Insomnia (1997) vs. Insomnia (2002)

With The Dark Knight Rises in theaters, what better time to examine the film that, after Memento, proved to Warner Bros thatChristopher Nolan could handle a larger budget and an A-list cast. In remaking a sly, subversive Norwegian neo-noir, Nolan offered a glimpse into the good and bad he would bring to spectacle cinema over the next decade. True to his hard-to-summarize nature, Nolan at once simplifies the psychological and moral miasma of the original while adding various touches that make his more streamlined, narrative-centric version more ambitious an overview of guilt. I know of no one else who can simplify his way into some form of depth, which may be why I cannot dismiss Nolan as I think I should. Nevertheless, I prefer the rawer, harsher original.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Runaway Slave (Pritchett Cotten, 2012)

I tried my best to actually address Runaway Slave, a loathsome new piece of sub-Michael Moore agitprop, rather than simply foam at the mouth. I cannot say to what degree I succeeded. To even list the logical fallacies present in this oversimplification of disproportionate poverty, crime, etc. among black Americans as a failure of the Democratic Party and welfare would stretch well beyond my 1,000-word limit. And for a movie that goes so far out of its way to assure conservatives that they are not racist, its techniques sure are offensive, from the way it sinisterly frames any leftists black speaker to the repeated refrain of black teenagers with their pants sagging (because that has what to do with anything?). Easily the most reprehensible film I've seen this year.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

[The following is my July entry for Blind Spots.]

Some Came Running opens with antithetical moods. Lush but subtle color paints the bus ride of a soldier returning from World War II in warmth, a gentle portrait of the prodigal son on his journey back home. But the CinemaScope framing and portentous music from Elmer Bernstein undercuts this sense of idyll, inserting a sense of tension and conflict before anything has happened. The incongruity of these moods instantly undermines any audience expectation and generating a level of uncertainty in what will follow. For another filmmaker, such unsure footing might be the sign of weak technique and structure, but Vincente Minnelli ingeniously sets to undermining his own frame before he's put anything of note into it.

Soon, the tension becomes clear. The bus driver wakes the soldier, Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra), whose grogginess turns to sober apprehension when he learns he has been brought back to his hometown. When he gets off the bus, a ditzy Chicago girl, Ginny (Shirley MacLaine), gets off with him, mentioning how he was so good as to rough up her abusive boyfriend back in Chicago and bring her along. Dave's bewilderment over her, and his clearly unwelcome return home, reveal that this ostensibly happy moment is the result of a night of blackout drinking. As Dave puts up in a nearby hotel until he can figure out what to do, he finds himself drawn into a world dictated by insipid proprietary norms and both undercut and fundamentally supported by a vulgar underground.

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Christopher Nolan's Batman films have seriously, sometimes ponderously, probed the ramifications of superheroes in the "real" world. Batman Begins used its rusted, humid underworld as a petri dish for urban bacteria into which its hero was injected like a test cure. The Dark Knight followed up on the consequences of that hero's success, replacing the low-level scum with a bigger, badder force that wreaked such havoc as a direct result of Batman's presence that one was left to wonder whether his presence made life for the people better or worse. The Dark Knight Rises inverts that thematic dynamic to explore what happens in the hero's absence.

TDKR picks up eight years to the day after the conclusion of The Dark Knight. On the anniversary of Harvey Dent's death, the mayor (Nestor Carbonell) holds a commemoration that flaunts the aggressive clean-up campaign waged in the late district attorney's name, one that has, apparently, rid the city of organized crime. As the mayor, then Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) give their speeches, a shadow watches from above. Not the shadow of a bat, but a man, and a broken one at that, the silhouette of a cane and the bent shadow of the person holding it suggesting not Batman's imposing, fearful, symbolic strength but just a hobbled man. Such has become Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), deteriorated physically from the strain of his days as Batman and mentally from the trauma of losing the friend in whom he believed and the woman he loved. But as another character tells Wayne not too long after, "There's a storm coming," one that will require the man to become a legend once more and handle a greater evil than ever before.

25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

I continue to love Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of his most shamelessly white elephant features (topped only by Miracle at St. Anna and, more positively, Malcolm X) but also one of his most affecting. Buoyed by a stellar cast, 25th Hour manages to walk its tightrope between an intimate portrayal of the crippling fear of consequence and a vaster portrait of its application to the September 11 attacks. The final, desperate fantasy alone rates among the best and most bravura work Lee has ever done.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004)

Ocean's Twelve is one of my favorite Steven Soderbergh films and the best reflexive takedown of the sequel ever made. It jovially begins as a shameless retread of Ocean's Eleven before spiraling out of control by exaggerating every aspect that made that film a success until the result is a bewildering mess and a giddy commentary on the lazy self-satisfaction of most sequels. Somehow, the in-joke-heavy, pally nature of the acting among Hollywood's A-list does not lapse into pure smugness, perhaps because as much fun as the film has in deconstructing overdone studio mechanics, it also invites the audience to have fun with the cast, provided the viewer can let go of the desire for any kind of fulfillment from the plot. Ocean's Eleven sublimated all of Soderbergh's aesthetic tics into an unexpected crowd pleaser; its first sequel let all the new fans know what they were in for.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, 1983)

If Passion juxtaposed a largely aimless narrative with another artform, painting, as a means of offering clues to its solution, First Name: Carmen uses music as its driving artistic counterpoint. Yet Godard does not simply swap out media but inverts the contrast: here the film has a much more pointed, understandable story, but the cutaways to the other artform prove murky and not easily explained. This, of course, can be explained by the different natures of classical music (wordless, united only by evocative compositional themes) and painting (more literal and, obviously, illustrative). Indeed, Godard uses music as an emphasis of emotion and mood, not so much clarifying an abstract story as deepening a coherent one.

Sound is a key element in the film, with the audio track taking on the jump-cut properties normally associated with Godard’s images. This is nothing new; sudden fluctuations of noise and asynchronous play of sight and sound have been part of parcel of Godard’s cinema from the start. But there is something different about the director’s aural play here: where cut-up audio typically plays an intellectual, confrontational role in, say, the Dziga Vertov period, First Name: Carmen features an unorthodox use of fragmented sound to evoke the state of the characters and the overall tone of the action. One of the first lines spoken on the audio track, “It makes terrible waves in me and you,” is immediately followed with the sound of waves rolling onto a beach as seagulls screech. That gull cry is the most distracting noise of the movie, and like the sudden superimposition of the shrieking cockatoo in Citizen Kane, it may partly serve just to take the audience whenever it is used. But its restless, agitated squawk offers as crystalline and instant an insight into the spiky energy of this speaker as the beautiful yet thunderous sound of the ocean roiling underneath.