Katherine Bigelow

I just wanted to say that I've been a huge Katherine Bigelow fan for years. I would suggest you start with her early film, Near Dark, a very stylish and energetic film about vampires. She also made the highly effective Blue Steel in 1990 with Jamie Lee Curtis (in one of her best roles). Her 1991 film, Point Blank, starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, has become a cult classic. I think it a highly energetic and original film. Her masterpiece, up until the Hurt Locker, was 1995's Strange Days, a futuristic, Blade Runner-like vision of a dystopic future. It is visually brilliant and has great performances by Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett,and Juliette Lewis. Now we come to the Hurt Locker. I think it is one of the best war films ever made, an equal to Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. It abounds with brilliant performances and brilliant style. Any one of these films will show a true film artist at work.

The Art of "Asterisking"

What is chasing my good name? Good God, it's an asterisk! In an article at Big Hollywood's website, authors Andrea Shea King and Dave Logan pose the question: "Is Katherine Bigelow Hollywood's Roger Maris?" The connection may be nonsensical at first glance. What would a film director have to do with a baseball player from the past? It has to do with the asterisk. The particular asterisk in question is the one that followed and forever haunted Roger Maris' name. The year he broke Babe Ruth's record was a controversial one. There were so many die-hard Ruth fans out there, that the fact that some hayseed was going to break the Sultan's record not only enraged fans, but baseball's commission as well. The latter enforced the rule, as the article states, " that unless the record was broken in 154 games, the same number Ruth played in 1927, the new record would go into the record books with an asterisk beside it, because baseball's season was now 162 games long, giving Maris an unfair unadvantage." As a result, when Maris did indeed break the home-run season record, and not in the prescribed 154 games, he never fully got to enjoy his accomplishment. The damned asterisk dogged him until his death. The removal of the asterisk came many years later, but Maris never felt that personal validation. It came too late.

The meat of the article comes from Avatar director James Cameron's interview with MTV. The article quotes an excerpt: "I would say that it's an irresistable opportunity for the Academy to annoint a female director for the first time. I would say that that's, you know, a very strong probability and I will be cheering when that happens." From this excerpt, they extrapolate that Cameron might be doing to Bigelow what baseball did to Roger Maris. They ask, "Is Cameron inadvertantly-or deliberately-attaching an asterisk to Bigelow's name if she wins for the Hurt Locker? Is Cameron poisoning the well? If Bigelow is awarded an Oscar, will it be because she was the best?" They seem to think that it is a distinct possibility.

I say, unequivocally, that if she does win, the consensus among the voters is that she will have deserved it wholeheartedly and that it is not in any way a sentimental or symbolic victory. Firstly, Bigelow has won the Best Director laurels from myriad of groups including the National Society of Film Critics, the Austin Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the Washnigton D.C. Area Film Critics Association. Even to the layman's eye, this is quite an impressive and comprehensive list of accolades. In the film community, this solidifies the belief, among major film critic groups and film enthusiasts, that Bigelow did the best directing job of the year. And in all the cases excepting one, these awards groups named Hurt Locker the best film of the year. In effect, this means they believe she crafted the best film of the year beacuse let's face it, the director is the one that harnesses all the talent involved and is the one directly responsible for the final vision, the final success of the film. Most significantly, Bigelow just won the top honor from the Director's Guild of America. According to the Wall Street Journal, only six out of the guild's past 61 recipients of this prize have not gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Director. Couple that with her recent win at the British Academy Awards, and one can see that the odds are in her favor. I personally could sing her praises, but instead I will defer to America's most estimable film critic, Roger Ebert:

Katherine Bigelow's film has a masterful command of editing, tempo, character, and photography. Using no stunts and CGI, she creates a convincing portrayal of the conditions a man like James [the protagonist] faces. She builds with classical tools. She evokes suspense, dread, , identification. She asks if a man like James requires such a fearsome job. The film is a triumph of theme and execution, and very nearly flawless.

By the way, this excerpt comes from Ebert's article on his ten best films of the decade, where Bigelow's Hurt Locker placed second.

After all this exposition, I think that what one person says will in no way malign Bigelow's Oscar win. It is clear that her peers in the Director's Guild as well as the most influential critics' groups in the country have proclaimed her the "best director" of the year. Both of these entities have historically voted with conviction and not out of sentimentality. Leave sentimentality and popularity to the Golden Globes, where, consequently, Cameron's Avatar won both the Best Director and Best Picture statues even though not one critic's group capitulated. One last and most important item: if one continues reading Cameron's interview, he calls Bigelow a "genius director". He said it, I didn't.

Follow up on Ebert's list

My previous entry provides a link to Roger Ebert's list of the best films of the decade. I wanted to comment a little on a few of his choices. His pick for the second best film of the decade is the Hurt Locker. I believe that this film, scene for scene, equals both the grandeur and verisimilitude of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. Locker's director, Kathryn Bigelow, never falters. In scene after scene, she sustains a feverish intensity and a sure directorial hand. Just plain gritty, cinema-verite camerwork with minimal flourish. She is expected to be the first woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Director next month at the Oscars. It is also widely expected to win Best Picture. Jeremy Renner, in an Academy Award-nominated turn, burns with brilliant intensity as the ballsy bomb expert. One hardly sees this level of acting in movies anymore. This isn't imitation, it is being. Other notable movies on Ebert's list is Monster. I agree with him that Charlize Theron's metamorphosis is astounding and clearly one of the best and most harrowing performances to ever grace a movie screen. Other, more innocuous efforts include the masterful Juno with brilliantly incisive and witty dialogue by Diablo Cody and an indelible performance by Ellen Page, and Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, which I think is one of the most heart warming and spiritual experiences I've had in my film going life. Its joy is infectious as is its soundtrack. An endearing masterpiece.

Finally, I would urge all who visit Ebert's page to read his online Journal. The last few entries have been brilliant, Dickensian musings on London and his past perambulations there. His pieces are comic, endearing, bittersweet, and fecund with social observation. One can just sit back and admire great writing and bathe themselves in sumptuous settings. His entries are usually of a personal nature and reveal the estimable man, the mensch, behind the estimable critic.

Ebertiana

What the hell does Synecdoche mean? Websters defines "synecdoche" as a figure of speech, in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for the part. For example, a rich man can be coined a "Croesus" or a garishly made-up girl a "Monet".

In one of the recent entries in his online journal, Roger Ebert elaborates on his choice for the best film of the decade. His lists for the best films of the year, or for that matter the decade, are usually pretty eclectic, but the underlying element in all his chosen films is how well they present the human condition. The director of his "best film of the decade", Charlie Kaufman, has made some pretty unusual films that all deal with the vagaries of the artistic mind and how it blurs the line between what is fictive and what is real. Kaufman's writing is typically very nebulous but its aims are very ambitious. Ebert states that Kaufman's newest film, "Synecdoche, New York", is the director's most successful attempt yet to create a crystalline vision of the human condition. He writes:

"Synecdoche, New York" is the best film of the decade. It intends no less to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives...Charlie Kaufman [the writer and director] understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.

Ebert explains that the "artist" in question, the theatre director played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, finds that his play is not just some ersatz reality, something non-subjective and hermetically sealed. No, he comes to realize that the play, the characters, and the actors playing these characters are organic in nature. They yearn to break free from their prescribed barriers. They are not points on a Cartesian grid, but living, breathing sentient beings. Ineluctably, they start to intermingle with the "real people" off the stage, affecting them in ways they never thought possible. The seemingly impermeable membrane between fiction and reality now becomes permeable and indistinct. Think about it, when an author writes characters, do you think he/she does so objectively, with no personal investment? Would he/she spend the time, all those arduous hours it takes to write something enduring and cogent and not make it personal? Isn't a character just an emanation, either slight or substantial, of the author's own persona or what he/she thinks of as an ideal persona? It is the same for actors. There job is to develop a persona, either culling it from personal experience or through total invention, to fit the role. Either way, there is personal investment in it. In real life,as Ebert states, we ourselves develop personae to deal with variegated aspects of our lives. Whether we are playing the dutiful son/daughter for our parents, the stoic husband/wife for our spouse, or the "cool", acquiescing friend to our buddies, we play a role to placate our intended audience. Kaufman is saying that the whole world, in essence, is a stage, and that we are actors upon it, that we are both real and fictive at turns. We simply can't dismiss our creations because we are our creations, at least in some part. To think that we cannot learn from them stems from an inner naivite or a recalcitrance to confront one's own inadequacies.

Consciously or not, whether we want to or not, for good or for bad, we are creating, action by action and choice by choice, a comprehensive representation of the human condition for future generations to judge. This is precisely Kaufman's goal with his films (or any other serious artist for that matter) and especially with "Synecdoche, New York", whose stage and settings serve as a microcosm of the real world. The stage, then, is the world. The word "stage", then, is a synecdoche.

A follow up to the "Bears" article

I want to digress for a moment and talk about Werner Herzog, the director of Grizzly Man (the documentary about Timothy Treadwell of whom I commented previously on). He, along with Martin Scorsese, is the best director working in movies today. He is ostensibly less well known by moviegoing audiences than his American counterpart. But in the film community, he is legend. He is known as a true visionary, who will venture to any clime, go to any length, to get a film made. He has nearly died during several of his productions, either by tribal threats, curses, or a severe case of dysentery. His films are thoroughly German in their aesthetic. They are contemplative, metaphysical, visually sumptuous ,and the characters have a Faustian madness about them (what German, in any artistic field, has not to tried to emulate Goethe?). Firstly,I urge you to watch his film, Aguirre: The Wrath of God about Pizarro's expedition. Klaus Kinski, an actor even more maniacal than Herzog, plays the titular character brilliantly. Roger Ebert has counted this film as one of the ten best of all time- better praise is not warranted. Other Herzog masterpieces include Stroscek, Nosferatu (his brillaint remake of the Murnau original with Kinski), Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. The latter is an especially poignant film about a true-life outcast, a wild-child, who was adopted, rather too zealously, into "modern" society and the disastrous consequences it has on him. Any one of these films is a true litmus test for any self-proclaimed film enthusiast. His films are truly transcendent and can leave an indelible mark upon you if you open yourself up to the experience. Yes, they are that powerful.

Lions and Tigers and Bears..Oh My!

What...Republicans don't like bearhugs? So let me get this straight...if Treadwell had a conservative mindset, he wouldn't have performed the acts he did? Are one's passions simply an emanation of one's political ideology? I think that is ludicrous. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you are damning the character and spirit of Republicans. You are saying that they do not have the drive or the audacity to do what Treadwell did for many years. All you can cull from his tapes is that he was a "madman", completely irresponsible and unheeding of numerous warnings from numerous, more rational folk. But if you listen to Treadwell, you may well concede that he was a pretty intelligent guy. Conceding that, do you really think he did not know the dangers of being in such close proximity to the bears? Of course he knew, but I believe that he felt a strong connection to these animals. Ostensibly, the love and affection was not reciprocal, it never could be. But it didn't matter to him. To you or me, it does seem completely nonsensical to travel to distant climes in order to cohabitate with an incohabitable species. But does that mean that I should label him a madman, simply because his beliefs do not align with my own? Apparenty, you do and that's the quintessence of conservatism- "What we think is right and any who oppose are maligned." I admire Treadwell. He had a vision, an "ecstatic" one, of man and beast living together harmoniously, one not superior to the other. He died living out his dream and who wouldn't desire that? How many of us live mundane lives with nary a shred of excitement or elation? How many of our dreams fall by the wayside due to lack of conviction or courage? Take the celebrated writer Yukio Mishima, a brilliant author and playwright. He chose to die for his beliefs, because he longed for a return to a bygone era of honor, servitude, and death in the line of duty. Yes, he was a romantic, but he did have a crystalline vision of how the world should be and when it fell short, he simply could not go on living a semblance of a life. Treadwell is exactly the same way, a romantic. He even cut his hair to look like a Medieval knight on a quest to earn the respect of a fair beauty (in his case, the fair beast). It was all the same to Treadwell. And it is this kind of fanaticism, this single-minded purpose, this adamantine resolve in the face of overwhelming logic, that attracted the visionary filmmaker Werner Herzog. This great German director would kill himself, and nearly has, to complete a film (take Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo). They are kindred spirits. They are also poets in the Wordsworthian sense. They feel more acutely the vagaries of man and the emotions they feel as well as the chaotic elements in Nature. The latter entices them, interests them. Herzog is on a mission to commit these ecstatic truths to celluloid beacuse as he puts it, "the modern world is starving for images"- transcendent images that lift us to a higher plane of emotion, of consciousness. Treadwell was "foolish" enough in this cynical day and age to try to live constantly in that plane. Don't beat a man down beacuse he had the balls, the chutzpah, to try!

The Genesis

I'm in 10th grade Chemistry class, way in the back, and I am dead to the world. The latter phrase works here as a sort of "double entendre"- I had become completely desensitized to school (and most other things) and I was,literally, fast asleep! Up until that time in my life I had played the part of the devoted scholar, earning nothing less than a B since 1st grade. School, homework, was my forte and I took a certain pride in my abilities. I was also a comic book collector and a rather serious one at that. I had amassed thousands of issues, Marvel posters were ubiquitously thrown onto my walls, and I frequently wore, much to the perplexity of my classmates (the uninitiates), my Cerebus T-shirt (a representative and renowned piece of my esoterica). Acting as a subcurrent just below my passion for comics was my fascination with cinema. In my household, one watched movies all the time, either on T.V. or on scratchy Memorex. Also, watching the annual Academy Awards was ritualistic as was debating the winners/losers afterward.


As I stated earlier, in about 10th grade, something changed in me. I simply stopped caring. Stopped caring about school, homework, pleasing people,etc. I simply wanted to escape from a world that seemed painted, or should I say caked, in lugubrious tones and shades. That, compounded with the fact that I was maturing, or at least I thought I was mature, precipitated me to sell my voluble (and I rationed "infantile") comics collection for an insanely small price (I believe it was around $300). I had a plan for all this money: buy movies. My reason for this was twofold: movies were the ultimate form of escapism and it satiated the compulsive collector in me. I 've ALWAYS had to collect something (now it is books), and movies seemed an acceptable, and more mature, successor to comics at the time. I had asked my mother to buy a certain movie for me while she was at the mall and I would pay her back for it when she came home. The movie was Amadeus and my first viewing of it changed my life.

I chose Amadeus because it dealt with a weighty, "artsy" subject, Mozart, and it had won many Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, and Actor. I found as I watched it, that I felt elated, moved, in ways that I have never experienced before. After I a while, I was able to pinpoint the source of these emotions. It was the magic of cinema and its uncanny ability to marry music, editing, lighting, writing, mise en scene, and acting into a harmonious whole. Naysayers would call it emotional manipulation, but I don't concur with this opinion. The elation comes when all these elements have unitedly and harmoniously expressed universal and what acclaimed German director Werner Herzog coins "ecstatic" human truths. Take, for example a scene from Amadeus. Antonio Salieri, once upon a time the illustrious court composer to the Emperor, is now an old man in a wheelchair, in a sparsely furnished room of a sanitarium (he has just tried to kill himself, believing he was guilty for Mozart's death), talking to a nebbish priest. He recounts the time when he first encountered the precocious, childish Mozart and his music at a concert held in an opulent salon. After the recital is over, Salieri surreptitiously strolls up to one of the podiums and looks at the notes on the page. He waves his hand in time, and hears the notes unfold beautifully in his mind (and we hear it on the soundtrack). The camera zooms in on the young Salieri's face as he is brought to tears by the pastoral beauty and musical genius of the composition. He alone, in a room full of aristocrats and sycophants, recognizes Mozart as "God's instrument on Earth".(F. Murray Abraham, who plays Salieri, is brilliant in this scene. He won the The Best Actor Oscar for this role and richly deserved it). This recognition by Salieri of his own mediocrity sets in motion a string of events that eventually leads to Mozart's demise. Scene after scene of this glorious film displayed such nuance of acting, such daring and insidious writing which dared to plumb the depths of the human soul, and such a brilliant aesthetic, that by the end of the viewing, I was emotionally drained!

Since that viewing, I have honed my critical acumen through watching many films from many different genres. I also realized that the power of cinema could transcend language barriers by watching and worshipping the films of Fellini, Kurosawa,Ozu, Bergman, Bunuel, and Herzog. All great visualists but, most importantly, all great HUMANISTS! What both pisses me off and perplexes me is that still, to this day, most people don't see film as an art form, a legitimate art form. I can honestly say that I've seen films that have moved me as much as a Rembrandt painting or a novel of Dickens or Dostoevsky. Well-construted films contain great themes, powerful writing, indelible images, and transcendent acting that bravely present the human condition. If people would stop limiting the efficacy of cinema by thinking of it as simply a diversion or brainless escape, they could really engage, and even enhance, their emotional and cognitive faculties.

What I can do to achieve this legitimacy is be absolutely perspicacious in my blog in trying to disseminate the power of film to the masses. There are many great filmmakers out there, notably Martin Scorsese and Mike Leigh, with something pretty darned imaginative and meaningful to say. We need only listen with a willing mind and an open heart.