November 30: Birth of a Nation (1915 -- D.W. Griffith)

★★★★

When a film can have you rooting for the Ku Klux Klan to rescue a group of white folks from a black military unit, you have to pay attention to what’s been happening on the screen. And when that film is from 1915, there’s even more cause.  The paradox of the repugnant racism which informs Birth of a Nation and the aesthetic beauty and technical achievement of the film puts it on a very short list of movies that make me uncomfortable to watch.  In a bad way.  Like the anti-gay bigotry of Rome, Open City and the aesthetic idealization of fascism in Triumph of the Will, the pervasive racism in Birth of a Nation makes watching the film today an ambivalent experience for me at best.

Birth of a Nation isn’t overtly hostile to its black characters, but it sees them from a condescending, paternalist perspective.  The black population in the film dances barefoot, plays music, laughs and eats chicken and watermelon, but the people themselves aren't portrayed as inherently anti-white.  Much of the black/white tension in the film results from Northern whites manipulating the simple-minded blacks, though there is some resentment of whites in characters such as Stoneman’s housekeeper.  Another element of the bigotry here is that some black men, like Silas and Gus, are unable to control their passion for white women, which leads to conflict.  There aren't any workable interracial love interests here.  And though Birth of a Nation includes some positive positive black figures, these characters embody the paternalistic attitude of the film in their own way -- Mammy and Jake are contented servants willing to give their all for their white owners/employers.  Because of the paternalism in Birth of a Nation, the black characters don’t hate whites and don’t especially want to dominate them; instead, the African Americans here aren’t able to think for themselves and mostly take their cues from white ideologues who are bent on using them to upend social convention.

A striking thing about Griffith’s paternalistic racism is that it doesn't imply that blacks need to be repressed.  Birth of a Nation lauds Abraham Lincoln and approves of his leadership in the Civil War and his freeing of the slaves in the South.  It goes on to show Lincoln as trying to ease the reintegration of the South into the Union against hardcore ideologues like Stoneman and opportunistic carpetbaggers.  It’s these latter parties, who manipulate the black population to their own advantage, that are the real villains in this film.  African Americans are too simple to be responsible.

But aside from the racism that informs Birth of a Nation, the film is clearly a giant step in film narration. 

E.W. Porter may have pioneered basic elements of modern film like simultaneous story lines and continuity editing, but it’s Griffith – here – who turns these elements into what feels much like the language of cinema as we still know it today.  

Early in Birth of a Nation, editing lays out simultaneous stories as we visit the Stoneman family of Pennsylvania and the Camerons of the Piedmont.  The simultaneity here contrasts life in the North and the South.  After the war begins, Birth of a Nation also cuts between battlefield and home front, showing us what’s happening in those two spheres.  But the real conceptual leap in this film is its suspenseful conclusion as we see the Klan rallying, Lynch trying to force Elsie into marriage, and the Camerons being surrounded by a menacing black militia.  All simultaneously.  And Griffith doesn’t grant the audience narrative relief until all three narratives are resolved.  We worry as the Klan gathers, wondering if the riders will be in time to rescue Elsie, but then while the rescue of Elsie is underway, we worry whether Ben will get the Klan to the countryside cottage to rescue the Camerons.  It’s this headlong narrative drive that so engages viewers today that causes us to end up rooting for, of all things, the Ku Klux Klan; this section of Birth of a Nation is a real testimony to the power of the film language that Griffith masters here.

Modern viewers also recognize other cinema elements in the film that are familiar to us.  For example, Griffith uses editing to portray a psychological state of mind.  At one point, Margaret rejects a suitor as she thinks back on her brother, and the director cuts from a shot of Margaret thinking to one of her brother dying.  This edit evokes not only the brother’s death but Margaret’s pain over losing him and establishes her state of mind.  And Griffith uses many now-standard cinema gestures to create the scale and kinetic energy of a battlefield.  A shot of a woman with her children morphs into the introduction of a huge battle as the camera pans from a medium close-up of the family unit on a hill and to a very long shot that reveals a massive military assembly in the valley below.  Later, a matte insert combines scenes of Atlanta burning with frenetic battlefield movement in the foreground to create an onscreen battle that not only forecasts the same one in Gone with the Wind but also the large-scale SFX work in movies like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Birth of a Nation uses such cinematic elements to put scale on the screen, but within such large-scale views, individual vignettes give us the human element of war.  The young Cameron and Stoneman die together in battle, a scene anticipating the melodrama that silent film would embrace so firmly, and there’s even a tracking shot of the Little Colonel leading a charge that is shot from the open bed of a truck ahead of the action. 

The 1915, Birth of a Nation also anticipates other features that would become cinematic stock-in-trade. 

There is the engaging humor in the way the guard at the hospital pines for Nurse Elsie.  His cute if futile gestures prefigure the Little Tramp as well as Buster Keaton.  And we have a full blown action hero in the sexy, shirtless blacksmith who fights off everyone in saloon.  It’s moving take on the action hero because, unlike today’s massive strongman hero, this one is ultimately shot in the back and killed, adding to our anger at the bad guys.  It’s hard to imagine a similar end to a Bruce Willis or Jason Statham character.  And Griffith even anticipates John Ford and David Lean in this film.  The brief shot of a silhouette of horsemen on a hill could have been shot in Monument Valley or Wadi Rum decades later. 

And I’m no expert, but I found the use of intertitles in the film to be inconsistent and, for that reason, interesting.  Some of them summarize and comment on the action we've seen, and others give dialogue.  Among the most interesting are the ones aimed to shore up the verisimilitude of the film.  Some explain that the way we see Ford’s Theater is the way it really was or that the tableau we see of the surrender at Appomattox is an honest rendition of the historical fact, complete with footnotes and references to sources.  Beyond the intertitles, Griffith also aims at being “realistic” by basing some scenes on Civil War photographs.  The image of the rider on the black horse with a wagon in the background echoes an image of Mathew Brady as do the images of battlefield causalities.  

All of which takes a viewer back to the uncomfortable paradox of this film -- the combination of its terrible racism with its breakthough discovery of powerful film language.  Birth of a Nation is certainly one of the most difficult films films for a viewer to know how to respond to.

November 27: Inception (2010 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★★

The central problem with Inception is that it's too complicated to be a movie, even a 2-1/2 hour movie.  That’s why we have the constant exposition of rules and amendments to them.  If we all knew we’d wake up if we were killed in a dream, that wouldn’t need explaining.  And we wouldn’t need to find out later that if we were dreaming under sedation and were killed in a dream that we’d wash up on the shores of our unconscious and our consciousness would be a mush.  But we don’t know that, so someone has to explain it.  And they have to explain what a “kick” is, why we shouldn’t use memories in a dream and whose projections hate whom and why.  And then there are the corporate and family connections that figure in the film.  And the technique for incepting an idea.  There is just way too much explaining in this movie.

There is also too little heart.  The most complex character, Cobb, is a string of adjectives – lovelorn, hurt, guilty, manipulative – but despite DiCaprio’s best efforts, there’s not enough time amid all the exposition to connect these parts into a cohesive personality.  And the other characters are mono-dimensional.  Adding to character weakness, Ellen Page, with one of the main roles in the film, is completely unable to commit to Ariadne and delivers her lines in precisely the same way regardless of the dramatic circumstances.  With so much exposition and so little sympathetic engagement, Inception doesn’t have a lot of options for audience appeal.

But it uses the remaining options very effectively.  For one, what Nolan can’t do with characters he does well with plot.  Like in Following and Memento, the plot of Inception is broken into parts and reassembled with a cleverness that draws us in.  To perform the inception, Cobb designs an intricate, three-level operation with the actions on one level being important to the actions on the others; time in all the levels is related.  And we even get a bonus level at one point.  Inception has something of a geek appeal in the way all the levels cohere, but they cohere with a satisfying consistency.

 There are fun visuals in the film, too.  Action sequences are effective and logical.  Chases like the one on foot though Mombasa and the one with cars and a train have lots of dynamism and surprise, and the James Bond-ish snow fight is particularly easy to follow.  Nolan complements these with great special effects.  Arthur’s fight in the free-fall hotel corridor is the central action sequence of the film as the fight occurs on floor, walls and ceiling, but the slow-motion plummet of the truck, too, has fun visuals.  Likewise the scene of Ariadne learning what she can do in a dream by folding Paris up and creating bridges and mirrors at will.  And all these aside, there are fun images like the bullet train speeding across a marsh or the elaborate décor of the Japanese palace that opens the film.  Nolan is at his most effective at technical feats like these.

Like much of Nolan’s work, Inception excels at the mechanics of an action movie.  Its plot is like a well-oiled machine, and technical elements like special effects and action hum.  There’s even the clever use of “Je ne regrette rien,” a cute nod to Marion Cotillard’s role here.  But someone should have reined in Nolan’s elaborate world and the complicated, unfamiliar rules that needed so much exposition.  And added a bit of heart.  Inception is fun, but it could have been much more.

November 24: Following (1998 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★★★

This is a surprisingly fun little film, enjoyable in its own right and and a pleasure to see from our vantage point now much further into Nolan’s career. The director’s first outing, Following is a film shot in black-and-white and complete with a dark mood, pervasive corruption, high-key lighting and a femme fatale in the person of the Blonde.  It also borrows the trope of starting with a cop interrogating our main character, and as is often the case in this genre, the hero doesn't fare well in the film.  It’s easy to see Following’s film noir roots.

None of this is very far from The Dark Knight Rises.  Not completely black-and-white, the later film is nonetheless often monochrome, and there’s clearly the same oppressive dark mood in both, even heightened in Following.  There’s also a fair amount of darkness and contrast lighting in Dark Knight Rises, and it has both a penitent and a full-blown femme fatale in Catwoman and Miranda Tate, respectively.  The correspondences are uncanny; without seeing Following, I wouldn't have picked up on the film noir elements in The Dark Knight Rises.

Yet watching Following is more fun than watching Nolan’s latest Batman.  Following is taunt and its elements, purposeful; in fact, in the reversal at the end of the film, the viewer even reinterprets all that has come before.  Something as insignificant as signing a credit card turns out to have been important to the story, unlike the rambling in Dark Knight Rises that can dwell on elements that don’t resonate later.  Why did Bruce Wayne spend all that time in an underground prison?  There is no such sprawl in Following.  This film is economical rather than sprawling and fat; every detail, item and even gesture has purpose.

This movie also has narrative engagement and suspense, two things lacking in The Dark Knight Rises.  Nolan’s fractures the plot of Following into four periods and intercuts them for the story, but there are always clear markers to cue the viewer into the respective parts of the plot.  We find ourselves watching the film as something of a puzzle, but this story structure also engages us with questions about how these parts are connected.  Why did the Young Man get cleaned up?  How did he end up with the bruises?  This type of narrative is somewhat contrived, and though Nolan uses it just as effectively in the later Memento, it’s not technique that would bear frequent repetition.  Here, though, it pulls us into the story.

And Following has lots of squirm-inducing suspense.  The film’s basic concept of following a stranger for fun is creepy and raises fear in the audience of the consequences; the tense scene when Cobb confronts the Young Man gets its suspense from this setup.  There’s also an extremely suspenseful scene when the two break into an apartment and Cobb casually goes through the residents’ personal items, even having a glass of wine in their kitchen.  That suspense peaks when one of the residents returns home unexpectedly.  And in yet another scene, the Young Man has to tape cash to his body while in constant fear of being caught.  That scene is has an intensity lacking at any individual point in The Dark Knight Rises.

Following has originality, creativity, engagement and suspense.  Darkness pervades this little movie, but it’s a sharp, cutting darkness rather than the continuing thud of a club.  This debut makes us hope that Nolan is eventually able to make contact again with the deftness and precision of this early work.

November 17: The Dark Knight Rises (2013 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★

If Dostoyevsky worked for Stan Lee, we’d get something like The Dark Night Rises.  An aging, battered Bruce Wayne opens the film in seclusion, licking his wounds.  Gotham crime rebounds, and Wayne goes through mental angst to decide if he should don the cape anew.  One he decides, and with the aid of a remarkable brace, he recovers his physical agility.  However, he is soon betrayed by the woman he loves (twice), loses his entire fortune, and gets badly beaten yet again by Bane, who exiles him to an underground prison in China (or someplace similar).  By comparison, Raskolnikov didn’t have much to deal with.  And into this unrelenting stream of pain, is added the infirmity of Commissioner Gordon and the fall of Gotham City into a sort of Reign of Terror with its own Robespierre. 

Then Batman defeats the bad guys and goes to Florence for coffee with his repentant girlfriend.  I kid you not.

The Dark Night Rises is a sprawl of cinema that veers from one mood to another and from one plot point to another.  First, Batman is crushed, but comes back to win the second round.  He’s imprisoned with little explanation, and he gets back to Gotham with little explanation.  To a degree, this aesthetic is true to the Marvel source, but on the screen, it becomes long and even annoying.  And Nolan isn’t inclined to pare his story down to a more fundamental narrative focus with consistent characters and values.  When we discover that Bane isn’t the real bad guy but that Talia is, this reveal nearly takes the wind out of the story; we lose Bane’s plot energy, but Talia doesn’t have the story interest to replace him. In the first 90% of the film, Batman undergoes so much pain and loss that we might be forgiven if we eventually wish he would indeed give up the cowl so his relentless pain would ease.

But for all these unsatisfying elements of The Dark Knight Rises, there are aspects of the film that warrant note.  One of the most interesting is that Batman is a past-his-prime male who has to try to find his place in the world outside the role he’s held for so long. Dark Knight Rises gives us a superhero that isn’t as super as he used to be, who is physically vulnerable and who can be tricked.  He’s a superhero we don’t see often.  Dark Knight Rises also makes a political nod in the direction of today’s situation of a shrinking middle class and an underclass with no upward mobility.  Catwoman resents the rich in an almost Robin Hood way, and Bane’s takeover of Gotham appeals to resentment against the 10%.  But if Dark Knight Rises has a political message, it’s difficult to read it clearly.  There’s a position here against Tea Party anarchy, but there’s also a feeling that Bruce Wayne and the moneyed class manage to keep order much better than the mob rule Bane incit and manipulates.  The ideology here isn’t clear, or it’s one that many of us might not want to think about.

As with the other two installments of Batman -- and many of his other films – Nolan goes for gut moments at the expense of the overall film.  Dark Knight Rises isn’t nearly as rambling and fractured as its immediate predecessor, but it’s not a very satisfying either.

November 16: Looper (2013--Rian Johnson)

★★★

Looper is the little sci-fi movie I’ve been wanting to see all year.  It doesn’t have grandiose ambition but instead takes a single conceit and works it into a clever, engaging two-hour cinema experience that teaseses the sci-fi-minded to daydream what-ifs. 

The strength here is Rian Johnson’s screenplay, as artful and precise as a music box.  In the future, if a criminal guy does't like someone, they send that person back in time, where execution awaits at the hands of a Looper, a killer who gone back in time to do this work.  However, Loopers must eventually kill their older selves, and sometimes this rule causes problems.  When Young Seth refuses to kill Old Seth, gang members capture the younger boy and carve an address into his arm which then shows up as a scar on the arm of the Old Seth, summoning the older man to his death.  It’s a grim scene as Old Seth experiences broken bones and missing appendages as he tries to get to the address, but it’s perfectly part of the time travel logic of Johnson’s music box.  The present affects the future, so when Old Joe starts to lose a clear idea of his (future) wife, an astute viewer will pick that up as foreshadowing about something that will happen in the future.

In addition to the time travel conceit that Johnson manages so adroitly, Looper putters right along with suspense from several sources.  What’s the gang going to do to the two Joes?  Will Old Joe be able to save his wife….and the same question: Will he kill the Rainmaker before the latter becomes a crime monster of the future?  And since we’ve already seen that the present affects the future, what will the future look like after Young and Old Joe have had their climatic encounter?  All these narrative questions keep you plugged into this fun, smart sci-fi movie.

Looper isn’t deep, intellectual sci-fi, but it’s smart and well-crafted.  And it even manages character development and passing cinematography along the way.  This is a worthwhile film to catch on a day when you feel like a ration of cinematic precision.

November 15: Oblivion (2013 -- Joseph Kosinski)

★★★

Bad notices aside, I enjoyed this film.  Visuals count, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be had from soaking up what’s on the screen.  From the clean look of the sky home where Jack and Vika live to NYC ruins like the public library and the Empire State Building, there’s most always something worth looking at in Oblivion.  Desolate scenes are empty, and panoramas have expanse, even when there’s a monster of a mechanism looming far away.  The movie also has an engaging tone of Romantic nostalgia for a lost civilization, similar to that in WALL-E, with Jack Harper as the last man on earth, left to maintain a few machines, sift through damaged artifacts of the lost culture, and engage his fantasies of what life must have been like.  All this makes for a good sci-fi movie, and if there’s the occasional Star Wars-inspired chase through a narrow canyon or struggle with a sophisticated version of Hal, so much the better.

There’s even enough suspense to hold our attention as we go through a series of surprises.  We discover, for example, that our Moon-inspired maintenance man has an little refuge in an area of rich greenery, and soon afterwards, we face the mystery of why the Scavs want to capture Jack rather than eliminate him in the library scene.  And before we linger on that point too long, a signal mysteriously comes from the Empire State ruins, a ship with a human crew lands, drones attack the crew, and Jack and a new character, Julia, end up with the Scavs.  The story continues to move quickly all the way through the big clone reveal, another salute to Moon, and on to the counter-attack against the Tet.  I enjoyed the ongoing narrative springs through the film.

Oblivion even gives us something of a sci-fi thematic question in the second part of the film: What does identity consist of?  In all the film’s loss and nostalgia, we discover that Jack 49 looks exactly like his clone, Jack 52, so 52 would logically have the same memories as 49;  however, memory scrub aside, it’s by no means clear that they share the dreams of their wife, Julia, or that both have their wilderness homestead.  With this same-but-different twist, the plot gets a little unstable.  And what’s more, Oblivion goes on to propose that Jack 49 can die while destroying the Tet – thus widowing his wife – but that Jack 52 can then replace 49 as the husband back on earth.  It’s a classic sci-fi conundrum to ponder if a bit creaky.

Oblivion offers some sci-fi satisfaction to fans of the genre, and there are good images and some narrative energy.  It’s not a bad way to spend a couple of hours in front of the screen.

November 14: Ender's game (2013 -- Gavin Hood)

★★★

I might have enjoyed Ender's Game more if it had had less money.  This is a film that feels like it should be smaller because of in the way it focuses on its simple ideas.  Ender's brother has failed at military college because he is too prone to violence, and his sister has likewise been bounced out because she is too empathetic.  Ender himself succeeds there, though, because he has a good balance of the two.  Ender's Game tells us that one should have martial prowess, but it’s important to understand the enemy first to be sure of the threat before attacking.  And in fact, when the militarist Colonel Graff finally gains the upper hand over the empathetic Major Anderson and uses Ender to achieve his battle aims, the teenage commander is appalled at Colonel’s manipulation and, gaining an insight into the Formics, sets about saving the species he was trained to destroy.  It’s this the kind of neatness of idea that makes Ender's Game have the feel of Gattica or Moon while simultaneously looking like a mega-EFX,  large cast star-vehicle.  It could have pulled off the thinness of its ideas if it had been less inflated.

Unfortunately, this is a big movie, and its scale magnifies problems we might’ve forgiven in a smaller film.  In Ender's Game fails to engage the sympathies of the audience.  The kids are oddly off-putting as they shout Marine chants, stand at attention and march together; adolescents going through adult motions don’t convince us that the kids have depth.  And nor does the script.  The film's contrived tableaus of school bullying and bf/gf play lack emotional depth and leave us as observers noting information.  It’s hard to engage the world of Ender’s Game sympathetically because the characters are as simple as the ideas.
addition to its neat polarities and the simple outcome of its story,

Ender’s Game ultimately provides us dedicated sci-fi fans with what we enjoy: some accessible ideas and lots of special effects.  It’s fun on screen.  However, you leave this film more dazzled by its look than moved by its characters and insight.