Cinematters

United 93

2006-05-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

Many people worried that it was too soon for a film about the events of September 11th. I know many people who flatly refused to see Paul Greengrass's latest film, United 93, for that very reason. But I was not one of these people as I've been dying to see a compelling narrative about 9/11. So when I went to a matinee of United 93 last week, I was looking forward to satiating an appetite that has only increased in intensity over the last five years. I'm sorry to report that United 93 failed to satiate that hunger.
British filmmaker Paul Greengrass came on to the film scene in 2002 as his made for T.V. film Bloody Sunday made the rounds at the international festivals. The film garnered him well-earned praise for its gritty realism and powerful treatment of the events of January 30, 1972 when a peaceful demonstration in Northern Ireland turned tragic. With such a cinematic pedigree, as well as a proven ability to engage an audience with his encore (the tight 2004 thriller The Bourne Supremacy), Greengrass would seem to be the right man to bring 9/11 to the big screen. Unfortunately, and despite the fact that many critics are hailing United 93 as a masterpiece, I believe that Greengrass has made a mediocre film that fails to say anything serious about the events of September 11, 2001.
The central problem with United 93 is that it suffers from an identity crisis. It's almost as if Greengrass wanted to
make a documentary, but realized that he didn't have the necessary footage. Instead of giving us an insightful emotional
interpretation of the events of 9/11, Greengrass tries to put us there with the passengers and the air traffic controllers. And in so doing, he misunderstands the purpose of narrative filmmaking. The central point of narrative filmmaking is not to fool the audience into thinking that they are experiencing the events depicted. Rather, it is to engage the audience emotionally and intellectually in ways that even a documentary cannot. When I watched United 93, I was certainly emotionally engaged, but not in a way that was significantly different from when I read the 9/11 commission report, or heard the real recordings of passengers calling their loved ones.
The film also fails to contextualize the events of 9/11 and this is its most serious transgression. I understand that Greengrass was trying to be "objective" here, but objectivity is a feat that is even beyond the documentary genre that he strives for. By choosing to suspend political or ethical judgment, Greengrass falls prey to a sort of negligent relativism that leads to narrative incoherence. Take for example the last few minutes of the film when both the passengers and the hijackers realize that they are going to die. Greengrass intercuts the hijacker's prayers with the Hail Mary prayers of the passengers. What exactly is he trying to say? Perhaps he means that 9/11 was so cataclysmic that it transcends even the boundary between hijacker and hostage. But this is not helpful to me as a viewer because it offers neither catharsis, nor insight.
It wasn't too early for me to see a film about 9/11, but it seems that it was too early for Paul Greengrass to make a film about that day. For the film is made as if its maker were still in shock and unable to offer any serious analysis as to why it happened and more importantly, how it has shaped the world that we the living continue to inhabit.

Sin City

2005-04-12T22:56:00.000-07:00

From the moment I saw the distinctive splashes of color on its otherwise black and white canvas, I knew I had to see Sin City. It seemed that finally, someone was capitalizing on the endless potential of the digital revolution to push forward a new aesthetic for film. Unfortunately, while the look of Sin City is truly breath-taking, almost every other aspect of the film is utterly disappointing.
When Robert Rodriguez made “El Mariachi” in 1992, he accomplished what seemed to be a miraculous feat of determination and perseverance. With no formal training to speak of and a bare-bones crew, he was able to pull together an entertaining feature-length film. To save on money, Mariachi was shot on 16mm and in order to fund the project, which was made for a paltry $7,000, Rodriguez sold his body for medical experimentation. Following the success of Mariachi, Rodriguez went on to direct a number of big Hollywood films including the sequels Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, as well as the Spy Kids films. What is peculiar about his career, however, is that for many of his films, Rodriguez continues to write, direct, shoot, edit, and score the projects he works on. Indeed, over the years, Rodriguez has become synonymous with this one-man-band style of filmmaking, for although he has the means to hire others, he chooses to maintain complete control over all aspects of the creative process. Sin City is no exception to this rule, although, Rodriguez boldly defied the Directors Guild to allow Frank Miller, creator of the original graphic novels upon which Sin City was based, to co-direct it with him.
There are three main story lines to Sin City. In one, Marv (Mickey Rourke), a man of massive proportions with a face that looks like it’s been on the wrong side of a baseball bat one too many times, makes his way through the city. Marv is on a mission to kill and torture the people who were responsible for murdering a prostitute he loved named “Goldie”. In the second story line, Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is a good cop with a heart condition who does everything he can to save a little girl from being raped by the son of a powerful politician. Finally, there’s Dwight (Clive Owen), who gets involved with the deadly prostitutes of “old town”.
Mickey Rourke delivers an admirable performance as Marv, the near super-human brute who has a taste for torture and revenge. However, none of the other actors really deliver. Particularly disappointing is Clive Owen, who was sorely miscast and feels entirely wrong with his fake American accent and action-figure gestures. The plot has the overall feeling of being forced and Dwight’s story is underdeveloped, despite a scene that is guest-directed by Quentin Tarantino. Another serious problem with Sin City is that the female characters are all either prostitutes, or lesbians that prance around the city wearing next to nothing. One gets the feeling that both Miller and Rodriguez come from a school of thought that actually believes that you can get away with this kind of exploitive misrepresentation of women as long as you make the female characters violent. This raises another issue that I have with the film and that is its adolescent obsession with violence and castration. Tarantino can get away with ultra-violence in his films, because his scripts are so intelligent, that the violence becomes something else: An ironic social commentary. But Rodriguez is no Tarantino and his violence comes across as immature and unexamined. Now, of course, Rodriguez didn’t write the graphic novels, so some of the blame must be laid at the door of Frank Miller, who created this homage to noir in the first place. In fact, if you look into Sin City’s production, you will note that Rodriguez was so faithful to the source material, that he would match his shots to the original compositions in the cells of the graphic novel. But herein lies another seriously problematic aspect of the film. For Rodriguez’s so called “faithful” retelling of the Miller original misses the point that when you cross into another medium, a certain amount of adaptation is necessary in order to remain faithful, assuming that this is your creative choice, to the original. You can’t simply transplant the original comics word for word and frame for frame into a cinematic framework and expect it to be anything like the experience of reading a graphic novel. This fundamental misunderstanding of cinema and the interpretive process of adaptation is the central reason that Sin City doesn’t work.
As an independent filmmaker, I must confess that Robert Rodriguez occupies a special space in my heart. After all, he is living proof that an individual filmmaker can quite literally do it all. But watching Sin City has forced me to reevaluate my understanding of the Rodriguez phenomenon. My admiration for his technical achievements hasn’t in any way been diminished. To achieve the look of the film, Rodriguez shot the entire project on the latest Sony HD cameras and like Kerry Conran’s “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”, it was all done with green screens. This allowed Rodriguez to achieve perfect lighting on both the backgrounds and the individual characters. As for the splashes of color, two methods were used. First, the movie was shot in color, allowing Rodriguez to selectively keep color in the sections that he wanted even after transferring everything to black and white. Second, Rodriguez used blue paint to selectively map colors on to the movie in post. The results are amazing and the detail and control with which Rodriguez employs these techniques is only possible in a digital environment.
Nevertheless, Rodriguez’s career also proves that one needs to be honest with oneself about one’s weaknesses. Robert Rodriguez is a brilliant technician who has an excellent grasp of how to use new digital technologies in the service of narrative filmmaking. But in the final analysis, Rodriguez is less like George Lucas and more like say, Douglas Trumbull. He is technically masterful, without really having anything serious to say. Rodriguez would make much better films if he started to understand the concept of creative collaboration and teamed up with a real writer, like his pal Tarantino. At the end of the day, narrative filmmaking is a collaborative art.

Inside Deep Throat

2005-03-31T06:02:00.000-08:00

If you’ve ever seen the 1972 porn classic “Deep Throat”, it’s hard to understand exactly what all of the fuss is about. After all, it’s a low budget, badly acted film with the absurd premise that its main character Linda Lovelace, who plays herself, has a clitoris located at the bottom of her throat. This absurdity is compounded by the fact that we see Ms. Lovelace’s actual clitoris, or “tinkler” as the film likes to euphamize, a number of times throughout the course of the film in its anatomically correct position. How could such a silly film have gone on to become the most profitable movie in the history of cinema? A new documentary called “Inside Deep Throat” written and directed by team Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (of “Party Monster” fame) and produced by Brian Grazer, seeks to explain the Deep Throat phenomenon.
The film starts with a shot of the writer-director of Deep Throat, Gerard Damiano, now in his seventies, picking up his mail and greeting his suburban neighbours. As we get to know him a little better, we learn that Damiano is a likable character who was a hairdresser before he got into porn production. The film reports that in the early 70’s, before the advent of video, filmmakers who made hardcore pornography saw themselves as independent artists. Indeed, as Wes Craven confesses, he along with many other mainstream Hollywood directors got their start in hardcore porn.
Early on, the film sets up the central conflict of the story as being between the producers of Deep Throat and the people in the Nixon administration who sought to have the film banned. Enter the celebrated talking heads of Alan Dershowitz, Larry Flynt, Hugh Heffner, Camille Paglia, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, to name but a few, who serve as the “voices of reason” in the film. These celebrities are pitted against a handful of the people who were responsible for prosecution of the film, who stand by their original positions on Deep Throat even after all these years.
As the story progresses, we learn that the person who was made a scapegoat for Deep Throat was Harry Reems, the actor who played the quirky doctor character that prescribes deep throat fellatio to Linda Lovelace as a solution to her frigidity. Though he was only paid $250 for his performance, Reems was put on trial and faced up to five years in prison for his participation. We learn that though he was eventually let off, his life deteriorated rapidly into drug and alcohol addiction. To complicate things a little further, we learn that the film, which cost a mere $25,000 to produce, was financed by the mafia. This twist provides some interesting comic relief as the methods of mob film distribution are brought into focus.
Stylistically, the film is fast-paced, using every trick in the editor’s arsenal. The source material comes from all over and includes copious amounts of stock footage and some animated clips. But this is where I have some problems with Bailey and Barbato’s approach. I understand that they are trying to argue that the forces of repression and the threats to the first amendment that existed when Deep Throat was released are once again rearing their ugly head in our post-wardrobe-malfunction neo-Con era. However, the stylistic cheap-shots taken at the ex-Nixon people do the film’s credibility a great disservice. For example, on a number of occasions, the filmmakers take advantage of the after-interview footage of these individuals to make them look foolish. Furthermore, much of the stock footage is used in a spirit of irony, which has the dubious effect of a pat on the back to the “savvy” viewer. This type of “look-how-silly-they-were” filmmaking has no place in the treatment of such serious issues.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the Deep Throat story is that of Lovelace herself. Born as Linda Boreman, she was married to an abusive husband, Chuck Traynor, who realized that his wife had a remarkable talent for fellatio and made the contact that got her into the film. Throughout the production and distribution of Deep Throat, Boreman, now Lovelace, seemed to support the film wholeheartedly. However, as Feminists turned against pornography in the mid-to-late 70’s, they swept Lovelace up in their wake. Lovelace was so taken by the feminists’ arguments that she became their poster child and testified against the film. She claimed that she had been forced to make it and that watching it amounted to watching her being raped. As Deep Throat continued to rake in money for the mob, none of the participants in its production, including Lovelace herself, saw any money from its profits. Desperate and destitute, Lovelace turned away from the feminists and posed nude for money at the age of 51. In 2002, Lovelace died in a car crash. Though we do learn about Lovelace’s story, it ends up playing a rather peripheral role in the film. There is very little interview footage of Lovelace and the short clip that’s there is only introduced in the last 10 minutes.
Bailey and Barbato, must be commended for keeping the hardcore images from the original film in their retrospective. After all, this move garnered their documentary the box-office killing NC-17 rating. Despite this and though the film is both informative and entertaining, Inside Deep Throat ultimately fails to transcend its political agenda, giving it an oversimplified feeling and leaving us as viewers wanting a treatment that’s a little more...Adult.

Born Into Brothels

2005-03-31T06:00:00.000-08:00

Watching the oscars this year, it was not hard to tell which awards were considered important and which were considered unimportant by the powers that be. If the category was considered important, the nominees were introduced individually in the traditional way and cameras would get close-ups of them in their seats. If , however, if it was deemed unimportant, the nominees might not even have had the honor of accepting their award on stage. In this new format, instead of introducing the nominees for Best Documentary Feature individually, all the nominees got on the stage together and we saw them in a high-angle wide shot, with the names of their films appearing on the floor. So I guess the backwards logic was that documentary film is more important than, say animated short, but not as important as cinematography. In any event, the winner this year was a film called Born Into Brothels, by activist/photographer Zana Briski and Ross Kaufman.
The film takes place in the Red Light District of Calcutta where Briski lived while she was photographing the sex workers of this region. While there, Briski met the children of the sex workers and decided that she wanted to help them avoid what seemed to be an inevitable descent into prostitution and crime. To accomplish this, Briski started a photography class for the children. They were given cameras and taught the basics of light and composition and they went around and photographed their world. In addition to the class, Briski set for herself the goal of getting her students out of the brothels and into boarding schools, where they at least had a chance at an education and a future.
Born into Brothels does a very nice job of interweaving the individual stories of the 7 children in Briski’s photography class while presenting their actual photographs in a flattering fashion. Indeed, each child is treated by the film as an artist and their work is given the proper Ken Burns style tribute of the slow and respectful zooms in and out. The children come across as clearly defined individuals who each have their own charming traits and throughout the film we are treated to their astute observations. The film also does a very good job of respecting the autonomy of each child, allowing them to express themselves and in so doing, it challenges our 19th century notions of romantic childhood. These children are not rosy innocents. They are individuals with strengths and flaws, all with surprisingly sharp minds. As the children get better at photography, Briski decides to display their work in galleries in India and New York. One particularly talented boy from the group, Avijit, is even sent to an international photography competition in Amsterdam.
Where Born Into Brothels raises some interesting issues is in its representation of Briski and the nature of her project. Briski becomes both our narrator and our guide through this world and I found myself asking more than once: Why is she doing this? The only clue we get is her telling us that there is no rational reason why she started the project. She simply felt compelled to do it. This is a legitimate response, but what I’m really getting at is not why she started the photography class, but: Why is she making a film about this? Haven’t the children had lots of media exposure already from their gallery shows? Certainly it is interesting to learn about a part of the world that we have no access to, but ultimately, Born Into Brothels is not about the Brothels at all. True there are references made to the conditions in which these children live and there are some well-placed scenes of shouting and, to some extent, neglect by their parents, but the dire circumstances are never really established in the film. Born into Brothels is really about Briski’s mission and our getting to know the children merely functions as an emotional hook that makes us care care about the real protaganist-Zana Briski. At the gallery opening in New York, we hear Briski repeat, almost like a mantra, that the sale of the children’s photographs is being undertaken to help them-she almost says it like she’s fighting with something in her mind. Indeed what she’s struggling with in this revealing moment is what all documentary filmmakers struggle with. Namely: To what extent are we exploiting our subjects? What is interesting about the answer to this question is that there is no necessary connection between the intention of the filmmaker and the degree of exploitation in the film as a piece of art. The really interesting thing to me about Born Into Brothels is that it is clear that the filmmaker wasn’t intending to exploit the children. On the contrary, I have no doubt that her intentions were noble. Nevertheless, the way the film is constructed, runs against these good intentions and creates a feeling of exploitative filmmaking that is hard to shake.