Inessentials

What’s the last thing the world needs? Another blog post about Christopher Nolan’s Inception, of course. Yet, nevertheless, I have succumbed to the need to purge these thoughts from my (conscious) mind and implant them in yours. Beware, moderate spoilers ahead. I see no way to talk about this film without assuming you have seen it. I try to talk about other films in a non-spoilery way.

Marge Simpson gets psychoanalyz

Most of the debate about Inception (beyond, “does it work?”) has dealt with Nolan’s views of dreaming and the subconscious. A lot of the criticism of the film has focused on Nolan’s rather chaste view of the subconscious and his failure to capture what dreams are like and their relevance to cinema. First, it’s notable that there’s no sex in anyone’s subconscious here. We have one very modest kiss, a couple slinky dresses, and that’s about it. This isn’t exactly the untamed wilderness of lust and desire that people (especially Freudians) associate with the subconscious. There is some violence, but no passion for violence; just violence that is necessary for the mission. Second, dreams make little sense once you’ve left the dream world, but Inception works so very hard to make sense that it’s clear you are supposed to leave the film thinking that it all works. Third, there are filmmakers who push us toward portraying the unease and bizarreness of dreams filmically (David Lynch being an obvious example), but Nolan simply misses all of this. Fourth, many have theorized that experiencing a film is like experiencing a dream, and that films can play to this aspect of our experience, but Nolan fails to do this. Most film edits are like the leaps our brains make while dreaming, for instance. And films can exploit this, perhaps most directly by drawing attention to themselves by employing dream imagery. Inception, it’s been argued, fails to do any of those things that would make it seem dream-like or draw attention to the film as a dream. (I’ve previously argued that Gone with the Wind used dream imagery in this way.)

I don’t mean to rebut these criticisms directly. What I want to say instead is that these criticisms have missed an important aspect of what Nolan is doing. Nolan is not exploring the subconscious and not exploring dreams per se, he is exploring the tension between control and chaos (a theme that runs through most of his work) and using dreaming and the subconscious to further his interest in how we learn to control the world around us (or in this case in us). Three points to consider: 1. Nolan is a controlling director. 2. Chaos and control is an important theme in Nolan’s films. 3. Inception is far more concerned with control over the subconscious/dreaming than with the subconscious/dreaming per se.

First, it is important to note that Christopher Nolan is a “controlling” director, by which I mean that he is a director who works out ahead of time all or nearly all of what will be filmed (scripting, storyboarding, etc.) and the filming comes last. (I know, I know, postproduction comes last, but that’s still been worked out ahead of time). These directors are interested in each detail of the frame, what goes where, and in every aspect of filmmaking because they want to control as many aspects of the production as possible to as fully realize their vision as possible. Other examples of this kind of director include Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Other directors are more open to filming moments as they occur to them (like Ingmar Bergman’s famous closing shot in The Seventh Seal), or leaving pieces of the film open to interpretation (like the blindfolding of the sheep in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel), or working without a script (like Wim Wenders attempted on Wings of Desire). These directors (at least some of the time or for some of the film) try to capture something that is happening in the moment, something that cannot be planned, something spontaneous. This is why it is so odd to see the spontaneous, captured-in-the-moment shot of the fly walking across the camera lens from Truffaut’s Jules and Jim show up Jeunet’s Amelie, since these two films are polar opposites in terms of the sort of control I am talking about. Of course all directors exert some control; we consider Truffaut an auteur, after all, which would be difficult if he had no control at all over his films! I’m just trying to point to two different tendencies among directors. Nolan is the craftsman control, the planner, the preparer. And that’s an important way in which he is engaged with controlling his films.

Second, the theme of chaos and control runs throughout Nolan’s films. I’ll mention just the two that I have watched most recently (which are also his two most well known and most loved films), Memento and The Dark Knight. Memento not only exhibits the sort of supreme directorial control that I talked about in the last point, it is also the story of a man struggling to gain control over himself and his world while he has the unusual condition that he cannot form new short-term memories. We watch in each scene (especially the black and white “forward” scenes) as he tattoos himself with important things to remember, as he makes notes to himself, and (in one crucial scene) controls his future action by manipulating these physical reminders. We slowly come to realize over the course of the film that the other characters are each trying to control the protagonist in unique ways, exploiting the ways in which he is not able to control himself. Memento is, among many other things, a battle for control.

I don’t see much need to harp on the ways that The Dark Knight continues this theme of control. The film (in some disappointingly direct exposition) states the theme of chaos and control quite clearly. The Joker represents chaos. He destroys and terrorizes for the joy of the chaos. Batman tries to bring order to the chaos, tries to help the police and district attorney’s office gain control over the city, because only with this control can there be peace. Batman, though, is a conflicted figure because he tries to bring control by operating outside the bounds of society. He uses his own sort of chaos to help bring control, and thus cannot be an accepted member of society. (This plays into the trope in Westerns that the gunslinger is necessary but cannot remain in the civilized society, captured most beautifully, I think, in Shane.) The Dark Knight is about the relentless struggle between chaos and control and the extent to which at least some of us must become chaotic in order to keep things in control.

Nolan is a “controlling” director and his films engage in the question of how we control the world and the struggle between control and chaos at an individual and societal level. Let’s turn now to the most important point: Inception is far less concerned with how we dream or what the subconscious is really like than it is with how we can control them. Most reviews I’ve read haven’t dealt with this. (Caryn James is one exception.)

The characters in the film are very interested in how much control they have, and how much they are willing that control over to the others. See, as one example, the exchange capture in this TV teaser, dubbed “Control.”

Being in control versus out of control runs throughout the film. It’s spoken of more frequently, I think, than even the question of whether we are dreaming or awake, partly because the question of whether we are dreaming or a wake only matters (in the film) insofar as it affects how much control we have over what happens and what steps we need to take to gain control. Totems are necessary to keep a (literal and figurative) grip on whether you are dreaming so that you can maintain control. Mal loses control over her life because of the inceived (?) idea that the world she experiences is not the real world. This idea matters because she loses her control over herself. When Ariadne enters the shared dream world for the first time, she realizes that knowing you are in a dream can give you control over that dream (visualized beautifully by the city of Paris folding in on itself).

The story of Inception is largely one of control as well. The son who will control his father’s empire. The competitor who wants to control the world’s energy supply. The competitor’s attempt to control the son. And, since this film is in its heart a heist movie, learning to control one’s opponent through sleight of hand (or sleight of dream, in this case) is central to pulling off the heist. From the second scene, where we see Cobb controlling Saito to break into the vault (which he does by noticing Saito’s uncontrolled reaction of glancing in the direction of the safe). When Saito realizes later that he was in a dream within a dream, he wrests control back from Cobb. We could easily run through the whole film talking about how characters struggle against one another for control, how they must cede control by entering into one another’s dreams (which is, after all, very similar to the way we cede control to a film when we enter that darkened theater), and how they must learn to control their dream states.

It is this concern with control, I think, that makes Inception feel like a film that is all ego and superego, and no id. The film is not about the chaos, not about the uncontrolled, except for where it overwhelms us. Like Leonard in Memento or Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Dark Knight, Cobb has learned to control himself amidst the chaos of his own mind. Even his own subconscious is ordered: he takes an elevator to visit his memories/fantasies, which is a rather silly but sort of neat technique to define and control what seems uncontrollable. Just as Nolan attempts to exert a masterful level of control over his films, his characters are struggling to control their own minds and their immediate surroundings. And far less than in The Dark Knight, the characters of Inception do control the chaos. The chaos is never gone, but it can be controlled. Leonard will never control his memory condition, only learn to control what he can with it. Bruce Wayne must always become out-of-controlled society Batman to maintain control-within-society. But Cobb can go furthest in actually controlling himself.

One of the great mistakes of the film, I think, is the closing shot, because it leaves people talking about only that last scene, which is really one of the film’s most sophomoric elements. “Am I dreaming?” is not a question that is very well addressed by the film, so to leave the film on that question is disappointing. The characters are too busy running through the machinations of the clever plot to do any real work on answering that question. That’s not the sort of question that can be addressed by a zero-gravity fight scene or an imagining of one’s subconscious as a James Bond film. The question of how much control we have over ourselves is a question that can be addressed by the story, and that may be the only intellectually engaging question the film can handle. (The film is far better as a heist film than as a philosophical meditation on the subconscious or dreams.) It’s a question that is well suited to Nolan as a director, because his style and the themes he has been exploring for a decade have all been pushing toward this question of control. So a finely tuned, enormously complex, carefully explained heist plot is the right sort of film to address the question of control, but not the question of “what are dreams?” or “am I dreaming?”

A shared experience, carefully crafted to be as believable as possible, occasionally drawing attention to itself as a dream, always steeped in the images and formulas of genre that involves a remarkable level of control – yes, it’s both the world of Nolan’s Inception and our experience of it.

For the last three months or so, I’ve been dealing with an eye condition that makes my right eye blurry, very sensitive to light, and occasionally painful. The treatment for it includes (temporarily) making the eye even blurrier and keeping it dilated all the time. It’s a condition I have had before, and one that I will probably have periodically for the rest of my life. The treatment takes months, but it quickly becomes such a regular part of my routine that I hardly think about it. Because one of eyes is always dilated and out of focus, it changes the way that I interact with technology, so I thought it might be worth sharing some of these altered interactions.

I wrote all this for two reasons. One, I wanted to chronicle (for my own benefit) what it is like when I have this problem, so I can deal with it better in the future. Second, I thought it would be helpful to point out the ways in which I experienced technology differently because of a relatively small difference in my physical condition from most of the technology-consuming public. As ever, I am trying to reflect on who I am and how I engage with the world around me, although this time I’m less interested in the content of what I view than the physical conditions in which I view it. So bear with this unusual (and probably boring) post.

Tom Cruise in shades, from Top Gun

There are basically three things I have changed to deal with the problematic eye.

1. I avoid bright lights. This doesn’t just mean not going outdoors when it’s sunny. It also means keeping the lights off at home, even at night (where the glow of the TV is often the only light source).
2. When I am near bright lights, I wear sunglasses. This includes almost situations when I am outside the house.
3. I wear an eyepatch. Yes, an eyepatch. Even in low light settings, it can be a strain on my eye to be near any light (even the backlit glow of a computer screen). Add to this the fact that my problem eye is always out of focus, and suddenly using an eyepatch can be a very helpful way of seeing things more clearly.

These three changes have an impact on how I engage with various technologies that depend heavily on eyesight. I don’t have a smart phone and I don’t use my iPod for watching video, so I’ll leave those aside.

1. Movie theaters. I simply refused to stop seeing films at the theater because of my eye. So I typically wear sunglass through the previews, when the house lights are still on, then switch to the eyepatch for some or all of the main show. Being in a dark theater isn’t too bad, depending on the brightness of the film. Since I’m especially sensitive to light, I’m particularly aware of the difference in how films are lit. Big Hollywood studio films like Knight & Day, for instance, are considerably brighter than moody indie flicks like Winter’s Bone. Not only is there a difference in lighting techniques (not least Winter Bone‘s greater reliance on natural light), but these choices result in how much light comes through the film strips themselves and therefore how much light reflects off the large white screen and back toward the viewer. Winter’s Bone is more consistent in its color palette and brightness (from outdoor to indoor and from daytime to nighttime scenes) than Knight & Day is from car chase to warehouse gun fight. Other than noticing this, my unequal eyes don’t make a great deal of difference when watching a movie at a theater. It is a bit harder to focus when not wearing the eyepatch, and I do have less depth perception when wearing the eyepatch. But, surprisingly, if I am sitting from the middle to back of the theater, having zero depth perception hasn’t made much of a difference in how I see the film. The closer I move to the front of the theater, though, the greater an impact it makes. In watching Inception, I sat near the front of a crowded theater, and I was losing too much by wearing the eyepatch. It may be that Inception keeps its background in focus more often, or I was more often drawn to the details of the dreamscapes, and thus I need both eyes to take in what is happening, but I suspect that most of the problem stemmed from sitting closer to the screen, where it is more difficult to take in the whole screen with one good eye.
2. 

   How 3-D glasses work from 3dglassesonline.com

   3-D movies. 3-D is completely lost on me because I can’t focus with one eye. So among the many reasons to be skeptical of this “new” technology is that it is (like many “advances”) going to leave some people unable to participate. Since my eye started acting up, I saw only one 3-D film in theaters, How to Train Your Dragon. Watching with only one eye focusing through the 3-D glasses and one not focusing very well is very comparable to watching without the 3-D glasses (based on my mid-movie experiment). Watching with an eyepatch under the 3-D glasses makes 3-D even flatter than traditional film. (I think this is often true of 3-D even with both eyes working, but it is always true if you’ve got one eye covered.) My wife hates 3-D because it gives her headaches to wear the 3-D glasses over her regular glasses, and I avoid it because it so rarely improves a film. (I gave Avatar a “B” when I saw it in theaters, but I suspect it would be no more than a “C” if viewed on other formats. But that is the exception.) (And, yes, I do believe it is legitimate to grade films differently based on the medium employed.) But trying to watch 3-D with one good eye reminds me of how technologies affect people differently depending on their bodily circumstances.

3. Live theater. Going to watch a play is nearly impossible, since I can’t see the stage from the cheap seats (the only ones I can afford). Distance viewing is very difficult, and it is extremely frustrating to be unable to see what is happening on stage. Even if I can handle the lights, which is already a strain, the frustration over watching blurry shapes move around leads me to avoid traditionally staged plays. There is a small black-box theater that I love, that perhaps I could handle because I would be close enough to the action, but I haven’t tried it.


Daryl Hannah, sporting the eyepatch

4. Computers. I keep my laptop’s brightness as low as it can go while still being brighter than the ambient lighting. And, frankly, my MacBook just doesn’t get dim enough for my comfort. I still usually wear an eyepatch, since looking at a computer screen through dark sunglasses is nearly impossible. That increases the strain on my good eye, so I need to relax it more often (close it or focus on something far away for a short while). The one thing that is really noticeable, though, is how difficult it is to watch embedded videos. Nearly all video websites, from Hulu to Youtube to almost every blog on the planet, has a white (or similarly light-colored) background. Videos, however, are typically dark, or at least darker than their surroundings when viewed on a computer. Watching streaming videos on-line is thus one of the most difficult things for me to do. I can lose a lot of quality by taking (some) videos to full-screen; otherwise, it’s a game of trade-offs between making the video bright enough to see and making the surrounding page too bright.
5. Television. My very accommodating wife lets me keep the lights off in our house when we are watching TV, and (with that adjustment) television is the easiest technology for me to engage in right now (at least for the size of our television and its distance away). Apart from the difficulty I have reading subtitles with my poor distance vision right now, television is the most accessible technology for me, in part because it is the most easily adaptable. I have control over the ambient lighting (unlike a movie theater or the area surrounding an on-line video), I have control over the brightness of the television set (unlike a movie theater), and I have control over starting and stopping it so as to give me eyes a rest.
6. Books. Books are perhaps the most difficult to parse. The eyepatch makes it very possible to read a book, but focusing at a reasonable distance puts a large strain on my one good eye, so it is difficult to read for any length of time. This is especially true as day turns to night, and my eye has been worked hard all day. So while reading is quite easy to do (an advantage over almost every other viewable technology), it is very difficult to read for long periods of time. Speaking of which, back to the dissertation…

The dilated eye

Spoiler-filled discussion of the Toy Story and Bourne franchises

I watched the satisfying Toy Story 3 yesterday, which is not only setting box office records (Pixar’s highest grossing opening weekend) but critical ones (one of the highest rated films on Metacritic, for instance). The story follows the further adventures of the beloved Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the gang, as their owner Andy prepares to leave for college. There are some stunning action sequences (the film’s opening is a highlight) and some emotionally moving moments (a moment when the characters hold hands is especially poignant). But what stands out to me the next day is the rich political messages the film offers.

Firstly, there is throughout the Toy Story franchise an emphasis on the emotional rather than commercial value of toys, most clearly exemplified by the evil collector in Toy Story 2. That gets extended in Toy Story 3 by the film’s final sequence which shows 17-year-old Andy passing on his toys to young Bonnie. In addition to being yet another Pixar paean to imagination it’s a reminder that there is a joy to reusing old toys and passing on those old toys to others when they have more use for them which cuts to the heart of a consumerist aquisition of whatever is newest. Caring for old toys is a recurring theme throughout the Toy Story films, which goes beyond mere nostalgia. In the Toy Story films, imagination plus an old box, a paper plate, and some old toys make a perfectly workable spaceship game that are superior to any video game. (Computer games make a brief appearance in TS3, but the suggestion is that these are best enjoyed as a shared experience rather than a solitary one.) Re-using, sharing, and donating wisely are virtues at the heart of the Toy Story films. Disney may make a billion dollars from TS3 merchandise, but the Pixar folks would rather have you playing with your original Toy Story Buzz Lightyear than replace it with every sequel.

Secondly, and more remarkably, the middle third of TS3 showcases a fascist dystopia from which the toys must escape, The Great Escape-style. The Sunnyside Day Care is run by Lotsa Huggins, who smells like strawberries but rules the toys with an iron fist. In the midst of a Disney-financed blockbuster that will earn hundreds of millions of dollars in theaters, and more than that in merchandising and tie-ins, there is a surprisingly seamless tribute to Animal Farm. Orwell’s novel chronicles how easily totalitarianism can arise within democratic societies and how socialist ideals are easily corrupted. Toy Story 3 runs Animal Farm in reverse, beginning with a totalitarian regime (complete with brainwashing, violence, surveillance, torture) and ends with a benign ruler who encourages everyone to contribute what they can to promote the greater good. Like all Hollywood films, we’re required to have a trauma in Lotsa Huggins’ life that leads him to be such a cold, calloused teddy bear. And it’s not as though Toy Story 3 is running a political allegory of the sort that Orwell offered. My point is simply this: Toy Story 3 is a rich, complex story, and (like all rich, complex stories) it is an imagining of how the world works; such imaginings are inherently political.

It’s become commonplace for film critics to encourage viewers to see a film because it is “apolitical.” This happened a great deal with The Hurt Locker, a film that was praised for being “apolitical.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a truly apolitical film, but it would be awfully dull. Every film is political because every film says, in some limited way, “This is how the world is or could be.” So, sure, The Hurt Locker was not political in some narrow, crude sense of saying you should vote for a particular political party. But it was a highly political film in saying, this is one narrow glimpse of what war is like. In understanding what war is like for a bomb diffuser, we are better able to make political decisions like whether we should go to war. Now, critics say The Hurt Locker was apolitical in part because they wanted people to see a very good film and didn’t want them to avoid it for fear of getting Michael Moore’d by it. And some films suffer for trying a bit too hard to make a political point, such as Paul Greengrass’ The Green Zone. But every film, from romantic comedies to big war spectacles, contains depictions of human beings interacting with one another that can shape the way we understand the world. And your politics grows out of your understanding of people and how the world works.

Very big spoilers for The Box, A Serious Man, and Days of Heaven

Biblical allusions were once standard fare in literature, and film has seen its fair share of epic tales of biblical heroes. But (with one notable exception) it has been at least forty years since Bible stories were winners at the box office. More than this, references to the Bible have never been as important to classical cinema as they have been to classical literature. References happen, but they’re not as central to understanding cinema as references to other films, popular music, or Shakespeare. Cinema (with the exception of the one mostly forgotten genre) is much less interested in the stories of the Bible than it is in many, many other things. So I was a bit surprised to view three films in the past month that draw on the Bible in three different reasons.

Richard Kelly’s The Box takes a sci-fi story that had been worked over a couple times before and adds in Kelly’s unique blend of half-baked ideas to make his most successful film yet (successful artistically, not commercially). Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) get a button in a box from a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella) who tells them they have 24 hours to push the button; if they push it, the get $1 million dollars but someone they don’t know dies; if they don’t, life goes on as normal. Kelly’s tale is surprisingly suspenseful, even after it incorporates bizarre elements of the supernatural. The Box, like Southland Tales, overstuffed with references, but to no discernible purpose. What are we supposed to make of the Jean-Paul Sartre references, for instance? More immediate to our purpose, what is the point in connecting Arthur and Norma (and the other button-pushers) to Adam and Eve? In each case, a woman pushes the button. Is there some misogyny lurking in this decision? The mysterious stranger is a Serpent figure (from out of this world), and their consequence has Tree of Knowledge-like implications, but what exactly are these implications? Kelly seems content to make the reference, even if it clouds what’s really going on. But the sneaking suspicion in all three of Kelly’s films is that there is nothing deeper going on. There’s just a story crammed full of references. There are a lot of ideas, but none that are fully pursued, none that make the film stronger, none that are important because none matter to the story. No one needs to know the story of Adam and Eve to understand what is happening in The Box, and the references to that story only muck things up.

On the other hand, A Serious Man from Ethan and Joel Coen can only be understood if one is familiar with the biblical story of Job. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg) watches his life fall apart, and his journey of anguish parallels that of Job’s. Gopnik even visits three rabbis who mirror the advice offered by Job’s three friends. A Serious Man is less effective than other Coen Brothers films at presenting a world in which we sympathize with a protagonist cut adrift in a cold, heartless, amoral world. But it nicely summarizes some of those themes. When the film ends with a tornado, it is hard to make sense of what is happening unless one is familiar with the story of Job. When God finally appears to Job (chapter 38 of the eponymous book), it is after a devastating wind. When the film leaves off this deus ex tornado, we see that the Coens are reinforcing what the film hammers all the way through: either the world is random and nothing matters, or there is a God out there who is just screwing with us. God isn’t going to save the day, because our lives show us that if there is a God, then the universe isn’t just disinterested, it’s a cruel joke. Knowing how Job ends is essential to understanding why A Serious Man ends where it does.

Finally, Days of Heaven, the wonderful 1973 film from Terrence Malick, takes a more traditionally literary approach to biblical allusion. The story of Days of Heaven (which hardly matters in a Malick film, where you just want to soak in the gorgeous images and fascinating edits) centers on a trio of early twentieth-century drifters. When Bill (Richard Gere) meets new people he says that his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) is really his sister. (Why? For Malick, it doesn’t matter. He just does.) This story recalls three different accounts in Genesis where Abraham and Sarah (twice) and Isaac and Rebekah are travelling in a foreign land and the husband introduces the wife as his sister. This ends badly for the local leader, who takes the wife/sister as his own (either wife or harem) and then suffers for it, before the truth is revealed and all is restored. In the film, this suffering happens in the form of a locust plague, which is a smart way of connecting to another Pharaoh story. Malick’s allusion deepens the appreciation of his film without depending on it. It doesn’t matter in Days of Heaven as it does in A Serious Man when and how the film diverges from the story to which it alludes. You don’t have to “catch” the reference to appreciate what he is doing, but your appreciation is deepened when you do. By treating the wife-sister narrative as an archetypal story, there is no need drop clues about what the writer-director is thinking, as Kelly too often does. The story speaks for itself, and if you are familiar with the Bible, history, literature, film, you’ll further appreciate what is happening, but you can enjoy it plenty even if you don’t.

I just happened to watch these films in near succession, but I like how they represent three different approaches to allusion. There’s postmodern name-dropping (Kelly), required background reading (the Coens), and archetype (Malick). Malick’s is simultaneously the most subtle and the most successful, but I’m not convinced that this is essential to the approach; it’s at least as likely that Malick is the most talented of the filmmakers (all of whom I admire a great deal).

Spoilers for Precious, but none that go beyond a general knowledge of the story

I finally got around to watching Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. (Yes, that really is the title of the film. They couldn’t keep the title Push because people might have thought it starred Cherie Currie and Captain America.) I had hesitated watching Precious for a long time, in part because reviewers I trust had hated it. But one of my general rules of film viewing is that you should see any film that divides critics sharply. Did some love it and some hate it? Go see it. Was everyone sort of blah toward it? Skip it. So Precious, like Rachel Getting Married or The Box, was something I was going to get around to eventually. (By the way The Box was completely underrated. Tense, loving, thoughtful. Give it a chance.)

Precious is not an easy film to watch. In part, this is because of the subject matter (abuse, incest, poverty, hatred). In part, this is because of worries about how this film might be received (is this reaffirming people’s ideas of welfare moms or urban black experience?). In part, this is because it’s just not a very well made film. And ultimately, it was the last concern that turned me against it.

I admired some of the performances in Precious, and I was won over to the need to tell a story like this, which is under-represented in American filmmaking. But the material is so poorly served by the director, Lee Daniels, that it distracts from any social value that Oprah and Tyler Perry apparently think it has. For example, in one particularly difficult scene, Precious’ mother chases after Precious, screaming abuse and throwing things at her. But Daniels cuts away from this to show a Polaroid of Precious as a baby being held lovingly by her mother. He does this twice. But why? To tell the audience that a mother should love her daughter and not throw things at her? We already knew that. To tell the audience that the mother once loved her daughter? We could assume that, AND it undermines the emotional impact of the scene. Cutting away to the Polaroid ruins the emotional impact of the scene, and Daniels seems not to realize that these sorts of choices can ruin a scene. We don’t need this juxtaposition, because we already understand that things have gone poorly in this mother’s life and she shouldn’t be verbally and physically abusing her daughter. This is just one example of how, throughout the film, themes are underlined, italicized, and highlighted in unnecessary and counter-productive ways. Setting aside the banalities of the story-telling (yes, there’s a teacher who just cares so much, and, yes, Precious steals food because she is so hungry), the film trades in nuance for thematic bludgeoning. But even this trade would be acceptably if there were any new insights being offered. Instead, we have an unhappy mixture of social melodrama and experimental filmmaking, and neither is successful.

This strangely apolitical film, which tries to focus narrowly on one (fictional) girl’s experience, never ventures into truly bold territory, like suggesting what went wrong instead of telling us repeatedly that this is wrong. You know going into the film that incest is awful and devastating, and you know it leaving it. You know going into the film that the world is a mixture of people trying to make it better and people trying to skate by, and you know it leaving it. You know going into the film that some kids are born into a life that’s unfair, and you know leaving it. And for a film whose marketing suggests you’ll leave this movie changed, the film does very little to actually encourage a change in the viewer. This is not a film that can be appreciated on pure filmic grounds, and it can’t be appreciated for its psycho-social insights. And that means there’s not much left to appreciate.

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.