Apocalyptic Nighttime: Taxi Driver (1976)

One of the most beautiful title cards in the history of cinema, Scorsese's Taxi Driver links us not only to the seedy grindhouse,
with its fading yellow-orange font, but also to the grand moviehouses of Hollywood's golden age, with its iconic Bernard Hermann score.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
I can see the moment in Scorsese's career where he steps confidently into the role of a great director: the gun purchasing scene in Taxi Driver.  Seen through the singular point of view of Travis as he eyes each gun, with a particularly beautiful pan across the .44, the salesman talks and talks about the benefits of every gun and we stay on Travis as he feels the gun in his hand, following his sightline out the window, across the city, over the freeway and to a couple of pedestrians milling about on the sidewalk several stories below.  No click of an empty chamber.  No comment about the scum. We have no clue where this is going or how far, but we know everything in this world is wrong and it is frightening to imagine what Travis may end up doing.  When he points the gun out the window, the camera's lens is focused on the outside, not the gun.  We feel his mind, even though we do not know it through narration.  

Our hero, imagined: insulated with words, overlooking the city, violence brewing.  A prophet of rage seeks for his voice.

Choose Your Dream: The Bling Ring's (2013) Wasteland of Teenage Idolatry

The Bling Ring (Sophia Coppola, 2013)
It is such an unusual and shocking thing: bored teenagers of privilege sneaking into the homes of particular celebrities and stealing their clothes.  If it seems foolish and vapid and narcissistic, it is.  But such is the culture of celebrity idolatry America has manufactured, and such is the hope of wildest dream fulfillment bestowed upon it's children by well-meaning but misguided parents.  Sophia Coppola sees all of it.  And instead of building a tired, pointed and moralistic tirade against it, she has crafted a brilliant observational satire that exposes the complex sociological consequences that enable not only the existence of something like TMZ, but the ubiquity of it's tabloid interests.  She also finds a more frightening cause lurking below the surface.

Alex in Wonderland (1970) and the New Hollywood Paradox

Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970)
Coming to audiences near the beginning of the New Hollywood era (1967-1979), Alex in Wonderland is both an appreciation of the artistic freedom afforded to directors by producers/studios during that time and a unique representation of the paradoxes and paralysis facing the New Hollywood filmmaker in light of that freedom.  It is bold and audacious and brilliant, written and directed by Paul Mazursky, one of the forgotten dual talents of that era.

The Refusal of Culpability in 'Flight' (2012)

Flight (Robert Zemeckis, 2012)
No one likes to take responsibility for the bad things that happen.  It is easiest to blame someone else.  We accept accolades for success but always shift the blame for the failures.  If that is true of individuals it is just as true of the institutions we build.  Families, governments, corporations, schools, even churches.  It is the root of social diseases ranging from extraneous litigation to alcoholism.  In that way, Flight is pertinent and hard-hitting.  Not just because it deals with alcohol addiction, but because it deals with the root of addiction: the refusal of culpability.  And, even though it paints a far-reaching societal portrait, it is also bold enough to admit that there is a way beyond it.  

The Color Wheel (2011)

The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry, 2011)
There is a moment about a third of the way into The Color Wheel where Colin's thoughts toward his sister are summarized in the statement, "You've always been a hot commodity in the world of perverts."  Not that his insults are one-sided, as the entire relationship of this brother and sister is based on their annoyance with one-another and the ability to place uniquely searing insults at the feet of the other.  Colin lambasts J.R. mostly for her failed dreams of being a news anchor and her taste in men (most recently illustrated in her affair with a broadcasting professor); J.R. lambasts Colin for his apathy and lack of imagination.  But, as the story unfolds, it turns out that J.R. and Colin -- as cruel as they are to one another -- are only slightly less cruel than the world of their fairly privileged bubble.

The Death of Romanticism in 'Les Bonnes Femmes' (1960)

Les Bonnes Femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960)
Swinging the pendulum deftly between various moods -- documentary-like observation, gender comedy, absurd comedy, tragedy and finally, quiet transcendence -- Chabrol's film shows a careful narrative structure and a formal beauty that really gripped me.  This is my first Chabrol film and I come to it already familiar, though not overly enamored, with the other early touchstones of the French New Wave: The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959) and Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960).  This is a really beautiful and unique film that is made so rich mostly because Chabrol's keen interest in human interaction, spoken and unspoken.

A delicate portrait of city women and a searing subversion of romanticism, Chabrol follows four Parisian girls in their early 20's over the course of a handful of days and nights, though it is the stories of Jane and Jacqueline that get the lion's share of the focus.  Both of these women are intensely romantic, though in opposite ways.  Jane embraces the romanticism of choice, freedom, being unencumbered, being her own woman; Jacqueline embraces the more conventional romanticism of being swept off her feet by a man who loves her deeply.  Over the course of the film, their romantic notions will be thwarted as the men who drift through their lives upend their dreams of freedom and love.

Jacqueline and Jane are walking home one evening when they are suddenly stalked very persistently by the ostentatiously lighthearted duo of Marcel and Albert.  They are nothing more than guys looking for a good time and though they seem charming and entertaining early on, over the course of the evening they become increasingly callous and demanding of Jane, who is far more accommodating than Jacqueline.  Eventually, she is in their apartment and expected to be sexually involved with both men.  Chabrol, though ultimately sympathetic to the women who are at the mercy of men in power, still sees a paradoxical conflict where Jane's own freedom of choice has brought her to this compromised state.  When Jane returns to her apartment early the next morning, we get the unfortunate feeling that she had to involuntarily give into at least some of the men's demands.  She is not in the mood to discuss with her roommate anything that happened. 

One of the key scenes is the night at the swimming pool, a scene where every major character (apart from Mr. Balin) is present.  It starts as a lighthearted jaunt that slowly turns into a aggressive assault of masculine dominance in its good and bad forms.  Marcel and Albert happen to be at the pool too, where Jane, Jacqueline and the rest are enjoying their evening.  The two men quickly start teasing Jane into introducing them to their party and find that she has become significantly less accommodating since the last time she was with them.  Quickly, things deviate into a prankish show of disapproval, where Marcel and Albert throw all the others into the pool and start dunking them all under water.  Jane and Jacqueline obviously get the brunt of the dunking in what has quickly shifted from good-natured prank into psychological torture.  Chabrol notes this shift in tone by shifting his camera angle, showing us underwater shots of Jacqueline being pushed under, matched with muffled underwater audio. Finally, we get our relief in the form of Andre, who dives in from the high dive to swim over and rescue Jacqueline from her peril.  The two men, now emasculated and embarrassed, back off as Andre becomes the hero of the scene and the wish fulfillment of Jacqueline, who has noticed him stalking her recently.  

At this point, it seems Chabrol has brought us full-circle into a traditional (though slightly unconventional) romantic film, as Andre and Jacqueline are quickly away into the countryside, sharing a meal together where Andre proves himself to be a jokester himself, full of little tricks that amuse the enamored girl.  He takes them on a walk in the woods that slowly becomes more and more uncomfortable, until finally we are given an ambiguous moment of consummation, as the two lay together in an isolated area as the birds around them call out rhythmically.  Chabrol finally lets us in on what is happening (having alluded to it so obviously earlier with Andre's own inquisition -- though as a hopeful optimistic, I disregarded it) as we see that Andre is strangling Jacqueline, whose squirms were not the happy writhing of passion but the desperate movements of anguish.  

Andre leaves the scene quite hurriedly and we are never afforded an answer to his mystery.  Why was he following her?  Why did he want to kill her?  Did he know anything about her at all?  Instead, Chabrol takes us into a dance hall where a young woman is being asked to dance by a young man.  We cannot see the man's face because we are left with the gaze of the young woman, who literally locks eyes with us and is intercut with the slowly changing angle of the glistening mirror ball above them.  The metaphorical fractured beauty of the ball is now a frustrated thing, not giving us narrative or sentimental satisfaction, but a vignetted series of dots that clutter the atmosphere and highlight how bright the light could be if it were just focused.  The romanticism that seemed so certain only ten minutes prior has now been unfairly shattered, and we are left with a moment to ponder the frustrating reversal as we experienced the fulfillment of our greatest fears rather than our greatest dreams.  It is a strange moment of transcendence.

Forrest Gump (1994) and the Subversion of American Exceptionalism

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)
Forrest Gump is the story of a blank slate of a man who finds himself passing through many essential and non-essential moments in 1960’s and 70’s America.  I describe him as a blank slate because he is very simply motivated and a character that the audience will cast their own meaning upon because of his simplicity.  Though Forrest has a low IQ and is generally thought to be stupid, he is guileless and loyal, naïve and, in many ways, innocent.  His innocence is not born from his ignorance, however: it is born from his loyalty.  He takes people at their word. 

The Freedom of Capital: Milos Forman's Portrait of Larry Flynt

The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996)
It is easy to embrace The People vs. Larry Flynt as a cinematic defense of freedom of speech or deride it as a botched biopic, but I think Milos Forman is smarter than both of those readings.  The skeleton key for my understanding of Forman is in the obscure Soviet-era aesthetic stiob, which is a form of absurd humor that requires such an over-identification with the object of its parody that it is difficult to tell whether there is sincere support for the object, subtle ridicule or some strange mix of the two.  The clearest practitioner of the form is Paul Verhoeven, though his is lived out in sci-fi movie structure (Total Recall) and genre gaudiness (Starship Troopers) that openly embraces the absurdity of its aesthetic (RoboCop).  Forman, on the other hand, is a smuggler, embracing the more conventional structure of Hollywood pictures (Amadeus) and subverting them slyly through his depiction of off-kilter subjects (Man on the Moon).  This has led to more universal acclaim for Forman among mainstream critics and an apathetic disinterest in Forman by many serious critics and cinephiles. 

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
I remember back in early 2002.  I read some blog or film site that I can't find now.  The guy listed A.I. as his pick for top film of 2001 and said (paraphrasing): "A.I. is a film that will be understood as a great achievement years down the road.  Right now the expectation of Spielberg doing Kubrick (or Kubrick doing Spielberg doing Kubrick) is too fresh and the best way to approach the film will be to embrace what it is not reject what it isn't (it isn't the last Stanley Kubrick movie)."  I didn't love A.I. at the time, but that idea stuck with me and I have waited it out to see if critical consensus would change to make A.I. one of the canonical films from 2001.  It seems to have happened.  It has risen in my estimation too.

There are many difficulties in coming to A.I.  The first is that the film is about a robot.  The second is the film deals with themes of alienation, loneliness, mortality, eternity and the unattainable.  The third is the film is dark and counter to what the average moviegoer may expect of a Spielberg movie (this is not E.T. with a robot).  Fourth: the film is deeply sad.  But the film is also a showcase of what Spielberg does well and I think is an essential text for arguing the merits of Steven Spielberg as an auteur.  I want to look at one scene.  Actually, the tail end of one scene.  Four sequential images.

David (Haley Joel Osment) is an advanced humanoid robot placed in the care of the Swintons while their biological son, Martin, is placed in suspended animation awaiting a cure to his rare disease.  After a cure is found and Martin is returned to his parents, Martin becomes jealous of David, who is programmed to love his human owners.  One night, Martin convinces David to cut off a lock of his mother's hair.  The parents awake to David holding scissors and are outraged and frightened.  

The next day is Martin's birthday party. The father questions the safety of having David in the household, while the mother is more honest about what truly happened.  While the children are playing, David comes up to Martin and tries to give him a gift.  Martin's friends step in and start subtly harassing David, eventually stabbing his arm with a knife to see if they can activate David's self-protection program.  Immediately threatened, David shields himself behind Martin and clings to him in fear as he steps away from the threatening boys and falls into the pool.  His weight carries Martin down with him, who can't escape David's grip.  Parents jump in to free Martin from the grip of David, who is left at the bottom as they rush Martin to the surface to resuscitate him.  

A seemingly frozen David now embraces nothing as the camera dollies in on a frontal shot of his face, ending on an extreme close up.  Blank stare.  

We are left in suspense while Martin is resuscitated.  But the point-of-view remains with David, underwater.  In addition to the suspense of Martin's outcome, we are left with an ambiguous David, a mechanical being, submerged in water.  We saw what happened when he ate food earlier (resulting in a trip to the lab so the technicians could clean out his insides).  Has he malfunctioned?  Is he conscious?  His arms extended, as if awaiting rescue.  But no one comes back for him.  It seems cruel even if he is an artificial being, and it is this lack of sentimentality that the humans feel for David that can be alienating as a viewer.  It creates an internal conflict between emotional connection (connecting to David's face and responses) and intellectual understanding (knowing that David is programed to look and respond realistically).

This would have been Kieslowski's favorite shot in the film. 

This is where Spielberg sets himself apart from many lesser filmmakers, who would be tempted to add weight to the resuscitation by taking us outside the pool, either to Martin's face or to the face of the mother.  Instead, Spielberg keeps us underwater, not simply because it is more suspenseful (showing Martin's face would suggest his forthcoming resuscitation), but also because it retains the point-of-view of David.  The audience must remain with David, feeling his distance and experiencing the scene as an outsider.  In practical terms, it doesn't matter if Martin lives or dies.  

David has now solidified his fate as the outsider and his life at the Swinton home is over.  The shot reminds me of Kieslowski's use of close-ups in Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993) to express isolation, a distancing effect rather than deepening emotional connection.  The distance is more than aesthetic as this also reaffirms the essential difference between Martin and David: life.  A real boy is mortal.  Mortality is humanity.

The visual distortion mirrors David's inability to understand the adult's response.  He does not understand what has happened nor the weight of it.  

Before the audience is allowed to connect with Martin's resuscitation, we cut to this distorted close-up of the adults lifting Martin and carrying him away.  The suspense of Martin's outcome is relieved, but we now see the adults as David sees them.  Our emotional interest is in David and therefore Martin's outcome loosens the noose around David's neck a touch.  If Martin died David would not be left untouched.  He would have been badgered and most likely beaten.  Though it would not hurt him, he would respond as if it did, and we would respond as if it did too.  David acts only according to his programming.  Hinted at beneath this, on a deeper level not dealt with until the final scene of A.I., perhaps the parents are acting according to their programming.  And what of the audience?

This distorted close-up also shows us the weight of mortality and the distance created by David's immortality.  No one stops to look back into the pool.  No one jumps in for him.

The mortals have gone.  Water engulfs the immortal one, as if still in the womb, awaiting a birth that will never happen.  

The camera pulls straight up from above the water, now freed from the claustrophobic close-ups but revealing the chilling reality of isolation.  David's one friend, a mechanical bear toy, walks up the water's edge but cannot help him.  David is alone.  

We see in the next scene that David's circuits are fine, but the emotional damage wrought on the Swintons has taken its toll.

Yi Yi (2000)

Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
I have only had the opportunity to see two of his films, but based on the unique strength and extraordinary power of those two films, I would call Edward Yang a cinematic master.  I hope to have opportunity to see the rest of his work, but if A Brighter Summer Day (1991) ever gets a decent DVD release that I can enjoy alongside Yi Yi, that may be enough.  There is enough in these two films to last a while.

Yi Yi (2000) was Edward Yang's last film and as such it works as his crowning achievement.  It is not an epic, at least, not a conventional one.  It is a small story of a family, but a full story, where every ellipsis will eventually cross back over itself and every detail has repercussions.  Part of his mastery is the ability to take mundane scenes and fuse them with significance that may not be conscious, but is certainly felt somehow.  A child is an outsider within his own family function, an event that seems a little too neat and planned to be real.  The characters are stuck like the helium-filled balloons rising up to the ceiling.

Even mundane events can set up the color scheme for the film, and visually express everything the audience is going to see the rest of the way.

Sometimes I wonder if Yi Yi is the last great film of the 20th century or the first great film of the 21st.  It feels like the fulfillment of traditional narrative filmmaking.  Yang's thematic material is traditional (generational conflict, death, infidelity, distrust, coming-of-age), his technique is not obtrusive or ostentatious and he completely avoids self-reflexivity.  He is the sort of filmmaker who may get overlooked for how accomplished he is because his brushstrokes are so carefully hidden.  But if you look carefully (and you know how to find them), you will see them.  For me, I saw them immediately in the recurring motifs he implemented and in his accomplished use of landscape.

Sometimes a reflection can show the longing heart of a character.

Sometimes reflections can trap the character within his own world.

Yang is a master of characters within spaces and utilizes sound to only deepen this.  In Brighter Summer Day he used the soundtrack cleverly to lay out the geography of the town.  In Yi Yi, sound can create distance by having a character hear what occurs off-screen, add detail that the image cannot reveal, or prophesy an upcoming event.

Every setting paints the context of a character. 

By utilizing long shots, Yang gives the close-ups he sparingly uses more emotional power.  His lighting is natural, often motivated primarily from without rather than within.  It all depends on where the character thinks they find happiness.  When a character is at work, they are usually caught in-between worlds.

Geometric patterns break down the space while obstructions prove to be just as prevalent as reflections.

Daily routine is very much a part of Yang's films, as he utilizes even the same framing for multiple scenes within a given setting so that when the routine is broken, either by obstruction or diversity of image selection, it is immediately felt by the audience.  Sometimes it is the uncommon sight that gives us narrative information often reserved for dialogue.  But why waste a powerful moment to engage the audience by having characters talk about it?

The characters cannot always see clearly what is right in front of them.

The space is finally stripped down so much the only place the characters can look is straight ahead.