a nightmare of Pete dying, Spielberg cuts to Pete standing by a window in the pale moonlight, his bouncy countenance grows cold and distant. Compare that to the overwhelming orange that engulfs the frame when Pete, Al and, in the end, Dorinda, fly into the forest fires. Always is loosely based on the wartime melodrama A Guy Named Joe, and the explosions of cracking, spitting wood and sudden gush of heat allow the characters to feel like war heroes even when Al tries to get it through Pete's skull that what he's doing is not the same as charging into battle.

My favorite shot of the film captures Pete's attempt to let his wife move on as Dorinda sits in a crash-landed plane having stolen Ted's plane not only to prevent harm from coming to the second man she's loved but in a subconscious effort to kill herself in the same manner that took her husband. As Pete, finally matured through death, urges her to continue living and to find love again, Spielberg places Dorinda in the foreground with normal flesh tones and Pete just behind her. Yet the blackness that dominates the surrounding frame and the colder light on Pete alters the perspective, distancing Pete even as he sits right behind her, as if the director placed Dreyfuss in the background and used a telephoto lens to crush him against Hunter, emphasizing how close the couple are even in death but also Pete's decision to at last leave this world and free his wife. Always itself may be a mixed bag, but this is one of my favorite moments in any Spielberg film.

As a throwback to the melodramas of his youth, Always never manages to tie together its clashing moods of high romance, farce and intense longing, attitudes that those films could inexplicably contain. Though he fills the first act with broad sights such as the men on-base clamoring to wash their hands to dance with Dorinda in her beautiful dress, Spielberg cannot commit to the full spectrum of emotions expressed in a melodrama, afraid to go that far in a time when big and bold acting had long ago fallen out of style. Still, there's something to be said about the quiet delivery of a sappy line like "It's not the dress. It's the way you see me," a decision that makes the corniness of puppy-dog love into something deeper. Always features Spielberg's most subdued direction to this point, but here's a film that could have used his bombast. He was on the cusp on launching into his biggest attempt to be considered a serious filmmaker, but Always marks the first of a handful of entertainment features that exponentially grew in size as he temporarily purged himself of his desire to show people a good time. For that reason, Always marks yet another pendulum swing in the career of a director who could only oscillate so frantically between serious and lightweight because he's so good at both.

Crash (1996)

David Cronenberg's Crash is a film about desperate people in a situation that is beyond desperate. It is, according to J.G. Ballard's introduction to his source novel, a work of pornography, but also a cautionary tale, as well as a political one. The automobile has long been a sexualized object, sports cars and gargantuan sports utility vehicles (rest in peaces, Hummers) viewed as displays of male insecurity and overcompensation, dilapidated, low-speed compacts the polar opposites of chick magnets. In how many films and television programs (including so-called reality series) have we seen gearheads treating their rides with more care than they ever show a significant other, or a group of ready and willing ladies who get off on nice motorcycles and fast cars? Crash takes this idea to the extreme, crafting an underworld below the excessive tedium of driving in a traffic-stuffed world where people respond not simply to cars but to car wrecks. It's the sort of fucked-up premise that screamed for an adaption by David Cronenberg long before he signed onto the project, but it's still surprising just how thoroughly he adapts the source material while fleshing out themes and styles that mark his auterial preoccupations and approach.

Of course, one cannot simply leap into so out-there a concept as the sexuality of car crashes, so Cronenberg eases us into the story by opening, separately, on the Ballards: Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) stands in an airplane hangar having sex with a man, while her commercial-producing husband, James (James Spader), boinks a camera girl in his office. Later that day, the married couple engage in sex with each other, without any of the passion of the illicit couplings, intensifying only when they describe their affairs to each other.

On his way home another night, James looks at some storyboards while driving and crashes head-on with another car. Like all the crashes seen in the film, it's over in a flash. The man driving the other car dies instantly, and James looks out to see the driver's wife (Holly Hunter) staring at him intensely. She reaches for her seat belt and instead rips open her dress an exposes a breast. Is this accidental, the result of a dazed attempt to remove a seat belt, or is she a member of the warped section of society we meet later? Cronenberg leaves clues when James and the woman, Dr. Remington, later forge a sexual bond through their experience, and Remington's sexual encounters -- on- and off-screen -- in cars makes clear her infatuation with the fetish.

But there's always a bit of mystery in the character, thanks to Hunter's constant look of shellshocked confusion; you're never quite sure to what extent she participates in these activities out of awakened lust and how much she might simply be too stunned to do otherwise. She, like the rest of the actors, is perfectly casted: Unger effortlessly projects an air of detachment, while Spader has long been a symbol of sexual perversity (that sounds odder written down than it does in my head) and moral erosion in such films as sex, lies & videotape and Less Than Zero. He plays a character who simply cannot exist in the real world, not because I am too prudish to accept or even comprehend the fetish that drives these poor souls but because of the nature of Spader's character.

In order to figure out what about car wrecks so excites them, James and Remington make their way to a secret exhibition run by Vaughan (Elias Koteas), whom we met earlier posing as a medical photographer taking loving pictures of James' leg brace. Vaughn restages "classic" car crashes such as James Dean's death for a small but dedicated crowd of crash enthusiasts sitting in bleachers hollering as if NASCAR fans got turned on by all the wrecks they hope to see. James and Remington immerse themselves fully into this sub-section of society, and soon they peruse photographs of crash sites and view crash test footage as if viewing pornography.

The camera frames these characters in flattened compositions, completely removing us from any possibility of a connection with the people on the screen. Likewise, the score, which alternates between ethereal strings and a demonic electric guitar that makes Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack sound like a collection of Billy Joel songs, distances us further. That the car crashes are over so quickly is the grand irony of the film considering the extent to which the characters fetishize them, and even as Cronenberg glides his camera smoothly over the aftermath of the wrecks, we cannot understand what about this carnage so excites Vaughan and his followers. Vaughan claims that he sees his fascination with crashes as a means to examine the "reshaping of the human body by modern technology" (a common theme in Cronenberg's films, highlighted in the still-ahead-of-its-time Videodrome and the creature feature The Fly), and in this sense we can view the characters' hangups with the mutilation of car wrecks and the detached direction as reflections of the corrupting influence of increasing coldness in the world due to our fascination with gadgets and gizmos. The eroticization of ripped metal and torn bodies speaks to the growing cult devoted to the worship of all the capitalist idols erected around us.

In the end, though, it's all about the sex, and even Vaughan admits it. He chases the thrill of a good crash because it offers an intensity that transcends sexuality. Indeed, both Remington and James experiment with homosexual affairs in the heat of the moment. The wounds and scars do not typically bleed, and for all the horrific wounds these characters suffer we only see a bit of the red stuff. These dry scars become both reminders of the sexual thrill and representatives of the emptiness of the passion they conjure. One of the crash fetishists, played by Rosanna Arquette, must wear braces on both legs,and she sports a scar on her leg that looks remarkably like a vulva, and James uses it as such in one of their sex sessions. There's nothing erotic about this, only disgusting and sad. Let us return to the nature with which Cronenberg films the crashes: as viewed from the erotic angle, the brevity and instant intensity of the wrecks serves as a sexual release. Vaughan and James tease out their crashes, tailgating and swerving behind intended targets as if acting out foreplay and sex. But actual ejaculation, the moment when all the pain builds to its full climax, lasts less than a second. So, the equation of violence with sex, of Vaughan's belief that a crash is a "fertilizing" act instead of a destructive one, makes for some oddball pornography, but for all the naughty bits on display in the film, is it reasonable to call something porn when it eschews titillation for confrontation?

Crash caused a bit of a firestorm when it premiered, accused by some critics and audience members as exploitative filth. But in an artistic world that constantly weighs the merits of sex and violence in debates of censorship and public acceptability, can the film's reception be at least partially be explained by its commitment to erasing the distinction between the two? Besides, I don't see how anyone could argue that the film exploits any of its grisly -- but never gory -- imagery. It's too detached, too critical, too afraid of what it's showing to glorify anything we see. If anything, it can only look on helplessly as these characters (the ones still alive anyway) seal their fate in the end, as James and Catherine finally bond through a car crash. As James brushes his fingers lovingly over his wife's bruises and scrapes, he wistfully sighs, "Maybe next time." Cronenberg, so removed for the entire film, suddenly seems unsure of what to do, not in an artistic way but in the sense that someone confronted with a terrifying truth about an acquaintance does not immediately know what to do or say. James and Catherine have finally reached a stage of normalcy and love in their marriage through the least normal of circumstances, and their reunion is made possible only through the recognition that they will continue on their path until they kill themselves.