Spreading the pain around

As you know, the main reason why it's taken me so long to finish the movie is that I kept shooting and reshooting things. This is not a matter of perfectionism but derives from the fact that for certain sections of the video I had no idea what I was doing. So I shot the bird scene four different times and shot about 20 times as much workroom footage as I need. The ingenuity of my process is that it enables someone to take a project that they care about it and shape and refine it until (to some extent) it starts to function properly. The other advantage is that it's profoundly instructive. You learn a lot because you're constantly running into—and resolving— extremely difficult problems, sometimes alone, often with the help of others. The (dis?) ingenuity of my process is that it's slow. Plus, it forces others to play along and participate in a seemingly never-ending process.

The Dark Knight — I just don't get it

I'm still trying to figure out how and why The Dark Knight was so popular and well received. Then again, Jim Cameron's Titanic...

My main beef with The Dark Knight is similar to my problem with Poseidon. It promises to be a gritty real-life drama and yet sidesteps some fundamental concerns. To me, the underlying question of TDK is this—what would stop you from killing someone? In other words, why doesn't Batman just kill the Joker? He has a lot of chances. The question is one with a lot of political ramifications. Do you have to wait till someone commits mayhem? How much mayhem is enough? Is a preemptive strike ever justified? The problem with the Batman character is his ambivalence. On the one hand he works outside the system. But on the other hand, he is beholden to the system. And it is his inability to reconcile these two conflicting halves that leads to the Joker's run on Gotham City. This is the same morally weak Batman as the one in Batman Begins, the one who says (ridiculously), "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you." Just kill him or don't. The Darker Knight.

Also—Heath Ledger's Joker. The performance was fine, but I would have preferred if it were more transparent. I can practically hear his development work on the character ("I'm a rat, a fidgety rodent"). But the main problem is the way The Joker was written. The Joker is a bit of a throwback to the eighties that brought us films like Robocop. Then, the overriding fear was randomness, the idea that you might get robbed or killed for no good reason. The Joker is capricious, and, as the film reminds us many times, playfully, frighteningly insane. No doubt Chris Nolan learned one thing from 9/11. The question "what do they want from us?" doesn't always have a logical answer. But that's where Nolan's understanding of The Joker ends. For a film that aspires to address big issues, the idea that The Joker just wants to have fun is not enough.

Figuring it out

I flushed out Callaghan (see comment in last post) with my statement that The Spirit was more interesting to me than Goodfellas. My assertion makes sense if you understand my reasons for engaging in creative activity. For me, creativity is a form of research, a way of trying to figure something out. So I'm most attracted to art products in which I see understanding coming-into-being. When I see a film like Goodfellas, I see Scorsese telling me what he already knows. The film is a statement, where research typically asks questions. Granted, The Spirit is not great research but it exhibits some of the exuberance and fearlessness of research. It's like the first stage of research before reflection.

When art stems from research it has a certain kind of life. Goodfellas is certainly a lively film with lively performances. But it lacks the awkwardness of life, the meaningful disjoints that occur when you're not exactly sure of what you're doing. It's not that kind of film. I like films that are more like abstract expressionist painting in which you see the missteps and mid-course corrections. In a way Goodfellas is more like Shakespeare's work in which the poetry unfolds perfectly within structure.

Also, in response to David: I would be more impressed with the tonal changes in Goodfellas if Scorsese added some slapstick.

Goodfellas and the raw Spirit

Watched Goodfellas on Netflix instant tonight. It was masterful with an impeccable sense of timing. Plus, it creates a credible world. Here I'm not talking about a world, as in a world of practice and history (though it does that too), but a world as something alive on screen. Just the other night I watched the Glenn Miller story (also on Netflix instant), one of my old favorites. There's a moment in which June Alyson gets a phone call but before she comes running down the stairs you see her shadow standing still, awaiting her cue. There's nothing like that in Goodfellas where all of the characters seem to live lives on and off the screen, walking into frame and then out of frame, living and breathing where ever the camera turns, their moves choreographed to the camera like dance (e.g., Ray Liotta and Larraine Bracco's characters on their first date).

As good as Goodfellas is, it isn't as engaging for me as The Spirit. The Spirit has a sense of rawness and experimentation. And its sincerity and reckless ambition make it more than a dimestore freakshow.

The play's the thing

Awhile ago I wrote a post about how I hate movies that try to start movements (e.g., Pay it Forward and Be Kind Rewind). Turns out that Be Kind Rewind was indeed an attempt to create a movement. Gondry's "You'll love this film because you're in it: the Be Kind Rewind protocol" is a slim book in which Gondry provides a game-like, algorithmic approach to DIY filmmaking. It's all very sincere but shows why Be Kind Rewind was so problematic. Not only was it created using some of these strategies; it wanted to encourage people to go out and make their own videos. That was the problem with Be Kind Rewind. It made its characters subservient to its meaning. Art usually doesn't turn out too well when it has an overriding agenda. As they say, "the play's the thing."

PS. Click here to visit the Pay it Forward foundation.

The Spirit—for example...

Here's the setup. As a teen, Denny Colt (The Spirit) was in love with Sand Seref. Then a tragic death occurs that tears them apart. Sand Seref says she's never coming back to Central City. He yells at her, "I hate you!" and they never see each other again. Until one fateful day. Years later. Sand Seref returns. The Spirit and Sand Seref, once naive young lovers, now hardened adults, meet again for the first time in years.

Now watch their first meeting in years...

If you find yourself wondering if you got the right scene, then you are beginning to understand the awesome strangeness that is The Spirit.

A Spirited obsession

Ben wants to know—why my obsession with The Spirit? First, this entire blog is about what it means for a visual artist to make a narrative film. Frank Miller making a film? Check. However what makes The Spirit particularly interesting is that it introduces a whole new set of never-before-seen problems. Usually, the main problem with artist-made narrative films is that the look of the film upstages the acting. The film works design-in, vs. character out and the performers become objectified. At worst, you get something that is kind of boring (Sky Captain) or confuses movement in space for thematic and emotional development (Mirror Mask).

But the Spirit falls into its own unique category--

1. Somehow, the film managed to bypass the corporate blanderizer's numerous checks and edits. They could have fixed it in the script, production, and editing, but there are significant problems at every level. How did that happen?

2. Frank Miller was given the carte blanche to put a graphic novel into film form. The movie isn't really a movie. It's more like a grand experiment, the superimposition of one medium into another, perhaps the purest extension of a 2D sensibility put into cinema. Like Haley's comet, this is something we may see only once in our lifetime.

3. It's an incredible example of a film that makes no compromises. It shoots for the sky and fails at every point. It attempts to do things even Spielberg couldn't pull off. Live action slapstick? Tough. See 1941. Doing a film in another person's style? Spielberg does Stanley Kubrik's AI with mixed results. Put both in the same film PLUS tonal experimentation? Not a project for a first time director, if any director.

This review does a pretty good job of describing my fascination with this film.