A Change in the Wind

Take Shelter -- the birds are falling (again)

2012 opens with news of blackbirds falling dead from the sky in Arkansas -- again. 

Thousands of dead blackbirds rained down on a town in central Arkansas last New Year's Eve after revelers set off fireworks that spooked them from their roost, and officials were reporting a similar occurrence Saturday as 2012 approached.

Police in Beebe said dozens of blackbirds had fallen dead, prompting officers to ban residents from shooting fireworks Saturday night. It wasn't immediately clear if fireworks were again to blame, but authorities weren't taking a chance.

Officer John Weeks said the first reports of "birds on the streets" came around 7 p.m. as residents celebrated the year's end with fireworks in their neighborhoods.

"We started shutting down fireworks," he said. "We're working on cleaning up the birds now."

Such was an image in two films this year, both contemplating environmental disaster. (Without the fireworks, admittedly.) The first being Melancholia, where blackbirds fall from the sky, and people plenty of good reasons to look to the heavens, as they contemplate the end.

By contrast, 2011 also featured a beautifully understated dramatic examination of oncoming disaster, called Take Shelter. In this movie a devoted father, plagued by delusional nightmares of a storm the likes of which has never been seen in Ohio, turns his life upside down. He alienates his brother, frightens his wife, and loses his job -- all in the attempt to save his family. 

Despite being devastated by blackbirds falling from the sky, he wonders if he's going crazy. 

Describing what motivated him to make this film, the writer/director Jeff Nichols said:

I wrote TAKE SHELTER because I believed there was a feeling out in the world that was palpable. It was an anxiety that was very real in my life, and I had the notion it was very real in the lives of other Americans as well as other people around the world. This film was a way for me to talk about that fear and that anxiety. I hope there is an answer to this feeling by the end of the film. I believe there is, and it's the reason that this wonderful group of people came together to help me make TAKE SHELTER.

Yes, there is a palpable sense of disaster about to descend -- no? For better or worse. Perhaps we're all wrong, but the fear is there, among us. 

Leave aside the much-reported record twelve billion-dollar climactic disasters of the U.S. in 2011. You can hear in the rhetoric of Ron Paul and his followers, remarked on by leading conservative Ross Douthat. You can  read it in frightened Tea Party economic analysis. You can hear it in the serious music of today, such as Holocene, by Bon Iver, and in A.O. Scott's superb encapsulation of the film's central drama:

Is Curtis mad, or is he prescient? You can debate this question when the movie is over — the brilliant final scene invites as much — but you are unlikely to find a comfortable answer. The real question is what difference it makes...in “Take Shelter,” [Nichols] has made a perfect allegory for a panicky time. There is no shortage of delusion and paranoia out there in the world. There is also a lot to be afraid of.

Once our culture located God in the skies; now we wonder if we can trust Him -- or them. 

Horror in Happy Valley: The Jerry Sandusky Movie

The scene: a nice little college town, where everyone is happy and peppy and civic minded, and really loves the football team. Someone from Colorado or someplace, transfers into town for a new job and … starts noticing things. It turns out that the town patriarch (Paterno) isn’t even the ruler…

Something Else is…

A comment from Rod Dreher's ever-interesting blog at The American Conservative. 

The writer who fired the producer: Brett Radner

Yesterday Mark Harris at Grantland eviscerated Brett Radner, the man chosen to produce the Oscar telecast this year, for his "rehearsal is for fags" comment, and lame subsequent apology.

Harris wrote: 

I’ve had to listen to versions of every one of these mea-not-quite-culpas over the years and seriously, I’m no longer interested in patiently witnessing the slow arc of a public figure’s learning curve. What I do care about is what the Academy does, which should be either to ask for and receive his resignation from the show or to drop him as the producer of a show that is supposed to represent the best the industry has to offer. There’s not really a long, nuanced debate to be had about this. If he had used an equivalent racial or religious slur, the discussion would go something like, “You’re fired.” Apology or not. The same rule applies here. You don’t get a mulligan on homophobia. Not in 2011.

Tuesday -- Ratner is fired! Er, resigns. Whatever.

Tree of Life: Does God love us in an abusive way?

I provoke, but really, that is the question that burns beneath the beautiful surfaces of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

I say this as an agnostic, as one who dislikes theology and theologians, but as one who (like many other critics) finds that this movie "touches me so much I can barely stand it."  

The story opens with a title card displaying a quote from God. Job, a devout believer, has lost everything -- his family, his fortune, and his health -- and asks, in so many words: Oh Lord, why me?

In reply, the God of the Old Testament demands to know what right Job has to question him in any way.

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" 

It's a harsh response, but from God's perspective, a truthful one. (And to underline the point, Malick in the film takes the time to tell us the story of Job again, this time in a sermon. He has a minister in Waco Texas in the 1950's reminds his parishioners, including the family in the movie, of how instead of peace and kindness, God can "send flies to wounds.") Of how cruel God can be. 

The human drama begins on a related note. The graceful, kind mother in the story, played by the ethereal Jessica Chastain, speaks in voice-over. As she speaks, we see her go from being a child, wrapped safely in the loving arms of her father, to being with the father of her sons:  

There are two ways through life. The way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow.

Grace doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, being forgotten. It accepts insults and injuries.

Nature wants to please itself, and for others to please it too. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. When love is smiling through everything.  

As discussed in a previous post, it seems that this voice-over in the mother's voice is actually not what she is thinking, but what her oldest son Jack thinks that she believes. And yes, it does seem she believes in grace, and her husband believes in a Darwinian nature. 

This sounds overly complex, no doubt, but in the context of the story it makes perfect sense. Jack, the oldest son, takes after his father, a stern controlling man, and not their mother, who loves them unconditonally. Jack grows up to be successful, but as he thinks back on the character, masterfully portrayed by Brad Pitt, he recalls a man who demands that his sons call him "Father," not "dad."

He thinks of how his dad tormented him, and how he in turn tormented his younger brother, a sensitive boy who takes after his mother, who refuses to fight -- either his brother or his father -- and who dies at age 19, of unknown causes, for no good reason.

Jack wonders if God the Father is as cruel as his own father, and his own self. 

As the story develops, and as we see characters enveloped by trees countless times, we may well if nature is opposed to grace, or connected to it. (Jack's pain, and his mother's beliefs, may or may not be the director's.)

But there's little doubt but that this question of the cruelty of God is what Jack is wondering about, when he lights a candle in his grimly modern apartment in honor of his brother, and begins to think back on his father, his anger, his brother's death, and his own regrets.   

We see it in the empty expression of Sean Pean, who is Jack as a grown man, successful, unhappily married, and alone. We see him yearning for the kindness and grace of his mother, and for forgiveness for them all. And as he looks back, questioning himself as much as his father, we see the harsh treatment meted out by his father paralleled by the harsh fate that struck down his younger brother.

How did she bear it? he wonders, thinking about the pain his mother felt over the loss of his younger brother. And as he mulls this, her words (in voice-over, in the past) begin to change: How did I lose you? (Is she speaking to God or his younger brother? Or to both? It's unclear.)

Who are we to you? Where are you? she asks God, the being she once trusted. The being she once believed lived in the sky, and pointed to in the clouds, assuring her infant son of his presence.    

Universes of pixels have been spent on discussions of the twenty-minute genesis of life sequence in this film, which is as overwhelming as anything seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Many a complaint has been heard, that nothing in the drama of the not-especially-happy O'Brien family of Waco, Tex., in the l950's, deserves such grandeur. But that misses the point, the connection between the God the father to us all, and the father in this story, the father to Jack. 

How can we love a father who is so cruel to us, and who insists on the goodness of his cruelty? 

It's an enormous question, brilliantly dramatized (if left unanswered, in the end). 

But what sticks with me are the last words of the mother, of the way of grace: 

You can only be happy if you love. Unless you love, your life will flash by. 

   

Reconciling religion and evolution: The Tree of life

From an unpretentious and persuasive visual essay on the most debated movie of the year, The Tree of Life, by Matt Zoller Seitz: 

There is this central notion in all of Malick's films that every individual person is just one tiny part of nature. Not too much more important in the larger scheme of things than an insect, or a blade of grass. It's really not all that radical to state, but it's one American audiences seem to have trouble accepting, because it's anathema to the way we are told we should live our lives. And in this [evolution] sequence Terence Malick has done something quite remarkable, which is that he has reconciled religion and evolution. He has reconciled religion and science. 

That's from the first part of the essay, which Seitz put together with a film editor collaborator. In the second part, which is much more beautiful, because it features the mother in the film, the most beautiful of its characters by about a country mile, he gets specific:

When we hear the mother speaking in voice-over, I think we're hearing Jack's projection of her internal voice, her overwhellming goodness, her unselfishness, her sunbeam warmth. Look at how she dotes on her infant child in this moment near the opening of the movie. She's Mother Earth, much as "The Tree of Life" itself is Mother Earth. 

 

"The Tree of Life" is the most debated movie of the year, because critics love it, by a 40-2 margin, and ordinary people often detest it.

The usefulness of forgetting: Tennessee Williams

 

"A bad memory is a great convenience." 

 

Tennessee Williams, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 1950

 

The quote is from the nouvella. Here's the poster from the first movie made of this story. 

 

[My god, what a cast! Lotte Lenya?!? Who was nominated for Best Supporting for the role? I have to see this picture.] 

"Living on their Fears"...

That is how one thoughtful character describes life in South Africa after the arrival of the "Prawns" featured in the stunning new film District 9...and it's also a description of much too much life in the US today.

Fascinating movie , with many many levels, of character, metaphor, and violence. (May have gotten a release due to a slim similarity to "Transformers," but never mind.) A must see for movie fans.

Here's the original short on which the new film is based:

Hollywood's Best/Worst Director to Make New Lousy Film

LOS ANGELES—In the largest deal ever made to shit out a movie, Warner Bros. and director Michael Bay announced a landmark $50 million agreement this week to monumentally fuck up ThunderCats.

"I couldn't be more excited to completely fuck this up," said Bay, who plans to begin production on destroying the live-action adaptation next month. "ThunderCats has a great story, endearing characters, action, adventure, space-travel, and fantasy. It will be an honor to run it into the ground."

"I'll use every directorial tool I have to suck the very life and charm out of this beloved cartoon," added Bay, claiming that the film could turn out to be the most colossal piece of shit he's ever worked on. "I won't rest until I get every last scene exactly wrong."

Don't believe this story from The Onion? Check out breakfast, as directed by Bay:

Cadillac Records: Why Release It in Theaters, If You Shoot It for TV?

The story of Muddy Waters was brought to the big screen this past fall in Cadillac Records. It's a great story, but not -- unfortunately -- a great movie, despite some spectacular performances. Jeffrey Wright, quiet but fierce, could not be better as Muddy Waters. When he goes electric, you feel it in your bones. Mos Def completely disappears into the role of Chuck Berry: he not only inhabits the character, he looks like the man. And every time Beyonce sings, everything stops, except the chills...

...but although the movie answers a lot of questions you may have had about the electric blues and early rock and roll (such as -- why did Chuck Berry cross over, but not Muddy Waters?) as a story it gets lost. Visually it's held together mostly by the fact that seemingly all the characters smoke like fiends.

Fundamentally, it's not really clear whose movie this is. It's about Muddy Waters, mostly, but also about Leonard Chess, and Little Walter, as told by Willie Dixon. Not to mention a quasi-romance that develops between Chess (played by Adrien Brody) and Etta James (played by the aforementioned Beyonce).

Leonard Chess's son complained on NPR that this romance lacked reality, but in movie terms, the bigger problem is it lacks feeling. The writer/director gives us enormous close-ups of the two struggling not to kiss, bigger than you see on the small screen in soap operas, but their scenes go nowhere, and it's almost embarrassing to see these actors who can't figure out what to say making eyes at each other. (The contrast to a show such as Mad Men, with articulate characters shot with a Hawksian reserve, is striking -- Mad Men would look fine on the big screen, even though it's intended for home viewing!)

But the strangest thing of all is what happens when Beyonce sings. Just as in Dreamgirls, when she takes the mic in hand, the rest of the movie falls away...to forgetability. My god, can this girl sing!

Just look...and listen:

Rosemarie Dewitt Will Break Your Heart

And that's a promise. Take a look at her and tell me if it isn't true.

This is from the show Mad Men, about which way too much has already been said.

It's a good show, but if you want to fall in love again, if just for an hour or two, with a woman of overwhelming smarts and impossible beauty, run don't walk to see her, Rosemarie Dewitt, in Rachel Getting Married.

The movie is at times a battle between the movie stars (including Anne Hathaway, playing the troubled addict sister, and Debra Winger, playing the estranged mother) and the virtual unknowns, such as the extrardinarily compelling Rosemarie Dewitt as the sister upon whom all in the story depend.

Dewitt's the real star of the picture, and they say she has a chance at a Supporting Actress nod from Oscar. That would be wonderful to see, but she will be long remembered for this performance, with or without the little statuette. 

In the picture below, she is the pretty woman, the real one with the earring, not the movie star.