See the World through Rainbow-Colored Glasses... Especially on Tuesday!

I know a lot of you movie-heads in Chicago will be trying to hit the new and prodigious-sounding Nuri Bilge Ceylan film on its Tuesday night screening at CIFF. But if you've noticed that screening is already sold out—or if a three-hour Turkish police procedural lit almost entirely by automotive headlights in the pitch-darkness of a rural plain sounds to you like what Justin Vivian Bond would call "a real weenie-shrinker"—then all the more reason to stop by Sidetrack on Halsted this Tuesday night for the kickoff event of Queer Vision, a new program co-sponsored by the popular watering hole and by Chicago's Queer Film Society.

If you've ever been to Sidetrack, there's a 28% chance that you stumbled into Showtune Nights on Sunday or Monday, where the bar broadcasts famous Broadway numbers, Tony performances, clips from movie musicals, and inspired diva turns, and the whole joint sings along, brilliantly, uproariously, and open-heartedly. The Queer Film Society thought a similar blend of cultural history, community, and liquored-up conviviality ought to be possible using clips of some of our favorite movies. Our fearless president Richard Knight—who gives a fuller sense of the QFS, the Queer Vision project, and the expansive range of "queer cinema" in this RedEye interview—has labored with some industrious collaborators to curate a whole range of clips: the fabulous, the hummable, the historic, the barely-seen, the hilarious, the sexy, the romantic, and the overlaps therein.

Please come. Admission is a $10 donation to QFS, which works hard all year long to plan advanced screenings of Hollywood, independent, and international movies of specific interest to queer audiences. This is how LGBT Chicagoans saw A Single Man, Nine, The September Issue, Howl, Quearborn & Perversion, and a bunch of others weeks before anyone else, and in cahoots with a huge theater of people to whom these movies really meant something. The group also lobbies with publicists and distributors to try to secure theatrical playdates for some titles that would otherwise pass us by entirely in the increasingly stressed-out market of commercial exhibition. We also do educational and outreach work around the city whenever possible, such as hosting those sold-out screenings of Chicago-set queer films of recent decades that played in the Cultural Center this past spring, followed by post-film Q&As that we organized and emceed.

It's a great cause, and with your $10 comes a complimentary cocktail, so Mary, lay down that Hamilton. Make this first outing a hit, and we'll be able to reprise regularly, in the good graces of the stellar folks and all-around nice guys who manage Sidetrack. Look forward to seeing you there!

In Response to Jeffrey Wells, about the London Riots

I was directed by a friend to Jeffrey Wells's latest column at Hollywood Elsewhere, and loath as I am to link to such a presumably well-intentioned but grossly considered piece, you ought to read it and read the string of comments below, at least up to Wells's defense of himself at #28, to know why I was so angered by what he wrote and so unable not to write this public response. In order to post a comment at Hollywood Elsewhere you have to register for the site, which I don't want to do, so I am posting here rather than over there.

Obviously, I don't know Jeffrey Wells and have nothing against him personally, but when you have as large and seemingly unregulated a pulpit as he does, you ought to take responsibility for how you're using it, or at least be prepared to hear back from the outraged and unimpressed. (I'm aware the same caveats apply to me, at my smaller daïs.)

—
Dear Jeffrey Wells,

Reflecting back at you the implications of your own statements is not the same as distorting them. You write about movies. You know that what people think they have "clearly expressed and intended" does not always come through that way, or often reflects implications or assumptions they haven't fully considered, or turns out to be something that didn't deserve expression on such a huge platform.

From your defense of your own post: "...or in such a way that it wasn't about flames and looting as much as a Howard Beale-type rage about how putrid and corrupted so much has become in Washington, D.C."

What you're talking about is not a modification of what's happening in London but a completely different thing. Maybe London's what made you think about Washington and Howard Beale, and you do make a vague nod to the vast difference in the situations you invoke. Still, linking the thoughts the way you have makes both seem incoherent, to say nothing of insensitive. You say you weren't suggesting any "spillover," yet your whole piece here is structured as a conceptual spillover.

Sometimes a title like "If Only..." matched to a snapshot of a family business engulfed in flames does its own work on your audience, no matter what you write underneath it, which is something else that a person who reports on an image-based medium might have considered. And your repeated invocations of Howard Beale really make it sound as though your ideas about politics and so-called protest come from movies and little else. Possibly not even from movies you have understood very well, as witness the profound political impotence of Howard Beale, no matter how angry he gets, and his swift, barely sweat-breaking corporate annihilation.

Particularly on behalf of any readers who are directly affected by what is happening in London, if not out of any obligation to mature reasoning and calmer reflection, can you possibly admit to having run wild with what you confess to be "rote boilerplate explanations" and "accurate or inaccurate" reporting about a situation that does not affect you? A situation, too, that you do not seem to be pondering in a very humble or subtle way, but which you have used nonetheless as as a platform by which to foment fantasies of something "similar" that is not in fact similar at all, and doesn't get its hypothetical hands dirty with, you know, the "flames and lootings," etc.? If only, indeed.

If you want to hear more Howard Beales shrieking into the wind, you are welcome to hold your ear up to the Internet. As it turns out, you're already on it!

P.S. I want to thank my reader Laika, who provided this link to such an admirable and thought-provoking meditation on what is still unfolding in England, written by a blogger who lives there. I'm sure there are comparably subtle and multi-faceted responses cropping up elsewhere. Anyone who wants to provide more links to that kind of commentary is more than welcome; it's probably the best use of the post.

Help Hold On To History

Thanks to everyone who's been so patient with the Great Blogging Drought of 2011. It's a huge year for me in terms of writing deadlines and professional obligations, which is the only reason I've been so scarce. Believe me, if I had time to write about the rapturous Tree of Life, I would! Even I don't think a tweet is remotely sufficient. Bear with me a little longer!

Still, some causes are too urgent to postpone, so I want to share some news from Anne Aghion, a filmmaker whose revelatory documentary My Neighbor, My Killer, about the Gacaca Trials and other local aftermaths of the 1994 Rwandan genocides, I saw at the 2009 Chicago Film Festival. I wrote a glowing review of the film, which later showed here in Chicago at Facets' Human Rights Film Festival, though it didn't get nearly the exposure it deserved. That said, two people have told me that the tip-off I provided to this extraordinary piece of work was the most valuable thing they've ever taken from my site; if you'd seen the film, you would easily recognize why they think that.

I was chuffed to get an e-mail today from Aghion, whom I do not know, informing me about a historical and cultural center that she and a colleague are trying to open in Rwanda. Many of us who hear the name of that country still think immediately of genocide, although I'm happy to say that I now have a friend living in Kigali whose reports are giving such a different, richer sense of the nation. Still, even Rwandans have painfully limited access to their own audiovisual history, so Anne Aghion and Assumpta Mugiraneza are working hard to open a Media Archive called the Iriba Center that will offer Rwandans free access to footage, photographs, and documents that preserve and illuminate their cultural legacy—to include, of course, the genocide, but also reaching back through an entire century of other records.

Aghion and Mugiraneza have already raised some key donations toward the amount they will need to open the center, but of course they need more—especially since some of the promised funding is conditional upon the two women independently raising $40,000 themselves, in two months' time. Please read about this impressive project and if you can give anything—literally, the minimum donation is $1—I hope you'll consider donating. I get paid Thursday, so I am broke as a joke right now; believe me, I understand. But one latte for me is $4 that this project could really use, and if 1,000 people felt the same, that'd be 10% of the fundraising bar right there.

And now that I've hit you up for money (though not for me! though I have thought about it!), I promise to do my best not to recede backward into eerie silence. In fact, I already have a comeback project planned, so stay tuned. Think: sunshine... glamor... "the universal language of film"... and microfiche.

An Open Letter to Roger Durling

The very short version is: what on earth got into me? Here is the very long version.

If you follow this site at all, you might know that I've worked myself into a tiny lather in recent years – drawing bubbles from my admittedly small soapbox – as both an incorrigible devotee of the Oscars and a somewhat cranky critic of how long, expensive, and over-crowded with nuggets and chatter the so-called "awards season" (or, worse, the "campaign season") has become. It's hard enough when so many of the wrong films seem either pre-targeted for consideration or disappointingly excluded from it. I find my Oscar addictions, which are no one's fault but my own, prompting me to think and write more about movies I don't really care about, just because they're likely to be nominated, than about movies for which I might actually have a thought-out, passionate, more valuable critique to put forward.

Meanwhile, I always feel sorry for actors and other filmmakers (some, not all) when we hear them say what a tiring grind "awards season" becomes, no matter how flattered they are by the attention, and no matter how happy they are to promote a film they are proud of, and which might struggle to find an audience without the spotlight of awards. Speaking only for myself, I dislike when awards and their surrounding discourses become goals in themselves, rather than opportunities for rich, detailed debate and conversation about the films in question—the quality of the work, including but not limited to, or even centered upon, its possible appeal to AMPAS. Anyone who reads even a little about the Oscars—and I stick to what I see as the best, The Film Experience and In Contention—may also have heard some editors and journalists say that the season has gotten out of hand, with too much to cover, and too little differentiation among events and prize-giving bodies. December becomes so crowded with films that many of them are doomed to box-office failure. The entertainment pages themselves are so glutted with tightly or loosely awards-based coverage that what (I think) should be a fun hobby and a spontaneous honor can become a bewildering blur, an echo chamber, or a vegetative industry all its own.

Beyond forming these aggravated opinions in recent years, I have jumped to my own conclusions about what is or isn't a "legitimate" event and what seems, by contrast, like a pure publicist's coup, with little to teach anyone about filmmaking. I haven't been consistent or very well-informed in arriving at these knee-jerk opinions, so I usually keep them to myself. Yesterday, though, in a comment thread at In Contention, I arbitrarily seized the occasion of a news item about the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to vent some of this frustration. The gap between what I have prejudicially been feeling and what I actually know quickly became obvious. I don't withdraw from many of the general principles of what I've outlined above, but I didn't take any time to phrase them carefully or test their validity before posting the comment, and I sure did a ham-handed job of picking a scapegoat without any basis in knowledge. (Perhaps you have heard of this kind of thing transpiring - even, occasionally, on the Web.) Having been rightly called out and calmed down by In Contention's editor, Kris Tapley, I then received a personal invitation from Roger Durling, the Executive Director of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, to come attend the festival and "have priority access to everything and criticize from experience. Let me know, and I will make it happen." I am taking for granted that Mr. Durling is in earnest, though he would be well within his rights not to be. What follows is my open response:

Dear Roger Durling,

The humble pie keeps coming, and deservedly so. Believe me, I fully appreciate what a classier, more generous overture you have made than I deserve from my exchange on In Contention. I feel particularly humbled after having aired my prejudices so vehemently and recklessly. I've been behind the scenes of enough festivals to know at least a little of what it takes to put one on. So on those grounds alone, cheers to you and the SBIFF, and hosannas from high up in the nosebleed seats for choosing a Vanguard award winner in Nicole Kidman who inspires so many people – including me – in just the ways you single out in your publicity release: her talent, her range, her fearlessness, her filmography, and her wonderful performance in Rabbit Hole, which I saw at a festival screening here in Chicago.

I've already caught myself red-handed, and enabled others to further catch me out, connecting faraway dots as an uninformed reader. So you know already that as one Oscar enthusiast, unusually or not, I have felt liable to fuse together in my mind several Southern California film festivals of the fall and winter (Santa Barbara, Hollywood, et al.), their pre-announced awards, the various career-recognition and Lifetime Achievement awards emanating from other groups, and all the other press releases and ceremonial prizes unfolding through the fall and early winter as one long campaign for Oscar. For me, this becomes especially tempting when, year to year, there seems like such strong overlap between the spotlighted recipients at these events and the actors and films we know to be involved in carefully orchestrated campaigns. But I should take more responsibility for these subjective impressions I've knitted together. I just never see coverage of SBIFF or the Hollywood Film Festival or other, similar events except as regards these pre-announced awards. I could obviously take the initiative to look up more coverage—and certainly should, at least before airing my arbitrary, petulant grievances about them, with no necessary basis in reality.

Foolishly, like other media consumers who think we can read between the lines and discern The Truth, I imagine I know what nominees or prospective nominees are talking about when I read them saying they wish the season were shorter, required fewer PR appearances, and felt like less of a grind, even amid all the generous adulation they receive. The truth, of course, is that I don't really know what these artists are talking about, and don't even know enough about what I'm talking about, so for lack of a better phrase, I ought to shush up. I have attended plenty of festival galas honoring artists and senior executives for their work. Of course it is often the case that the readiest people to accept are often those who are trying to cast a light on recent efforts that are just finding their way to market, to voters, or to critical notice. I have seen them be very proud and flattered by the recognition of their own careers, and pleased that someone else's gracious admiration has enabled them to draw extra eyes to a just-emerging film that could use the support in a crowded market, at a frantic time of year.

I wrote on In Contention as though this entails an implicit act of bad faith or "shilling" on the part of festivals I have never attended, even though I know it not to be the case at any festivals I have attended. You don't have to be naïve about publicity to know how earnest a festival or an executive director or a programmer or a festival staff is in honoring someone whose contributions they truly admire, and whose time they appreciate. It's one of several grounds on which I owe you and your colleagues an apology.

No matter how coordinated or not your festival is with other publicity efforts for actors or their films, I do know that every festival in the world only comes together through long, hard work and coordination. You'd never know I understand that, based on what I said above, and I'm sorry to have rejected the possibility out of hand—based in part on what I have projected onto the timing of Santa Barbara's film festival and the framing of the small bits of coverage I happen to see. My perceptions or misperceptions of what's going on half a country away are just that: cursory, faraway perceptions.

Most importantly, I at least oughtn't pull the two lamest moves on the internet: forming strong opinions in the absence of adequate knowledge, and then broadcasting those opinions with a cynical vehemence that's beneath my age and good sense. I admit to wanting to see more diversity in the range of names getting honored and fêted at this time of year, and to other personal hankerings and nostalgias related to film awards and press campaigns, past and present. But they, too, are subjectively cultivated biases, and I should have stated them responsibly as such, if they even needed stating at all.

Please accept my apology for what I wrote, including tones and claims that were more scurrilous than I intended or ought to have allowed. Meanwhile, I wish I could accept your humbling, generous offer to grant me press access to SBIFF, were I able to attend. I can't be there, and at least in the context of today, I think it's clear I haven't warranted the privilege; maybe you can extend it instead to a journalist, writer, or blogger who has already supported the festival and would be thrilled to enjoy their first press pass at an international film festival.

As an alternative, either sooner or much later, may I propose a short, open interview to be published as free publicity on this site for SBIFF, about how your role as Executive Director works, how the festival's honorees are chosen, how you see the festival as relating or not relating to the awards campaigns that are ramping up around the same time and around many of the same people, and what you most wish people knew about SBIFF that we might not know or understand. I would learn a great deal from this, I expect my readers and students would learn a great deal from this, and it would be my privilege to promote the festival, even from afar, as – wait for it – an informed member of the blogosphere. E-mail me if you're interested and available. If no (or even if yes!), many, many best wishes for your festival. I look forward to reading about it, carefully and in context.

Sincerely,
Nick Davis

Spirit Day: In Support of LGBT Youth

I'm not even sure if "Spirit Day" is the official name for today's outpouring of mourning for the five recent and highly publicized suicides by LGBT youth, all of them tormented by homophobic bullying and very public persecution. But somehow, in the lavender ether of the internet, I have gleaned that we are all meant to wear purple today, and tint our cyberimages purple, to let people know that we care. This, I am only too happy to do, but since fiddling with the "Color Balance" feature on a piece of graphics software so old you would laugh if I named it doesn't quite feel like enough, allow me just to add –

I am extremely fortunate to say that I was never bullied, much less violently, for any aspect of how people read my sex, gender, or sexuality, even though I know there were people reading me as gay before I did. Watching some of the testimonies on the "It Gets Better" Page on YouTube only reinforces how lucky I am in this respect. And I was hardly mainstreaming my gender or opting for deep cover during those years, not least because I wouldn't really have known what I was "covering." I effused about actresses as much then as I do now. I walked down the hallways of school belting Whitney like an idiot. I sucked at sports and wrote a lot of (bad) poetry. My groups of friends were almost exclusively female. A 9th-grade English teacher caught me craning my neck during That Scene of the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. You know, while he walks to the window. My 11th-grade English teacher gave me stern, somewhat bemused, but understanding looks whenever she saw me gazing like a fool at the back of the head of the very cute and charming guy who sat in front of me. That same year, in a high-school pageant for which I was voted to participate—catapulted unexpectedly into this popularity contest on a surge of Nerd Voting (nerds unite!), at the controversial expense of some of the jocks who actively campaigned for this annual event—I offered, for my talent portion, a full-on drag routine to Boy George singing "The Crying Game." The castle walls of heterosexuality did not exactly quake in the face of my routine. Sometimes we queers, especially the white, male, middle-class ones, can get a little precious about thinking that every sissy or saucy thing we ever did struck a giant blow for The Cause. Still, I wouldn't say it was the safe option. I wonder if anyone I went to high school with, including me, even knew what a drag show was in 1994, and I am baffled that I went ahead with it, not knowing at all how people would react. I just couldn't think of anything else to perform and thought it would be fun.

I have to say, at risk of flaunting my good fortune, all those varsity football guys and Prom King types I was suddenly thrust into company with were nothing but nice and jovial and back-slappy during our rehearsals, while I learned to walk in heels and they practiced whatever skits they'd worked up. (The only one I remember concerned sleeping with a girl and drinking a six-pack of beer, and I guarantee my 16-year-old self found his routine at least as alien as he probably found my wig and rhinestone clip-ons.) I add this detail for three reasons. One is that I sometimes want to reach out to the LGBT kids who actually enjoyed high school and say that that's okay, too—just recognize, as I did and do, your incredible good fortune! Another is to say that there are lots of kind people in the world, many of them wearing football jerseys and revering Animal House like a religious scroll. Struggling gay kids should know that it's not only from other LGBT folks that they'll eventually receive friendship and support, no matter what their present antagonists look like. Don't let the bullies or haters currently in your midst mislead you into forming your own sense of entire categories of people who are never to be trusted. Maybe I'm also addressing some other kids, too, with these comments: I know from experience that you can be the captain of the football team or voted Best Looking in the yearbook or be devout in your faith and even be uncomfortable with some of the things in your world without being a jerk, much less a hooligan or an oppressor. There are a million ways to be Homecoming Queen or Big Man on Campus or a hero to your buddies or a member of your church, just like there are a million ways to be gay. Let's everyone try to avoid the small fraction of ways to be any of these things that turn you into a bully or a snob or a bigot or a creep.

Most importantly, though, I'm trying to say this: as much as I marvel at all the LGBT role models and Gay-Straight Alliances and out activists and queer entertainment options and pre-college romantic relationships that exist for today's queer high schoolers—and which I absolutely didn't have, and of which people older than I am had even fewer—my heart sometimes goes out to today's LGBT youth for, ironically, these same reasons. The increased visibility of gays, lesbians, and transgenders, and the chance to identify yourself or identify others at very young ages within those terms, can have a really vicious kickback. I wonder if I would have had a harder time in high school if more of my peers had really been thinking all that much about homosexuality, and whether they were "for" or "against" it, and who in their vicinity might have stuck out as a tempting emblem, or a scapegoat. I'm speaking to my age bracket and older right here: sometimes it's easy for us 100-year-old queens to think today's young-duckling queers have got it made, at least by comparison. We need to remember how hard it is (and I'm reminding myself here, too) to come out and fit in even if you're not surrounded by overt aggression. And we also need to know that with all these new privileges have come lots of new pressures, and some people get swatted by the pressures without enjoying any access at all to the privileges.

I know of one other guy and one girl from my senior class who have come out since I graduated high school in 1995, in a cohort of nearly 400 students. There must be more, but since I don't go to reunions, I don't know. On both occasions I have learned about classmates who have come out (one of them a very good friend, with whom I'm barely now in touch), I have felt a huge wave of surprise, which is crazy. I should be surprised that I only know of two! But for me to be this taken aback, even now, only signals how not on the radar non-straight sexualities were for most of my high-school classmates. That probably caused some suffering for people who felt totally lonely, totally unrecognized, totally lacking in a vocabulary or a context for their own feelings. But at the same time, few people were walking around with a police-lamp looking for a gay kid or a butch or a flamer to antagonize. Whether because of the time or the place or the people, there just wasn't nearly as much of this happening as I gather there was and is in so many other high schools... though I don't mean to imply there was none. Our lesbian gym teacher, who was absent from school the day of a major LGBT Rights rally in nearby Washington, got hit with some gross epithets, sometimes to her face. A handsome guy and National Honor Society member whom I literally never met was transferred out of our school during sophomore year by his parents, because someone had written an article in an underground newspaper calling him a "cocksucker," and, from what I gather, offering highly ornate verbal portraits of him engaged in this felonious pastime.

But here I'm writing about myself and my experiences when I meant to write more directly to you, imaginary lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgendered reader—or to any imaginary reader, anyone who wants to know what you or someone you know might be feeling as they advance into a sense of sexuality that is awfully hard to know how to manage, at least at first, even without the additional and vicious threats of bullies and hate-mongers. And in that category, I am tempted to include anyone from teachers to parents to community leaders to school administrators to politicians who won't say or do anything about acts of violence or intimidation transpiring in their midst. Sometimes the bullying is internal, and I urge you so strongly against this: the last enemy anyone needs is themselves, not least because they're the hardest enemies to get away from. I am trying to be honest enough to say how strongly I empathize with you and how often I think about you even though I didn't exactly walk in the same shoes as all of you—not even when I was wearing high-heeled pumps and fishnets in front of the whole school and tossing my lollipop into the audience. I've been through plenty, have seen a lot more, and have read and heard about still more than that. I worked for three years as a hotline counselor. I can understand the feelings and the pressures, though if one of you bullied lesbians or transgenders or gay kids were to say to me, "You can't really know without having gone through what I go through," I would respect you enough to say yes, you are right, and ask you to tell me what it's like for you.

The official rallying cry this week has been "It Gets Better!" and I'm of two minds about this. Part of me wants to say, it does and it doesn't. Mostly it does, but it's not always a consistent upswing, and in general it really depends on almost everything that life always depends on. More LGBT visibility, politics, and action means more power and more peers and more love for you, which counts for a lot. But in some cases they unwittingly entail more pressures and more danger. As a certain image of homosexuality (often white, often male, almost always upper- or middle-class) becomes more "normal" anywhere in this country, there's usually some other group, even some populace within the LGBTQ umbrella, who gets stigmatized with new fervor as the bad queers, or the people it's safer to pick on, or to try to silence.

Some queers need hope, some need love, some need power, some need a job, some need medicine, some need basic acknowledgment from fellow queers. Lots of people need all of these things. I read last week that one in three black men who has sex with other men in Washington, DC, is statistically likely to be HIV-positive. If that's the community you're already in or growing into (and I wish we all felt it to be part of our whole community, to at least some broad degree), then that is a really, really tough row to hoe. You might not give a damn about Brokeback Mountain or the right to get married. My purple-tinted Profile Picture, or anyone's, is unlikely to count for anything, especially if you never see them.

I wonder what Tyler Clementi needed to hear after he found out what his roommate had done, found out in what way his privacy had been exposed to the world. I wonder if any of what I'm saying today, or what anyone is saying today, would have assuaged him in what was surely a moment of profound mortification. It's so crucial that we reach out to LGBTQ kids, but I hope we think of ways to reach out pre-emptively, too, to the people who are most at risk of becoming their antagonists and attackers. (Sadly, Rutgers was in the middle of trying to do just that, in the week that Tyler died.)

Then again, the fact that the media now reports these kinds of news, ideas, and terrible tragedies, and that I can openly post a blog entry about it, and I can expect sympathetic readers to take note of them and think about them and maybe even respond—that's huge. Life is tough, and it's tough in different ways—sometimes more difficult ways—if you're transgendered, or bisexual, or gay, or intersexed, or lesbian. But to have a partner, a circle of friends, a circle of co-workers every single one of whom knows I'm not straight, a Web-based network of people I read and admire, and a country that's as far along as it is in respecting its LGBTQ citizens, though not nearly far enough: all of that constitutes a tremendous gift in my life that I didn't know I would have when I was younger. I bitch plenty with my friends, gay and straight alike, about everything I just mentioned, but I've got the friends, and I've got the life. Clearly, a lot of LGBT kids need to hear that, and to know that it's much closer to being within their grasp than they might think. It's a climactic refrain in my and everybody's favorite gay play, Angels in America: "More life."

And there's the catch. There's the reason why, despite my concern that "It Gets Better!" could unwittingly conceal some of what might be tricky or hard about your burgeoning queer adulthood, I nonetheless enthusiastically agree: It does get better. Even if it was never that bad, it still gets better! I am so blessed that I never thought there was anything wrong with me for being bi or gay, and that even settling on one of those terms doesn't even feel important to me now, when I once thought my whole world hung in that very balance. I didn't assume I would be unhappy, but what I didn't know is that being gay (the easiest shorthand) would become one of the very sources of my happiness. Even at my most optimistic, near the end of high school or in college, even as I accepted that I wasn't straight and refused to give myself a hard time about that, I think I instinctively felt it would be a hardship I would manage—a fair burden for a life that frankly hadn't been saddled with all that many, like having a disability so slight that some people wouldn't even notice it, or having a latent health condition that wouldn't flare up if I were responsible about monitoring it. That's probably what I thought, and it's so off the mark of what has actually happened. Being queer is an absolute source of joy to me.

I thought when I was really young, that if I were gay, as I secretly secretly secretly suspected I might be, I would still be okay, but I might not ever meet another person like me. Do kids today, after Ellen and Will & Grace and Glee, still worry about that? Not only do I know more LGBTQ people than I can count, I find them to be, on the average, remarkably generous people, open-minded about all kinds of things. "We" are not any one way—I'm talking about a huge swath of people here, thank goodness—but on the whole, the kind of thoughtfulness, humor, compassion, self-reflection, and principled living I see among my LGBT friends and acquaintances sets a hugely high standard that I love aspiring to. Coming to grips with yourself is tough, especially if you're simultaneously dealing with hostility from the outside or the inside or both. However, it's also a way to find out who you are, and to grow up into an adult with a clear, sturdy self-identity. Like anything that's tough at the start, it eventually makes you stronger. Like anything you have to put some work into, the fruits of your labor get repaid twofold, at least.

If you're young and stigmatized, bullied, suspected, jeered, unprotected, or unloved, you probably feel a huge, huge weight on your shoulders, your back, your heart. It can feel like no one will ever take it off of you. And then you meet huge groups of people, and you really, finally, fully meet yourself, and with all of those people putting their two hands under the weight, it gets lightened, maybe even lifted off entirely. Sometimes this can even feel bizarrely easy, if only compared to what you might have expected. Though I spend a lot less time at the gym than some of The Gays (read: no time at all), I do understand the principle: working against a weight endows you with muscle. You have to break that muscle down in order to build it back up, stronger and tougher and more resilient than before. It gets bigger. It gets more flexible. It can more easily lend its power and support to someone else. It gets better.

Come on In, the Mise-en-Scène Is Fine!

I'm feeling perturbed by an article that Tom Shone has recently published in slightly different versions on his own website and at the Daily Telegraph. I am not going to dispute all of the reasons for which Shone is understandably annoyed at the state of contemporary film criticism nor defend all of the reviews he singles out for disdain. But having seemingly worked himself into a lather over all of the sins he perceives in these reviews, I think he strikes some incoherent notes and zeroes in on some inappropriate targets that weaken his overall credibility.

I tried commenting on both sites to no avail, whether because of Blogger's recent rash of Comments-related problems, or the convoluted interface at the Telegraph that keeps asking me to login before I comment and then cycles me among the same series of comment-blocking screens, or because of some ineptitude of my own, or because Tom Shone doesn't want to hear from anybody. I assume the first three culprits are much more likely than the last. In any event, here's what I would say if I could figure out how to get it said:

A quibble, since you're opening the door for critiquing everyone else's critical vantage and voice: is mise-en-scène really so hard a term to understand, or such an irrelevant term to film criticism worthy of the name? It strikes me as one thing to be rankled by hyperbole, clichés, groupthink, and lots of the other trends that flatten and homogenize so many film reviews, which seems to be your overarching beef. But to ridicule writers for using even the most essential terms related to the art they are critiquing? And in an age where more and more film programs and wider and wider access to them and more and more exposure to "insider" commentary means that many, many more than "six people" know what mise-en-scène is? Seems churlish, and inconsistent with your other gripes.

Despite the long tradition of hiring paid film critics even at major publications with no real background in film or film studies, I'd think one would want to encourage more film criticism that can actually articulate the aspects of a movie that provoked a critical reaction, rather than implying that simply writing from emotion is enough to constitute a "review." I wouldn't want to read music criticism that wasn't allowed to talk about melodic lines, or book criticism that couldn't talk about voice or syntax, or theater criticism that couldn't talk about blocking or alienation. Surely it's not an insult but a credit to a general readership, maybe even an obligation, to write arts criticism that bespeaks and presumes at least a rudimentary grasp of the arts in question. And if some essential terms require a bit of explaining from time to time, then critics ought to offer portals into that understanding, rather than making sure that no one reading a review—including some of the people writing those reviews—ever has to deal with anything except intuitive responses and non-specific comments about huge, undifferentiated categories like "writing" and "acting."

I always get in trouble when I spout off about issues like this, but I just soured at Shone's conviction that certain forms of hollow prose imply that all forms of writing that he dislikes or misunderstands are also, by extension, equally hollow. Let me know what you think.

And by the way: mise-en-scène encompasses every tangible thing that is a visible component of a cinematic image, from the actors to the props to the locations to the color palettes. Imagine that what you formally experience when you experience cinema could be divided into four groups: what you hear (the soundtrack), the objects and stimuli physically present in the images (mise-en-scène), the lighting that illuminates those objects (cinematography), and the ways in which those images are sequenced and juxtaposed to each other (editing, or montage). Some areas like color or depth of field involve an overlap of cinematography and mise-en-scène: how far into the scene you can see, and how resonant or meaningful the image remains the further back you go, requires the camera to be situated a certain way, the lighting to be organized and manipulated a certain way, and the space and the objects being filmed to be arranged a certain way. In some films, the lighting is so intensive that it's almost a palpable component of the image, as in German expressionist cinema, so lighting can reasonably be discussed as part of the mise-en-scène in some cases. Other elements like visual effects, more and more of them computer-generated, entail part of the mise-en-scène despite having never appeared before a camera.

So, yes, there is sometimes ambiguity about where one of these arts stops and another picks up, perhaps especially between cinematography and mise-en-scène. It's a hybrid and highly collaborative medium. And I realize that Tom Shone might have been making a justifiable point about the blurry edges of these terminologies, if he hadn't got caught up implying that to even broach them is to make yourself jargony and ridiculous. But stop me if your mind has just been so blown that, even if you just learned the term for the first time, you can't imagine reading a review that invoked it in any way. Otherwise, don't believe anyone who thinks their readers are unequal to the task of looking up a word they don't know, or whose impulse to redeem film criticism involves laundering reviews of any language that implies even the most limited forms of expertise.

From what I hear, Inception does have pretty mind-blowing mise-en-scène (see how easy it is?), but I probably won't know until next week or the week after.

How the Grinch Quit the Oscars

Isn't The Hurt Locker spectacular? Aren't you elated that it exists, and that it's been heralded so loudly by so many of the year-end critics' groups? I notice it's been quietly re-booked into one downtown Chicago multiplex, and I cannot wait to see it again.

And I'm so pleased to have something nice to say in this post. Please don't forget that I started on a sunny note. Because it wasn't easy to find.

With about ten days left to go in 2009, I only have five planned theatrical rendezvous remaining with the year's commercially released features. I don't much care about seeing Sherlock Holmes, though I hear it's fun, and Screen Media Films, whoever that is, seems insuperably challenged at getting The Private Lives of Pippa Lee into Chicago. Which does not, from friends' accounts overseas, sound like a tremendous loss, though I'm still curious.

That leaves Crazy Heart, The Last Station, The Lovely Bones, Nine, and The White Ribbon. Formal elements and performances in all five films promise to make them worth seeing, though the middle group feels intensely dubious. Reports by people I trust and the films' own advertising campaigns give me trouble imagining any of them except The White Ribbon hanging in there as projects that, six or twelve months from now, I'll be remembering clearly and fondly. Go figure that Ribbon is also the title that faces the biggest uphill climb getting any attention from Oscar, much less the multiple nominations that most or all of the others seem able to expect.



But that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for a bigger problem. By my estimation, the newly expanded Best Picture derby has these 20 movies jockeying for a spot: Avatar, The Blind Side, Bright Star, District 9, An Education, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Invictus, Julie & Julia, The Last Station, The Lovely Bones, The Messenger, Nine, Precious, A Serious Man, A Single Man, Star Trek, Up, and Up in the Air.

I gave only five of those movies a grade higher than a C+, even though more than half the 2009 releases that I saw scored above that particular bar; and come on, I'm not even counting highbrow festival screenings, and it's hardly as though I stay out of the malls and multiplexes, monastically holing myself up in some Sharunas Bartas retrospective at the edge of town. The Hurt Locker, which I find to be unquestionably the best of these films, is an object of almost universal adulation, so bully for me, for you, for Summit, and for Kathryn Bigelow. Bright Star, my B+, has missed all the precursors so far by such a wide margin that it barely belongs in this list of persistent contenders. That leaves three B's, for The Messenger, aesthetically modest but full of integrity, against which the odds are stacked in any contest "higher" than Best Supporting Actor; Precious, whose many prepossessing virtues I found to be limned with reasons for social and aesthetic concern; and Up, which I barely think about, and consider firmly in the middle-to-low range of Pixar's accomplishments.

Screening out, temporarily, the three movies I haven't seen, this means that 60% of the pack was roundly underwhelming—and this, coming directly off a year where I liked one Best Picture nominee, my second-favorite was rather generously scored at a B–, one was thuddingly mediocre, and two were dementedly horrendous.



Apart from The Hurt Locker's precursor success and the high likelihood of seeing a woman (and Kathryn Bigelow specifically) winning Best Director, there are only two things that don't depress me about this year's award season. One is the expansion of the Best Picture field, which should have raised the likelihood of at least a few more decent movies getting the visibility and advertising boost of a top-shelf Oscar nod, but has at least made the sport of predicting more interesting up to this point (more on that later). The other is Mo'Nique's refusal to play the campaigning game, at least not in a straightforward way, which if/when she wins for Precious has the potential to set an inspiring precedent for letting quality of work, rather than vehemence of desire and scale of self-advertising, determine the eventual Oscar winner. This would entail a huge victory for actors, who ought to be able to prioritize their creative work over their own grossly expensive and almost inevitably canned gabbing about it, and also a victory for us, since the ubiquitous obsessions with horse-racing and self-perpetuating publicity are threatening to overwhelm what almost anyone has to say about the actual movies. And yet people have been giving her shit about it for months! For God's sake, why?

The way I see it, given all of the above, and since, in addition, from my perspective...

— Avatar is embarrassingly self-fetishizing of a world it forgets to fully explore or even make us curious about, is full of the same old alien-planet crap (jump off the waterfall just in time! big weepy death scene for the last person who deserves one! hide in the tree-roots just inches away from the beastie's teeth!), and, despite being by the director of Aliens, is remarkably blithe about concluding that the best way to cast the film's lot with the Na'Vi is to foist an increasing number of Paul Haggis lines into the mouths of Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi and to authorize all sorts of grisly close-up deaths for all the troops, because we're not supposed to care when they get pulverized and garroted, because we don't like the policies of the people they work for, even though the "heroes" also work for these people;

— The Blind Side has some charming work from Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw, and it's at least less self-serious than its more somber cousin The Green Mile, but is in most ways unspeakable;

— District 9 is excitingly eccentric and superbly acted by its lead, but makes a notably careless botch of a faux-documentary conceit that it doesn't even need, and has a vicious anti-black African streak a mile wide, despite styling itself as a critique of Apartheid;

— An Education, indifferently shot and gruesomely scored, has no inclination or ability whatsoever to imagine that its lead character should be complicated for us by her active role in her own fate, and prefers to make her an unfathomably winsome gamine, allowing her to lecture just about everyone around her at some point in the film, including that hambone Alfred Molina;



— Fantastic Mr. Fox devises an engaging, ruddy, excitingly textured style of animation but only to convey the same kind of promising but quickly stalled narrative, featuring (as ever) too many characters, that Wes Anderson is always trying to pull over with increasingly dim results, and in this outing, he is not at all helped by the ever-urbane, paradigmatically ironical George Clooney, who apparently isn't clocking how hard the adapted script has asked us to accept that at heart Mr. Fox is a wild animal;

— Inglourious Basterds had me reeling out of the theater so furious about its patent unevenness as a formal and narrative construction, its naked bloodlust, and its arrogation of "Jewish vengeance" as some kind of ennobling closet for its own point-blank overkills that I never finished the long screed I was drafting against the movie... even though I have to concede that there's an excitement and a deep debatability to Tarantino's project and his imagination that I can't detect in almost any of these other films, and which is in some ways to be commended;

— Invictus is so literal-minded that it takes Mandela's plan at absolute face value, that this rugby game really is uniting a nation, and then lazily backseats the more interesting facets in Freeman's characterization as well as everything else that he might be witnessing at this unprecedented juncture in history—in fact backseats everything so that we can watch the damn rugby in what feels like real time, give or take the usual passel of amateur-hour supporting performances in an Eastwood film, plus some off-puttingly jerry-rigged suspense involving an airplane pilot;

— Julie & Julia is a fun night at the theater but hardly what you'd want to submit to even your most lenient filmmaking teacher for grading, and it pushes even the wonderful Meryl into some embarrassing semaphores, especially about all the children she wishes she could have but can't (oh, hold me!);



— A Serious Man zeroes in with relish on the odiousness of almost everyone in the protagonist's life, lights him as pitilessly as possible (which still can't compete with how the movie treats its women or its nonwhite characters), and tries to shape this bitty, sour, disjointed narrative into a coherent film by invoking shaky allusions to Job as well as three chapter-marked visits to three rabbis, each of them written at a level profoundly below what we should expect from the Coens, although they're at least frustrating and clichéd in three separate ways;

— A Single Man has the brilliant idea of so transparently flagging its infatuation with Wong Kar-wai, Pedro Almodóvar, Mad Men, etc., that we can't help but clock Tom Ford's gigantic failures to come anywhere near the formal strength and psychological penetration of the texts he emulates, and it not only rehashes a dated gay fable that would have smelled musty even 20 years ago in The Celluloid Closet, it pivots on a lame, doe-eyed, half-baked, risibly written teacher-student flirtation that absolutely everyone would deservedly be pouncing on, for political as well as dramatic and aesthetic reasons, if the participants were a man and a girl;

— Star Trek, even making exceptions for Zachary Quinto and Bruce Greenwood, has a wan and inconsistent cast, a terrible opening followed by a boy's-rebellion sequence that's even worse, a whole lot of gobbledygook in the script to "explain" a narrative that still doesn't make a whole lot of sense (and wouldn't need to, if people would just shut up about it), a bunch of gum about Simon Pegg getting stuck inside a pipe or something, and a 10- or 15-minute commitment toward revising Uhura into a "stronger" character for 2009 audiences, only to make sure she gets nothing to do through the rest of the movie except dress like a stewardess from View from the Top; and

— Up in the Air, beyond its unnecessarily cruddy cinematography and its garish overdirection of the bafflingly lauded Anna Kendrick, makes a smug show from the (extremely compacted) opening montage to the (sadly sketchy) closing song of being "relevant" to and "in touch" with the current recession, before bolting to get away from anything plausibly topical, or anything unseemly about the Clooney character and his rationalizations about firing people "with dignity," or anything specific to his ethics and self-consciousness as a white-collar hangman, so as to re-code him as a witty, typecasted bachelor who has to be convinced like 1,000 other movie protagonists that the only acceptable way to live is as a member of a romantic heterosexual couple... so that he can be saved from his insultingly emphatic White Soulless Apartment and, hopefully, cued to live a little bit more like the optimistic, sad-eyed, but irreproachably "real" people that you can only find in places like Wisconsin (and when it doesn't work out—oh, hold me!);

... then consequently I am officially signing off for the rest of this awards season from writing any Golden Globe predictions or recaps, any SAG-related features, or any Oscar nomination predictions or follow-ups, and also from contributing to any blogathon entries or any more podcast conversations or other enterprises about what's going on with all of these dispiriting movies and their jostlings for unearned position. I got in on Nathaniel's second podcast of the season last week, before Avatar brought me crashing down (and I get a big on-air rant about Up in the Air), and I definitely encourage you to listen to it. Nathaniel, Katey, and Joe are, as always, a joy to talk to when I detach myself from my feelings about the films in play, and if you like these movies so much more than I do that you're eager to keep tracing their fortunes, there's no better company in which to keep reading the tea leaves.

But from now on, I am boycotting. I will still watch the Oscars, no doubt with some eagerness, and if Bigelow or Sidibe or their films do pull out the win, I'll want to celebrate that. I'll still do the Best Actress write-up, since my ongoing and historical interest in that category remains exciting to me. But that's it.



Maybe the incredible bitterness that hit me after Up in the Air and Avatar will eventually relieve itself, and this will only be a one-year hiatus from publicly caring about Oscar. Maybe I'm just firing myself from this particular position, so that I can go build an empire or whatever bullshit Ryan Bingham would tell me—with dignity!—that I am now free to do, having renounced any coverage of this year's Academy Awards.

For now, I am throwing (almost) everything Oscar-related out of the backpack that is my life. I have other things to do, even on this blog. For instance, all through this month, I have loved shining a light on so many other movies and personal memories of the cinema, and I want to keep doing that. From my own perspective, there's no way I would relinquish any of that joy so as to deduce more energetically how AMPAS will or will not make a further cock-up out of the limited, dispiriting mound of studio-, publicist-, and advertiser-selected options that they now have in front of them. It's not quite Christmas, but consider that my New Year's Resolution.

So anyway. Back to the movies.

The Damn Basterds Won't Let Me Be...

...and though I have a lot else to get done this weekend and can't afford the time to write or deliver a finished screed, I am finding myself too upset but also too gripped by my response to this movie, and by several other people's responses to this movie, that I can't not write about it. Plus, I figure: what the hey. Tarantino loves chapters. And he's hardly one to balk at breaking his own mammoth pieces into smaller chunks (if only because higher powers force his hand), and hoping nonetheless that people will keep checking in. So, that's how it's going to be.

Chapter 1: Whipped Cream
Chapter 2: Perspective

Two More Grouchy Notes...

...about the expanded Best Picture category and its epidemic debates and discourses around the Oscar blogosphere, including here. I have already made clear that a movie getting nominated for Best Picture and no other award seems eminently likely and perfectly fine: when that very thing recently almost happened, the nominee in question may not have been top-drawer artistry but it was a welcome breath of fresh air in the category and a much-beloved movie. Earlier single-nom Best Picture nominees like Trader Horn, Five Star Final, Grand Hotel, The Smiling Lieutenant, She Done Him Wrong, The Ox-Bow Incident, and Libeled Lady were sometimes among the best movies included in those line-ups, and even at worst offer some valuable time-capsule glimpses of what Hollywood felt boastful or proud of in those years, besides its standard fare. Snatching lead acting noms for the legendary Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt back when those categories only admitted three names apiece probably "should," in some Oscar bloggers' minds, have made The Guardsman a shoo-in for Best Picture, but I think the single-nom Lubitsch movies that bested it are at least as good, and certainly more historically interesting. So please, let's worry less about this possibility. For a film to pull off this trick in the 00s or after, if it even happens, will hopefully require that the film be something special to a lot of people, or something different from the rest of the pack. All things considered, that could be good, right?

More worryingly, I'm reading some commenters who are dismayed that a movie without a "major" nomination for directing, acting, or writing could "sneak in," no matter what other, presumably "minor" nods it scores. Even a movie that had one acting nomination, as The Dark Knight did, has been mentioned on one blog as a possible "sneak" in the new system. I.e., a movie that has plenty of nods, but not in the "right" categories, might trespass into a category where, by Oscar logic, it has no business.

Surely it is high time for Oscar bloggers to acknowledge (and we all need to) that Editing, Sound, Cinematography, Score, Art Direction, and Visual Effects are "major" crafts, and if you take either the industry or the art of filmmaking seriously, there's nothing less "major" about them than about acting or writing. Believe me, I understand what you mean, and as we know, I idolize great actors as much as anyone. But I'd also venture, in the abstract, that a film with some of the best editing of the year and some of the best sound work of the year is on average a better film than a film with one of the best performances by a leading actress and one of the best adapted screenplays. Or at least as good, anyway. We're not helping Oscar stay more "relevant" by perpetuating these lame shorthands for what "counts" as film art and what doesn't. Some of the same folks who claim to want to see Oscar broaden its horizons into less parochial "genre" fare turn around and slag off exactly the categories where these "genre" films often cop the most recognition, and make their most earnest stabs at lasting popular or artistic value.

Someone is bound to say, "But what about Best Director? Certainly that's major," to which I will reply, we all know films have been scoring Picture nods without reinforcing Director nods forever. The new change doesn't structurally change that, it just creates more films without (heavily politicized and genre-influenced) director nods. I suspect that Apollo 13, Sense and Sensibility, and Moulin Rouge!, lacking Director nods, still got more Best Picture votes in their years than did Il Postino or Gosford Park, which had them. It's not an absolute test of being in or out of contention, and as we've all been discussing, the new size of the Best Picture race, which only requires 10.1% of the general vote to win, might redraw all those rules anyway. Let's wait and see.

It will be pointed out, more than fairly, that my sidebar keeps readers up to speed about what I've seen most recently in the Picture, Director, and Acting categories, and no others. Guilty as charged, but believe you me, if Editing weren't quite possibly the most egregiously misunderstood category in Oscar history, and if Cinematography and Sound hadn't had a dozen or more nominees for so many years—many of them harder to find these days than almost any Picture or Acting nominee, because DVD and video distributors buy right into, and even create, the same "major category" discourse that we too often perpetuate—I'd have them right up there, too. But still, egg on my face. I'm grumbling at myself, not just at you.

In the meantime, "high-profile" and "most publicized" are great synonyms for what people mean by "major" or "important" categories. Let's try to use them, but let's also try to raise the profile and increase the publicity for these other categories while we're at it. While this news, off season, has suddenly got everyone talking Oscar and people are paying attention, let's seize the opportunity to be thoughtful and disciplined about how those of us who are silly and misguided enough to still give a rat's a** about the Oscars actually go about characterizing the awards we purport to love, and the artistic labor of important filmmakers, marquee names and otherwise, that they ostensibly honor.

P.S. I'll return to a better mood tomorrow.
P.P.S. Or maybe I won't, because look at this. If you need to know why this is a problem, Nathaniel can tell you.

One Step Forward...

I've mostly been staying off the political soapbox on this blog, but on a day when one hugely exciting political breakthrough hits simultaneously with an announcement of yet another legal-political insult to gays, lesbians, and other queer-identified folks—reminding me of just how it felt last November when the nation's giant step forward in the Oval Office was accompanied and (understandably) overwhelmed in the news cycle by a statewide referendum against the legal personhood of LGBTs... I don't know that I have anything to say about it so much as I just feel like sighing. Publicly.

Once you've caught your breath and feel able to do something more productive than sighing, especially if you live in New York state and can fairly expect your legislators to listen to you, consider reading up on the Empire State Pride Agenda's efforts to pass marriage-equality statutes in New York, and think about donating just a little to the cause. Or, if you're a non-New Yorker, the Human Rights Campaign is still going strong with its national push on this issue, but they can always, of course, use your help. One dislikes the feeling of paying into a campaign for rights that should automatically, equally, and freely accrue to the full citizenry... but hey, one also dislikes sitting back and fuming at the computer without putting some money where your blog is. Scrape it together, people.

Haven't I Seen This Before?

I expected to be thinking about all kinds of things today, but I didn't expect to be thinking about Showgirls. Still, how exactly does a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court wind up reading the words of the inaugural pledge all out of order? Is it related at all to how a whole buncha marbles just sort of happen to wind up on the floor of the Goddess show?

I wonder. But in the interest of reaching across the aisle, and of keeping a tight lid on straight-up paranoia, this post will explode by morning. Burn after reading, etc.

O, Happy Day!

Wherever you are on the political spectrum, and whether or not you're an American citizen, I hope you are following today's historically tremendous events and thinking about where and how you fit into the promise of renewal, recovery, and redistribution in the U.S., and in the way the U.S. engages with the rest of the world. I'm all for figuring out how to suture myself into this revitalized America and devising some means for being a more active agent and participant in the politically and globally progressive tide.

But for this moment, with the inauguration about ten hours away, I'm just feeling the tide. It feels like this:



I know that it's a 20-year-old jam and that Caron and Jazzie and the rest hail from English shores, but this is nonetheless the song that's been playing in my head every time I think about the home-turf regime change. Granted, Team Obama has had me a little nervous at times in the last few weeks, re: Senator Burris and Larry Summers and Tom Daschle and Rick Warren, etc. Don't get too, too far into "However do you want me / However do you need me," Barack. Be you. "We need a change! A positive change!"

At the same time, though, it's been wonderful to see how seriously the incoming administration has taken the mandate to include all Americans and their belief systems, secular and otherwise, in their visions for building our collective, immediate futures. Times are going to be hard, even more than they are now, but all the same, I am feeling pretty Back to Life myself. Hope you are, too!

If you need more help getting in the mood, let's make it a full-on concert. I mean, Barack did. Now try it at home.

We Are One

Most saliently, the national slogan for yesterday, today, tomorrow, the whole week, and hopefully for the next four years, and hopefully for longer than that. Think on that for a few minutes.

But also, the governing idea and the glorious reality behind these five spectacular acting ensembles from five good-to-great movies of the last year. You might hate my segue, but don't hate my choices. Or do, but tell me why.

11. 4. 08. B-Day.

Supply your own Beyoncé pun. I'll help you start: it's time to ring the alarm. All the signs point to Obama/Biden in 2008. G.O.P., executive branch, Supreme Court, lemme lemme lemme upgrade U. Barack's got the only plan to help the middle class and the working poor pay our bills, bills, bills. He's a survivor; McCain is just a bug-a-boo, and don't even get me started on the nasty girl and her "Hussein" rallies.

The writing's on the wall. Barack Obama is destiny's child. (But he still needs you to GO VOTE.)

Let Me Be Frank

No, seriously—just for one day, let me be Frank Rich. Or at least let him hear my loud huzzah about this. He liked the movie more than I did, but our hearts and our angers are in the same places.

All Racist on the Western Coast

Welcome to the third episode of Season One of Best Pictures from the Outside In. If you're just joining us—don't worry, you'll still count later on as a "vintage" fan from the infancy of this series!—Goatdog and Nathaniel and I are surveying Oscar's top prizewinners from inception forward and from this year backwards, leading to all kinds of bonkers juxtapositions... though episodes One and Two have convinced us, and hopefully you, that these arbitrary pairings can lead to fresh, lively takes on the movies. This week, we bunk up with All Quiet on the Western Front, a prestige adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about young German soldiers working hard to stay alive in World War I, which was the Academy's favorite movie released between August 1, 1929, and July 31, 1930. We also run into Crash, Oscar's anointee from 2005, tracking 20+ characters through the mean, bile-spewing streets of modern LA. If these two films were mashed into one, you might call it...


Nick: So, this week the inevitable finally unfolds, twice over. On the one hand, for the first time in this series, Oscar ignites a major uproar with its choice of the top prizewinner. Even more typically of AMPAS, and at both ends of our historical double-helix, Best Picture goes to a movie that huffs and puffs along with a Worthy Message. Without dodging the issue completely, I'm inclined to steer clear of the whole Crash/Brokeback passion play, partially because it was all so recent and so heated that we hardly need another rehearsal: you all know how you feel, and so do we. Partially because I'm the host, and I wouldn't have voted for either one of those movies; given Oscar's choices, I was all about Capote and Munich that year. And partially because our goal is to reassess the movies, not the conditions or controversies that surrounded their victories.

So, with that caveat loosely in place - the First Amendment does, after all, still prevail on this blog - I think we might begin more fruitfully with the moralizing aims of All Quiet on the Western Front (war is hell, and the homefront has no idea!) and of Crash (contemporary racism is as horrible as it is pervasive, and you, the viewers, have no idea!). Neither film leaves any doubt about its motivating ideology, although they position themselves a little differently with regard to their didacticism. All Quiet... is brazenly anti-war, as expressed through its stomach-turning battlefield scenes as well as its dialogues and voiceovers—but the film is also intent on making huge forward leaps in realistic "style" and in technical sophistication. Considering how alert we were last week to The Broadway Melody's crude fascination with its own soundtrack, it's amazing that All Quiet...—so much more ambitious in scope, depth, sonic density, and especially camera movement—is only a year older. Director Lewis Milestone makes a huge case for All Quiet... as groundbreaking cinema, which Paul Haggis all but refuses to do with Crash. That film is formally and technically modest, almost TV-like, as though this in itself will make the movie's elaborately contrived dialogue and dramaturgy more "believable."

So, while we grab our first round of cocktails, I have some questions: did you guys feel that the grand scale and artistic ambition of All Quiet... or the almost anti-cinema aesthetics of Crash made you take their implied "messages" more to heart, or less so? What IS the message of Crash, anyway, and does the movie have an artistic identity apart from its rhetorical points? And if I can ask a more pointed question than we sometimes have in beginning these chats, is there a single scene or moment in either film that sums up how you think the movie works, or how you feel about the movie? (I'll keep quiet about my answers till after I've opened the floor.)

Go to it, you crazy lily-white crackers!


Nathaniel: I love that it took us until episode 3 to get to the Worthy Message film... although I fear we shan't ever be granted a two week leave again. We'll be abandoned on the front lines from here on out.

I'm glad you mentioned the anti-cinema aesthetic of Crash. It's one of the reasons I have a problem with it. I'm not predisposed to hating anti-cinema cinema but I almost never take it as seriously as the Movie-Movie. Even in cases where I like the former kind more than in this case, I can never get truly passionate about them. I think it's charitable that you view this deficiency as an aesthetic choice... I'm inclined to view such films as merely lacking in visual creativity or technical skill. So my answer to the first question is that I can't take Crash's message as seriously as All Quiet's, even before we get to the other problem: Racism is Wrong! is hypocritical in delivery. One of the things I respect a great deal about War is Wrong! is that its message is not compromised. It doesn't wallow in the thrills of the battle and victories like many supposed anti-war movies do. The War is Wrong! soldiers actually look distraught whenever they win OR lose... which I think marks a brave commitment to the Message first and foremost. It's not interested in having and eating its cake. Meanwhile, over in Racism is Wrong!, the players and audience seem to be blatantly pandered too whenever the occasion permits. So often the movie seems to be saying, "It's wrong but we all do it—and that doesn't make us bad people!" I think we need a YouTube mashup of Crash scenes set to Avenue Q's "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist", pronto. The movie is similarly "Oops, my bad!"-forgiving, if much less witty in the delivery.


When thinking on Crash, it's not a scene but a line that careens into me. It's the often lampooned but interesting (to me at least) moment when whitey Sandra Bullock has her inchoate breakdown: "I'm angry all the time and I don't know why." I much prefer the movie when its notions of widespread psychosocial sickness are vaguely expressed. I think Crash is more effective in these fuzzier moments than when it hits any nail (black, white, brown or yellow) on the head. We, as humans, may like easy explanations and diagnosis but that doesn't mean they're good for us. Easy categorizations are part of the problem. If I have to choose a scene I'm going with the bookend of Michael Peña and the bedtime story of the magic cape. The first scene is a beauty since Peña is a sympathetic and fine actor. [Note: producer/star Don Cheadle ventures on the DVD commentary that Peña's performance is "arguably the best thing in the movie."] But the payoff, potent as it may be, is manipulative. It works but the aftertaste is gross. That's how Crash plays for me throughout. I think it's well meaning. I really do. It's the delivery that's the real problem.

Goatdog: The scene from Crash that best illustrates why I think that movie is a train wreck is Sandra Bullock's post-sprain embrace with her sometimes helpmeet, sometimes whipping Hispanic, Maria (played by Yomi Perry). Crash structures itself around a series of accidents—of wrong-place-wrong-time meetings, of "there are only five cops on active duty in LA" coincidences, and of genuine accidents proving that nothing is more unsafe than the home except the outside. These accidents both (1) provide fodder for people to dig out their Racist Thesaurus and Old-Timey Book of Creaky Insults, and (2) provide opportunities to realize the errors of their ways. So Sandra takes a tumble, and none of her self-obsessed (presumably white) friends will help her, but her savior, Saint Maria, rescues her from her beige cocoon, takes her to the hospital, and brings her tea.


How lovely! How loyal! You know, the Maria whom Bullock pays to help out, who would likely get fired if she did not help out. In this grand rapprochement between representatives of the Unaware Racist White Union and the Long-Suffering Hispanic Union, Paul Haggis doesn't see fit to give her a single closeup without Bullock, and after Bullock makes her silly declaration, doesn't show her face at all. By that time, she's a prop, not a person. What. the. fuck? Is he making some subversive statement about how Bullock's self-deluded epiphany isn't real? If so, why not at least one little closeup of Maria rolling her eyes? (We all know Ang Lee would have given Perry her own closeup.) It doesn't matter to Haggis what Maria thinks of this, because he's already dealt with what Hispanics think about race in his Michael Peña storyline. This, like Matt Dillon's rapprochement with Thandie Newton in the flames of the burning SUV, strikes me as completely false in so many ways: it illuminates the silliness of the film's reductively interlocking circle of characters, it proudly brandishes the film's reductive view of how people deal with race every day, and it posits a reductive solution in which we only have to viciously stub our toes while running for the teapot in order to have a grand epiphany about how we're racists but we're not bad people and there's hope for us yet.

Which brings me to All Quiet on the Western Front. You know, because it stands at the opposite pole from Crash's technical, moral, and thematic deficiencies. The one scene I'd choose as being emblematic of everything it does right with its technique and message is the recruits' first outing with the lovably ugly Katczinsky (Louis Wolheim) to lay barbed wire. What struck me was the screaming. When people are shot or struck by shrapnel in this film, they don't fall over on their side and die quietly: they scream, they run around, they tear at their faces, they cry, they're in agony, and their friends have to watch because there's nothing else they can do. When they try to help, it's useless—heroism is useless. Like Nathaniel said, it never deviates from this message, not for a second. I don't think audiences had seen a film deal with war this way before (because the sound is so important to the effectiveness), and it would be another 15 or so years before a film dealt with war this honestly again.


The bumper crop of early-30s antiwar films this one kicked off (many of them written by John Monk Saunders, who wrote Wings) weren't this realistic, and from what I remember of the early WW2 films that dealt with combat, they chose the "slight grimace, then fall over quietly" type of battle death. This scene also plays up Milestone's mastery of all the tools available to him as a filmmaker, and at times it's almost as if the creaky-early-talkie period didn't exist, that he was able to meld some of the impeccable technique of the late silents with all the possibilities of sound without losing anything from either side of that formerly impenetrable boundary between sound and silent. It's a legitimately great movie, one of the ten best winners of all time.

Nick: I'm glad you highlight a failure of Crash's editing, Mike, because I do find it galling that the two specific crafts for which Crash won Oscars—the writing and the cutting—are the two things it misjudges more often than anything else. This might seem like nitpicking, but for me a defining moment in the movie is when Don Cheadle's character barks at his mother over the phone that he's "having sex with a white woman," but rather than move closer to Jennifer Esposito's reaction or even hold the full shot where they are lying on the bed in real time, editor Hughes Winborne actually cuts to an arbitrarily different shot as Esposito gets off the bed. This means we don't experience the moment as the character does, in any way; instead, the screenplay digs in its heels for another righteous monologue where a character describes what is structurally wrong with what someone else just did/said. The coarseness of the editing here is botchy in exactly the same way (for me) as the moment you describe, Mike, and works against the film's occasional strength (I agree with Nathaniel here) at showcasing human behavior and vulnerability without always underlining what exactly is most troubling or wrong with the person or moment or event we've just witnessed.

	+		=
Offending Dialogue + Anti-Reaction Shot = Freestanding Lecture

That said, I don't always think Crash is one-dimensional or totally overt. I don't experience the Matt Dillon/Thandie Newton scene on the highway as a "rapprochement," for example, because I find both of their affects—hers especially, when she subtly shakes her head at the end of the scene—interestingly inscrutable. Some of the writing works, both in the rare understated moment ("You embarrass me") and even some of the florid ones, if you take the movie as a Eugene O'Neill-ish exercise in forcing characters to speak their subconscious thoughts aloud, rather than a snapshot of alleged "reality." And the actors frequently save the movie, or parts of the movie: Terrence Howard's painful apologies to the police, Shaun Toub's and Michael Peña's fight over the door and the lock, Loretta Devine calling office security but then holding them off to hear Matt Dillon out. Strong scenes, sharply played. I do have to give Crash credit for being punchy and vivid and occasionally quite bracing, for all the other times when it's tripping over itself.

But I'm short-shrifting All Quiet on the Western Front! Ditto on its conviction that war really is ghastly and intolerable. I also love the palpable violence of some of the social encounters (Himmelstoss the mailman, converted overnight into a defensive and hostile automaton) and even the camera movements (tracking back as the soldiers rush into their barracks for the first time, underscoring their excitement but also sort of retreating from their painful naïveté). I agree it's one of the best winners Oscar ever chose... but are we going too easy on it? Does it have a Saving Private Ryan-ish problem of getting weirdly talky in the second half? Compared to something as visually and cinematically robust as that horrible scene where the bunker caves in on itself and Franz Kemmerich (Ben Alexander) goes stir-crazy inside, the scenes where the soldiers discuss what war "really is" by the side of the river or where Lew Ayres wrestles internally with his own guilt at killing an enemy feel like a different and slightly lesser movie to me.

Nathaniel: I do think All Quiet gets talky to its (very slight) detriment but it was pointedly moving all the same. The film works best when it's visually conveying the message... like that simple but effective journey of the coveted bad-luck charm boots, or the absolutely stunning ending, which merely recycles a shot from earlier in the film but double exposes it to remind you of the cumulative losses of the movie. It's a gut punch but a humane one, I think. I was also, like Nick, amazed at its technical control. This is only a couple of years into sound filmmaking? They learned very very quickly in Hollywood. Or at least Lewis Milestone did.

But here's where I get all Lew Ayres post-war disillusioned on ya. Perhaps it's distasteful to be this cynical but I've seen too much of the annual Western Fronting. Western as in Hollywood, California. Don't these two movies paired (and other wins too) suggest that the technical mastery and aesthetic sensitivity of a film like All Quiet on the Western Front are rather irrelevant to its triumph on Oscar night. Doesn't The Message film always win because of group sympathies for The Message?


Goatdog: I agree that the talkiness of a few of the late scenes detracts from All Quiet, but only a little: yeah, the "let's put all the leaders in a circle and let them fight it out" bit is belabored, but it's such a small part of the film. By the time of Lew's alienating trip back home, his return to discover that just about everybody he knows is dead, his tragic reunion with Wolheim, and that ending, I had forgotten my issues with those few too-talky scenes. I can't put Lew's soliloquy to his dead French foxhole-mate in the same category, because even despite the sometimes creaky dialogue, it's one of the most horrific scenes in the movie, one that drives home the general awfulness of everything Lew's been through. That dead guy sitting there with that half-smirk on his face... shudder. Plus, I just took a break from viewing next week's offering, and my god, All Quiet on the Western Front is a miracle, hallelujah! Although healing the problems of the other talkies around it is not part of its legitimate claim for canonization.


But with Crash, it's the other way around: the general morass of the hapless shooting and editing (my favorite [read, least favorite] being Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton fighting in their apartment, and Haggis deciding to shoot it through the patio doors because he's seen better filmmakers do that, but doesn't stop to wonder why it might work in some cases but not in others), the general preachiness and obviousness of the dialogue and scene construction, etc., make the good moments—I'll admit that there are a few, some of which are really powerful—seem to disappear.

What has Oscar done to make you so cynical, Nathaniel? I'd like to imagine that voters are familiar with their craft and they recognize outstanding work when they see it. That's the way it works, right? But this pairing (and so many other "message" winners, good and bad) (and, for that matter, their repeated demonstrations of their lack of familiarity with their craft) could suggest that they're blind to anything but the message, at least when they go for a message film. That's a therapy session I'd love to eavesdrop on. But at least sometimes, as we saw last week, they can look past clumsy sermonizing (like Babel) and go for something that seizes the brass ring through sheer, ballsy technique. Looking through the list of films we'll be addressing in the coming months, we'll be wondering a lot about what specific motives led to the choice Oscar made in a given year, even when, as here, they made the right choice. Sometimes it's a strong message or phenomenal technique. Or vast, overwhelming scale. Or a comeback vehicle for a director who doesn't get enough credit. Basically, Oscar needs something huge and noticeable to pin its medal to. It might be fun at the end to try to divide the winners into categories: technique, message, scale, comeback. And Ernest Borgnine.

Reader: Don't front. Don't be all quiet. Do you agree with us that the Milestone film is a milestone? Are you angry at Crash all the time, and do you know why? Though Oscar may have said it all with that interpretive dance of "In the Deep" before a blazing car, leave us your impressions in the form of a Comment...


Stats: All Quiet on the Western Front was nominated for four Oscars, winning Best Picture and Best Director. Crash was nominated for six, winning Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing in addition to Best Picture.

Tags:
Currently: Goatdog's and Nathaniel's posts on this week's films
Previously: ep.1: Wings & No Country; ep.2: Broadway Melody & Departed