ericmvan

Fourteen hours is a lot of time to devote to dinner and a movie, and $60+ a lot to spend on just the movie. But that turns out to be the cost to see the newly restored print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) at the Film Forum in New York City--if you live in Boston.

It was a bargain.

I believe it is fair to say that The Red Shoes is the only famous movie by the British writing / directing team. It was certainly the only movie of theirs that I had heard of back when I was a more casual film fan. I think it is also fair to say that, were she forced name a favorite filmmaker, sovay (my companion on this insane adventure, and much else of course) would name them. Which is how it came to pass that I saw a near-handful of other films by the Archers before seeing their acknowledged masterpiece: A Canterbury Tale (Sonya's favorite), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (a masterpiece to film buffs), Peeping Tom (the film that effectively ended Powell's career by daring to portray a serial killer sympathetically), and the hugely underrated bomb-defusing drama The Small Back Room. I want to see them all, now.

Some random thoughts on watching The Red Shoes (I'll hide the spoiler-ish ones):

• This restored print is among the most gorgeous things you'll ever see. And it's not just the things that are supposed to knock us out (like the redness of the shoes) that are extraordinary; even the character's faces look exquisite. See it on a big screen if it comes to your city. Buy it when it comes out on Blu-Ray.
• It contains what is easily the most extraordinary dance sequence I've ever seen on film (a precis of the title ballet). It makes the justifiably famous dance sequence in Singin' in the Rain, which owes it an enormous debt, seem like a sketch.

( Spoilers be here ... )

I have loved all of the Powell / Pressburger movies I have seen, but (with the very possible exception of A Canterbury Tale) none struck me as likely to vault into my all-time favorites list upon re-viewing. The Red Shoes absolutely does. It is at least as good as any of them, and it is most to my taste: I am drawn to its themes as I am not drawn to those of, say, Colonel Blimp, a movie I admired ferociously but many of whose concerns seem remote to me. The Red Shoes is All About the conflict of Life and Art. As someone who once wrote a song about Yeats whose chorus went "I think he would have rather married / Maud Gonne" (i.e., than achieved artistic immortality), this couldn't have been more up my alley if I'd written the specs.

The thing is, the pilot episode of ABC's V remake doesn't play as stupid.  The production values are sky-high, the dialogue and acting credible.

It's only afterward that you realize how preposterous and vacuous it actually was.

Point one: the first thing the arriving aliens tell us is that they have only come to Earth to get one resource which they have exhausted, and that once they replenish that, they will leave, and in return they will give us technological advances.

Well, here's the kicker: that missing resource turns out to be aluminum foil for conical hats. 

Or perhaps it was dryer lint.  Or CD copies of America's "Horse With No Name."

In fact, we are never told what the resource is.  The entire plot point is never mentioned again.

Point two: one of the first things we say to the aliens is "our scientists say that it's impossible that you look exactly like us" (which they do, only better).  To which Anna (Firefly's Morena Baccarin), the alien's gorgeous leader, replies curtly "Our scientists can explain that."

And their explanation is ... they've eaten so much dryer lint and listened to so much America that it has transmorgified their hideous alien physiognomies into the cast of America's Next Secretly Reptilian Top Model.

In fact, this plot point is never mentioned again, either.  I think we're supposed to think that the aliens have offered their explanation and that our scientists have been duly convinced, but that's preposterously bad storytelling.  You can't leave their explanation out; their explanation is our only justification for trusting them.

And of course the only conceivable explanation is that we share the same origin.  In which case, they are not alien visitors, they're essentially us.  And everything we think we know about human evolution is wrong.  Both of which would make thought-provoking plot angles (as alien lies we were led to believe), if the show had any interest in provoking any thoughts other than "that makes no sense whatsoever."

(Note that Philip K. Dick's Now Wait for Last Year has this same idea; aliens from the planet Lilistar have arrived and, playing on their status as our secret progenitors, have enlisted us in their war against horrible bug-like aliens.  Of course, there is a delicious PKD twist which I shan't reveal if you haven't read what is widely regarded as the best of his non-famous novels).

Point three: everyone calls them "the Visitors," or, for short, "the V's."  No one has asked them what star system they come from?  They haven't told us?  No one cares?  And when was the last time you heard someone call the Iraqis "the I's" or the Russians "the R's"?

Point four: it is ultimately revealed that many prominent humans in positions of power are secretly aliens, and that this is part of their plan to exterminate us.  Showing up over all the Earth's cities in huge spaceships, Childhood's End style, is just  the next phase in the extermination plot.

WTF?  WTFF?  Why didn't they just wipe us out when they first arrived here twenty or thirty years ago?  What is their rationale for going to all the enormous difficulty of cloaking their hideous reptilian alien physiognomies in the faces of mostly obscure Hollywood actors, and then providing us with universal health care?

Now, if it weren't for points one through three, I might hold out for some ultimately satisfying explanation for what the aliens are up to.  If that happens, I will buy the first person who notifies me of such (and provides a good argument for the storytelling worth of the explanation) one copy of every item of the show's merchandising tie-ins.

In the meantime, though, we have a show about an alien invasion where the alien's ostensible purpose here is omitted, where there justification for earning our trust is omitted and / or preposterous, and where their true purpose is preposterous.

Other than that, it was really good.

Most folks know that Stanley Kubrick trimmed 29 minutes from 2001: A Space Odyssey immediately after its premiere.  What's less well known is that the original cut was shipped to and screened in multiple cities, where it played for as long as a week.

I saw the original cut of 2001, at the Cinerama Theater in Boston, probably on Saturday, April 13, 1968, just weeks before my 14^th birthday.

When I saw the film a second time, a year or two later, there were two changes that absolutely startled me.  The first was the well-known insertion of the low angle shot of the monolith as Moonwatcher ponders the use of a bone as a weapon.  I remember thinking, I don’t remember that at all!  At the time, I was unaware that the film had been re-edited. 

Descriptions of the other well-established cuts (see the IMBD "alternate versions" page, or www.underview.com/bhpalltrims.html) all ring true to me, but, except for the added title cards, I did not notice them at the time—testimony to their correctness.  (The title cards I thought I might have forgotten.)

Near the end of the movie, though, there was another change that so startled and bothered me that I was convinced I was watching an adulterated print.  And this change, as far as I can tell with the powers of Google, has never been described anywhere.  By anybody.

In the original cut, HAL is absolutely silent as Bowman prepares to enter his chamber and deactivate him.  HAL’s monologue that starts at 1:50:06 (in the original DVD release in the Kubrick box set)  (“I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me”) is absent.  Note that the shot of HAL’s eye in this sequence (to establish that he has a presence in the antechamber and could watch and talk to Bowman) is a closeup insert (actually an addition to the re-edited cut); it’s never established where in the antechamber the eye is because there wasn’t one in the original cut (and if you watch that scene, it’s quite mysterious where the eye might be, in fact).  There’s nothing on the soundtrack but Bowman’s breathing as he enters the chamber and uses his tool to begin deactivating HAL, module by module. 

I have a pretty vivid memory of HAL starting his monologue (retained intact, just moved on the soundtrack relative to the visuals) after several modules had been deactivated.  Watching the existing cut, I’m reasonably certain that it originally started at about 1:52:14, when we see Bowman react with a glance.  That means that about 2:08 was cut.

This re-alignment of audio to video was accomplished by a cut at 1:53:12, between the shot from behind Bowman, when he’s extracted half the modules in the top row, to the overhead shot when he has finished the top row and is halfway through the second row.  That sort of elision is extremely uncharacteristic of the editing style of the movie, which favors long, complete, unbroken sequences.  And in fact, as I remember the original cut, we saw every module coming out -- I have a pretty good memory of a long shot of Bowman floating in the chamber and continuing the deactivation.

Is this clear?  To tighten this sequence, Kubrick trimmed 2:08 of visuals from the middle of HAL's deactivation, and he took the audio of that 2:08 and placed it over the preceding 2:08 of the movie, causing HAL's monologue to start as Bowman is entering the antechamber to deactivate him, rather than after the deactivation has started.  And -- perhaps more importantly to the perceived pacing -- 2:08 of soundtrack that consisted of nothing but Bowman breathing was cut.

Does the evidence of the film support my memory?  Absolutely.

First of all, 2:08 seems right as the length of the elided portion. Bowman inserts the tool to extract the first module at 1:51:43 and the 9th module (having skipped one) at 1:52:52, so he is extracting a module per 8.5 seconds.  (In the shot at 1:53:12, fewer than 9 modules appear to be out; this appears to be a continuity error and may have been introduced in the re-edit).  The next time we see a good view of all the modules, it is at 1:53:13 + 2:08 = 1:55:21 of the original cut, so 2:29 have passed, and a further 15 modules have been extracted. We would have expected 149 / 8.5 = 17 or 18 at the rate he was going, but there were modules he skipped over (presumably those that are the equivalent of HAL's brainstem and run the ship's life support system) and the extra 20 seconds are easily explained as the time it takes Bowman to skip over those modules, or because he has slowed his pace as he tires, or (most likely of all) because of the leeway in editing between shots.  The key point is that 2:08 is absolutely in the ballpark as the time required to extract the modules that comprise the difference between the shots on either side of the edit.

But there is also a smoking gun.  Note that in the final cut, the pitch of HAL’s voice has lowered and his speech (“Dave. Stop. Stop, will you?”) has slowed before Bowman has extracted a single module.  That makes no sense; the slowed and altered speech has to be a product of the deactivation. 

The entire sequence played out differently.  In the original cut, HAL’s assertion “I feel much better now. I really do” happens after Bowman has extracted Memory Terminal modules 6 through 3, and is hugely ironic and pathetic.  “I can see you’re really upset about this” was originally an understatement so massive it would have been comic if it weren’t so sad, where in the re-edit it’s perhaps too perceptive.  “I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over,” in the re-edit, is just an attempt to ward off deactivation before the fact, and comes across as defensive and self-interested, while in the original, it is HAL’S reaction to the feeling of being deactivated, and it is almost heartbreaking.  (And note that there is a closeup of Bowman at 1:52:27 that in the re-edit serves no clear purpose, but when HAL's monologue is delayed 2:08, which is to say in the original edit, it shows us Bowman's reaction, or, rather, his refusal to react, to this one part of the monologue that is about Bowman rather than itself).  When HAL finally just asks Dave to stop (in a clearly altered voice) when Bowman is much more than halfway through the deactivation process, the alteration of his voice is an unexpected but very clear consequence of the deactivation, and it is again actually rather sad.

I have been carrying this profoundly vivid memory, and telling this tale, for years, but it wasn't until this morning that I went to the DVD to see just how much sense I could make of it.  I am very pleased to see that there is not only objective evidence for my memory in the existing cut, but that it’s even possible to nail down the location and length of the edit and see how the audio and video originally synched.  I really believe that the original sequence was much better than the re-edit: the only mistake Kubrick made in trimming the film.  It bothered the hell out of my the second time I saw the movie, and it bothers me to this day.

Well, it’s either phenomenally good, or merely great with some significant but minor flaws that will keep it out of the top of my all-time favorites list, but still near the top of this year’s Top 10. I will need another viewing or two to decide (and there will be no final verdict until we see the 30 minutes that were removed from this cut.)

What was great?

• The screenplay is absolutely brilliant in two aspects: its true grasp of the themes of the graphic novel, which it underscores and emboldens with authority, and its ability to compress the story into 2 hr 40 min. I can’t think of a single moment where the story was compressed or simplified and I reacted negatively: in every case I could immediately see the logic of the change. Speaking of which …
• The ending, which is to say, the replacement for the novel’s giant telepathic mock-alien squid, is actually a huge improvement on numerous levels. (Take that, slavish fanboys!) When I read the novel originally, and eleven issues of complicated plot climaxed in a rehash of the Outer Limits episode “The Architects of Fear,” which in turn leaned heavily on the Theodore Sturgeons’s “Unite and Conquer,” I was more than a little let down. I had always assumed that David Hayter and Alex Tse changed the ending because destroying NYC with a monster had become old hat (Godzilla remake, Cloverfield), and that singling out NYC had acquired unfortunate resonance. I was hoping they would come up with something different and adequate. I didn’t dare hope that they realized the original ending was stale and maybe kind of dumb and that they could come up with something much better. But they did.
• Jackie Earle Hailey is just spectacular as Rorschach, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Billy Crudup are very fine as The Comedian and Dr. Manhattan respectively.
• This may be a function of the difference between movies and books as they interact with my brain, but I found the movie emotionally moving, at times very much so, in ways I didn’t find the book to be. Hailey and Crudup and the thematic underscoring in the screenplay get the credit, I think.

• What was perhaps less than great?

  
  

  • In the rare cases where they had to invent substantial dialogue, it’s usually just OK and once in a while flat; there’s nothing remotely like Boromir’s speech to Aragorn in Lothlorien, i.e., at no point do they channel Alan Moore the way that Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens were consistently able to channel Tolkien.
  • The rest of the cast is nothing special. Again, the obvious comparison is to LOTR, where the twentieth best performance (i.e., everyone but Elijah Wood) is better than the fourth best here.
  • I probably had my hopes for eye-candy way too high, but I was merely satisfied with the movie as a visual feast, when I hoped or expected to be stunned.

  
  It’s very clear that there are some critics who just aren’t getting this. Ty Burr, for instance, thinks that setting the sex scene between Dan and Laurie to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” creates unintentional humor. I guess he missed the part where Dan is impotent when his clothes have been taken off but a stud when its his superhero costume that’s been removed, and it didn’t occur to him that the scene was mocking him.

  In the case of the really negative reviews, I can guarantee you that those critics went in with preconceptions about what the movie might be like or should be about. (As a movie to rival Iron Man, it does suck incredibly.) As the movie fails to slide neatly into the slot they had prepared for it, they start to tune it out, stop actually listening. When, for instance, Dr. Manhattan explains why he’s returning to Earth, they’re not even parsing the content, because they’re just assuming it must be pseudo-scientific babble rather than actual science, because they would never expect something that sophisticated from a comic-book movie. Viola! A very moving scene becomes “emotionally distant.”

  To sum up: this is a very fine and capable and in a few important ways quite brilliant adaptation of terrific source material. As such, a very easy **** or 10/10.

Here is a brief review (and some key information on what other people thought) of every movie released in the U.S. in 2008 that I’ve seen as of the eve of the Oscar telecast.

I’ll count down from the film I liked least to the one I liked most. While this bears some relationship to a ranking by “best” (I’m quite sure that my favorite film was the best film, too, for instance), any critic who thinks they can really rank films by objective quality is kidding themselves. (In fact, once you separate masterpieces from the rest, any notion that there’s any kind of objective “better than” is a mistake. But that’s a screed for another time.)

For each film, I’ve named the writer(s) and director and given three other pieces of information:

• “IMDB” is its user rating on IMDB.com. For those of you who aren’t users, 6.7 is average, 7.5 is a very solid score, 7.8 downright impressive, and 8.0 or better is Magic.
• “Crit” is its ranking among critics based on mentions in Top 10 lists. The raw data is from MCN (Movie City News), but I’ve massaged and corrected it. NR means not in the top 100. (During the year, I use Metacritic to get a sense of the degree of critical enthusiasm, but once you get the Top 10 lists that information becomes largely redundant.)
• “RT” is its Rotten Tomato score (the percentage of critics who liked it). Comparing this to the Top 10 ranking can be very informative.

Why do I bother with all that? Because I have tried to explain my reaction to each movie relative to everyone else’s. In fact, I’m not sure that an individual reaction to a film, without such context, has much meaning at all, since it basically assumes that the reaction of the critic is universal. Ha!

So here are 36 movies I’ve seen this year (most in the theater, and a few – numbers 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, and 14—more than once). I liked and would recommend them all. This is not so strange: I just don’t bother seeing movies that aren’t well received by either critics or viewers, I like every kind of movie, and I have the neurological gift of enjoying what’s good about a movie without letting its flaws spoil the overall experience (I can effectively “firewall” the parts that didn’t work for me and enjoy the parts that do). I’m proud to say that I merely liked only one movie that everyone loved; I wish you all similar success.

There are no spoilers here at all, I think.

 

( 4000+ words of reviews after the cut ... )