Inessentials

My wife and I snuck off to see the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at the local theater before they disappeared into the void on Friday. It was an immensely pleasant experience, in part because these short films are clearly labors of love, crafted by people who may be taking their first shot at a film with (modestly) wide distribution, so it is easy to feel sympathy for the creators. And, heck, even if you don’t like a film it’s only going to last about 8 minutes, right?

Catch a run-down of all the short films here: http://www.shortshd.com/theoscarshorts/ (They are also all available to purchase from iTunes.) Here are four highlights from the ten or so shorts that we watched.

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty

Although this film had more apparent flaws than many others of the night, it easily packed the most laughs over its six minutes. Watch the whole film below.

Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death

Wallace and Gromit are two of the most beloved characters in film history, and any new episode in their on-going adventures is to be treasured. Nick Park has refined the stop-motion animation style into its definitive form over the last two decades. This adventure is nearly identical in plot to the earlier ones (Wallace falls for a girl, hijinx ensue, Gromit saves the day), but that’s not why we watch. We watch because we are cinephiles or Anglophiles, punsters or funsters, have kids or feel like kids. These films are so sweet-natured, even in their frightening sequences, that they infect you with good cheer. (And a craving for stinky cheeses.) A Matter of Loaf and Death is more franticly pace than earlier installments, with faster cuts (which means more set-ups for Park and friends). I can’t wait for the next one.

Logorama

The winner for best animated short at the Academy Awards was Logorama, which was perhaps an even more pointed political statement than giving a documentary award to Michael Moore. This was easily the most daring and conceptually innovative film of the night. Constructed almost completely out of brand logos, the film reads like a big postmodern joke at the way in which American culture is saturated with corporate branding. When the film’s story get’s going, it reveals a similarly postmodern mash-up of Tarantino dialogue, Michael Bay action sequences, and CNN round-the-clock “news” coverage. However, like many such attempts to skewer advertising, it must do so by becoming an advertisement. When watching the film, you look for all the fleeting jokes (that’s a GOP elephant! that mountain says The North Face!), so you end up searching out the very corporate brands that the film presumably wants you to dismiss. As one-time viewing, perhaps we can see this as an important step: we raise our consciousness of how steeped in branding our culture is, so that we can defiantly reject it. But in doing so, we give an audience to the very images we are supposed to reject.

Watch the first 45 seconds below.

La Dama y la Muerte (The Lady and the Reaper)

My favorite film of the night was also took a strong ethical stand, but more effectively than Logorama, partly because it did so only casually. To avoid the spoilers that follow, watch all of La Dama y la Muerte before continuing. (Don’t skip the closing credits.)

The frantic chase sequences recalls Looney Tunes, but does so in an innovative, visually daring style unto itself. It begins in a realist mode (the bedroom), but quickly devolves into a hyper-real locale (the hospital room), and continues in an exaggeration of the classic Chuck Jones style (the morgue). So it’s fun to watch. But it’s also a surprisingly touching story of a woman who is prepared to die but is forced back to life by a doctor. (“Famous Doctor Saves Another Miserable Life” reads the magazine cover on the wall. “I feel like a god.”) More effectively than Million Dollar Baby, it presents a way of understanding how a person might choose to end their life with dignity rather than continue it. Perhaps because of its Spanish origins, the film presents a mythology that combines Catholicism (there is an afterlife where we can see our loved ones), Indo-European folklore (the Grim Reaper), and classical Greek mythology (River Styx, Cerberus) to pose a challenge to medical technology that can prolong life. Perhaps most remarkably (and in direct defiance to Catholicism) it gets a laugh out of suicide, and leaves the viewer accepting that this was perhaps the right choice for the woman.

This points to an overall theme for these assorted animated shorts (and, come to think of it, for this website), which is that pop culture can be revealing in the stories it tells us about who we are and the lives we live. Even eight-minute cartoons can be expressions of attitude or summaries of philosophical thought experiments about how we do think or how we should think about the world we encounter. Euthanasia, the afterlife, how advertising affects our perception of the world, how our experiences shape the stories we tell about the world. Heady stuff for simple cartoons.

If you are on Twitter (like I am) and follow pop culture creators and critics (like I do), you may know about the rebirth of Roger Ebert. If not, then it is worth taking a moment to see why his is one of the more remarkable stories of the last six months.

Ebert is the long-time film critic for the Chicago Sun Times and was co-host and producer of At the Movies, which cemented the “Two Thumbs Up” lingo in our national slang lexicon.

A recent article by Chris Jones in Esquire discussed his battle with cancer, which led to his jaw being removed in 2006. (Ebert talks about why he agreed to give the interview and have his photo taken at his wonderful blog. Also, there is a wonderful piece there on his not being able to eat or drink.) He now has new technology that allows him to speak, as demonstrated on his recent appearance on Oprah. (Here is a clip with Ebert’s wife Chaz.)

Ebert has embraced other technologies, too, becoming one of the most prolific Twitterers around; he has a following of nearly 100,000 people.

And if there was ever a question about whether Ebert is a nice guy, this remarkable story about his mentorship and forgiveness should settle it.

The story of Roger Ebert is not just the story of a remarkable person with a remarkable story, it is also the story of film criticism in America. For decades, people have fretted over the state of film criticism, particularly in America. “It’s dying.” “It’s dead.” “It’s pointless.” “It’s all about celebrity.” Ebert is sometimes seen as the major culprit behind the last charge. Ebert, first with Siskel, then with Roeper, became the face of film criticism in a way that earlier critics were not. He was a minor television celebrity who reached a national audience and whose “thumbs up” could lead any advertisement for a motion picture. The worry is that film criticism, partly because of television avenues like At the Movies, has become more about celebrity and less about the art of criticism.

There is a kernel of truth to this charge, but it’s largely off point. Film criticism serves a number of functions, and Ebert excelled at a number of them. First, he is a film lover. Critics can inspire love for films in us by demonstrating their love for films. And Ebert has always been a champion of film. Second, he is a lover of storytelling. Ebert, more than many critics, is interested in the story of a film more than many of its other artistic aspects. This is partly why he gives such favorable reviews to mainstream Hollywood films. Hollywood films tend to employ certain storytelling techniques, and Ebert is quick to praise films that tell conventional stories in a competent way. Third, and relatedly, Ebert has very populist tastes. One thing we look for from critics is the standard, “should I see this movie that opens tomorrow?” And Ebert is a great barometer of mainstream tastes. For a long time, especially when I first started paying attention to film criticism, I realized that no film critic was as good as Ebert at predicting whether I would like a given Hollywood film. And that is still valuable. Finally, Ebert is a very fine writer, who has an above-average prose style and a good sense of when to connect film reviews to larger truths, which makes his writing even more compelling.

There are other important roles that a film critic performs that Ebert has been less successful at, and I think this is the source of many complaints about him. For instance, his populist taste and preference for classical Hollywood storytelling lead to somewhat bland and predictable grades. While he champions films in his Great Movies series, they are usually films already part of the canon. You’re not likely to find many surprises in there. Also, Ebert has never focused on the close analysis of film. Now, this is moving more toward the domain of academic film studies since it is often not possible to do this in a newspaper review with a set word limit, but film critics also should have an eye for various formal elements of film, and many reviewers find ways to incorporate this into their writing. There is one other complaint about Ebert’s mainstream sensibilities: many of the most interesting films are those that divide critics. Some films deserve both passionate defense and full-on ridicule. (The films of Lars von Trier come to mind here, as well as what appears in Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon or Manohla Dargis’ defense of Southland Tales.) Which means that we don’t always want critics that we agree with. Sometimes a critic’s job is to defend something we hate or devastate something we love. That makes us better film viewers.

The various roles that critics perform also suggest why we should read many different critics. Sometimes we simply want to know whether it is a movie we are likely to like, articulated very clearly or cleverly. (Ebert and A.O. Scott are good at this.) Sometimes we want consistently sharp or provocative reactions, even when they disagree with our own. (Here I like Mike D’Angelo and Stephanie Zecharek.) Other times, we want more historical and scholarly discussions. (David Bordwell and Matt Zoller Seitz.) A good critic can teach you how to watch film; engaging multiple critics can teach you how to understand film.

Every year there are a few surprises at the Academy Awards that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Here’s your chance to wow your party guests by yelling out a surprise correct pick just before the names are read. This is your guide to Oscar night upsets.

Best Picture: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

Conventional wisdom says this is Avatar’s race to lose, but if it loses it will lose to The Hurt Locker. There’s also been a little speculation recently that Inglourious Basterds is making a late push and could pull a dark horse upset. While Avatar is still the best bet in this category, I think it is worth considering how the method of Oscar voting for Best Picture could lead to an upset here. Academy members rank the nominees from 1-10. In counting the ballots, all ballots are stacked by their first place vote. If one picture has 50%, the counting is over. If not (which is much more likely), the film with the lowest total is eliminated, and those ballots’ second place votes are counted. This process continues, eliminating one picture at a time, until there is a film with 50% of the ballots. What does this mean? It means that a film could have only a medium-range number of first place votes, but if it has a lot of second- and third-place votes, it could win Best Picture. And this seems pretty likely. The films most likely to be eliminated first (A Serious Man, An Education) seem more likely to have The Hurt Locker ranked higher than Avatar. So unless Avatar begins with a very sizeable lead (say 25% of first-place votes with nothing else over 10%), I think it is very likely that The Hurt Locker or Inglourious Basterds wins. Also, the Academy loves violent films (No Country for Old Men, The Departed, LOTR: Return of the King, Gladiator), which favors The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds. Also, a science fiction film has never one; Avatar (or District 9) would be the first.

Best Director: James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Quentin Tarantino, Lee Daniels, Jason Reitman

Everyone has handed over this award to Kathryn Bigelow already. Since no woman has ever won Best Director, many assume now is the time. But of course, that’s as much a reason to say Bigelow won’t win as that she will. That logic could also work with Lee Daniels, since he is only the second African-American to be nominated. (The first, John Singleton, didn’t win for Boyz n the Hood.) Remarkably, QT has only been nominated once before; if IB picks up some technical awards early in the night, he could pull an upset here. But I think the real upset will be Cameron defeating his ex-wife Bigelow. The Academy loves traditionalist men who command large epics. For the last six years, Best Picture and Best Director have gone together, so it’s hard to believe that the Academy will go for Bigelow for directing and Avatar for film. If there is a split, expect it to be the reverse, due to the voting procedures.

Best Original Screenplay: Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman (The Messenger), Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (A Serious Man), Bob Peterson & Pete Docter (Up)

This category usually goes to the most inventive or innovative script and rarely aligns with Best Picture. Going by innovation, QT is the winner here. But the Academy has recently been leaning toward first-time writers (Dustin Lance Black, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola), which could favor Mark Boal. Oddly, if Hurt Locker gets shut out of the other major awards, expect a win here; if it does well elsewhere, then this one is for Tarantino.

Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz, Vera Farmiga, Maggie Gyllenhall, Anna Kendrick, Mo’Nique

There is nearly universal consensus that Mo’Nique will run away with this award. But that runs against a strong precedent. This is the award that Hollywood gives to some pretty young thing like a glistening tiara in a beauty pageant. Cruz, Weisz, Blanchett, Zellweger(!), Zeta-Jones, Connelly, Jolie, Sorvino, Tomei… the last 15 years have almost always gone to some under-35 up-and-comer. (Sorry, Carey Mulligan, but you need a fake accent or heavy make-up to win Best Actress like Witherspoon, Theron, or Kidman.) Reasoning that Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga will split the votes of Up in the Air fans, this award goes to Gyllenhall. But don’t be too surprised if Up in the Air snags one or two acting wins, and this is the place to do it.

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Colin Firth, Morgan Freeman, Jeremy Renner

Bridges has this one locked up, the experts say. But will enough people have seen Crazy Heart to give it to Bridges? He hasn’t been nominated in 25 years, but don’t give too much attention to an actor’s being “due.” Freeman could win simply because the Academy so loves bio pics (Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jamie Foxx). But everybody loves them some Clooney, and who wouldn’t like to see Firth win? Especially since, like Hoffman and Penn, he is playing a gay man. I have trouble seeing how Renner wins this, but since no one is talking about anyone but Bridges, let’s at least mention his name, too.

Best Actress: Sandra Bullock, Helen Mirren, Carey Mulligan, Gabourey Sibide, Meryl Streep

This is being pitched as a heavy-weight fight of Bullock vs. Streep. Recently, Streep has only been the bridesmaid and never the bride, while Bullock has (understandably) never been nominated before. I can see an Erin Brockovitch-type win here, but that film had Steven Soderbergh’s pedigree behind it. This award never goes to a performance in a Best Picture winner, but that doesn’t seem to be a concern here. (Mulligan’s and Sibide’s films are nominated, but are very longshots.) Let’s call this one for Bullock because she used an accent and because we know she’ll squander the Oscar love on terrible films, just like Halle Berry.

So those are the categories where there’s a stand-out favorite, but why there could be an upset.

Still not enough to impress your friends? Tell them Up in the Air has no shot because only one comedy in the last 30 years has won Best Picture (Shakespeare in Love, during Miramax’s heyday). The Hurt Locker would be the lowest grossing film to ever win Best Picture. (Obviously, Avatar would be the highest.) When Christoph Waltz wins best Supporting Actor, tell them that Tarantino had given up on making Basterds until he found Waltz to play the multi-lingual Col. Landa. Tell your friends that you think Michael Giacchino should win Best Original Score for Up, and that you love his work with J.J. Abrams on television (Lost, Fringe, Alias) as well has his film scores for Abrams and for Pixar (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Star Trek).

Thematic spoilers for The Hurt Locker

I was talking with my father-in-law recently about The Hurt Locker, a film that my wife and I had recommended to him. Turns out, he hated it. He hated it because he thought it was glorifying character traits that he thought were destructive, dangerous, and repulsive. He’s not the sort of man to use the word “asshole” but that’s a fair way to describe the central character in The Hurt Locker, whose machismo jeopardizes the lives of his fellow soldiers. Whereas he saw the film glorifying this character, my wife and I had seen it as an indictment – an indictment of the military that both requires people to act the way this character acts but destroys the person and his relationships in the process. Whereas he saw the film praising a man who couldn’t live a “normal” life, we saw it as explaining how the psychological barriers he constructed to do his job prevented him from entering into well-adjusted familial relationships. Whereas he saw glorification of war, we saw an explanation of its devastating effects on soldiers.

Why did we view this film so differently?

When my wife and I watched the film, we were sitting in our local art house theater in a Northeastern college town, with a hushed, reverent audience. When he watched the film, he was sitting in his living room in a rural Red State with people whooping and hollering at the explosions and complaining that the soldiers didn’t just “shoot all the Muslims.” It’s as though we watched two different films: one a sensitive exploration of the difficulties of war and the effects on the soldiers, the other a propaganda film like those shown for the National Guard or Air Force in a theater before the movie starts. The audience made all the difference.

So were there really two films? Two equally good readings?

No. Despite the differences, I think there is really only one film here. And frankly, there is only one “correct” reading of the film, which is the one my wife and I had. Some readings of a film are closed off, and I think the one my father-in-law had is the wrong one. It is understandable why he had it. The whooping and hollering of the audience overwhelmed the comparatively subtle notes that the film uses to make its point. He got that the lead character is a prick and was willing to see that this was caused or exacerbated by his position as a bomb-diffuser, but he held this view coming into the film, and missed that the film was trying to show this.

Is the film a failure if people can misread it so badly?

If my father-in-law’s friends could misread the film so badly, and see it as a work unreservedly praising the brave soldiers who are defending the country from those evil Arabs/Muslims/terrorists, does this mean that the film is a failure? Surely sometimes a film fails to achieve what it sets out to do. A film could try and fail to do what I think The Hurt Locker does successfully. But it doesn’t follow from this that everyone will understand it. Understanding a film (or “reading” it) is a skill that takes practice. We don’t think about it much because most of us have grown up absorbing the clues subliminally, and we don’t often reflect on how a film uses certain elements to tell its story or convey its elements. Most of us don’t know the 180 rule, couldn’t tell one lens from another, and could only guess at what an “establishing shot” is. But we might still suspect when the conventions surrounding these things are broken, even if we are not sure what the convention is or why it is being broken. And some of us spend time learning these elements because we want to become better readers of film, more engaged viewers, more reflective critics. It’s no more the film’s fault if people can’t read it than it is Shakespeare’s fault that a high school English student doesn’t get it. Like diffusing a bomb, “getting it” takes time, patience, and training.

Some spoilers for Terminator Salvation, but it’s not like you were going to watch it anyways

Terminator Salvation fails for a number of reasons. It’s about 30 minutes too long, and all the dullest, most senseless, least compelling sequences come in the second half of the film, leaving the viewer with a sour taste. That’s a shame only because there are some pretty nice action set pieces in the first half. But what stands out about the film is its ham-fisted attempt to reflect on the classic science fiction question, “What makes us human?”

You see, in Terminator lore, machines are bad and humans are good. So when Salvation attempts to break new ground, it does so by introducing a character that is partly human and partly machine. This is then supposed to provide a philosophical quandary both for hybrid (“what am I?”) and for those who interact with it (“what is it?”). (Apparently this has become the standard fourth-film-in-a-franchise question, since Alien: Resurrection posed the same question, but with alien-human hybrids instead of machine-human hybrids.) Perhaps in more deft hands this could have been an interesting question for a film. Instead, it is in the hands of McG (Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), the pens of John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris (Surrogates, Catwoman), and the grunting of Christian Bale (Reign of Fire, Newsies).

Not having anything interesting to say about the interactions of humans and machines, the filmmakers decided to blow stuff up. Personally, I am in favor of blowing stuff up on screen. It’s fun to watch. Maybe not in the second hour, when the filmmakers have lost track of who we care about and why, so we have no reason to root for any of these characters to survive. We just hope our bladders survive the two hours it takes to finish the film. But not content to blow stuff up, McG, Brancato, and Ferris also decide that they should say something. This is a science-fiction film, after all, and therefore must have pretenses to philosophical navel-gazing.

So here is what they do. They create a character that is partly human and partly machine. Half the film’s heroes argue that the hybrid is fully human, and the other half argue that the character is fully machine. Apparently, the writers decided that there would be added emotional resonance if every person in the film was an idiot. This is called “screenwriting.”

As a philosopher (yes, I really do have a postgraduate philosophy degree), one thing I try to do in exploring difficult questions is start with the facts. Applied to this film, in wondering what we should think of a human-machine hybrid, and important fact to consider would be this is a human-machine hybrid. Apparently, this never occurred to anyone involved with the making of this film. They decided that it is much more interesting to ask “Is it fully human?” or “Is it fully machine?” In other words, they could never reach the part where they actually do some philosophical reflection, because they are too stupid to acknowledge the single most basic fact that the entire film is built around. Somewhere between deciding to make a film that introduces a human-machine hybrid and actually making that film, they lost track of that single basic idea.

Now, it would be wrong to say the movie fails because of some intellectual fault in the film. As an action spectacle, this film fails because it is boring. But sometimes boring science fiction films can be saved by the interesting questions they address. This is why we still watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris. And it is also why you should watch Moon, the low-budget space flick that nobody saw last year. Better acting, a more compelling plot, and an interesting question at the center (albeit one that is raised to explore psychological and emotional elements rather than strictly philosophical implications). While I don’t think Moon is an excellent film, I can guarantee that you won’t leave it with that gross, McG-y taste in your mouth.

Pretty big spoilers for Gone with the Wind

Rewatching Gone with the Wind yesterday at the local art house theater, I was struck by the dream imagery of the film. It begins with the film’s grandiose foreward:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…

“A dream remembered” gives the viewer a pretty fair handle on how to read the film. The film’s heightened emotions, narrow focus on Scarlett O’Hara, and whitewashing of the unpleasant aspects of slavery in the Old South fit the model of the retelling of a dream. Like a person giving a first-person narrative account of a dream, we are told a solipsistic account of a world that a cold-eyed viewer would recount much differently.

More than the narrative structure, there is another way that dreams figure into the story of Gone with the Wind. The first half of the film (the two hours leading up to the intermission) is the story of Scarlett O’Hara’s slow waking up from a dream. Scarlett, particularly in facing the death and stench of the make-shift military hospital in a church, wakes up from the dream life she has been living. In fact, Dr. Meade shakes Scarlett and tells her to “Wake up! Wake up!” And, unfortunately for Scarlett, she does wake up at the end of the first half, when she returns to Tara, her family’s plantation and vows to never be hungry or poor again. She is waking up from a dream and in doing so finds life to be a horror (much like the awakening in Mulholland Dr., come to think of it). And for Scarlett, awakening to the world around her leads her to lie, cheat, steal, and murder her way through life.

Interestingly, this is the same conclusion about life reached by the film’s other protagonist, Rhett Butler. For the first half of the film, he enters and leaves the story at well-spaced intervals. Like a bodhisattva who has awakened from dream-life yet still walks the earth, Rhett Butler is the only character in the first half of the film who is awakened to the dream-like state of the white characters in the Old South. Like the awakened Scarlett O’Hara, he has the very un-Budhhist attitude that the awakened life is one where anything goes – robbery, fornication, anything that benefits him. In his first speaking scene, Rhett even chastises the eager Southern gentlemen for their “dreams of victory” – a clear statement that he can see through the dream they are living in to the world that has already arrived without their knowing. And his decision is not to side with their gentlemanly honor, but to act as a smuggler out to line his pockets.

In an interesting reversal, Rhett attempts in the second half of the film to re-enter the dream life he accurately punctured in the first half. But his attempts to live in a dream are doomed, as his attachment to Scarlett is doomed. He cannot become a gentleman, and Scarlett cannot become a lady. And the one dream from which Scarlett never awoke was her dream of Ashley, which she realizes too late was only a dream. Rhett knew this all along, as he tells her in the films closing scene, “I’m leaving you, my dear. All you need now is a divorce and your dreams of Ashley can come true.” She has realized by now that it really was just a dream, but she has awoken too late to salvage her real marriage.

Like all dreams, the Old South was always illusory. The happy slaves, the code of gentlemanly honor, the concentration of wealth in the few landowners were all unstable at best and delusional at worst. The Old South is a remembered dream, a dream that never was as it is remembered.

Trailer-level spoilers for Up in the Air and medium spoilers for Drag Me to Hell

Manohla Dargis called Up in the Air “a well-timed snapshot of an economically flailing America.” A. O. Scott called it “a classic in the making. In 50 or 60 years when people want to know what life is like in this anxious, strange moment of recession at the end of this decade, they’re going to look at this movie the way we look at the movies of Preston Sturges or Frank Capra to find what life was like in the ’30s. … It captures something very deep and very sad about the way that we live now in a light-hearted and comic way, and I think that that’s brilliant.” And those descriptions are exactly right, but they’re about the wrong movie.

They are talking about Jason Reitman’s fine character study of a man who fires people for a living. It’s the one booming business these days, but even this job is unsettled as George Clooney’s character, who has trouble forming relationships with anybody, realizes his job is being replaced by an up-and-comer, played superbly by Anna Kendrick. The film is very aware of its prestigious ambitions and careful tone, and it is a moderately successful film that is a big-issue story masquerading as a small, intimate story. It’s pretty good. You should see it.

But, with all due deference to Mr. Scott and Ms. Dargis and the many others who have made similar claims, Up in the Air is not the 2009 film that best captures “this anxious, strange moment of recession at the end of this decade.” For that, we should turn to Sam Raimi’s throwback horror film Drag Me to Hell.

Drag Me to Hell is the story of Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), who in her role as insurance officer at a regional bank branch, decides to try for a promotion to assistant manager despite knowing that doing so requires her to make “tough decisions” that will impress her boss. The first such decision is to deny a third extension on a late mortgage payment; unfortunately, this is an old gypsy woman who begs Brown to reconsider, and in refusing to do so, shames the old woman. Being a gypsy, she curses Brown, who spends the next 60 minutes chased by a demon who claims her soul. Why is this the film that best captures the feeling of 2009?

“Actually, it was the bank that took the house. I just work there.”

Before entering a by-the-book horror-film third act, Drag Me to Hell is largely about the psychological consequences of working in a capitalist society. Brown is torn between doing what she knows is right and doing what she knows will help her get ahead in her workplace. She feels threatened by her boyfriend’s parents, who see her as a failure for not being born successful. She feels threatened by her male coworker who is gunning for the same job, and taking every opportunity to demean her. But she chooses to work within the cold machinations of capitalism, even when she knows it will hurt others. She will sacrifice an old woman’s future to keep her job secure and get just a little ahead. We see the devastation wrought by the financial sector on this old woman. The film doesn’t even attempt to cloak it as a case of capitalism-run-amok with greedy robber barons destroying the country; Brown is doing what makes sense for her job, since her bank will earn nice fees for foreclosing on the house. We watch the pitiable woman being beaten down by a system that doesn’t stop for her, and the subsequent shame. And we also see the shame to Brown as she participates in this. Early on, she attempts to deflect the guilt of her actions onto the company for which she works, but the film is a slow realization that she must face up to her guilt rather than hide behind her company.

“You deserve everything that is coming to you.”

After the gypsy woman attacks her, Brown suffers a mental break. (Notably, most of the film could be read as a psychotic break suffered by Brown; almost no one else experiences the terrors that she experiences, even when they are in the same room, unless they are already “believers.”) Like someone fired in a massive downsizing, Brown believes that she deserves what is happening to her. People who have been fired often feel like they are at fault rather than the company or person who fired them; if only they had worked harder, they would have been okay. They feel guilty, like they deserved what happened to them, even if that is not the truth. And certainly Brown goes through this as well. She, and the viewer, know that her actions led to this point, and that she must face the consequences herself. That feeling of deserving what is coming to you perfectly captures the feeling of the displaced worker, even though Brown deserves it and many downsized workers do not.

“It was my decision and it was wrong of me.” “You have such a good heart.”

The shame to those destroyed by the system, the guilt of those complicit in the system, the difficult choices faced by those still in the system. These are the feelings of 2009 that Drag Me to Hell captures and Up in the Air does not. After all, Anna Kendrick’s character got hired coming right out of college! And she had multiple job opportunities! Up in the Air may have some nice things to say about changing ideas of corporate loyalty and growing old, but nothing hits 2009 where it hurts like Drag Me to Hell. [BIG DRAG ME TO HELL SPOILER] When Christine Brown recognizes that what she did was wrong, it is too late for her. Having a good heart in the end wasn’t enough. She had to face the consequences of staying in her job. And the film’s final scenes are a working out of her survivor’s guilt.

2009 was hell. Sam Raimi captured it in a way worth remembering.

Here are my picks for the Top 10 films of the 2000s. These lists are always a little silly (will I still like my No. 1 pick in 10 years? how many times must I rewatch a film to be sure I love it? who cares what I think?), so you might be more interested in my list of 5 essential films of the decade that didn’t make my 1o-best list. Those five all reveal something above movies in the last 10 years. Enjoy.

1. Inglourious Basterds (2009) – Quentin Tarantino films generally leave me a little cold. I love the flair, the humor, the knowledge, but his plots are too often thin vengeance flicks that leave you feeling stupid for not catching all his arcane film references. But here, finally, QT has a plot worth loving, a revenge story that says something fascinating about the nature of revenge (forget what others say, this is not wish fulfillment), and a film that you can watch without feeling frustrated at your lack of movie trivia. Devastating, beautiful, terrifying, hilarious, tense, thoughtful. Bravo.
2. Moulin Rouge! (2001) - It takes a bold storyteller to tell you no less than three times how the film will end yet still have that ending leave you moved. Somehow Baz Luhrmann manages to do it, while reinventing the musical, the movie soundtrack, the star vehicle, and the smash cut. The most exhilarating and shamelessly romantic film of the last 10 years. Spectacular. Spectacular.
3. Zodiac (2007) – This is one of the few great films about research. It is simultaneously an obsessive portrayal of obsession and masterful twist on the tired serial killer genre. Subtle use of CGI, and a stellar cast. Like QT at No. 1, this is a film a head and shoulders above the director’s (David Fincher) other work. This film still haunts me.
4. In the Mood for Love (2000) – Perhaps the most beautiful film of the decade.
5. City of God (2002) – An epic that feels intimate.
6. No Country for Old Men (2007) – The best comedic filmmakers are also the best dramatic filmmakers.
7. I (Heart) Huckabees (2004) – I love comedies. I love films about ideas. This is a comedy about ideas.
8. Elephant (2003) – Devastating to watch.
9. Mulholland Dr. (2001) – What begins as a genre pastiche ends with a suggestion that reality is the true horror.
10. Ratatouille (2007) – Everyone has a favorite Pixar film; mine is an ode to creativity and creators.

5 Essential Films of the 2000s

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2002, 2003, 2004) – Redefined the blockbuster. The first film feels corny to me now, the second is still thrilling, and the third is still boring. But it brought attention to the possibility of a blockbuster entertainment that is also a smart film, and was one of the first to let fans in to the filmmaking process (and more than a little marketing) by using a thing called the Internet.
2. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2003) – This film defined the goal of distributors of independent films in the 2000s: through slow release and word of mouth, hope a film finds a huge audience. (Idea: why not buy good films, let them find their modest audience, and make a small profit rather than get into bidding wars for films you hope will make a huge profit?)
3. The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) – Along with Wedding Crashers, it showed there is an audience for R-rated comedy. It also launched the Judd Apatow phenomenon.
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2002) – Each time I’ve watched it, I’ve found this film trite, dull, needlessly formal, and on-the-nose. But, like Punch Drunk Love, it has a passionate following among people who watch only a few movies but like to feel like they are very smart movie watchers. It seems like every Sundance picture tries to recapture the alleged magic of this film.
5. Yi Yi (2000) – I have not seen this film. I’ve seen many lists with this as one of the great films of the decade. And since an essential part of film-going (at least for us amateurs who can’t run the festival circuit) is not seeing every great film, I’ll let this stand for all the great films I didn’t see this decade.

Significant spoilers for Avatar; medium-sized spoilers for Aliens

When I was a kid, my favorite movie was Return of the Jedi. (Now known as Star Wars VI.) It’s not that I was especially fond of the Ewoks. Any kid knows that their treehouse homes are way cooler than the Ewoks themselves. It took me many years to realize it, but what fascinated me about Return of the Jedi is that the Star Wars universe suddenly was transplanted into a verdant forest. After the khakis and browns of A New Hope and the blacks, whites, and grays of The Empire Strikes Back, to suddenly see the speeder bikes racing through a lush forest of greens made the whole world more real. I grew up around forests, and seeing speeder bikes and light sabers in a forest was the coolest thing ever. Ever since, I’ve found science fiction stories set in wooded areas to be very compelling. (Similar for fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings, or sci-fi set in that other great untamed area of Earth, the sea.)

So I was pre-disposed toward the world of Avatar, created by the man who made The Abyss (about strange life in the ocean depths) and Aliens (about the strange interaction of biological life and mechanical steel). Watching the film, I was struck by Cameron’s fussiness. Here is a man who never leaves an inch of frame unfilled. Showing off his command of technology and filmmaking, Cameron plugs every scintilla of his computer-generated world with some creepy-crawly, some background figure, something to fill the frame. When depicting the rich world of Pandora, this adds to the thrill that I felt watching Return of the Jedi as a kid. But over the course of 162 minutes, I did find myself occasionally yearning for the sparse landscapes of No Country for Old Men, a film content to let its characters drift through barren landscapes and barely decorated hotel rooms. Like the Coen Brothers used those repeated shops of nearly empty landscapes to engross the viewer in the moral emptiness of the universe they depicted, Cameron uses the lush greens and blues of Pandora to demonstrate the biological and spiritual connection the Na’vi have to their planet.

As a side note, Cameron also seems to forget about his camera. He’s so interested in filling the frame, that he forgets the cinematic possibilities of changing viewing angles. Of course, he expertly crafts the flying scenes, but it is not until a rush down the halls of a spaceship (strongly reminiscent of the Alien films) that we see the camera put in motion in a way that adds to the storytelling, rather than just showing off the admittedly wondrous world that Cameron and crew have created.

And of course, this world is supposed to be made even more life-like by Cameron’s embrace (and advancement) of 3-D technology. And I must say, at times I was really sold on the tech. Watching a spaceship glide through space, like we’ve seen a thousand times in Star Trek and Star Wars and a dozen other outer-space epics, I had never seen one quite as realistic as the ship at the beginning of Avatar. At other times, though, the 3-D effects were simply laughable. Any shot with multiple foci (for instance, a character walks across the foreground, a computer station sits a bit further back but still in focus, and more activity occurs at a distance in the background) comes across in the comical style of Captain EO. And fast moving characters were very choppy, at least in the theater where I watched. (I’ll be interested to see if that is still the case in 2-D.) Frankly, I’m glad I gave Avatar a chance in 3-D, but it will be a long time before I bother watching another film in 3-D. The pain and price just aren’t worth the payoff. It was barely worth it this time.

But back to the world of Pandora. Cameron presents the Na’vi as a mish-mash of indigenous peoples who have more to teach the “civilized” than the “civilized” have to teach them. As morality tales go, this one is a groaner. As a good liberal, I prefer it to a paean to the military or a we-can-do-no-wrong propaganda campaign. But the deadly serious New Age-y religion (captured in an unintentionally hilarious group hug-and-swing that recalls the Wachowski Brothers’ dance marathon in Matrix Reloaded) and the uber-intense way that Cameron enforces his point is, shall we say, less than subtle. And like many attempts to show how much we Westerners have to learn from indigenous peoples, the film slides into a subtle form of liberal racism. You see, these savages are noble savages. Look at how they commune with the animals they kill for their survival. Look at how connected they are to the world around them and each other. (Succinctly captured in those three oft-repeated words, “I see you.”) Clearly, the film pounds into our brains, we Westerners have much to learn about ourselves and our world from the National Geographic sort. As if to bring out a big yellow highlighter to make sure we don’t miss the point, the central characters among the barely clothed Na’vi are motion-captured and voiced from three African-American and one Native American actors. So the only time we see people of color in the film, that color is blue. (The lone exception is Michelle Rodriguez, whose Latino skin is two shades darker than her lilly-white pals.) I’m not claiming that James Cameron is a racist in any strong sense of that word. That word is too important. But his film does reveal a tendency to paint (blue?) a portrait of people of color as noble savages who could teach a thing or two to white Westerners who come after their resources. And that is a subtly racist message, at the very least in its racial essentialism, which is one short step from stereotyping, and in its praise of “noble savage” qualities in native people.

But the issue of race pales (ha! a pun!) in comparison to Cameron’s shockingly anti-military message. Watch movies for long enough, and you’ll see your fair share of anti-war films. But you’ll have to watch a long time to find a film that is not only so anti-war, but anti-military. What’s the difference? An anti-war film chronicles the terrible consequences (on soldiers, civilians, the land) of waging war. It may emphasize the futility of war. But it can also present soldiers positively in the face of these terrible evils. Even anti-war films can present soldiers as heroic, brave, virtuous, and wise. Cameron’s film bluntly opposes the very idea of a mechanized military. We consistently are presented with a contrast between Colonel Miles Quartich (Stephen Lang), the film’s clear villian, and every other character in the film. He’s not a scientist who just wants to learn, like Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver). He’s not a noble warrior like Tsu’tey (Laz Alonso). And when given the choice, he chooses evil (=Western =militaristic =colonial) when Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) chooses good (=indigenous =communal). The film’s only other villain is Parker Selfridge (the always-welcome Giovanni Ribisi), who stands in for the cash-hungry mission leader who is here to rape and pillage the land for profit.

In case the trailer or the description so far hasn’t made it clear, the film is a thinly disguised allegory for the war in Iraq, with that thin disguise coming in the form of an allegory of colonization of North America, with just a splash of Vietnam for color. Like a said before, the film isn’t exactly aiming for subtle.

What strikes me about the message of the film is how it inverts many of the images of Aliens, which Cameron directed nearly 25 years ago. In Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley enters a giant walking robotic suit to battle the titular alien, who is a queen defending her progeny. In this story, the hero uses technology to defeat an alien biological life form that is following its biological imperative to defend its young. In Avatar, a similar suit is used by the evil Colonel Miles Quartich to defend himself against a tribal leaders defending their clan. The same images of a technological exoskeleton fighting an alien are used in both films, but to remarkably different effects. In one, a battle between mothers is made equal by human technology. In the other, military technology is the very evil that is being battled, since it is what enables the destruction of these people, their home, and their sacred places. It’s as though Ellen Ripley, at the end of Aliens decided to join the acid-for-blood alien and fight the Company because, after all, what business do we have on her world?

Avatar is an ambitious film that holds an interesting place in Cameron’s corpus. Its images suggest Aliens, but its message suggests The Abyss. For a big-time Hollywood director, Cameron has always been a critic of moneyed power, and he takes that further in Avatar then he ever has before. It’s visually rich (maybe too rich – I recommend a strong shot of espresso to ease digestion), and thematically blunt in a Steven Spielberg manner, but, like many of Spielberg’s films, a rather stunning filmmaking achievement.

There’s been a spoiler-disclaimer backlash happening among television critics. You can read a nicely condensed argument at Monkey See. The even-shorter version of the argument: In TV journalism, “spoilers” applies only to reveals about unaired television episodes. If you time-delay on your DVR or if you are just now finishing season one of Mad Men, it is your responsibility to avoid discussions of what happens later. Journalists and critics can help by not spoiling things in the title of a post or article, but use your common sense: don’t read ahead. And if an article references an old occurrence from a different show, that’s not spoiling.

I am very sympathetic to nearly all of these points. But it’s not the policy I’m following here. Whenever possible, I’ll alert a reader to the television shows and films being discussed by placing a big, bold statement at the beginning of that piece. Even if it means, as it did in the last post, that I’m discussing only the first 30 minutes of the film Wendy and Lucy. Why would I be so hypersensitive? Because I am going to reveal information about a film that I want people to see and discuss, and by informing them of how much of the film I am discussing, they can decide for themselves whether to read on based on how much of the film I will be discussing. It’s just one of the many services I helpfully provide.

By informing the reader of which films or shows I will be discussing, and how mild or strong I consider the spoiler to be, the reader can make a more informed choice about whether to read on. That’s not always possible. If I do an end-of-the-decade discussion like the AV Club’s Best TV Series of the Decade or, more significantly, Best TV Episodes of the Decade, it will be impossible to avoid all spoilers. (Heck, it’s a list spoiler if you see the picture at the top of the latter article and know that shows on the latter list aren’t on the former list. Oh, well.) I’ll try in that case to keep them mild (e.g., talking about “romantic developments” instead of “getting married”), but remember that you proceed at your own risk, even as I try to help avoid big spoilers.