Uncle Boonmee

I’m not going to claim full understanding of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, but it did something for me that went beyond understanding, I think. It made me want to increase my understanding.

Winner of last year’s Palme d’Or (top prize) at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s a gentle, deliberately paced, and visually sumptuous work. The Thai director who for quite understandable reasons goes by the nickname “Joe” has a distinctive style. Frequently, his compositions are filled from top to bottom, side to side, and corner to corner with foliage. He is closely in touch with nature and seems to be suggesting that we all exist amidst a never ending jungle, literal and figurative.

Uncle Boonmee shows us Boonmee during his final days as he succumbs to kidney failure. (It is based on the true story of man who appeared to Buddhist monks with claims of being able to see his past lives while dreaming.) He is surrounded by a fascinating assortment of caregivers and comforters including a male nurse who administers his dialysis, his devoted sister-in-law, the ghost of his late wife, and his lost son who returns in a not quite human, ape-like form that resembles Bigfoot with laser-like red eyes.

The film consists of quiet scenes of Boonmee receiving care and slowly slipping away seamlessly overlapping with visions of his dreams. The centerpiece is an extraordinary sequence from a time long ago of an aged princess carried by servants before a waterfall where she has a conversation with and ultimately has sex with a catfish. This occurs after she gazes upon her youthful reflection in the water and she rejects a human suitor. It’s a scene that mesmerizes with its folktale-like qualities, yet managed to escape my grasp due to those tales being outside my experience.

I’m fascinated by folktales, but so far have little exposure to those beyond The West. Uncle Boonmee constantly hints at a whole new folk tradition waiting for my discovery. I also have little knowledge of things spiritual outside of Christianity and detect something imminently worth discovery within the film’s lush, densely green frames.

I’ve never encountered a film that suggested so strongly a sense of the circular nature of things; of all living things living in close relationship; and of past, present, and future co-existing. There is a moment where Boonmee’s sister-in-law narrowly misses stepping on an insect and is warned to be more careful as if what’s once small may one day be large and what’s powerful could easily one day be weak, both in this life and in lives to come. That insect may have already spared her life, or may one day end it out of similar carelessness. (A scene where mosquitos are casually killed with an electrified flyswatter left me asking, “Just what are the boundaries in this belief system?”)

Joe has an affinity with nature, but with Uncle Boonmee that extends more than ever to man’s relationship with animals. The opening scene depicts a water buffalo breaking free of its bonds, wandering into the jungle, and then its owner gently retrieving it. Boonmee’s sister-in-law cavorts happily with her dog. Completely relaxed, Boonmee and his sister-in-law taste honey from a hive, bees buzzing all about them. His son returns with an ape-like appearance. And of course that scene with the catfish was one of last year’s most talked about love scenes, to say the least.

More than anything though, what left me wanting about the beliefs expressed in Uncle Boonmee is how all of the people, regardless of cast in life, treat each other with love and respect. I want to learn more, a lot more.

Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine is an achingly sad affair. It chronicles the final days of a marriage between Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), seemingly held together only by a young daughter (hers, not his) and desperation (his, not hers). Don’t let this scare you away though. Sadness is an emotion of many colors, and this movie does a magnificent job of showing them all. It’s my favorite American movie in years.

The movie is structured as if from Dean’s point of view as he sorts through the events of their relationship, trying to discover what went wrong. It tells of their final two days separated by a night together in an all blue, futuristic honeymoon suite. This is all aching. It’s punishing. It’s angry and filled with denial that stops just short of acceptance.

These scenes are punctuated by flashbacks to their meeting, dating, her revealing her pregnancy to him, and their quickie wedding. These scenes display the other colors. There’s a scene of his serenading her late at night in front of a closed storefront that’s magical. There’s palpable affection between them. His reaction to her being pregnant is fear laced with determination. Her reaction to his proposal, immediately following a scene in an abortion clinic that sets a new standard for such scenes, is to tell him, “You don’t have to do this,” as she clings to him.

What went wrong? The answer he finds is pretty much everything. But it’s a very understandable sort of everything, or at least it was for me. In my twenties, I fell in love at first sight and ignored all the signals the pretty young woman was flashing before my eyes until we found ourselves sitting before a roaring fire enacting “the marriage proposal scene.” The woman, hand trembling, gave back the ring, stood up, and walked out of my life.

I was lucky. I was spared what I now know would have been years of sadness. And, if I hadn’t already known this, Dean and Cindy would’ve taught me once and for all. Watching the course of their relationship – meeting, falling into something like love, passionately never quite connecting, and not enough caring – hit me in some very sensitive places. Oh, only a few of the specifics were the same, but the emotions were all familiar.

I wonder what others think of this movie. I’ve heard many people young and old express how deeply it affected them, more than I’ve heard for any other movie. People in their sixties were shattered by it. My 19-year-old niece has proclaimed it her favorite recent movie. Would all of them have a story to tell similar to mine? I read that writer/director Derek Cianfrance spent 12 years developing the script and that his two brilliant stars contributed a great deal of personal pain as well. It really shows.

I came across something very interesting while discussing the movie in between my first and second viewings. I very strongly empathized with Dean. He seemed the White Knight to me and Cindy was the messed up, troubled one. And I found most men felt the same while most women felt just the opposite. I couldn’t understand. I chalked it up to some sort of gender thing.

But, while watching it a second time, I found myself agreeing with my wife and my niece. All of Dean’s jealousies and over-willingness to pass blame rather than share it became painfully apparent. I think I finally saw things from the point of view of that pretty young woman I wanted to marry 25 years ago.

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story

I’ve always loved Hollywood movies of the 1970s. It has something to do with my wishing I had been part of the student protests that opened the decade – like the burning of the Bank of America in my home town of Isla Vista, California. Wishing I had been at Woodstock to witness a generation’s high point, and the beginning of its end, also plays a role. Mostly though, it’s a reaction to seeing my parents trembling with hushed tones in the kitchen trying to hide these events from me.

American movies during those times of unrest and Richard Nixon were notable for taking their cameras into the real world, away from Hollywood’s sets and stars. Also characteristic were frank and free explorations of sexuality, downbeat, ambiguous endings, and conflicted characters that left audiences grasping and asking: Was I supposed to like that hero?

“America Lost and Found: The BBS Story,” a rich new box set that combines seven movies released from 1968 through 1972, some well-known – Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show – some not so well known – Head (starring The Monkees), Drive, He Said, and The King of Marvin Gardens – and one forgotten – A Safe Place, feels like a primer on 1970s Hollywood.

BBS Productions, named after [B]ob Rafelson, [B]ert Schneider, and [S]teve Blauner, was born out of the success of two productions: the television series The Monkees and the whirlwind known as Easy Rider. Monkees co-creators Rafelson and Schneider filled their bank accounts with enough cash to finance the Peter Fonda/Dennis Hopper pipe-dream of a biker movie. But first they tried to spin The Monkees into a theatrical movie. They planned to jokingly promote Easy Rider as being “from the producers who gave you Head.”

Now, thanks to this set, we can see Head, a box office disaster that forced one of the greatest taglines in movie history to be abandoned. It’s actually a fun and inventive movie, though far more politically serious than the television show, which explains it failure.

Jack Nicholson was on the verge of hanging up his acting gloves when he was cast as George Hanson in Easy Rider (he also co-wrote Head) and a star was born. He saved Easy Rider which would’ve been deadly dull without him. He owns this set as well, being involved in six out of the seven movies including his fascinating directing debut Drive, He Said. Watching these movies is like watching the birth of a major career that almost never was.

Idiosyncratic director Henry Jaglom seems an odd man out with A Safe Place, his meditation on loving and forgetting, until one notices the threads. Jaglom was the editor who helped simmer Easy Rider down from a four hour mess to a mostly taut 95 minutes. Jaglom and Nicholson made a pact that they would each act in the other’s first movie. Jaglom appears in Drive, He Said, Nicholson in A Safe Place.

Seeming the most out of place though is The Last Picture Show (the one without Nicholson). Its classical storytelling and black and white cinematography harken back to earlier Hollywood times of Howard Hawks and John Ford, but watching it within the context of this set makes it feel perfectly at home at BBS.

Peter Bogdanovich insisted on shooting entirely in the town that inspired Larry McMurtry. The pool party with Jacy stripping on a diving board perfectly captures the era’s freewheeling sexuality, and no ending is bleaker than its encounter between Sonny and Ruth Popper that dissolves into an image of the town’s desolate main street with one forever blinking traffic light.

"I knew two things for sure...

I'd love to include things like this from time to time. It's a reaction to the Cinema 100 experience by first time season ticket holder Kelsey Schable:

Throughout the course of this semester, I have searched for an opportunity to immerse myself in a different culture in order to complete my cultural event project. My efforts had been mostly futile, due to the low number of cultural events located in the Bismarck-Mandan area. It occurred to me that perhaps I was being too simplistic in my cultural views and should look beyond race and ethnicity to find a group of people with completely different interests than my own. To my chagrin, I did not even realize that I had been attending a significant cultural event every Thursday afternoon for months in the form Cinema 100, a club that regularly shows new and remarkable films at the Grand Theatres weekly. Cinema 100 is unique because the people who attend the showings of these films not only have their own culture, but they involve themselves in other cultures with the medium of film.

I was first introduced to Cinema 100 through my fiancé, a local director, movie enthusiast, and board member of Cinema 100. It was his first year working with the organization and every Thursday afternoon he would have to disappear to the Grand Theatres to take tickets and view a different film. The members of Cinema 100 took great pains to find the perfect blend of films in order to expose the people of Bismarck to captivating movies that range from foreign films to classics. On the first week of the Spring 2011 Cinema 100 showing, my fiancé halfheartedly asked me to join him, knowing that it was unlikely that I would give up my Thursday afternoon to sit in a crowded movie theatre. I surprised him and myself by accepting his offer.

The first week I attended Cinema 100, I paid six dollars to watch a documentary about Joan Rivers. Although the documentary was provocative and feisty, the electric atmosphere was more stimulating than the film. Veterans who had attended Cinema 100 showings for years lingered with one another before the movie and were the first ones out of the theatre, bursting with critiques. Newbies, like me, were more reserved. I liked the vibe, but I was cautious about giving my opinion about the film with so many vivacious personalities surrounding me. As I drove away from the Grand Theatres, I knew two things for sure: Joan Rivers was a dynamite comedienne and I was purchasing a season pass to Cinema 100.

In the weeks following, I attended four other films presented by Cinema 100. I enjoyed viewing films that were different than the romantic comedies and explosive action films one usually sees in theatres. As the weeks wore on, my misgivings about expressing my opinions gave way to the fun of debating with other Thursday afternoon film critics. I realized that the Cinema 100 culture is built on the idea that everyone has an inner film critic, and that those who attend have inner critics that cannot be satisfied by the regular blockbusters of the week. This culture is exceptional because the members may not be the same race, age, or religion, but they have the same yearn for education through film and spirited debate.

While my cultural event project may have been atypical, that is fine with me. In fact, it may even be preferable. Cultural diversity is something to be celebrated and explored, especially because the fact that all people belong to the same, human culture can sometimes be forgotten. I have found that not only does it pay off to expose oneself to different cultures, but that every once in a while one may find another culture to which one belongs.

Sidney Lumet - RIP

After the recent passing of legendary movie director Sidney Lumet, I decided to go on a voyage of re-discovery. I’ve always admired his movies, been greatly entertained by them, and been impressed by his willingness to disappear inside the different stories he chose to tell, nothing flashy, just honest and earnest serving of the material.

What I didn’t expect to find is a vision that is startlingly relevant today. His career which spanned six decades grew increasingly concerned with the struggles of the little man, the working class, and the steadily weakening middle class to make ends meet. He was especially concerned with what man was capable of doing if pushed down hard enough and the consequences of his desperate actions.

The movies I’ve watched over the past week surprisingly fell neatly into two matched pairs. Dog Day Afternoon and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (his final movie shot when he was 82) are both about men driven to commit robberies to cover unexpected expenses. Daniel and Running on Empty offer two different views of revolutionary parents, focusing on the effects their actions have had on their children.

Every time my wife sees a poster from a family forced to hold a pancake breakfast to pay out of the blue medical expenses, she comes home upset and tells me I just have to write a letter to the editor. There is no way that people should be put through such hardship because fate deals them a card imprinted with a word like leukemia.

Dog Day with its famous “Attica! Attica!” spouting Al Pacino and Before the Devil with its brother attacking brother and father attacking son conflicts that approach Biblical proportions are moral quagmires. Pacino needs money to pay for his lover’s sex change operation. Philip Seymour Hoffman needs money to cope with his drug addiction. But, how unsurprising it would be to open the paper tomorrow and read, “Father Robs Bank to Keep Daughter Alive.”

Lumet was fascinated by radical figures, with clearly mixed feelings. The parents in Daniel – arrested and executed in the 1950s as Soviet spies – and in Running on Empty – on the run from the FBI after bombing a napalm lab – are presented sympathetically. But their children are put through Hell as if asking, “Was it really worth it?”

Daniel (Timothy Hutton) has been struggling to find meaning in his parents’ execution for most of his life and his sister Susan (Amanda Plummer) ends up suicidal. And there is no scene more deeply moving than Danny (River Phoenix) tearfully telling his girlfriend Lorna (Martha Plimpton) that he loves her, knowing that he may have to leave her tomorrow.

Lumet’s masterpiece is Network. I didn’t connect with it when I was in my twenties, but it has grown increasingly powerful with aging, its aging, my aging. It deals with a fourth place out of four television news network and its struggles to improve its ratings. The old guard has been striving to remain ethical even if it loses money and the new, represented most memorably by Faye Dunaway, wants to turn the station into, essentially, Fox News.

The most oft-quoted scene is when news anchor Howard Beale gets out of his chair during the live evening newscast and encourages his listeners to open their windows and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Things just aren’t done live anymore. The sponsors have grown too concerned with their well-being to allow that and Timberlake and Jackson didn’t help matters. But I can imagine just as much shouting out of windows occurring today as back in 1976.

A Film Unfinished

In a tenement building in the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews are shown living merrily day to day, their courtyard filled with an ever growing mound of human feces as they toss garbage from their tenth story windows, appearing to enjoy living amongst filth.

This scene from the extraordinary documentary “A Film Unfinished” both reminded me of and trumped what has long been my most indelible portrait of the possibilities of hatred and the powers of propaganda to cloud minds. As a child, my grandfather would sit in his big, puffy easy chair – me on one knee and my sister perched on the other – telling us how the black neighbors didn’t even use the bathroom. They would just “go all over the house.”

He wanted us to think in the most unforgettable way possible to our impressionable young minds that blacks were animals.

“A Film Unfinished” makes a truly unique use of a fortuitous discovery. Ten years after the end of WWII, researchers began to sift through the racks of footage left behind by the Nazi propaganda machine. An odd, hour long film was discovered showing the daily lives of Jews. It’s editing was rough as if something abandoned. It had no titles or credits and the cans bore the simple title “The Ghetto.”

The film’s scenes juxtapose wealthy Jews living a comfortable existence and poor, starving Jews wandering and panhandling and often dying in the streets. The footage was long considered a valuable document of how things really were during those dark times.

Two discoveries in the years since have revealed this footage to be something else entirely. A document was discovered bearing the name of one of the cameramen, Willy Wist, and he was located and interviewed. And a never meant to be seen reel of outtakes was found. These two documents combine to show “The Ghetto” to be a most sinister and carefully constructed lie, the propaganda purposes of which we can only now surmise.

Healthy looking Jews, the few remaining, were costumed and placed in carefully redecorated and plush rooms and ordered to eat extravagant meals. They were ordered to walk down the sidewalks past starving Jews – themselves ordered to extend their hands begging for handouts – and callously place nothing in their hands.

Corpses were arranged on the sidewalks by laughing Nazi soldiers while “rich” Jews were ordered to walk past them carrying packages of food for their evening feasts without so much as glancing downward.

We learn of these filmmaking details from Wist. We learn just as much from viewing the outtakes. In scenes left on the cutting room floor, people are seen looking down at those corpses in horror – one particular little boy in disbelief. A scene of two filthy young boys looking into a shop window as a woman strolls inside to make her purchase is repeated four times until the filmmakers were satisfied with the illusion of authenticity.

The makers of “A Film Unfinished” have added one more layer to their presentation. Survivors, young children at the time, now in their 70s and 80s, are shown watching and commenting on the footage, the light flickering across their faces, fingers often covering their eyes. Watching a funeral scene, one woman says with disgust, “But Jews don’t bury their dead in coffins.”

Those scenes of Jews living amongst feces and garbage are revealed in the outtake footage for what they really are. A filmmaker is shown carefully, aesthetically arranging and rearranging a pile of garbage and toying with the idea of propping up a photograph of an elderly Jewish man atop the refuse, before casually tossing it aside.

Heaven's Gate Re-Re-Opened

James Averill has just completed the long journey to rejoin his lover Ella Watson bearing the gift of a horse drawn carriage. The Wyoming vistas are gorgeous, the music sweeping. He stashes the carriage away in the barn outside her bordello and goes inside. Their reunion is tender, their lovemaking sweet.

He unveils his surprise gift and she can hardly wait to take it for a spin and show it off. And then it gets me every time. The scene as the pair careen about in the carriage is so exuberant and the following scene as they enjoy magic hour on a lake shore is so touching that I begin to cry. I wipe my eyes and keep watching almost holding my breath and always saying out loud, “This is my favorite movie ever.”

You might be thinking I’m describing some acclaimed romantic epic from David Lean like Doctor Zhivago, but, no, I’m writing about a movie with the reputation for being one of the worst disasters in Hollywood history, a movie that almost singlehandedly sank United Artists, a movie filled with the alleged perfectionist indulgences of the director of The Deer Hunter run amok.

Yes, I’m writing about Heaven’s Gate.

I’ve had a long love affair with this movie. My first time was on the huge screen of Seattle’s Egyptian Theater during their international film festival. It is such a magnificently visual movie that I’d urge anyone to see it under those conditions if they get the chance. It’s the most memorable movie I’ve ever been overwhelmed by and I’ve been overwhelmed by the best.

The affair has continued over the years on home video, greatly enhanced by another great love – the writings of film critic Robin Wood. Most critics played leapfrog trying to outdo each other with creatively sarcastic and scathing reviews. Wood watched the movie many times and then wrote one of the most marvelous works of film criticism ever published. His piece “Heaven’s Gate Re-opened” and its equally illuminating companion piece on The Deer Hunter really shook me up. I’ve emailed Roger Ebert several times asking if he read Wood’s essay – and if he ever reconsidered his scathing remarks. He’s never replied.

The movie’s director, Michael Cimino, began his career as an architect. And with the aid of Wood’s insights, I quickly began to see this as the key to understanding the brilliance of Heaven’s Gate’s structure. The movie for many years, hell, even nowadays, has been condemned as being sloppy and unstructured. I watch it – once every few months – and ask, “What are these people smoking?”

The movie opens at Harvard during the graduation of two of its major characters, 20 years before the main action. There is a huge dance set to “The Blue Danube Waltz” with hundreds circling a tree. (This scene is almost tearfully beautiful as well.) Later, a dance set to fiddle music sends roller-skating dancers circling around a wood burning stove. Later still, settlers circle on horseback in a swirl of dust as they attack bounty hunters pinned against a tree.

All three of these scenes, its three great set pieces, play like ecstasies of the moment as if time came to a standstill. All are scenes that gradually build toward cinematic bliss, like the docking scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And all three work hand-in-hand to express in a way that’s beyond words the movie’s themes of sadness and loss and disillusionment.

Wood thought – and I agree – that Heaven’s Gate failed because people at the dawn of the Reagan era simply didn’t want to see a movie that eloquently portrayed the death of a nation.