The Story of the Life of Pi: Pay No Attention to that Plan behind the Curtain

In an interview with Life of Pi author Yann Martel, Jenni Renton asks, "Would you say that religion and fiction work in the same way?"

Martel answers,

To the extent that for either to work you have to suspend your disbelief. The subtext of Life of Pi can be summarised in three lines:
1) Life is a story.
2) You can choose your story.
3) A story with God is the better story.

If you've read the book or seen the movie, you recognize this as not only a good summation of both but point three as being the final declaration of Pi to his interviewer, just not using those exact words. (If you have not read the book or seen the movie, you would be best served to do so without reading further as spoilers await)  The problem is, not everyone thinks that way and allegories work best when they're more than an allegory, that is, when they could easily function as something not allegorical.  No Country for Old Men, for example, can work as an allegory for many things or it can be taken at face value.  Because it does not state its message or meaning every few minutes, it can be so much more than an allegory, it can also be a sober and somber tale of treachery and evil.  Life of Pi, on the other hand, states its message with reckless abandon, points out its own symbols, and even identifies its own allegory as such in its final moments so as to let the characters, readers and/or viewers choose for themselves which made the better story (and if you didn't answer the one where a brutal and deranged Gerard Depardieu kills and eats a sailor, we clearly have different outlooks on life).

Of course, that's the point (that we all choose our own story) but it's weighted, heavily, towards the other story, the one with the animals.  We see the tiger story over the course of an hour but we only hear the deranged Depardieu story over a total of about five minutes.  When the choice is given, of which story is better, the deck has been relentlessly stacked.

I take comfort in reality and reason and Martel does not, as he points out thoroughly in this talk to be found here.  That's fine and he's the author telling the story so he should absolutely stack it in his favor.  But when he talks of children dying as a reason to have faith, i.e., to give their death a purpose, I can only think, having encountered such things in life, including a drowning, a fall to death from a bridge and a little girl of five cut up and stuffed in a closet, it is much more comforting to know there is no reason for it at all and no cosmic plan.  If there were, I would be forever depressed, in bed and cursing existence.  When he says, in the talk linked at the top of this paragraph...

And I remember thinking, if you are dying in your bed, you know, if your legs are like two little sticks and you have a mountain of a stomach and you’re rotted by disease, you know, you’re, the flesh on your face is melted away and you’ve lost your hair, what’s the point of being reasonable? Why not believe in whatever? You know, whatever? Jesus, Buddha, any one of these? Why not believe that someone transcendentally loves you? Why not believe that?

... all I can think is, "Because then that means you have to believe that someone in control has chosen this horrible end for you.  And now you have to die knowing that."  Perhaps that is comforting for some but not for me.  To me, that is hopelessly defeating.  I have children and would never do anything to harm them so the thought that there may be a cosmic power that decided it's an important part of the plan to have this child raped and dismembered or that child drowned in the rough surf is one that makes me sick to my stomach.  What evil would ever devise such a plan?

Life of Pi tells its story well but it takes the easy way out by not dealing with the nature of that cosmic plan.  What it does, instead, is say, "Life can be brutal and violent but if you substitute animals for the reality, it's easier to take."  That is, if you substitute a God story, it's easier to digest life.  But that's not true once you introduce the plan where Anne Frank dies of typhus and children are shot dead in a school.  Now the story becomes, "and there's a father figure that made this happen for a reason."

"So, wait," you ask, "you mean someone planned this out, someone who could have stopped it but didn't?"

Yes. And if that doesn't depress you, I don't know what will. I don't want to imagine that kind of evil, that kind of hopeless horror, planning out anything.

For me, the reality is more comforting.  I'd rather know that my friend's cousin, raped and mutilated at five and stuffed in a closet, died because horrible things happen, not because she was playing a part in an all-important plan, a plan so callous and monstrous and without empathy that it, in fact, involved a five year old girl being raped and mutilated and stuffed in a closet.  That plan is morally filthy beyond compare.  I'd rather believe that we are here to make what we will of this world and when we pass, it will not be because some plan pre-destined it but simply because we died.

In the end, I much prefer the philosophy of Will Munny:  "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

Thoughts on "Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel"

I tire of apologists for the racism of the past.  Despite the fact that there were plenty of prominent people who weren't racist in the early twentieth century (John Dewey, Eugene Debbs, Eleanor Roosevelt) much less all the non-prominent ones we know nothing of, we are often asked to believe that, good golly, folks just couldn't help but be racist back then.  Horrible racist attitudes were everywhere, yes, but there were people who didn't buy into it.  Those who did, and they were doubtless the majority, well, let's just be honest and say they were racists instead of saying, "You've got to understand, it was different back then."  And so it goes with Margaret Mitchell.

I recently watched the American Masters episode on Mitchell (Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel) and quickly found myself saddened at how much apologia it contains.  Having been produced in 2012, and knowing that nowadays people can simply look up Mitchell on the internet and read about anything the producers might leave out of the program, they wisely include the bad parts but also tend to rationalize them.  There's positive, too.  In the last ten minutes, they focus on her efforts to pay for scholarships for black students at Morehouse College and donate funds to build the first black hospital in Atlanta.  She gave money to Morehouse College upon the request of its president, Benjamin Mays, and this continuing act of giving scholarship money, throughout the rest of her short life, is to be applauded, certainly.  She obviously changed and grew as a person.  Still, there are episodes from her early life that give one pause.

One such episode occurred at Smith College, where Mitchell attended.  When she learned a black student would be in her history class, she demanded to be moved to another class.  Here's how historian Kathleen Clark explains that episode in the documentary:  "Sitting in a classroom with an African-American student offended her understanding of what was an appropriate context for blacks and whites to relate to one another."  Uh-huh.  Here's another way of explaining it:  She was racist.

When her teacher took offense (and good for the teacher), Mitchell wrote to her mother, "I want to know if the teacher of that class has ever undressed or nursed a negro woman, or shielded a negro man from being shot by the police."  Curious.  The documentary reveals no incidents in Mitchell's life of her heroically using her own body to shield a black man from being shot, nor, apparently, did Mitchell ever bring it up again.  So how exactly is this a defense of her actions?  Because the teacher's never done these things, her attitude is hypocritical? Am I to believe Mitchell would risk her very life to save a black man but found sitting in a classroom with a black girl simply too much to bear?  Do I even need to call bullshit on this one?

Mitchell grew up as a well-to-do white woman in the American South and had black domestic help.  The character of Mammy in Gone with the Wind is said to be based on her maid, Bessie.  Her view of black people tended towards them as simple, obedient children that white people looked out for and to whom they generously gave jobs cleaning up after them.  When she wrote her one and only novel, the aforementioned Gone with the Wind, she populated it with demeaning portraits of black people and was shocked, SHOCKED, that the black press hated the book.  She wrote, "They refer to the book as incendiary and negro-baiting.  I do not know where they get such an idea, for as far as I can see, most of the negro characters were people of worth, dignity and rectitude."  Of course, there's not a single black character who speaks out on slavery or isn't completely enamored of the O'Haras and serving them.  Hell, there's not even a black character who just seems a little pissed off or resentful at his or her station in life. As Elizabeth West, historian, states following the Mitchell quote, "Mitchell's black characters are not characters, they're caricatures.  If Gone with the Wind is the last statement about the experience of slavery in America, it would be a horrendous legacy for blacks to live with."

Later, at the premiere for Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, Hattie McDaniel, who received an Academy Award for her performance as Mammy, was absent since Georgia didn't allow black people to attend movies with white people.  This problem is the biggest of them all because David O. Selznick, Clark Gable and Margaret Mitchell (all in attendance) easily had the power to tell Georgia, "she comes to the premiere or we premiere it in Hollywood."  Does anyone really think everyone in Atlanta would boycott the movie if it had premiered in Hollywood instead, or if McDaniel had attended in Atlanta?  Come on, Gone with the Wind was destined for box office records from the moment the cameras first rolled.  In the great documentary, The Battle over Citizen Kane, Jimmy Breslin says this of the studios that caved when Hearst threatened to pull all advertising for RKO and stop promoting its stars: "You know, and those poor fools out there got scared, didn't understand until years later that the movies were more powerful than any newspaper ever could be. But they didn't understand that."  Hollywood could have told the Governor of Georgia to kiss McDaniel's ass in public and he would have done it to make sure the premiere happened.  And that's what is so sad.  No one had the courage to do the right thing, something that, with their standing and power, would've required little courage in the first place. No one stood up for Hattie. At the Oscars, they wouldn't even let her sit at the cast table.

Margaret Mitchell was not a horrible person, no, and yes, her beliefs and attitudes matured as she got older.  She gained more understanding and was willing to help out with the hospital and the scholarships but without letting anyone know.   What the documentary slyly refers to as "quietly" really means "anonymously."  The president of Morehouse, understandably on Mitchell's side given her good relationship with the school, says that if she had revealed publicly that she was helping black students, she may have been killed.  Well, no.  Racist thugs, coming down on the cowardly side and tend to kill children and civil rights workers with low public profiles, not Margaret Mitchell.  What would have happened is she would have set a powerful example for everyone that promoting higher education for all, no matter the race, was a noble goal.  But she didn't and that matters.

There isn't much to recommend this short (56 minutes) biography of Mitchell, unfortunately.  From the requisite voice-overs (something only Ken Burns seems to be good at) with actors who sound ridiculous in their overly-inflected readings, to the parade of talking heads not willing to say anything too challenging about Mitchell, to a rather rushed section on the biggest event of her life, writing Gone with the Wind, it's a sadly dull affair.  And with its consistent whitewashing of Mitchell's life and rationalizations for her more ignoble attitudes, a little insulting.  American Masters often provides insightful and challenging biographies of American artists.  This time, like Rhett Butler's old south, it appears to be a lost cause.

"This is the girl."

"Don't show me this fucking thing here."

"It's just an actresse's photo resume.  Everybody's got one."

"You got the money?"

"I sure do."

The Dead of Andromeda

The most chilling thing Robert Wise ever filmed, and the most subversive, was the village of dead people in The Andromeda Strain.  Nothing else in the movie can match it and it's a very good movie so that's saying something.  Although Wise had done eerie (The Curse of the Cat People), horrifying (The Body Snatcher), and spooky (The Haunting), he had never done anything as downright creepy as the scene in The Andromeda Strain when two scientists (Arthur Hill and James Olson) show up to investigate a town of dead people.

Wise makes hard choices early on, such as not turning away from children laying dead as well as adults.  Whether it was in the script or not, it was Wise's decision to go with it and go with it he did.  The opening shot, of an older man lying on his back, doesn't shock us because of the man's age and angle of the shot.  But then, without warning, we go to the next shot, two boys who dropped dead in the middle of a basketball game. And it goes on.  And on.  And on.  Another boy.  A dog.  An old woman.  A man in a barber chair and, slyly, the barber's feet lying on the floor next to him.  Blink and you'll miss it.  A younger woman with a peace sign around her neck lays dead, breasts bare.  An older woman in the next shot prominently wears a cross.  Then we see the suicides.  And an entire family, dead at a gas station while the mechanic slumps over the engine.

And the music?  Nowhere to be found.  The whole scene is shot in silence with nothing but the sound of wind behind it.

Coming from the man who gave us The Sound of Music, the scene is positively devious.  Wise seems to revel in showing one shot after another, perfectly staged and imagined.  The gas station scene alone, with a boy who just happened to pull up on his bike, and then die right there, is a beautiful master shot of a scene with close-ups that never follows.

The Andromeda Strain was one of the best science fictions of the seventies and it's suspenseful and thrilling throughout but its visual highpoint comes early when Wise decided to spend some time lingering over the dead.
____________________

See complete stills from the scene at Unexplained Cinema, here and here. 

Django Freeman, Oskar Schindler, and the Atomic Bomb

There are questions in this world that cannot be answered and many times they are raised by art.  Most of the time it is intentional but sometimes the question comes from the devices of the art itself.  Recently, Django Unchained raised the question, quite unintentionally, about what kind of history can be used as backdrop for story.   Django Unchained has been called a revenge fantasy and a spaghetti western and both of those have a little truth to them though, in the end, it is more a love story told through those genre conventions than anything else.  The problem is, or the problem that some people have with the movie is, comes with the historical reality of slavery used as a propellant for the story.  Some notable commentators on the subject, like director Spike Lee, find the idea offensive on the face of it and refuse to even see the movie. It is difficult to engage in a discussion about a movie one hasn't seen but for Lee, I suppose, the offense is too high to risk seeing it.  Tavis Smiley agrees.  On the other hand, how much harm can come to two grown men watching a two hour and forty five minute movie if the end result means they will be taken more seriously in their arguments?  It seems a no-brainer - see the goddamn movie, it won't kill you.  The two questions at the center of it all are simple:  First, how and when can a movie use history as a backdrop without causing offense?  Second, who gives a damn?

Both questions are as important as they are virtually unanswerable.  Let's say a filmmaker decides to use the horrifying event of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as a backdrop to a story of a troubled relationship.  And let's further say that the relationship story is treated with utter solemnity and the subject, of both the relationship and the bombing, are treated with respect.   In that case, you probably have Hiroshima, Mon Amour and won't find too many people taking offense at the use of such a disturbing event in the service of a fictional story.  If, on the other hand, the events of Hiroshima were used in a flippant or callous way, in the service of a tawdry sex comedy, things might be viewed differently.  Audiences might ask, "Couldn't you have come up with a different backdrop for your story than that?"

Or sometimes, the backdrop is so incidental that it seems wrong to use something so important for something so unimportant.  For instance, when I watched Shutter Island a couple of years back, I remember thinking, "Dachua, huh?  You had to use Dachau for a minor story backdrop?  Couldn't just turn it into watching a soldier die in a building after a battle?  Why?"  I wasn't hideously offended but, well, it just seemed a bit off.  That is to say, there are certain events in history that are so overwhelmingly awful that we owe it to them, if we use them at all in our stories, to make the story about them, period.  If I'm going to use the Holocaust in my movie then my movie better goddamn well be about the Holocaust.  It can occur inside the camps or years after (The Pawnbroker, Sophie's Choice) but the end result is, it better be about it and not used as some clever way of giving our lead character some deeper back-story.

The same goes for slavery.  Slavery in the Americas encompasses hundreds of years before the United States existence and nearly a hundred years after and it's in that "after" period that it really gets truly, monumentally awful. The number of men, women and children born into or sold into slavery and worked to death or beaten to death or simply brutalized by the knowledge that they were human property is incalculable.  Unlike the Holocaust, we don't have a condensed period of time, with modern records and census numbers, to make the task easier.  We have instead only the dreadful estimate that over hundreds of years (and given the number of slave ancestors living in the United States today) the numbers must have been in the millions.  And that is, by any measure, irreconcilably terrible.

And so, like the Holocaust, it feels as though a story that includes slavery as an important element of the story better goddamn well be about slavery for the whole story.  It's too serious, too horrible, too revolting an event in human history to be used as a plot device.  

But why?

Upon its release, Schindler's List was greeted with both praise and detraction.  Detractors stated that it was insulting that a movie about the Holocaust wasn't really about it at all but instead a tribute to a non-Jewish, German industrialist.   Why didn't Schindler's List tells Schindler's story through the eyes of Jews suffering instead?  At the same time, supporters asked why was it off-limits to celebrate one man's heroic act.  After all, if Schindler indeed risked himself and his business to save his fellow human beings, why is it a problem to celebrate that?  How else are you supposed to celebrate it without focusing on him?

But, it has also been said (by Terry Gilliam, for instance) that the Holocaust represents one of humanity's greatest failures and Schindler's List focuses on a success story.  Is that a problem?  Why?  Yes, it does focus on a success story but it does not imply that the Holocaust itself wasn't a titanic failure of human morality on almost every conceivable level.  It says only, in effect, yes, we know this larger event was awful but here's one tiny corner of it that provided a brief but meaningful cover from the rain of shit that defined almost all of it.

Django Unchained, of course, has a different set of problems than Schindler's List.  Django Unchained is not based on a true story and is only about slavery to the extent that it works to give our hero, Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx), a risk and a challenge in getting his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), back.   But, really, plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) could be a James Bond villain, the plantation a fortress and Django and Schultz (Christoph Waltz) two agents working to free their partner from inside (and Stephen, played by Samuel Jackson, could easily sub as the Bond villain's henchman).

Now it's not that Django Unchained doesn't show the brutalities of slavery in an unflinching way, it does.  It shows it in disturbing and uncomfortable detail.  But, in the end, it's all in the service of the "not without my wife" story and, honestly, I can see how taking hundreds of years of brutality and pure, unadulterated moral filth and making it a backdrop for a spaghetti western love tale might piss more than a few people off.  Just as I can with Schindler's List and even Hiroshima, Mon Amour.  I can imagine, though I have no evidence, that there were a few survivors of Hiroshima who felt fourteen years was a little too soon to start using their personal nightmare to tell a love story.  Survivors of the Titanic might have felt the same way about the countless movies made about the doomed ship but I don't really know.

But, of course, the second questions remains: Who gives a damn?  When I watched The House on Telegraph Hill a couple of months back and wrote it up for a blog post at TCM, I noted that it starts out in Bergen-Belsen and then said no more on the subject.  Here was a movie that was specifically using the Holocaust to set up a goddamn mystery-thriller.  That seems pretty damn offensive and, yet, it wasn't.  Why?  I don't know.   Maybe because it was made so soon after the actual events that I knew everyone involved understood the gravity of the event.  Maybe it was because the Bergen-Belsen scenes were so obviously stage-bound that it seemed harmless.  Maybe I just forgive older movies too much.

The problem here is that I can only assume that everyone involved in Django Unchained also understands the gravity of slavery just as the makers of The House on Telegraph Hill understood the gravity of the Holocaust.   And since Django does an excellent job of showing the horrors of slavery and the horrifyingly callous indifference of the slave owners, I imagine they felt it important enough that flinching away from it would be the bigger insult.

So where does that leave us?  In the case of Django Unchained, it leaves us in the same place that Schindler's List leaves us, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour and, yes, even The House on Telegraph Hill.  It leaves us in a place where it's up to each person who sees it to decide what level of offense they take from it.   I was not personally offended by Django Unchained because it was at least blunt and straightforward on the horrors of slavery.   Something like Gone with the Wind, so cavalier in its disregard for that very thing, so sugarcoating of the true horror of that very nasty, not peculiar, institution, is much more offensive.  No one is beaten or set upon by vicious dogs and everyone leads a happy, peaceful existence until those damn Yankees get all hostile.   Something like Birth of a Nation, coming up on its hundredth year anniversary, is such a nightmare of racial animosity and moral turpitude and so far removed from anything that is betrayed now that it probably belongs in its own discussion.

Those who would argue against Django Unchained or Schindler's List do so on the basis that films are not history but films do teach history to a great many people.  As we get further away from the horrors of slavery and the Holocaust, it's important to remember that plantation owners weren't given their comeuppance by freed slaves and German industrialists didn't work together to end the Holocaust.  Sounds obvious but give it another hundred years and a few more "inspirational" movies and let me know what the consensus is.  Think I'm crazy?  Check out any poll on how much people in this country know about history.  Christ, over a quarter of all Americans don't know we gained our independence from Britain and you're going to tell me we don't have to worry about movies teaching history?  The hell we don't.  Or maybe we can take solace in the fact that 74 percent do know.

Django Unchained, in the end, feels like a cartoon adventure, like that Bond movie scenario I alluded to up top.   I also found it rather dull for long stretches and easily the least of all of Tarantino's works (although I've never seen Death Proof so maybe that's worse, although I can't imagine anything worse than Parker Lewis Can't Lose sound effects being employed every time there's a smash close-up).  But does that preclude it from using slavery as a backdrop?  Is history something to be recited with unfaltering reverence or something to be riffed on and used for commentary?  I don't know.  I don't have a single, concrete answer to one of these questions.  I just hope art keeps forcing us to ask them.  If it does that, surely we can't go too wrong.

Ask for Babs: Barbara Stanwyck's Studio Shots

Back in the day, studios put together glamour shots of their stars in different locations and get-ups to give directors an idea of their versatility, or something like that. Kind of like a 1930's version of Peter Graves going through the photos at the opening of each episode of Mission: Impossible to pick his team.

Anyway, here are four of Barbara Stanwyck from 1935, courtesy of Paramount. I can only guess that decades later, while working up the idea for The Big Valley, the producers got a hold of that last one and thought, "Hey, wait a minute!"

My Name is Julia Ross, a Different Approach

My Name is Julia Ross is a great noir from Columbia Pictures, the studio whose noirs always took a backseat to Warner Brothers', not because Columbia didn't do a good job, merely because Warner Brothers did such an exemplary job.  That said, at 64 minutes, there's not much to screw up and a lot of chances to get things right while making the screenplay taut and focused.  And they do, except...

Actually, there is no except, just an observation.

WARNING: MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS FOR REMAINDER OF POST
.
My Name is Julia Ross was made just one year after Gaslight found its greatest success from all its versions with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer playing the roles of the tormented/insane wife and the suffering husband beautifully.  And I can't help but think they changed their approach so as not to seem like a ripoff of the 1944 movie, not in plot but in tone.

In Julia Ross, the titular character, played by Nina Foch, interviews for a job as a live-in house manager/secretary for an old widow and her son, Mrs. Hughes and Ralph Hughes, played by Dame May Whitty and George Macready, respectively.  She is hired when they discover she has no family and no friends in the area that might miss her.  She arrives at their home that night, settles in and goes up to bed.  When she awakens, she's in another bed, in a mansion by the ocean and everyone calls her Marion Hughes.  They tell her she is Ralph's wife and everything she thought she knew, about the secretary job, her prior life and even name, Julia Ross, are the manifestations of a crazy mind.  She is here to recover and, hopefully, get her sanity back.

Sounds like an incredible twist, right?  What's real and what isn't?  Is she really Marion Hughes or Julia Ross?  Was her life before really just a hallucination?  Is it all a plot to drive her crazy?  Why?

But it doesn't actually go the way I just described it.  Instead, she goes to the house on the first night and goes to sleep and then we immediately see Mrs. Hughes and Ralph plot to make her think she is the wife he murdered so they can convince the town that never saw his first wife that she is his wife and then make her appear to commit suicide.  And done.  No suspense.  No wondering what's real and what isn't. Instead of playing off of that for an hour and then revealing the true nature of the scheme at the end, we're told everything up front.  Kind of like if Shutter Island opened with the doctors talking over their plans for DiCaprio and saying, "Remember, he can't suspect he's a patient here."

I believe that would be the obvious way to go to build up tension but I suspect due to the success of Gaslight, they revealed everything up front and went with Julia plotting to escape instead.  And it works, completely.  But it could have gone a whole other way.  If only...

The Wild and Wasteful Ocean

Interrogation scene, Zero Dark Thirty.

Happy New Year, I guess.   Two weeks in is a little late to welcome in the new year but when have I cared about timing?

Speaking of which...

When a new movie comes out I'm often very excited to see it and then I see discussions all over Twitter and Facebook about said movie and I get even more excited to see it.  I bide my time while I watch screeners for TCM and write up articles and blog posts knowing that, as soon as I have the chance, I'll go catch the latest movie getting chatted up on all the social media that's fit to read.  And then the chance to see it finally arrives and, frankly, I don't give a damn anymore.

Here are some movies I was absolutely champing at the bit to see and now?  Couldn't give two shits less.

Zero Dark Thirty
Django Unchained
The Hobbit
Argo
Skyfall
Hitchcock

Here's what happened.

Zero Dark Thirty:  It caused a controversy and once that happens, watch out, here comes the endless online discussions that I myself got involved in.  Shortly thereafter, I got exhausted by the overload and no longer have any desire to see it.  I will, of course, just no time soon.  (I eventually see most movies from a given year but long after the fact).

Django Unchained:  I read too much about it.  Honestly, it began to look like a movie I would absolutely hate.

The Hobbit:  I was excited to see this when it was first announced, years ago.  I thought, "Wow, that'll be great for The Hobbit to get the full theatrical treatment.  Should be a nice, tight two hour movie filled with adventure and excitement."  Then I heard it was going to be two movies.  That kind of pissed me off because it seemed so nakedly greedy but I was still willing to give it a try, at which point it turned into a nine-hour trilogy.  Sorry, Peter Jackson, but fuck you.

Argo:  It came and went but of all of these it got the least talk.  As a result, I now find myself wanting to see it again.  It will be the first on this list I will see, without a doubt.

Skyfall:  This isn't much of a story.  I usually get excited for a new Bond movie for about two minutes and then forget about it.  Same happened here.  Hell, I still haven't seen Quantum of Solace.

Hitchcock:  In the production stage I was extremely excited to see this.  Then, it came out and so did the reviews.  Ouch.  I'll catch it on Instant.

Other movies I was never excited to see had trailers that, to my great misfortune, made me even less excited to see them.  The Life of Pi trailer makes the movie look like a never-ending CGI laser light show, a carnival of nausea inducing bells and whistles, flashing lights and extraordinarily overdone shots.  My God, how can you make an isolated boat on the water, something that is starkly beautiful in its solitude (see Jaws, the dinghy scenes from Mutiny on the Bounty or, hell, any scene in any movie ever where it's just a person on a boat in the water, from Friday the 13th to Castaway) and turn it into the goddamn Moulin Rouge?!

If they win, the dance team gets a five, the family
dog catches a squirrel, and everyone in Philly hugs
at the same moment, Bradley Cooper wins
the Oscar. It's simple, really.

Silver Linings Playbook's trailer made it look, to these eyes, like the smarmiest, cleverest goddamn rom-com you ever did see.  Ha, ha, look at him walking into his parents room at four in the morning to bitch about Hemingway!  Ha, ha, that's so utterly clever and contrived.  Ha, ha... oh, wait, I mean, groan.  Oh and there's the young widow, so young I can't possibly give any damns at all about her because she looks like she should be in high school and thus doesn't convince me she could have any depth whatsoever.

Both of those movies have received very good reviews so I'm more convinced that the trailers suck rather than the movies themselves.  Still, seeing a trailer can, sadly, ruin wanting to see a movie for me.  And in these two cases, the trailer really hammered the nail in the coffin, hard.

Other movies I was excited to see this year that I managed to see before they were all talked out, like Lincoln and The Master, sat pretty well with me.  I enjoyed both but neither sent me over the moon.  The rest seen this year range from the blockbusters (The Avengers) to the sleepers (Bernie) with the end result being a year that left me shrugging my shoulders.  But you know what?  I haven't seen Amour or Holy Motors or Argo (which, again, I am now excited to see for the second time).  I haven't seen Kon-Tiki, and I really want to.  And all those movies I don't want to see that I listed above I will see at some point and may love every damn one of them.   So I'm thinking it could turn  out to be a damn good year.  I just have to see it first.

P.S. - Jack Black was robbed. 

Opening Credits I Love: Bullitt (1968)

Pablo Ferro designed the opening credits for Bullitt, my second favorite Steve McQueen film (number one - The Great Escape).  I love the way the words drop off the screen and leave phantom credit behind which transports the viewer to the next scene.  Enjoy.

Zero Dark Thirty: Revert to Draft

After receiving numerous comments about seeing the film first that is exactly what I shall do.  I have reverted my post on Zero Dark Thirty to draft until I can see the film for myself.  It opens here on the 19th and I will see it shortly thereafter.  I honestly hope that everything I have heard about its embrace of torture is wrong.

Given everything that has been written or stated about the scenes in question, I have little hope that it is wrong but I cannot know it for myself until I see it.  One thing is for sure:  This year's Oscars already have the ready-made controversy they so greedily crave.   Perhaps they can even get a repeat of the 1979 ceremony honoring the 1978 nominees that included The Deer Hunter and Coming Home, with Jane Fonda yelling "The Deer Hunter is a lie!" as it won its Oscar.  Will someone yell the same of Zero Dark Thirty?  And will they be right?  We shall see.