2012 in Film: Norwegian Wood

Although Norwegian Wood falls within the group of Murakami's novels that I am perhaps least fond of, those being the ones which could be broadly & misleadingly categorized as straightforward realism; & though the film tended to highlight all those bits of the novel which were the most unappealing to me; & though it has been nearly a full year since I saw this one, I am going to go ahead and give this movie a "positive review," or whatever.

Murakami tends to shine brightest, for me at least, when the alienation and sadness of his characters is more refracted than expressed or symbolically deployed. Especially when those moments of magical realism or explosive violence don't comfortably fit into any explanatory frame (or at least when they manage to evade the ones that I attempt to apply), with the prime example being the rain of leeches from Kafka on the Shore. With a close second being the assault from Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Norwegian Wood has none of these moments, instead off(er)ing characters whose reactions tend toward the extreme but whose psychological makeup is fairly easily ascertained. And it is very much within these extremes that the characters of the film operate, placing their reactions at the emotional and dramatic center. The scene in which the main character stands on a rock screaming and crying being only the most obvious and unfortunate instance.

By choosing to do what it does, though, and sticking to it faithfully, it succeeds on its own terms. Given that it is the story of a set of varyingly solipsistic youth and their attempt to connect to each other, the cinematography which is often so pretty it verges on cloying fits very well, even and especially that it flirts with kitsch in a way that I think I have only ever seen Antichrist do; the woods around the psychiatric retreat in particular are shot with an almost alienating reverence that I still remember very vividly today. Unfortunately, the score isn't really up to par, at least in my memory, and the short shrift given to the roommate and the school friend is really disappointing.

The absolute best thing about the movie, however, is the way that it doesn't forget its sociohistorical moment, or try to shoehorn its relevance. When, in the beginning, we see masked-up student radicals rushing across the background of the scenes, we are given the tools by which to situate the film.

Murakami's fiction can be broadly read in two ways; as universal or as particular. It has moments in support of both, but it is only at its best when read through its particularity. He deals with broad themes, of course, but to fail to acknowledge them as acting through very specific subsets defangs them, makes them into boring paeans on Modernity and Loneliness and so on. It is in particular in his more realistic fiction that the impulse to read this way is present, and it is why I tend to find it boring.

The inclusion of those students, racing across the background of the frame, seemed to me a wonderful acknowledgement of that fact. We are not here to experience the lives of those who seek to change the world. But they exist, and obliquely inform, the lives we do experience. And, like the song from which the title is taken, we find ourselves experiencing that particular story of impossible, painful intimacy that tends to crop up only when absolutely everything in the world around us is broken, and we are too wrapped up in the pains of our particular moment to notice the trend.

Just as Rubber Soul marked the break between the early Beatles and the late, this film indexes a vary particular instance of the moment that the popular was forced to reckon with the political. And just as Norwegian Wood (this bird has flown) opened a space for non-Anglophonic instrumentation within pop music, finally taking a tentative step away from the purely insular and at least nominally creating a space for dialogue (see: "world music," and all its problems), this film is an act of translation in a wonderful sense, albeit one whose impact has not, and almost certainly will never, be felt. It translates the moment of its production, of its content, and of the moment that it title takes from, and returns them to the Anglophonic sphere, mutated through all these transformations that register only in brief flashes in the background. And it does this, when it manages not to fail, by speaking through the particular, which is not to say the individual.

It's own particularity is that it manages to index without abstracting; we see these characters, and they are not us, and they do not live near us, and we do not become them, but we might live with them in their cinematographically advanced world for a moment. In its best moments of the film, it manages to not reduce the characters (it keeps) to depression-type and angst-type and turmoil-type without whispering to you that there is a reason for this, but they cannot see it so you cannot either, unless you choose to look; but even if you do, do not forget that you are the intruder here.

Of course, what we watch when we see this film is a particularly well-done form of kitsch, and it is not unimportant to note how this is reinforced by the melodrama of the narrative, in which nothing really happens except that everyone fucking dies. So it isn't so much that the characters react unrealistically to how shitty everything is as that the world itself is an adjunct to their solipsism. Which is why when the student radicals appear, their passing leaves such a strong impression; even if this whole world is a solipsistic nightmare where all your friends kill themselves and sex is even more traumatic and alienated than everything else and the only way out is a desperate search for love with someone who will only be immediately codependent on without anything changing, at least this isn't the only possibility for everyone, even if it is for who we see.

But again, this is all deeply embedded into the fabric of the film; the melodrama that constitutes the film's narrative never touches it. It is relentless, and that is only useful as a backdrop, not a moral, because the second it becomes the center it adopts the frame of love which is always then reduced. The love story at the center of the film is The Love Story, of course, and ultimately who really cares. It is that The Love Story is framed subtly in this way that matters.

2012 in Film: Men In Black 3

As far as time travel movies from this year go, I think I would recommend MIIIB over Looper, at the end of the day. That's maybe just a symptom of me having a wretched track record of recommending movies to people, though. And the fact that the last time I was interested in time travel as a fictional conceit was when I used to get high and watch Primer over and over in high school. I dunno.

Maybe the strangest thing about Looper was that it wasn't adapted from a novel. That would have gone a long way towards explaining why it seems to so relentlessly disavow anything filmic about itself. MIIIB doesn't have this shortcoming. Compare the two modes of time travel; one is a little capsule, the other a watch that you press after jumping off a building. To claim either is more "realistic" is to play into the hands of boring rule-based criticism; to claim that one works way better in the cinematic medium is pretty fucking undeniable.

So, the film. Basically we get the story of how Will Smith's dad was actually really cool all along. So that's cool.

I didn't realize it at the time, but there's something of a highly sanitized Cthulhu Mythos feel to the aliens in the lab, and the movie itself could maybe be read as an attempt to translate unspeakable horrors from beyond the stars into hilarity instead of terror. It isn't quite Monsters, Inc about it either; there is something that remains of the genuinely weird in the aliens here. They are comprehensible without being totally domesticated, and many of the most famous comedy moments could very well have been played for horror without much alteration.

The biggest disappointment I had with the movie, I think, was how seriously it took itself. That maybe sounds weird to say about a movie in which Andy Warhol is an undercover agent for a secret governmental organization that polices aliens, and is a comedy, but there is something indefinable, except maybe in the moralizing ending, about the movie that made me think that it wasn't nearly as interested in being of itself than it was of being, well, serious. Maybe it's the lack of a new Smith rap song. Possibly it was how the most absurd alien of all happened to be the main villain and his actions were for some unknowable reason treated as if they had dramatic effects. I can't really remember, honestly. Pretty sure it was there, though.

What this film does do is to treat itself as a film, which is to say that it builds its world and narrative with a sense of the visual at least as much as the thematic. For that alone it beats Looper hands down, though who out there exists that needs to hear me compare the two I don't know. But just for good measure, the opening subway scene outpaces anything in Looper by miles, so fuck it. Also that fucking dog wasn't in this one I don't think? or maybe only really briefly? which is great.

I (probably totally spuriously) attribute the original Men In Black movie with an inordinate amount of importance in shaping, or at least predicting, much of what I would end up being fascinated with in my teenage years. I didn't watch a lot of films growing up; I was one of those book nerds who would hide in my room and read when the rest of the family was watching television or a movie. But one of the earliest birthday parties I ever had -- probably in fourth grade, because that was when I finally first made some friends -- was to go see Men In Black in theaters. I then spent a few formative years, during high school, basically a recluse reading conspiracy theory bullshit about September 11th a few years after the fact. I also wore around multiple pentacles -- a necklace and a ring, primarily -- along with other magickal objects. I can't say that I ever much believed in any of these things, but they held my interest for a long time in a way that wasn't really academic or whatever so much as just, well, interest, and was only tangentially at best a way of creating an image for myself.

What Men In Black had to do with that is hard to pinpoint, exactly, and I am not especially proud of that moment, but there is something there, I believe. Because unlike the X-Files with "the truth is out there," or Lovecraft's cod-philosophizing, one of the most important things about the Men In Black movies is that they do not attempt any sort of extrapolation. They simply present a very vibrant world, which draws on certain mythologies of our own, without ever needing to claim that it impacts our understanding of reality. The series doesn't have a pedagogy; meanings get thrown off them, many of them unsavory, and there is obviously an assumed subject to some extent, but unlike the milieu out of which it rises, and which it lovingly mocks, there is no directed program on how to teach you to see the world better. There is only the sights themselves, for you to make of them what you will. And that is wonderful; and it is also why MIIIB's seriousness can almost terminally wound it.

2012 in Film: The Amazing Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man finally gave us an accurate version of the shittiest of all super heroes. Batman, especially after Frank Miller got his hands on him, might be a fascist or whatever, but he doesn't hold a candle to the nasty geek wish-fulfilment and entitled prickishness known to the world as Peter Parker. And finally, free of the curse of Toby Maguire's charisma and Sam Raimi's kitsch sentimentality, the reboot unveils the kid in his full glory.

Everything about this movie screams wish-fulfilment for a specific set of those entitled self-proclaimed victims known as white dudes who were "bullied." Not just the high-flying heroism and getting the girl, not just the fact that the webslinging is back to its bootstrapsish origin; not even just the Uncomplicated Moral Righteousness. More than anything Spidey is the wet dream of the self-identified nerd who loves to imagine lunchroom encounters with jocks where his debate skills debilitate their underdeveloped brains, with a nice little helping of ultraviolence to cap off the encounter with their "oppressor."

Obviously this fantasy is bullshit down to its very premise. But then, the film itself is informed by it down to its very structure, so. And much better to have the fantasy shown for how it would actually play out, with the fantasist coming off as a snarky, entitled prick, than to mask it with cheap sentimental hooks. Because even when the movie isn't letting Parker spout grating one-liners, it is fetishizing technology (occasionally masked as science) at the level of both plot -- it being the only thing that can actually impact anything, for good or ill -- and form -- the fucking 3D, man, my god.

Which isn't to say that the 3D is any good, of course. Both Silent Hill and Ghost Rider did it way better this year, which was kind of a dissappointment given that Spidey is probably the single most 3D friendly film character who ever was born. But it not being particularly well utilized doesn't stop it from being fetishized just like every other technology in and of the film, presented with all the mystical reverence that nerds show for their toys. In fact it even ends up being more apt for its incompetence, expecting you to coo at it just because it is so clearly cooing at itself; a better description of this movie I cannot imagine, and sort of charming in its infuriating, loathsome way.

The fact that all of this is perfectly internally consistent is kind of marvellous, ultimately. Every thread collapses in on itself, each apparent misstep an even more accurate portrayal of itself than a more technically accomplished or politically or psychologically robust alternative could have possibly been. The barks of laughter that came from the audience when Stan Lee showed up were such a perfect response I was floored; it was the opposite of the Hitchock self-insert, whose pleasure is for the quiet collector or self-described cinephile. Lee instead parades himself as a librarian listening to classical music as Spidey and Lizard smash up his library, while he is totally oblivious. There is nothing to be said about this. Every single aspect is so self-aggrandizing, so narcissistic, so utterly fucking thrilled with its own vapid power that the only possible reaction is to laugh.

And, y'know, laughing can be fun.

2012 in Film: 21 Jump Street

fuck cops

2012 in Film: Safe

Safe is basically a movie about fuck cops and #nodads. It also is a movie about some really cool action sequences, a self-consciously thin plot, and some unselfconsciously shitty racial stereotypes. I assume it was generally disliked by critics because the racism wasn't quite strong enough, in the final calculations, to counterbalance the fact that it didn't worship cops.

So Statham is a cage fighter who used to work as a semi-official assassin for the police, but got kicked out for ratting on his coworkers. Then THE RUSSIANS killed his wife and made his life a living hell because he failed to throw a fight. Then he tries to kill himself but sees a little Chinese girl running from THE RUSSIANS so he saves her & it turns out she has a Super Secret Number memorized because she's (you guessed it) a math genius, and then he protects her as THE RUSSIANS, THE CHINESE, and the crooked cops try to get her. He kills a bunch of dudes and then finds out the safe that the numbers unlock has like hella cash and something like The Entire Collected Knowledge Of The DHS, In Convenient Disk Form. Then the mayor's aide & gay lover fights a bunch of dudes & goes to fight Statham but Mei shoots him so Statham wins, and is like hey kid I'd be a shitty dad and she's like yeah fuck having a dad and hes like alright cool lets go to Seattle.

Honestly I don't really know what to say beyond that. Until I reread the plot synopsis I remembered literally nothing about this movie -- less even than I remembered about John Carter. I am not particularly well versed in action films, and I can't think of any other Statham movies I have ever seen. Was he in District B-13 or whatever that was called? I don't remember anything about that one either.

I am really out of my element here. I'm not even sure why I am trying to write this. I think the only genre I am less familiar with is comedy, because comedy is awful. Oh god the Men in Black 3 review is going to be such a disaster.

The cops in this movie are pretty unrelentigly shitty. Also one of them is stuffed into a trunk for the last like half hour of the film. The mayor almost gets stuffed in there too but they chickened out, which was really unfortunate, but he does get knocked out. The way the plot advanced seemed actively funny to me while I was watching it, in a pleasant way, especially the scene where Statham cracks the cipher effortlessly in the Hotel room while he is like fortifying it or whatever. The whole thing just deeply did not give a fuck about you and that was kind of wonderful. I literally don't remember anything about the cinematography, or the sets, or anything. Jesus man narrative analysis is so fucking boring how do people write this shit.

2012 in Film: John Carter

So, in case you were worried these would all be long rambling screeds, I will today review a movie which left roughly no impression on me whatsoever: John Carter, of Mars, or so they say.

What I do remember: the movie was hella racist. But you know, its Disney, and they weren't natives, they were aliens, so it was totally okay. Also that it was really just remarkably shitty on gender. But see previous.

The only bit of the movie I remember at all, really, was the scene where Carter goes all White Rage and slaughters a ton of aliens who, if memory serves, were pretty civil to his annoying ass prior to that moment. But as spectacle it worked surprisingly well, quite nearly managing to obscure the fucking despicable politics of the moment beneath its visual strength. Except not quite, because unfortunately for us white people these histories don't actually tend to disappear.

There was also that weird bit at the end, where Carter goes all Bond or Odysseus or whatever, and out-cunnings the godlike race of aliens by like, only pretending to be dead and buried in the mausoleum or whatever? That was pretty terrible too I guess.

I suppose there is something to be said, too, about the sheer implacable wall of boredom that this movie was. Which was, in its way, and as Keishi pointed out to me, its strongest aspect. Every single aspect of the film, from its scale to its content to its production, screamed that it was going to bore the hell out of you, and I can happily report back that the mission was accomplished. Even the aforementioned fight wasn't good in the sense that it rose above the boredom -- boredom is not something to be risen above, but is worthy of exploring in its own right -- as that it brought the spectacle fully down to its own level in a successful interpolation of the action sequence not as immersive excitement but as alienating boredom. Without diminishing the degree to which this is based on a pervasive racist logic, the flattened affect of boredom, which is not only experienced in relation to the narrative and visuals and music -- that is, the diegetic aspects of the film -- but is always also a self-conscious, meta reaction to both the film as experience and even to itself, produces a kind of awesome disharmony in the face of a glut of generic signposts that demand to be read as kinetic, immanent, and intense.

Which then leads me to want to rant on a bit about irony and how things like "post-irony" fail to acknowledge that the way that irony works isn't hegemonizing or even multiplying but splitting & doubling, creating concurrent extremes, and that New Sincere bullshit is just a way of sacralizing immediacy in a way that is not so much honest as itself a homogenizing mode of discourse. But I intended to keep this one short. And anyway, that would be boring.

2012 in Film: Looper

I left Looper feeling weirdly similar to how I felt when I left the theater after Inception; vaguely better than when I had gone in, but in a way that didn't seem at all to correlate to the film I had just watched, which just seemed to have sort of been there. There have been other similarities noticed between the two, although for me the most important thing is one difference; that Looper never comes across as a fucking Allegory For Cinema. That's what made me go from a sort of pleasant nonchalance about Inception to an active dislike; I get the impression that pleasant nonchalance is where I will stay with regards to Looper. And I say "pleasant nonchalance" because it seems like the right nonsense mixture of words to convey the non-feeling it doesn't really correspond to.

I think the reason this film was so talked about is in a lot of ways attributable to how little there really is to say. Genevieve Valentine hit the nail on the head here, although even that doesn't manage to convey just how much this appears in the film. Other than the psychosexual issues, it is tightly plotted (I suppose), well acted (if that is even a thing), visually impressive (what does that mean), and has a fairly interesting premise (even though it has flaws or whatever what the fuck is even going on do people actually care about any of these things).

I think the most interesting thoughts I had about the film were actually thought in reaction to this review over at Strange Horizons. And that largely because I disagreed with it. Specifically the last couple paragraphs, which mix a variety of arguments from authority – the rules of genre fiction, of personal experience, and of the "real world" and mature, adult understandings thereof – which ultimately to me seem made to justify the final claim that "while the film has a point, it’s not one that needs a science-fictional telling." Which is all well and good, I suppose, and I think on its own terms the argument works well enough, is properly supported and so on; but the idea itself seems fairly suspect to me.

Because I don't think the film has much of a point, really. And I mean that in a good way – Inception sucks because it "has a point," and so each moment of it becomes an overdetermined mess of Significance, and the whole thing ultimately allegorizes itself all the way to being an insulting piece of shit in the exact way that, say, Shutter Island manages to palpably barely avoid throughout. To take Looper as "having a point" makes it at best a really awkwardly bad Coen Brothers movie at best, and I say that as someone who really really hates the Coen Brothers.

But the argument which stresses rules is one which seems to me both obsolete and actually more obstructionist than useful, as it makes any fictional property into a boring feedback system in which rules are posited and then obeyed, and flattens all texts to this possibility. So something like the Extended Universe of Star Wars can be praised on the grounds of how it adheres to the rules that were laid out in prior texts, instead of being engaged on multiple levels regarding their craftsmanship, their content, and their place within the genre, and so on.

Specifically to that review, the focus on the rules leads to an understanding of the movie which forecloses any political possibility that doesn't conform to a very narrow understanding of politics. What are presented as "real world" understandings are more symptoms of exactly the type of cynical "realism" with which political thought is pervaded, and rely on a view of reality which is nothing more than the "rules" of genre writ large, such that they cover the whole world. The claim, for instance, that the links between the government of the film's present and the government of the film's future are not immediately graspable only makes sense if one assumes that a state hews closely to the progressive idea of the state; that there could have been some sort of fascist irruption doesn't even cross the reviewer's mind, precisely because the framework under which they are reviewing the movie doesn't allow for that. It wouldn't be playing by the rules.

There is even a suggestion of this within the film itself, in the form of the TK characters. The rules-based interpretation of the movie sees them and, because it necessarily operates on the meta-level as well as the diegetic, thinks "Get your Children of the Corn out of my time travel adventure!" What it doesn't see is the possibility that what is being described is not just an awkwardly shoehorned trope into a Proper Genre, but an element of the frame which suggests the relatively unseen social structure that informs it is thoroughly different, and getting rapidly stranger. Time travel itself is almost a retro concept within science fiction at this point, especially when it involves a machine, functioning more as one of those things you list when you are mocking your friend who likes science fiction – so what, you read about space ships and time travel and alien abductions all the time? – than something that is encountered in the literature very much. Which is just to say that the movie, from the beginning, seems to be working with a certain idea of genre as such, rather than within any genre; and because of that, it is both boring (as it doesn't ultimately enter dialogue with anything) and not particularly well-described by a genre-specific interpretation.

So uh, ultimately I suppose what I have to say about Looper itself is that it was fine or whatever, I guess.