The Armond White Thread - THE GRANDMASTER and THE WORLD'S END

We know. You love Armond. If Armond and I were in a bedroom and you had to choose one of us, you'd choose him.

I'd give all my loving to you, but I'd keep Armond in the room for moral support.

He is the closest I have to a superego.

I'm not convinced.

Sharky wrote:

Too much time wasted on mind-numbing synopsis.

Synopsis is necessary to speak to a readership that hasn't seen the film. A necessary evil, if you will. Otherwise, Gonzalez's thoughts on the film are spot-on.

Sharky wrote:

I've always liked the way Armond draws parallels and contrasts between other films.

Too bad they are often inane, as his reference to RACHEL GETTING MARRIED is.

Santa wrote:

We know. You love Armond. If Armond and I were in a bedroom and you had to choose one of us, you'd choose him.

Sharky wrote:

I'd give all my loving to you, but I'd keep Armond in the room for moral support.

He is the closest I have to a superego.

Santa wrote:

I'm not convinced.

Clap! Clap! Very good. You guys could open for Rave and Ambler.

I don't think so. Sharky is much younger and fitter than Ambler.

I'm seeing THE SKIN I LIVE IN tomorrow night, and I have to say Armond White's rave has me intrigued.

Quote :

The Incredible Tom
by Armond White on Dec 21, 2011 • 10:53 am 1 Comment
Cruise’s Mission Impossible Victory

Brian DePalma’s 1996 Mission Impossible was a cartoon even though he didn’t direct it like one. The sheer, exhilarating pleasure of Mission Impossible IV (officially subtitled Ghost Protocol) comes from star-producer Tom Cruise’s ingenious decision to cast animation master Brad Bird. This is easily Bird best film since The Iron Giant and the best parts of The Incredibles; it’s even good enough to forgive Ratatouille.

It was clear from Ratatouille that Bird’s animation skills had fallen into a Disney-Pixar mousetrap. Cruise rescues Bird and Bird returns the favor. When Ethan Hunt’s Impossible Missions force reduced to three (Paula Patton, Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner–all MVPs) attempt preventing a Soviet madman from initiating nuclear Armageddon, the resemblance to James Bond intrigue brings out Bird’s best–that tongue-in-chic use of space and speed that gave The Incredibles such pop-cult zest.



Whereas DePalma’s hyper clear visual style was gravely emotional even when the action was absurd, it didn’t quite transform the TV-based material into the Fritz Lang revelation DePalma intended (despite the helicopter/train Chunnel sequence’s very obvious reference to Lang’s 1929 Spies). Bird’s movie is lighter, yet more visionary. Using IMAX camera technology for the central Dubai sequence where Ethan reppels down the 2716 foot Burj Khalifa tower, Bird fulfills his gift for space and composition without being limited to drawing-board flatness. The realism of the spectacular stunts and vertiginous montage between simultaneous actions by Ethan’s crewmates make this the most invigorating big-budget American action movie in years. Plus, it’s cast with actors who provide character gravitas: from Ethan’s physical and moral commitment onwards, they credibly convey genuine stress–Patton’s love-grief, Pegg’s geek-courage, Renner’s wonk-regret are perfect for the apolitical essence of the series.

Co-producer J.J. Abrams tried and failed to make a deluxe TV-movie in Star Trek. Abrams simply lacks a cinematic eye comparable to Bird (comparable to DePalma? Forget it.) Bird’s conceptual staging of a prison break, a choreographed seduction at a ball in India and a chase during a desert dust storm display a big-screen sense of movement that harkens back to great animation as well as silent movie slapstick. Ethan’s remarkable reppelling stunt is truer to the spirit of Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last than the tiresome homage that Scorsese crams into Hugo. And the large-scale sleight-of-hand sequence in an ultra-modern parking garage pays witty, bruising homage to the delightful acrobatic auto-factory chase that Cruise tumbled through in Minority Report.

If Ghost Protocol was any better, it would match the splendid advance of action movie aesthetics that Luc Besson has spearheaded in the Transporter movies (especially Olivier Megaton’s Godardian Transporter 3) as well as Angel-A, Taken, From Paris with Love and this year’s terrific Colombiana. These recent heroic action narrative innovations by Besson, Paul W.S. Anderson and Neveldine-Taylor are accomplishing what DePalma was after. Hollywood is slow on the uptake. Tarantino, Eli Roth and their ilk can only amp-up brutality; they lack visual wit. But in Ghost Protocol, Cruise and Bird are catching up. It is a rare pleasure to salute a Hollywood action movie that gets it right.

http://cityarts.info/2011/12/21/the-incredible-tom/

Quote :

Fincher Goes Gaga
by Armond White on Dec 21, 2011 • 10:45 am 4 Comments
Dragon Tattoo Remakes Nonsense

You can’t get your mind off Lady Gaga while watching David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Gaga, the ubiquitous pop star summoned up by the same self-loathing zeitgeist that popularized the Stieg Larsson crime novels as well as their Swedish TV-movie franchise, bears an uncanny resemblance to Lizbeth Salander, the franchise’s protag originally portrayed by Noomi Rapace and now by American actress Rooney Mara. By not casting Gaga as the Goth-eyed bisexual computer wiz with the pixie haircut, multiple body piercing and tattoos, Fincher missed out on confirming his pop bona fides. Why Fincher is enamored of film geeks and critics is a bigger mystery than any in the film itself.



Although indulging that same interest in violence and serial killing that marks his most popular films, Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, Fincher’s not interested in character or narrative. Dragon Tattoo is consistent with Fincher’s advertising-slickness. This remake doesn’t streamline Larsson’s strained, overloaded plot but merely glosses its surface. Instead of getting to its potboiler essence–the way Gaga appropriates familiar riffs and tweaks them into meaningless anthems–Fincher has made a nearly three-hour movie trailer with Gaga themes.

Salander, is a deliberate cipher like Gaga (no wonder actresses with double-aught first names take the role). Her chameleonic appearance fronts a confused, nihilistic, yet very sentimental gimmick. It’s the unrequited love story of a chronically sexually abused waif, the too-knowing child of contemporary dystopia (tracing a prominent Swedish family’s breakdown to 60s disorder then Nazism) and a disgraced journalist played by Daniel Craig, the latest James Bond. And sure enough–with commercial savvy worthy of both Mad Men and Gaga–Fincher introduces this s&m Little Nell story by imitating a James Bond credit sequence. It’s pure hack work–Fincher‘s ultimate motivation.

With videographer Jeff Cronenweth, Fincher figured out how to dress-up the Swedish trilogy with trendy pop references–including a montage of black and white stills on a computer screen that pays homage to The White Ribbon, the Michael Haneke standard of Euro-trash. It is only Cronenweth’s cool, glistening videography that keeps Dragon Tattoo from being as dead-in-the-glacier as Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. These images drift toward nothingness, even the money shot of Lizbeth’s revenge upon her parole officer (she tattoos “I am a rapist pig” on his body in a crucifix posture) resembles a halfhearted Gaga blasphemy. Her promise “And there will be blood” is as much a Gaga lyric as a Paul Thomas Anderson shout-out.

Trent Reznor’s score provides a new kind murder music, laughably indistinguishable from a floor-waxer or jet engine. Fincher’s team of high-priced, show-offy hacks are simply in the business of polishing and numbing Dragon Tattoo’s repugnant storyline even if it means incorporating such distractions as Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” or Enya’s “Orinocco Flow”–mash-ups worthy of Gaga. It’s all pointless enough to revoke Fincher’s Kubrick Fan Boy membership card.

http://cityarts.info/2011/12/21/fincher-goes-gaga/

Quote :

Thatcher Sings
by Armond White on Dec 13, 2011 • 1:26 pm

Streep’s Iron Lady Makes History

Before confronting Meryl Streep’s remarkable transformation as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, it behooves us to consider Thandie Newton playing Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in Olivier Stone’s W. Newton’s portrayal of a female public figure invading a masculine realm necessitated combining tenacity with feminine reserve—a rare sight, especially in the genre of biographical political drama. Stone’s ambivalent concept in W. constrained Rice—as well as Bush—between tribute and satire. Yet Newton trod an unmistakably original middle ground; it was a bold artistic victory in the face of media-wide scorn.



Streep and director Phyllida Lloyd achieve a similar take that! victory in The Iron Lady, going against prevailing liberal preconceptions: They humanize Thatcher’s rise in British politics with a specific understanding of (rarely seen) feminine tenacity. The Iron Lady doesn’t confuse its tribute because Streep and Lloyd (whose goofy Mamma Mia! collaboration grossed a fortune, thus gaining personal power) find a deeper core to Thatcher than her political achievements.

Streep and Lloyd emphasize a principled woman’s wily resolve. They give emotional detail to moments that define the character while also shaping an era (“Move to the right!” she instructs her daughter during a driving lesson; “Someone must force the point,” she tells political advisors). If this upsets liberals who can’t tolerate the opposition articulating a polemic, that’s too bad. Streep and Lloyd force politics to provide deep, rousing human insight.

The British, being Shakespeareans, are past masters of a tradition of replaying, if not reexamining, political history through the perspective of complicated heroism. It’s a distinct form of culture, unlike Americans’ current tabloid-partisan tendency seen in Stone’s W. and the wretched Frost/Nixon. Watching Streep’s Thatcher score points about the miners’ strike, equating the Falklands War to Pearl Harbor and disparaging pseudo-feminism (“Instead of doing something they want to be someone”) is theatrically thrilling as well as politically challenging.

Streep’s maturity (the hallmark of her socially attuned and underrated performances in Lions for Lambs and Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate) grants greater subtlety to her flamboyant gift for mimicry. Her old-lady tics and vocal lilt are as authentic as Dame Edith Evans in The Whisperers.

Lloyd provides delicacy and rapport worthy of such eloquent historical biopics as The Young Mr. Pitt, Becket and the recent Amazing Grace. But Lloyd also nimbly depicts the context of Thatcher’s passion in a clever montage of female high heels among male wing-tips, a speech from St. Francis and a syllogism about thoughts, words, actions, habits and character that allows Streep/Thatcher to really sing. The obtuse, however, will not sing along.

http://cityarts.info/2011/12/13/thatcher-sings/

Quote :

The P Word
by Armond White on Dec 26, 2011 • 3:17 pm

Pariah is such a decent film it is a shame that its title seems designed to keep people away. The “P” word title is too close to Precious, the abomination that set-back the recent cultural progress.

In Pariah, debut writer-director Dee Rees tells a coming-of-age story rooted in the family and social customs of black Americans, but its lead character, Alike (charmingly portrayed by Adepero Oduye) lives a universal story. Alike is a teenager lesbian who has difficulty making her sexual awakening compatible with her strict family life. She alternates two worlds: the teen dyke subculture and the boundaries of her home life with a policeman father and socially-obsessed mother.



Alike’s on the verge of romantic access, the state of expectancy too often overlooked in an era that programs kids to become immediately sexually active. (Blame Madison Avenue and its flip side, Hollywood/ MTV.) Choosing realism as a storytelling mode, Rees introduces an exotic subculture of tough, physically thick girls alongside the conventional high school girls and daddy’s pets.

Ethnically, there hasn’t been a film like this since How She Move, departing form the conventions of Bring It On and Easy A that are essentially recent derivations of John Hughes movies that queers and teens of color relate to, even without seeing their personal reflection. The way Alike interacts with different sets of peers (her younger sister, her best friend and a new duplicitous flirt) reveals news sides of American teen life.

Part of what made Precious so scandalous was its distortion of non-white teen life as bizarre, contradicting the progress that mainstream media likes to claim for the Obama era by indulging the worst racist-Liberal stereotypes about African Americans. It may have so seriously damaged the general perception of African American femininity that the makers of Pariah felt compelled to respond–or conform to mainstream interest. The gamble has not worked. Precious has been ignored in the year-end awards chase–with The Help providing the mainstream’s preferred slander of black women.

The unsettling title Pariah exaggerates Alike’s fear of being an outcast–as if begging for toleration rather than asserting her humanity. The good news is that Rees tells an individual momentous story in a modest way and she directs her performers so that their full humanity is displayed: Charles Parnell as the stern, loving father, Aasha Davis as the flirt (“I’m not gay gay”) and Kim Wayans as Alike’s panicky mother, herself the product of a different, inflexible feminine traditions.

Finding no villains and no outcasts, Rees (and surely executive producer Spike Lee–a more socially conscious producer than Lee Daniels) have made a movie that includes a full range of family and social complexity. Rees’ view of adolescent controversy deliberately avoids controversy–and that’s its strength. It recalls another taboo-adjusting, gay-themed, P-word movie, Carl Franklin’s little-seen Punk. It’s worth checking out, too.

http://cityarts.info/2011/12/26/the-p-word/

"You can’t get your mind off Lady Gaga while watching David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

Well that's patently false. She didn't come to mind once for me.

Agree with him on M:I, though.

Armond's reviews never make any sense to me. They read like a very padded college essay.

You could probably take one of his reviews, condense it to a one paragraph forum post, and lose nothing in translation.

Then you'd lose Armond White. His prose is one of the most unique things about him.

Sharky wrote:

Then you'd lose Armond White.

Mightn't be so bad.

Harmsway wrote:

Sharky wrote:

Then you'd lose Armond White.

Mightn't be so bad.

Then what else would we have left? The banalities of A.O. Scott, Glenn Kenny, David Denby, Manohla Dargis, Johnathon Hoberman,.Roger Ebert, Leonard Maltin, and David Bordwell? No thanks.

We'd still have Michael Sicinski. That's enough for me.

Are any of these professional critics really needed in this day and age? I'm constantly reading well-written, perceptive and thought-provoking reviews from unknowns on the IMDb and on various blogs and forums (including this one).

Loomis wrote:

Are any of these professional critics really needed in this day and age?

Yes, but not the ones I listed above. In White's words, he's knows his sh*t, and has the life experience, education, and understanding necessary to be considered a genuine film critic, not simply a reviewer or Hollywood shill.

You can now follow Armond on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/#!/3xchair

Quote :

Spielberg’s Game Changers

Movie watching can never be the same after the doubleheader of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, his first animated film, and his live-action War Horse. Each film upgrades the way our imaginations construct the world, the way we see ourselves in the digital age. All art devotees should recognize the history being made.

Tintin, the intrepid boy reporter from Belgian author Hergé’s cartoon storybooks, and Joey, the young stallion traversing World War I-era Europe as in the hit Broadway stage play, both emerge from the childhood reveries that often start Spielberg’s fictions. These imaginary protagonists go through large-scale comic and dramatic escapades that not only span the breadth of human experience but apotheosize it.



In the language of pop immediacy, Tintin and Joey’s stories are immersive—a term for the right-now gratification encouraged by both digital media and the exhausted cultural legacy recently eulogized in Godard’s Film Socialisme. Tintin’s childhood curiosity and resourcefulness and Joey’s natural grace and endurance are captivating on so many levels that the usual terms of film appreciation hardly apply. This may be key to why many critics underappreciate Spielberg; they react conventionally to these unconventional films and are bewildered by Spielberg’s refinement, precision, piquancy and vision.

Perhaps the best way to understand the achievement of these two revolutionary films is to realize that they do nothing “new.” Their revolution is in Spielberg’s technique—very familiar after almost 40 years of popular and profound entertainment—but now with a new impetus and subtler depth. As a modernist filmmaker, he turns Tintin into a commentary on traditional genre expectation and pushes beyond it, toward the personal feelings about history and legend that are stirred by fantastic exploits and imaginative catharsis.

In War Horse, Joey is at the center of the historical events that define what came to be known as modernity—eternal class struggles intensified by war that level all our ambitions and vulnerabilities, whether English, German, French—or American. (It purifies global human values, as Denis Villeneve’s Incendies also showed.)

Embarking on digital anime methods, Spielberg has answered the need to reconceive the pleasure to be had from the adventure genre and war movie—The Adventures of Tintin is state of the art, War Horse is commemoration. Both are prophecy.

For Spielberg, entertainment equals enlightenment. Not realizing that, critics take Tintin’s on-screen miracles for granted. There’s too much for ordinary critics to look at, starting with the opening scene of Tintin having his portrait made at a street fair: “I think I have captured something of your likeness,” he is told by a painter. When we see it, it is, of course, a Hergé drawing—now a caricature of a cartoon.

From that image onward, Spielberg toys with ways of seeing. Lenses, binoculars, window reflections, magnifying glasses and mirrors pop up everywhere (clever self-consciousness in the script by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and Steven Moffat).



A less thoughtful filmmaker, such as co-producer Peter Jackson, would settle for telling Tintin’s story (maybe even making it as convoluted as the awful Lord of the Rings trilogy, which set back the intellectual development of digital fantasy). But Spielberg continues the modernist ethic of heightening viewer awareness. Intrepid Tintin becomes our digital-age surrogate, reenacting chase movie traditions like River Pheonix in The Last Crusade (the basis of the credit sequence’s silhouette overture) but at waterslide velocity.

This is far beyond the hackneyed talk of dreams in Scorsese’s banal film school lecture, Hugo—Spielberg believes in cinema as kinetics, prioritizing movement, not antiquated “cinephilia.”

As ultimate cinema, The Adventures of Tintin features the bliss of camera movement. A sequence in Tintin’s apartment where the model ship he purchased at that opening street fair becomes the object of an action-ballet burglary has ingenious slapstick speed. It was Hitchcock who famously exclaimed, “Spielberg doesn’t think in terms of a proscenium”; Tintin’s P.O.V. is positively gyroscopic. The images are always vertiginous, as when sailors slip-slide in their bunks or pet shop canaries circle a man’s head after he falls.

This wittily stylized activity evokes how we dream. As we watch, we live the history of cinema and animation just as spectacularly as André Bazin theorized our recognition of nature and experience in photographic realism.

Tintin advances the motion capture technology that Robert Zemeckis has fumbled with for years (hideous faces in The Polar Express, Halloween expressiveness in Monster House). The improvement allows animation to affect cinematic realism (unlike Scorsese’s out-of-scale CGI) but as aestheticized dream play.

Spielberg’s narrative escalates when Tintin, seeking the secret of the Unicorn model ship, encounters drunken Captain Haddock and learns the ship’s history. In Haddock’s meta-narrative, legend segues into visions, then flashbacks, and vice versa. These endlessly inventive transitions (a ship in a desert mirage morphs onto roiling seas) salute David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia as well as Roman Polanski’s Pirates (the latter particularly in Haddock’s Walter Matthau-countenance and bluster).

Yet, Spielberg’s sensibility controls the fable’s crescendo—the friendly confidences that Haddock, Tintin and his white terrier Snowy share recall the emotional connections to history and family in Catch Me if You Can and The Last Crusade. Haddock chronicles a legendary competition between his ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock, and the pirate Red Rackham that ties the Unicorn to three lost scrolls and leads to even more awesome spectacle.

Spielberg shows lyrical inspiration: an amazing sea battle where one pirate vessel swings on the mast of another ship, leaping from churning waters to aerial sparring. Nothing in Pirates of the Caribbean compares. Mere fancifulness is heightened in favor of centrifugal force. These vectors are repeated in a later joust between gigantic cranes that surpasses the dynamism of Michael Bay’s Transformers 3.

Chief among Tintin’s climaxes is an extended chase sequence that may be the greatest in movie history; it juggles characters, narrative strands and those scrolls, plus Snowy and a mischievous falcon, and stretches across the screen. This ribbon of hurtling delight recalls Temple of Doom but with clearer, brighter imagery. Spielberg uses 3-D width, not just background-foreground depth, which is more than practitioner James Cameron ever conceived of and closer to Paul W.S. Anderson’s panoramas in Resident Evil: AfterLife and The Three Musketeers.

Scorsese’s sad, dull use of 3-D in Hugo just seems part of contemporary Hollywood’s techno hoodwink to sucker family audiences and intimidate cineastes. But Spielberg utilizes the gimmick as an occasion for reexamining cinematic imagery. Confronting Hergé’s Tintin rendering with his own green-screen Tintin startlingly brings together 20th- and 21st-century modes. Ready or not, the double image of cartoon and 3-D Tintin propels us forward.

If 3-D is ever to be an acceptable narrative technology, it will have to unlock viewers’ imaginations, as in Zack Snyder’s The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga‘hoole, and not blatantly repeat the primitive “realism” of early movie hucksters, which Scorsese unhelpfully romanticizes. Neither Wim Wenders’ Pina nor Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, recent exercises in 3-D documentary realism, were as good as their fictional predecessors, Altman’s The Company or the 1959 Journey to the Center of the Earth. Tintin’s cartoon mode defies Wenders’ and Herzog’s banal gimmickry (which is why it will also work in 2-D, offering as much carnival delight as Temple of Doom and 1941).

Tintin’s 21st-century artistry redeems our corrupted taste for narrative and spectacle—it’s the best kind of restoration. This rediscovery inspired the aesthetic behind Spielberg’s follow-up project: War Horse looks like a cinematic version of an illuminated manuscript. Its cavalcade of human longing and suffering during World War I has an uncanny spiritual tow, thanks to the way cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s glowing frames combine storybook and Hollywood epic grandeur.

Joey, the horse bought at auction by a struggling farmer, becomes a surrogate for young Albert (Jeremy Irvine), whose attachment and faithfulness are tested when Joey is taken into service by the British army and on the continent becomes part of the lives of two German brothers, a young French girl (Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup) and anonymous soldiers on the battlefield.

Anyone who takes for granted the emotions elicited in War Horse fools themself to think they’re slogging through clichés. The human emotions reflected in Joey’s sojourn are purified to a spiritual essence. There is an uncorrupted, presexual belief in human potential in this series of tales.

The critic Dennis Delrogh insightfully caught Joey’s resemblance to the African slave’s travails in the criminally neglected Amistad. Indeed, War Horse views Western “civilization” from an indentured soul’s distance (same as in The Color Purple) that is almost prelapsarian—not just anti-war but wartime seen with honest, not idyllic, moral complexity.

The first battle scene brilliantly confronts us with the horror of undefended Germans attacked by brutal Brits; the unexpected shock is matched by the poetic startlement of riderless horses seen leaping over machine guns. This image is as haunting as Griffith’s seminal “War’s Peace” in The Birth of a Nation, capturing the irony in ritualized killing.

Spielberg uses Joey’s story to achieve the equivalent of an outsider’s unbiased detachment, fair to the tragedy and beauty of worldly experience. This richness derives from concentrating narrative skill with popular perceptual needs. It shames the shallow view of war (and Germans and violence and love) that Tarantino disgraced in Inglourious Basterds. QT’s nihilistic revisionism negated the humane values previously held in wartime narratives.

Spielberg challenges such cynicism while encouraging viewers to recover their basic emotional responses. QT wants audiences to enjoy killing and vengeance—the folly of the post-Vietnam unengaged, anti-military sensibility. Spielberg steps back from that and resurrects the profundity of war service.

What he learned from the research for and reactions to Saving Private Ryan causes him to practice the same scrupulousness as earlier generations of war vet artists, from John Ford to Kurosawa. The result produces either catharsis or the confusion felt by those who have grown comfortable with cynicism and are inured to the beauty that comes through Kaminski’s supernal images.

Spielberg’s flaming sunsets are more referential than QT’s film geek echoes; they evoke Gone With the Wind romanticism but with the same modernist sentiments as Coppola’s The Outsiders and Téchiné’s French Provincial, films that use the movies’ past to articulate a contemporary longing. It’s the height of sophistication, achieving complex expression with phenomenal simplicity.

Spielberg has arrived at David Lean/John Ford’s visual grandiloquence and emotional clarity—greatness is at his fingertips, but it’s also the result of artistic integrity. Every sequence in War Horse may seem summary because its episodes—whether of Albert and his family or various civilians and soldiers, including Tom Hiddleston as the figure of sacrificial British rectitude—suggest a parable on anguished human aspiration and arrive at their point with stunning elegance.

This is especially true of Joey’s wild attempt at escape, enmeshing himself in trench wire. An extended metaphor for the terror and absurdity of No Man’s Land, it eschews warfare but symbolizes tormented flesh and anxious spirit—Joey as one of God’s noble creatures. It is a sequence of sustained agape, the stark animal-equals-soul image suggests the full range of torture, enslavement, cruelty and finally—breathtakingly—hope through mankind’s humility.

War movies inherently memorialize, but Spielberg uses his gift for action to capture frenzy plus its moral implications. The scene goes beyond mere genre filmmaking but also brings us back to reflect on genre and what styles and methods of storytelling mean to modern consciousness.

War Horse has a different kind of resonance than The Adventures of Tintin, but it isn’t necessarily better. Each is an experiment that could only be possible after the distillation practiced in The Adventures of Tintin. Spielberg’s reconsideration of cinema aesthetics allows him to refine the cinematic image; to create, as critic Robert Storr said of Gerhard Richter, “works of art that attempt—and I believe succeed—in fundamentally repositioning the viewer in relation to…the 20th century’s running narrative of utopianism and despair.”

Tintin and War Horse range between utopianism and despair through comedy and drama, but it’s important to note how their nearly abstract visual styles address our changing perception of the moving image narrative.

Only dullards would misunderstand these visions as either trivial or clichéd. By altering the imagery of his Indiana Jones cycle and stylizing Hollywood’s pictographic classicism, Spielberg uses cinema “in a way which is both extremely personal, even idiosyncratic, and extremely pointed, even polemical…verging on the abstract,” to quote Peter Wollen, also writing about Richter’s paintings-based-on-photographs.

In the digital era, our basic assumptions about movies have changed with the methods of their exhibition and consumption. Movies won’t be the same—we know that from the way critics settled for the shoddy look of the Iron Man and Harry Potter flicks, The Artist, Hugo, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris and others that have no visual quality to speak of. Movies as we knew them are over; today’s increasing artifice concedes to digital, but Spielberg finds the perfect expression of new imagining.

Quote :

Jar Jar Binks Goes to War

George Lucas’ sales tactics for Red Tails, his $93 million production about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American pilots in the armed forces, make a bigger bang than the film itself.

On the publicity rounds, Lucas has talked about the dearth of movies with African-American heroes, promising that Red Tails will give black teens the kinds of on-screen heroes and patriotic good feeling they’ve been denied. Apparently, Lucas has missed all blaxpoitation, post-blaxploitation and post-hip-hop cinema, not to mention the 1995 TV film The Tuskegee Airmen. Lucas’ ignorance condemns Red Tails to be irredeemably condescending. It’s also one poor piece of filmmaking. Red Tails’ 332nd Fighter Group are a bunch of superficial GI stereotypes, black only in the brown-skinned Obama sense, displaying superficial personal traits. Their captain, Easy (Nate Parker), drinks for courage, and pilot Lightning (David Oyewolo) is a brash daredevil.



Their commanders, Col. A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) and Maj. Emmanuel Stone (Cuba Gooding Jr.) are shallow lifers given to speeches about perseverance. All are cartoon figures; visually, the film also resembles a cartoon: postcard colors that make the squadron’s base at the Ramitelli Airfield in Italy look like it was shot in Southern California (oops!).
Cartoonishness defines Lucas’ approach to Hollywood revisionism; he doesn’t take World War II any more seriously than he took the Galactic Empire, and The Tuskegee Airmen mean no more to him than the Jedi knights.

The pilots, who due to military segregation were denied the right to fly combat missions but were used as escorts and decoys for white fighter pilots, perform selflessly to unspecific codes of conduct, as if they were uninvolved in history (their war chant: “To the last plane, to the last bullet, to the last man, we fight, we fight, we fight!”). This is goofball heroism, though totally without a sense of humor—less, even, than Snoopy’s fantasy dogfights with The Red Baron, which Red Tails frequently evokes.

Why comic strip artist Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks) participated in co-writing the screenplay is mystifying given the film’s total lack of his usual sarcasm. McGruder, too, must believe in The Force, which has infantilized American cinema since Star Wars, and so answered Lucas’ call to sign up. That meant signing on to the notion that moviegoers wouldn’t respond to a serious depiction of young men who fulfilled the intellectual requirements of aviation or comprehend the complexity of young black people who felt duty-bound to fight for the country that denied them basic civil rights.

Lucas and McGruder don’t go for realism but the most meretricious fantasy. McGruder viciously trashed Lucas for creating the Jar Jar Binks character in a Star Wars prequel—he’s lucky Red Tails makes no dent in the culture; it would ruin his cool cred.

Lucas’ rep for puerile entertainment stays intact. Star Wars modeled its intergalactic battles after World War II combat movies, so Red Tails models its computer-generated World War II dogfights after videogames. The lack of visually credible flying contradicts the significance of the real-life heroism.

Director Anthony Hemingway—recruited from TV’s overrated The Wire—must only be comfortable with ghetto stereotypes and urban miscreant clichés. His images of principled military men and the 1940s era are unconvincing, and the post-synch dialogue has the same laughable impact as a badly dubbed Japanese monster movie. Nothing in Red Tails shows serious artistic commitment.

By promoting Red Tails (named for the Airmen’s customized new P-51 Mustang aircraft) as a correction of Hollywood bigotry, Lucas shows that he knows nothing about how popular culture works. In a New York Times magazine puff piece, Lucas explained his wish for cultural crossover: “Which is what you get with sports. Which is what you get with music. I wanted to do it with just being an American citizen.” He ignores how black moviegoers have often identified with white movie heroes and enjoyed cinematic patriotism—and not vicariously. When Red Tails’ Airmen fraternize with white officers, they never so much as ask which states they came from. This isn’t American culture; it’s beer commercial bonhomie. Lucas has spent so long in the manufacture of sci-fi nonsense that he has lost grasp of realistic human behavior. He cast Howard and Gooding for their contemporary currency, even though emphasizing their soft voices and pleading demeanors distracts from the ideas of masculine military strength and dignity that Lucas means to convey.

Red Tails not only insults the experiences of the Tuskegee Airmen, it is disconnected from the figures of black male dignity that audiences embraced when forged by Rex Ingram, Paul Robeson, Juano Hernandez, James Douglas, Canada Lee, Woody Strode, Ivan Dixon and others that George Lucas forgets. He’s Jar Jar Binked us again.

Quote :

The Also-Rans: Rampart’s Hipster Cop



This exclusive CityArts series will chart the recent peculiar releases that failed to get Oscar nominations. Yet, just like the Oscar-nominated fare, these movies are not a part of film culture but exist outside what moviegoers patronize and talk about. The films’ staggered release from December 2011 to early 2012 delays the effects of film on the public. These movies don’t seek popular response; they’re made simply to stroke filmmakers’ egotism.

Rampart is yet another movie that still doesn’t answer the single most unanswered question in the history of film genre: Why does one become a policeman? L.A. cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), known as Date-Rape Dave and Bang-Bang Brown for recklessly killing an innocent rape suspect, is a conceit, not a character. He’s a 24-year vet, hyper intellectual, stud-paterfamilias, juggling ex-wives and two daughters—symbolic of the white male prerogative gone wrong. Yet director Oren Moverman (co-writing with James Ellroy) use the conceit gaudily; their “investigation” continually backs away from the social reality that makes the name “Rampart” a resonant term for urban police corruption from the Ramparts section of L.A. (Curtis Hanson’s film of Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential similarly romanticized and distorted L.A. police history.)

Moverman affects film noir style, which was originally a technological advance meant to portray spiritual conditions through stylized social environments, not obscure or gloss it with visual artifice. Reminiscent of Drive and just as insipid, Rampart appeals to a generation that divorces cinema from social and moral questions. Like Dave Brown, it’s all posturing, without a hint of social consciousness.

Note how Brown goes off when addressing an Internal Affairs panel: “I’d like the event to be judged ad hoc. Empirical knowledge often distorts the content of the act on scrutiny.” His words could well describe a Todd Haynes ploy (Overman scripted Haynes’ I’m Not There): Too much artiness, no relationship to social, historical, political, human reality. Rampart even breaks the Hollywood cop movie traditions that dealt with L.A. corruption, from Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground to Lee Tamahori’s Mulholland Falls and innumerable TV shows in between. Hollywood social consciousness led to (sometimes honest, enlightening) formula. This sub-genre of politically speculative fantasy is a sociological version of sci-fi. Its authenticity resulted in pop art like Charles Burnett’s The Glass Shield and the NWA rap song “F— the Police.”

Ice Cube (star of The Glass Shield and former NWA member) makes a bizarre appearance as an IA investigator, challenging Dave Brown in Cube’s unmistakable truculent drawl. But what’s Cube doing in this gaudy mess, which is less reliable than one of his rap fantasies? It’s sad if Cube thinks Moverman and Ellroy’s apathetic exploitation of urban corruption even comes close to exposing L.A. law enforcement scandals. Not even Cube’s bravado provides insight into why one becomes a cop. The profession is just an opportunity for actors to grandstand. Harrelson plays this melodramatic monstrosity calmly and subtly. His bald virility recalls George C. Scott, but Scott, as in The New Centurions (1972), belonged to an era when filmmakers knew how to write characters.

Moverman and Ellroy only write sociological bluster. The gaudiest is a speech to Cube. Its fatuousness bears repeating: “You got this assignment because I’m controversial and your ancestors were stolen from Africa. You got this assignment to cover the department on perceived racial bias pertaining to Shomwell J. Parley and other shit-faced scum. You’re mad as hell and you want me to know it, but bear in mind that I am not a racist. Fact is I hate all people equally, and if it helps, I’ve slept with some of your people. Now you want to be mad at someone? Try J. Edgar Hoover. He was a racist. Or the founding fathers, all slave owners. Me, I’m just doing my job.”

But the motivations for the job are precisely what Rampart avoids. Its distractions include a sex club orgy scene—the latest in this year’s pretenses like Shame. Brown’s masculinity is tested by interchangeable blonde bots (Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon, Robin Wright), like the women on Fox News. That’s not Liberal snark, but evidence of what left Liberals and right Conservatives have in common—attitudes so full of self-pity they cannot possibly show empathy, just the same race-smugness that besets The Descendants. The worst is when Brown’s daughter charges, “You’re a classic racist, a bigot, a sexist, a womanizer, a chauvinist, a misanthrope. Homophobic clearly, or maybe you just don’t like yourself!” Fact is, Brown’s just a liar, which Moverman tries inflating to existential proportions. Rampart isn’t critical of police corruption; it simply favors hipster narcissism with a badge.

Quote :

Tiresome Threesome: Movie Star Casualties in ‘This Means War’



In the stultifying Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, British actor Tom Hardy briefly appeared in a romantic subplot as a heartbroken, repentant operative who laments all the impenetrable death and subterfuge simply because it cost him the woman he loved. For a few fleeting moment, Hardy’s alert eyes, sensual lips and magnetic ruddiness broke through film’s tedium, making the story clear and accessible—then his character receded, sinking back into the middle-brow muddle. For different reasons, Hardy’s youthful blush is also wasted in the new knockabout spy comedy This Means War, where Hardy plays the loser in the film’s ménage a trois with Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon.

CIA agents Tuck (Hardy) and FDR (Pine) vie for products executive Lauren (Witherspoon)—they dodge bullets, make passes at the woman and threat/passes each other in a pointless, meant-to-be-funny sexual competition. This latent homoeroticism is livelier than in Tinker Tailor, yet so persistently unfulfilled that it feels both mistaken and misdirected. The film’s uncommitted approach to the battle of the sexes and gender confusion has as little to do with current sexual habits as Tinker Tailor does with contemporary politics. It’s a lowbrow version of Tinker Tailor’s skepticism about government pushed toward cynical manipulation of today’s baffling romantic impulses.

Here’s Hardy, a genuinely charismatic movie actor in a period where the incumbent George Clooney runs on an outmoded, blatantly insincere platform of smarminess, stuck in the teasing outsider position of a love triangle. That Tuck loses Lauren to Pine’s FDR (FDR?!) settles for a blandness that goes against movie-watching instinct.

The film doesn’t have the subtlety or finesse to successfully maneuver action comedy, screwball romance or bisexuality. Just when you expect the threat of danger to edge the film toward the risqué, it stays banally far outside it. Director McG takes none of it seriously, which is a disappointment given that his two previous films, Terminator Salvation and We Are Marshall, indicated McG was outgrowing the adolescent puppyishness of his two Charlie’s Angels retreads.

It must be commercial desperation that makes McG hit every note here so tunelessly hard; he can’t even juggle the physical humor of shoot-outs, skydiving and mano-a-mano one-upmanship. If McG could have aced the assignment and found a method of slapstick eroticism, This Means War might have made sense of its raunchy and reckless view that combines global political problems (post-9/11 romantic disillusionment) with the anxiety of personal commitment. Instead, it’s as bonkers as Brangelina’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

If Tinker Tailor suggested a Bourne movie directed by Béla Tarr, This Means War suggests one of the stars of Jackass directing a Valentine’s Day chick flick while lying in traction. I would have expected McG, of all directors, to come up with a romantic comedy version of the Jackass movies. Hardy and Pine supply enough comic virility (Witherspoon, alas, is superfluous and performs anxiously). The entire overbright, overbearing production is already outdone by a viral promotional clip of McG and Hardy dropping their pants to become paintball targets. That clip is funnier and more authentically boyish than anything in the film’s arrested adolescent assumption that anyone wants to see two guys persistently go after the same woman while fighting Eurotrash terrorists and dodging the ire of their angry boss (Angela Bassett).

This Means War runs along three separate tracks that never successfully converge; it’s just off the rails. Hardy’s waiting-in-the-wings movie-star charisma seems not only underutilized, but misunderstood.

Quote :

Tarr and Horse Feathers: Art Movie Turns to Glue



Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse isn’t funny at all but it sure is laughable. A Hungarian farmer with a bum arm, Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzi), lives in a drab, yet limitless cabin with his morose spinster daughter (Erika Bok), who boils potatoes that go half-eaten. This goes on for two and half hours. What’s laughable are the festival-circuit panegyrics that praise The Turin Horse as “total” cinema (I guess because it isn’t recognizable as anything except “cinema” at its least revealing). Not knowing these reviews makes the viewing experience drudgery; knowing them leaves one derisive.

I’ve admired previous Tarr films—especially the magisterial Werckmeister Harmonies and even Satantango, which I kinda hated but found compelling. Tarr’s camera movements and long takes show that he “savors film,” as Pauline Kael said of Michael Cimino directing Heaven’s Gate. In The Turin Horse, Tarr (co-directing with Agnes Hranitzky, whatever that means) is like the titular beast pulling that tired old dray; he’s treading water. Yet fest-circuit-whores pull out their quota of references—Beckett repeatedly. But why must Tarr be Beckett? I liked him for being Tarr—circling and panning and traveling with his camera in ways that critics forgot Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, Andrei Tarkovsky and Max Ophüls have already done. Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters” opened my adolescent eyes to the world; Tarr’s potatoes simply make me hungry for French fries.

It’s providential that The Turin Horse opens in the U.S. after Spielberg’s War Horse. Pseuds will prefer the European opus because it’s baffling. The sophomoric insistence that mystery and negativity are deeper than clarity and feeling satisfies moviegoers who forgot the basic—essential—glories of cinema. They reject Spielberg’s mammal-witness to mankind’s inhumanity for nihilistic European pretense.

What makes this pompous attitude unacceptable is that in sheer visual terms, Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski’s imagery is superior: evocative and stirring while Tarr (employing Sontag pet Fred Kelemen) uses drab black and white without the textual depth and friscalating light of his previous cinematographers Gabor Medvigy and Rob Tregenza. Spielberg uses an Everyman horse while Tarr’s horse comes from postmodern speciousness (based on an apocryphal Nietzsche story). Once again, Spielberg’s ecumenical view is held against him in favor of atheist nihilism. How sensible is this? When desiccated young Erika is confronted by a band of gypsies, laughing, drinking, dreaming of America and cheering “The earth is ours!,” Tarr keeps her (and us) in that solitary cabin with Ohlsdorfer who scowls like both John Brown and Moses. No Fun, which pseuds regard as High Art.

The Turin Horse plays at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater as part of a Tarr retrospective, “The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Bela Tarr,” Feb. 3–8. (Apparently no one at Lincoln Center considers Godard or Spielberg our last modernists.) Tarr has said this is his last film. Hopefully. He’s obviously lost his drive. But Ingmar Bergman broke a similar promise and Soderbergh is playing the same game. He and Tarr both lack horse sense.

Quote :

The Also-Rans: Shame on Steve McQueen



This exclusive CityArts series will chart recent releases that failed to get Oscar nominations. Yet, just like the Oscar-nominated fare, these movies are not a part of film culture, but exist outside what moviegoers care about and talk about. Their staggered release delays the effects of film on the public; they don’t want for popular response; they’re made simply to stroke filmmakers’ egotism.

If Michael Fassbender was a Fassbinder, Shame would not be about “sexual addiction,” as British director Steve McQueen promotes it, but it would have displayed the psychological and social conditions that separate private desires from public acceptance. The late German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most compelling films (Querrelle, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, I Just Want You to Love Me, Fox and His Friends) weren’t merely controversial—they did more than put its actors’ bodies on display, as in Fear Eats the Soul’s famous full frontal male nudity in 1974—but went to the heart of human sexual/social struggle, all the while reconceiving film narrative—and that’s what made the Fassbinder name.

McQueen is not a film artist as Fassbinder was but a museum installations pseud. He contrives Shame’s story as a project about yuppie New York sex addict Brandon (flashed by Michael Fassbender) and his drunken younger sister Sissy (Carey “Crybaby” Mulligan) who flirt incestuously. McQueen doesn’t narrate the difference between instinct and indulgence; he uses Fassbender, a good actor, the same way he did in Hunger—exploiting his body. That’s McQueen’s true medium—from the feces murals in Hunger to Fassbender’s European physical traits, an ethnic and sexual prototype including his penis (on floppy display in the early scenes). McQueen repeats typical art school disgust with the body and its urges

But a greater question than Fassbender/Brandon’s self-abuse is McQueen’s self-neglect. Shame is doubly alienated—McQueen disregards the regular approaches to sex inculcated in his black British cultural background (seen in Isaac Julien’s good films) and so pretends to express white sexual habits. (Brandon’s liaison with Nichole Beharie as a willing black co-worker is the least honest interracial movie sex since Spike Lee’s confused Jungle Fever.) Plus, as Brits, McQueen and Fassbender foolishly set their story in New York City while disregarding the Apple’s particular erotic landscape. A subway cruising scene that bookends the film is not as authentic or credible as the great cruising sequence in De Palma’s Dressed to Kill—a pre-AIDS 1980s time capsule, just as De Palma’s Whitney Museum peep-art conversation captured pre-porn era New York in his 1970 Hi, Mom!.

McQueen’s sexual tourism includes assignations at The Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District and excursions through Chelsea, leading to a vaguely homophobic red-lit gay inferno sex club sequence (de rigueur among pseuds, as in Rampart) yet never offers a sense of emotional reality. McQueen can’t shake the “artist’s” preoccupation with “disturbance” and “subversion“ so he includes a risible montage of “the ugly face”—Brandon’s anguished, unending orgasm during a threesome with a blonde and an Asian hooker. (It’s followed by a remorseful subway episode to reveal working-class desolation.)

McQueen doesn’t go where Fassbinder’s movies, De Palma’s, Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris or even Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge dared to mark sexual territory. Shame is actually a sex-phobic art fraud.

Quote :

Theory Vs. Practice: A Dazzling Allegory In Chronicle



“Ever hear of Plato’s allegory of the cave?” one teenager asks another in Chronicle. This philosophy quiz was unexpected in the midst of a thrill ride movie but Chronicle is so surprisingly interesting, I wondered if its makers ever saw The Conformist (1971), where Bernardo Bertolucci visualized Plato’s allegory. When it’s good, Chronicle is less a thrill ride than a deliberation on movie thrills and contemporary youth market tastes.

In Chronicle, debut director Josh Trank uses all the high school adolescent clichés, polished into queer angst (camera geek Dane DeHaan as Andrew who documents his mother’s illness and his father’s abuse); Obama stargazing (lookalike Michael B. Jordan as student council prez Steve Montgomery); and hunk sensitivity (Alex Russell as Andrew’s very responsible cousin Matt).

It’s commercial formula with a brash spin; Andrew’s snooping camera represents a poor kid’s attempt at both the self-consciousness of the social-media age and Hollywood’s latest cheap trend: using subjective realism as a premise for the horror and supernatural genres. This goes back to Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield—trite exploitations of the hand-held, real-time camera gimmick—but Trank distances himself from both with state-of-the-art panache. Videography by Matthew Jensen makes spectacle the movie’s real subject. Chronicle’s sharp, ultra clear, subtle imagery is more compelling than what happens to Andrew, Steve and cousin Matt’s friendship after they develop telekinetic superpowers upon encountering a meteorite.

Chronicle alludes to the metaphoric hormonal urges of DePalma’s classics Carrie and The Fury—in fact it’s loaded with pop references. Screenwriter Max Landis throws in plot concepts and gimmicks (like Obama and the cousins’ pursuit of a female video blogger) without ever achieving the concentration on moral quandary and mythology that distinguished last year’s Trollhunter, the Scandinavian upgrade of the witness-to-horror stunt premise.

Landis and Trank only play around with that potential (also tossing in Let the Right One In allusions). But when the three friends discover an ability to fly and play football in the sky, the metaphor for prowess and transcendence blends digital video effects and genuine cinematic spectacle into the damnedest thing since the skydiving scenes in Point Break. From there, Chronicle’s play with spectacle and imagination is almost a fascinating version of Plato’s allegory.

Beyond its gimmicky premise, Chronicle’s visual excitement raises the important issue of how we use and respond to media. When the camera appears to follow Andrew’s P.O.V. or capture his different adventures and humiliations—from spelunking to flying to sex—Trank seems to be exercising cinematic form. Like Andrew, he attempts to figure out what to do with this amazing digital-video technique. (Is it accidental that neurasthenic DeHaan resembles a cross between Jonathan Caouette and Todd Haynes?) Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity movies have degraded cinematic form, but when the hand-held, real-time stunt isn’t trite, the matter of aesthetic purpose and artistic responsible must be pondered, as here. Do modern audiences know about (Godard’s theory on) editing as a political act or, having been raised on television and Internet excess, is cutting and camerawork just ignored in favor of dialog-based “content”?

Masterpieces like Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Bertolucci’s The Conformist, DePalma’s The Fury and Spielberg’s War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin make aesthetic issues part of their stories—the Blair Witch hoaxes don’t. Trank’s fumbling allegory questions responsibility: The boys realize that their ability to move things and do damage carries an onus (their noses bleed) and cousin Matt comes up with rules which Andrew defies when enraged. Lacking consistent follow-through (Landis never explains the source of the boys’ powers), Chronicle deteriorates into a destruction-of-Seattle finale (eventually trashing Trank’s subtle references to Nirvana’s cheerleaders-in-hell music video “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).

That Plato question is smart-assed. Chronicle superficially touches on philosophy as it also superficially questions violence while exploiting Hollywood’s violent trends. Smart-alecky Landis invokes the Apex predator theory as if to explain Andrew’s anxiety before defining it in dramatic terms. Chronicle’s frustrating misuse of dazzling cinematic technique raises the question of the era: Do youth audiences know what cinematic form is for?

Sharky wrote:

You can now follow Armond on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/#!/3xchair

He's gonna struggle with that '140 characters per message' limit ...

Quote :

On His Majesty’s Secret Service
by Armond White on Nov 7, 2012 • 9:37 am

007’S ‘SKYFALL’ GOES SKY-HIGH



Agent 007 James Bond (Daniel Craig) returns to his roots in Skyfall, defending the MI6 agency to which he’s always had steadfast dedication, even while gallantly enjoying its bachelor benefits. On home turf, Bond restores all of us to our pop culture roots; Skyfall’s national security plot, combining an arch villain’s (Javier Bardem) threats to M (Judi Dench), then breaching Bond’s ancestral residence, carries affectionate—even cultural—resonance. The sense of adventure is stabilizing and feels good.

Skyfall’s success isn’t a surprise. It should probably be the first Bond film to win a Best Picture Oscar—not because it’s the best (Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are still the series’ high points)—but because Skyfall maintains quality popular filmmaking in an era that’s lost sight of what that means.

Exactly what it means can be seen in the fascinating promotional documentary Everything Or Nothing, which details the history of the James Bond franchise from its inception as a Cold War spy novel by British journalist Ian Fleming then adapted by Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, intrepid American film producers who shared the dream of a popular entertainment featuring manly daring, sexual suavity and a subtle sense of political purpose. That this Anglo-American commercial enterprise would result in a 50-year globally admired venture that morphs yet without changing speaks to the marvel of the West’s pop culture dominance.

That dominance is at stake in Skyfall’s plot involving a Wikileaks-style enemy whose nefarious personal crusade and terrorist attack on MI6 heralds a new breed of international threat. (Javier Bardem is spectacular in this role; superior to his performance in No Country For Old Men.) Sizing up her enemies, M says, “They’re not nations, they’re individuals”—which was also true for the old Bond villains but now takes on the modern sense of social chaos that was unconscionably exploited in Chris Nolan’s Batman movies. But Skyfall avoids nihilism by hewing to a code of valor that extends from Fleming to Saltzman and Broccoli.

That code never changes despite having six other faces on its brand. As Everything Or Nothing shows, each Bond actor lent his own personal integrity. Daniel Craig follows that tradition. His brutalized face and cold eyes personify our acceptance of killing more than Connery’s camp glamour and sophistication. Yet, after the spectacular opening stunt, Craig bounds into a moving train and snaps his tuxedo cuffs with terrific élan. Bond’s urbanity bests The Dark Knight’s affluent yet sophomoric pessimism; the world is in safe hands—as is the idea of entertainment.

Most movie chases are alike, and the Bond movies have set the standard for all action thrillers—Road Warrior, Indiana Jones and even the Transporter flicks are just a few that display the Bond influence. The level of stylistic commitment in the Bond films is reassuring. It takes an ace team (including producer Barbara Broccoli), because director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) knows nothing about this kind of cinema. Joe Wright’s Hanna showed genuine style, and Luc Besson and his cadre have revolutionized action tropes, quickening their purpose, while Skyfall clicks efficiently. The opening escapade introduces a Bond-girl sidekick (Naomie Harris), which enriches what would be routine; that humane flourish sets the tone for Mendes’ foray into genre.

It might have gone badly—imagine Mike Nichols pinch-hitting an Indiana Jones film. But Skyfall features more character nuances than Craig’s previous Bond movies: Harris’ role, along with vivid participation from Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Ben Wishaw and Bardem display Mendes’ striking interest in actors.

Mendes is lucky. Skyfall is his first film on home turf, and he knows how these people talk and how they relate to the environs of metropolitan London (including a brief stint among the J.M.W. Turners at the Tate Museum) and the Scottish countryside. It adds to the story’s personal feel. These well-tailored Tories fighting an internal security breach and “a war we can’t understand and can’t possibly win” sounds sufficiently post-9/11, which makes Skyfall a modern version of the British WWII homefront movie Went the Day Well? as much as a Bond installment.

When Bond escorts M in the fabled Aston Martin, Skyfall also carries us back to the past—our pop culture past where entertainment wasn’t merely frivolous. Skyfall plays with heritage and personal homeland defense but those ideas are no richer than Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Fortunately, the movie looks terrific. Roger Deakins photographs a silhouetted assassin brawl in a skyscraper and a sequence of red-gold pagodas at night like Robert Burks did in It Takes a Thief—for sheer splendor.

In Everything Or Nothing, Fleming’s first book is referred to as “the autobiography of a dream.” This speaks to how the Bond film series epitomized desire and satisfaction. As an expression of Western hegemony, the series isn’t just commercial; its good work translates to all territories. In the real world, espionage ain’t pretty, but when James Bond wins, it’s a global victory.

http://cityarts.info/2012/11/07/on-his-majestys-secret-service/

Wow, even Armond likes SKYFALL huh? Must be the bee's knees.

From Armond

"Sizing up her enemies, Q says, “They’re not nations, they’re individuals”—which was also true for the old Bond villains but now takes on the modern sense of social chaos that was unconscionably exploited in Chris Nolan’s Batman movies. But Skyfall avoids nihilism by hewing to a code of valor that extends from Fleming to Saltzman and Broccoli."

This is encouraging stuff - dispensing with the nihilism of Nolan. Messages of hope, honor, valour etc are far more invigorating to the human spirit.

Armond:"Skyfall’s success isn’t a surprise. It should probably be the first Bond film to win a Best Picture Oscar—not because it’s the best (Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are still the series’ high points)—but because Skyfall maintains quality popular filmmaking in an era that’s lost sight of what that means."

Very nice. SF is not the best. Armond appreciates the import of the series defining era, but SF can still be the best film of 2012!

==Armond:"In the real world, espionage ain’t pretty, but when James Bond wins, it’s a global victory."

Well said! James Bond as global champion in the fight against evil. The world will always need 007!

Yep, it's one of the more reassuring reviews in a sea of positive feedback. I'm glad for the Everything or Nothing documentary too... it sets up Skyfall really well.

Here it is, trev.

Aha. Okay.

Hmm. Can't you have nihilism and honor? (I contradict myself? very well I contradict myself, I am large, I contain many multitudes)

Not getting the code of valor with Saltzman and Broc either, especially the latter. Giving his word to let McClory start making Bond movies 10 years after TB, and then doing everything possible to tie him up and screw him over till McClory had to bring in Talia Shire's hubby in to counter the Broc's strongarm tactics.

SF is most definitely generating a lot of memorable copy, I'll say that.