Retail Resistance

Just a Little Miss

I finally got around to watching Little Miss Sunshine.  I've been procrastinating this entire time because I was worried I wouldn't dislike the movie, thus ruinning my top 5 list.  With everyone loving this movie so much, and contrarian that I am, I thought I would have to come up with some dirt to justify not liking it.  Now having seen it, I realize I don't have to actively dislike it.  It's just a mediocre movie, and not worth the loathing. 

Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, is every bit the movie critics made it out to be, and then some.  It reminds me of a quotation from La Pasionaria, speaking of the Spanish Civil War, "They took the cities, but we had the better songs."  And that, is still the case.  Art is for the humane, and humane art, whether it is brutal, or vulgar, or graphic - and none of these are a contradiction in terms - will always be the province of people with whose dreams for humanity run the deepest.   

With Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro has made an anarchist fantasy, wrapped in a gothic film, within a horror movie, nestled in an anti-authoritarian fable.  And the movie succeeds in each attempt, and at every level.  Watching it is almost like the opposite of Dante descending realm by realm into the Inferno.  Instead of Dante's guide Virgil, del Toro gives us Ofelia, to guide us as we wend our way through the labyrinth of modern authoritarianism on our way to a more sublime world.  A world where the ideals of the red and black flag waving partisans of the Spanish Civil War emerge victorious; even if only at the end of the movie.   

Graceless

Producer Mike Ryan (Junebug, Fay Grim, 40 Shades of Blue) sent this letter to Filmmaker Magazine excoricating John Cusack's new film Grace Is Gone. A friend told me yesterday she saw the movie previewed before Pan's Labyrinth earlier this week and they couldn't wait to see it. According to Mike Ryan's letter, people of conscience might want to think twice. Not simply because the film is receiving mixed reviews at Sundance, but according to Ryan it is tantamount to war profiteering.

That's a hell of a claim. I missed my flight to Sundance so I haven't seen the film and can't comment on it's propaganda quotient. That said, I don't doubt Ryan's probably right. I often wonder how supposedly liberal actors make politically disastrous movies, i.e.., anything by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Truly intelligent and politically sophisticated actors and filmmakers are able to recognize and subvert the reactionary narratives of the movies they are involved in. A great example would be how Tilda Swinton negotiated her potentially reactionary role in Chronicles of Narnia. Of it, she said, "I love the idea of goose-stepping old Walt D making over $700m with the help of a Red Witch. He is more than welcome. At least we made her whiter than white, the ultimate white supremacist, and we managed to railroad the knee-jerk attempt to make her look like an Arab."

Enough about the genius of Tilda Swinton. Here's the letter about Cusack's movie:

Donald Rumsfeld and all pro-war Republicans will love the new John Cusack film, Grace is Gone. Others, some whom may be liberal, agree: it could be a crowd-pleaser able to reach beyond the indie ghetto. It was bought earlier this week for $4 million.

Rumsfeld will love how the film shows a family coping with the grief following the death of the family's soldier mom. There is no anger at the film's end; we are left feeling that this grief will be healed. The film offers a positive portrait of how a family can pull together in such sad circumstances.

Rumsfeld will love how the film's one dissenting, anti-war perspective is mouthed by a clichéd liberal couch potato. Alessandro Nivola plays a 31-year-old bearded lay about. We see him in mid-afternoon on his mother's couch, dozing off in front of cartoons. This liberal also has unfocused opinions, no ambition, and is really only concerned with eating. And being unable to pay for his own meal, living in his mothers home, he is seen as mooching off the system.

Rumsfeld and most Republicans will agree with Cusack's response to his older daughter's questions about the war. To question the value of the war would lead one to a scary place, "we'd be lost," he says. Better to stay the course and trust that the government has our best interests in mind.

Cusack may think that by showing grief and the pain of a soldier's loss, he's made an anti-war film. He couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, he may have inadvertently made a pro-war, pro-Bush film. I think all Republicans will endorse Grace Is Gone; it does not question the war's purpose, instead it focuses on how the country will get through this difficult period.

Assuming the filmmakers are liberal -- and don't intend to come off as supporters of Bush or the war -- how do we explain these sloppy aesthetics? The filmmakers have said they want to reach the biggest audience possible; they feel the subject of their film is nonpartisan. Truth is, though, there is nothing nonpartisan about the war: you either support it or feel that it was a tragic mistake, one that has resulted in countless innocent Iraqi and American deaths.

The "nonpartisan" excuse is really just a cover-up for the fact that the goal of the film is to make as much money as possible. Profit drives its aesthetics, just like profit has driven this war. In this sense the film is the worst kind of exploitation film -- a film that profits off the unjust deaths of innocents is a heinous, odious thing. Like war profiteers Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and Bush, the filmmakers proceeded ahead without truly and fully thinking out their strategy and understanding the consequences of their choices. But as with Halliburton and Bechtel, their choices will very likely result in enormous profits for them and their clan.

Shame on all war profiteers. And please, let this be a warning to all liberally minded filmmakers: let's think out our choices carefully before proceeding with a war-themed film. We may end up doing more harm than good.-- Mike Ryan

Little Patience...Little Minx

The idea was to try and see Pan's Labyrinth today. The line down the block and around the corner from the one screen in the entire city where the movie is playing changed my mind.

I did make it to the theater earlier this week to see Little Children. Porkie or not- and I think not - it's fair to say Kate Winslet has the greatest nipples. And it may be just one man's opinion, but I think she is a very good actress as well. The movie itself is more of a mixed bag. It's better than American Beauty - a comparison I make because they are both of the suburban/bourgeois ennui genre - but what isn't.

All of which isn't to say I didn't identify with and enjoy particular things about it besides Kate Winslet's performace, notwithstanding the strange and incogrous omniscient narration. But in the end it is of a piece with Babel and Marie Antoinette as movies by directors with undeniable talents whose philosophical reach far exceeds their intellectual grasp. (Or is that vice versa)?

Dialectical Bowel Movements

I really should have watched Bush's speech. It's saddens me that I cowardly ignore a moment of such historical importance. It's almost as if I'm afraid to look at the thing straight on, like avoiding Medusa's gaze, for fear of the damage it will do to me. Instead I opt for filters - commentaries and other types of third-person accounts - so I can get an idea of what is being said without risking my own eyes by looking straight into the sun.

Here's an example of what I mean. The latter portion is penned by Wolcott who is commenting on a posting by That Little Round-Headed Boy about cultural time folding in on itself as Altman swallows Nixon as Nixon swallows Bush, while Bush continues his fall farther and farther down the rabbit hole into 1973.

Secret Honor is another first-rate Criterion Collection disc: Hall's 20-minute interview interspersed with stills and footage from the set gives you insight into Hall's approach to the character and Altman's working methods. (This is a real "indie" film; can you imagine a top-rank director today other than maybe Soderbergh who would make a movie in a dormitory at the University of Michigan using a largely student crew?) And I was intrigued by another extra on the disc, something I'd never seen before: Nixon's actual "Checkers" speech. Here he is, vintage Nixon, addressing "my fellow Americans" and saying "I am not a quitter" and defending his actions, even detailing every debt he owes on his house, loans, cars. It's quite an amazing--and effective--piece of political agitprop, especially the cutaways to poor Pat Nixon looking on with the glazed, defeated visage of the political wife. Meanwhile, downstairs on the TV in real life and real time, there is Bush defending his actions and refusing to break, acting more and more Nixonian by the minute. Nixon, Bush; Bush, Nixon. Depressing, utterly depressing.

And unlike Nixon, Bush will not be able to rehabilitate himself in retirement because he's simply too stuntedly ill-informed and reality-detached. I remember seeing an aging Nixon on C-SPAN speaking and answering questions smoothly and cogently for over an hour on a range of geopolitical topics without benefit of notes and with a humbled confidence that was (for Nixon) charming. Clinton has that kind of sophisticated knowledgability, Jimmy Carter does as well, but Bush never will, so uninterested is he in other cultures and so reliant upon platitudes and homilies and self-affirmation. I think (hope) Steve Gilliard is right: Bush's presidency will unravel in shame and disgrace, as Nixon's did. But unlike Nixon, Bush will not enjoy a lion-in-winter third act. For better or worse, Nixon was his own man, a stark lesson in the possibilities and limits of self-reliance. Bush, who has always relied upon others to bail him out of jams, is not his own man. If he were, he wouldn't let Cheney secretly run the show.

From Contrary to 10

Recently this site was described to me in conversation as "surly." I tried to bristle at the accusation, but, I am surly. Or at least, upon introspection, it's one of the sources of creativity I draw on.

As far as surly goes, no one is surlier than the critic Armond White. He's so surly that even White's top ten list is picking fights. I've never seen anything quite like it.

The DVD Straight Up

Michael Atkinson wrote this list of best of films that haven't been in theatres. Evidently,

a legal DVD disc cannot qualify for inclusion in critics' polls and award systems, despite the fact that often the receipts are higher than those a "specialty" theatrical run would garner, and the rentable/buyable indie or import in question is far more accessible and is seen by more people.

The Mother List

The year's list of lists has arrived. The aggregate film critics best of list that used to be the in the Village Voice has migrated to indiewire.com. They always wait to the last minute to produce this list because if they didn't it would make all the other lists obsolete.

It's a Wonderful Post

I've come across this James Kunstler post in three different film blogs now. I suppose that's one of the bad things about blogs like these; they tend to have multiple variations of the same thing. I'll leave it to someone else to be a solution to that problem, because if ever there was a blog that Kunstler's reimagining of It's a Wonderful Life resonates with it is Retail Resistance. (Remember our concerns? Film, politics, small business.)

Try and tell me this doesn't belong here. It's like a alternative historical synthesis of either everything we are fighting for, or fighting against.

At a crucial point in the story, Clarence the guardian angel takes George Bailey on a tour of Bedford Falls as-if-George-had-never-been-born. Only the town is named Pottersville now. Main Street is lined with gin mills, strip clubs, and dance halls instead of wholesome banks, groceries, and pharmacies. (Oddly, casinos are absent, because in 1946 we lacked the vision to see how truly demoralized our nation could get.) Prostitutes ply the busy sidewalks. Now the weirdest thing is that Pottersville is depicted as a busy, bustling, lively place -- the exact opposite of what main streets all over America really became, thanks to George Bailey's efforts -- a wilderness of surface parking, from sea to shining sea, with WalMart waiting on the edge of every town like Moloch poised to inhale the last remaining vapors of America's morale. Frank Capra could imagine vibrant small towns turning their vibrancy in the direction of vice -- but he couldn't imagine them forsaken and abandoned, with the shop fronts boarded up and the sidewalks empty, which was the true tragic destiny of all the Bedford Falls in our nation.

True That

This isn't just another list of great movies. It's a rallying cry for films that for a variety of reasons - fashion, perhaps, or the absence of an influential advocate, or just pure bad luck - have been unduly neglected and should be more widely available.

Thanks for that introduction person at The Guardian. I know it's Best of 2006 season, but I repeatedly find these alterna-lists more interesting. I'm sure that in keeping with my contrarian nature I'll get around to the 2006 Best Ofs once they've stopped being ubiquitous. I think also due to my contrarian nature Box Office Video has already made these films more widely available.

The Rapture is US

When it comes to the old New World, Mel G definitely subscribes to the "life is nasty, brutish, and short" philosophy. That is, it's all of those things if you haven't been saved, or saved by European civilization. But more on that later.

I've been waiting almost a year now for this movie to surface. It was New Year's day of last year that I first saw the preview. That preview was a spectacle of exotic and demented brown people with the contextualizing quotation, "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." That quotation wasn't from the Iraq Study Group, but from some historian named Will Durant that conservatives are fond of quoting - I also found this quotation on the Drudge Report. I was agog at what seemed like The Blaming the Victim of European Imperialism and Racism...and I couldn't wait for more.

But something odd happened on the way to the cineplex; Gibson got drunk and blamed The Jews for all the wars in the history of the world, like the Crusades for instance. Then the movie got delayed, and limbo set in while Gibson did the round of apologizing to all the Jewish Leaders listed in the Jewish Leaders White Pages. But Hollywood can't deny a genius his due and after a while the movie resurrected. Oddly though, this time the preview was recut, the quotation excised, and what was once a statement movie looked to be turned into more of an action movie of heroic individualism.

I was frankly disappointed by this shift in tone. But after hearing how violent all the critics were saying it was I conqered my disappointment and worked my interest back up to see the film, and was delighted that the "destroyed itself from within" quotation was the movie's actual epigram. Yes! that Mel's still got it. And in spades at that. Not only is the statement of the original preview in the film, but the second preview's themes are there as well. It's like two for the price of one. (A $7 matinee price of one, by the way.)

The heroic, Homeric, portion of Apocalypto is a pean to blood and Family Values. Women are on earth to be mothers, and men are here to protect their women and make sure those women beget their ten babies. Hence, the film's two main heroic narratives. The main one, the male one, being whether the protagonist will be able to save his wife's life by saving his own. The more minor but related of the two is whether his wife will be able to save not only the son she already has, but the baby she's carrying. And let me tell you, she does better than that. Thus we are given a female whose heroism is having healthy babies, and her husband who is heroic for his ability to hunt, kill, procreate, and protect his offspring. God bless.

Of course the protagonist isn't the savage that the other Others, the institutionally heathen Mayans of the city are. The main character may be a pagan heathen, but he is no human sacrificer, unlike the other misguided savages with no concern for the value of human life, what with their slaving and beheading. This is where the "destroyed itself from within" part of the quotation surfaces. In Gibson's moral calculus the Mayan moral decay of Urban Elites was so great their empire was obviously past its imperial expiriation date.

The fact that Europeans would soon come and take South America by force was therefore only natural considering how immoral the continent had become. (Never mind the bollocks about the European's slaving and beheading. It's entirely different. And even though this seizure was violent it wasn't war, evidently because the Jews didn't cause it. Maybe that's the difference. War is bad because Jews cause war, but "humanitarian interventions" are good because they come from the barrel of a Christian gun.)

The movie comes to an end after the hero has escaped from urban Mayan Elite Dyscivilzation, fighting to return Home, while dispatching all but two of his foes in doing so. He makes it home in time to save his wife and kids, but is about to meet his very own end beneath the blade of these last two foes until the timely intercession of the miraculous. On his knees, waiting for death with the last of his two enemies standing over him, the three look up, and lo, the Europeans are coming ashore. His two would be killers relent, either under the influence of the sublime, or knowing a miracle when they see one. Thusly is our hero is Saved to return home to his newly minted family of four.

Gibson tells us in the second preview, "Apocalypto means a new beginning." The Apocalypse isn't all hellish and fiery at all; it's a new European beginning for the Saved.