The Novels of Film.

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Onward and upward.

Cinephilia is the focal point of both Walker Percy's beautiful debut novel The Moviegoer and "counterculture"-term-coiner Theodore Roszak's paranoid fantasy Flicker. Having accidentally just read the two books back-to-back, I was struck at the lack of novels regarding film culture. Sure, there are plenty of films on films, including the recent (and undeniably brilliant) TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY. But, where are the novels of film?

The Moviegoer presents the existential dilema of one Binx Bolling, a on-the-cusp-of-30 stockbroker living the single life in New Orleans. An active moviegoer and womanizer, Binx ponders his lot in life amidst the lazy summer of the Big Easy. Taking his cues from French writers, Walker Percy's 1962 novel presents a very American version of the "existential novel" (Albert Camus' The Stranger). Supposedly, Terrence Malick wrote an adaptation of the novel sometime in the 1970's. More comedic in nature than it may sound, this astute National Book Award-winning novel is profound and deeply Romantic. Binx's revelation equates moviegoing to the most spiritual of acts, one that enriches the soul. Percy's debut novel now has an added layer of bittersweetness to it with the tragic events that occurred in New Orleans this past year. The Moviegoer should be remembered not just as one of the numerous great literary works of New Orleans, but as one of the great American novels.

Theodore Roszak's Flicker, on the other hand, presents moviegoing as a most sinister act; perhaps the flipside of The Moviegoer. Beginning as an exhilirating account of how one becomes a cinephile, the novel slowly becomes a paranoid horror story about the potential evils of film. Narrator Professor Jonathan Gates is the first and foremost expert of the largely forgotten b-movie director Max Castle (surely an homage to filmmaker William Castle). Innocently, his love affair with the cinema begins in an allegoric cave, a basement movie theater in Los Angeles. Soon thereafter, budding moviegoer Gates strikes up an intimate affair with the theater's owner Clare Swann, a soon-to-be Pauline Kael-like nationally recognized film critic. Roszak's command of film history is staggering in the novel's first half when the mystery of Max Castle is only beginning. He has a gift of gently interplaying the fictional and real; frequently shifting between actual films and the fake films of the novel.According to the edition I read, a movie adaptation is in the works with both FIGHT CLUB screenwriter Jim Uhls and PI director Darren Aronofsky involved. One only hopes that they, too, can balance the real/unreal film history evenly. Gates, later, becomes fixated on the works of the German director Max Castle when accidentally viewing one of his "lost" films. An undescribable hypnosis occurs when the film is watched. After investigating what fragments remain of his chopped-up American b-movies, Gates discovers subliminal messages contained in the films lighting and its flicker--inbetween the frames. What are the messages? Where did Castle learn them? What purpose do the messages serve? The answers to these questions lead Professor Gates on a decades long search that involves Old Hollywood cinematographers, sleazy Roger Corman-esque exploitation moguls, Orson Welles and John Huston themselves, and most importantly a pre-Christian cult that controls Hollywood itself. Flicker descends into a rather silly paranoid fantasy in its end (much like a Max Castle film), but the lead up is a taut and effective thriller that could find its home on any cinephile's shelf.

Where have you gone, Whit Stillman?

"Manhattan. Not so long ago."

Fifteen years ago, an auspicious debut landed in American cinemas. A writer/director from New York managed to turn a no budget film about a self-absorbed group of young WASPs in Manhattan's Upper East Side into a widely-acclaimed minor hit that eventually went on to garner itself a BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Oscar nomination. Whit Stillman's METROPOLITAN is a warm debut film about a group of friends in a world only a few of us know, and it still holds up today as one of the handful of truly transcendent films about growing up, as well as being one of the first to kick off "The Great American Independent Film Explosion of the 1990's."

Centering around a small Upper East Side clique, self-dubbed The Sally Fowler Rat Pack (after one of the girls in the group), during the height of the Christmas-slash-Debutante season, we enter this foreign METROPOLITAN world through the idealistic Tom Townsend. By happenstance, he is almost forcefully absorbed into the group after standing at the same corner as a cab the SFRP has hailed. Tom was not hailing the cab, but attempting to find a bus; "a public transportation snob" he is called by the group's ring leader Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman). Tom enjoys an evening with the crew, but denies he is at one with the group, proclaiming himself a Fourierist in the face of the very welcoming Upper East Side untitled aristocracy. At the SFRP's insistence, thanks to a purported "escort shortage," Tom continues to fall into the group of young socialites.

While many of Stillman's peers wrote and directed films about "Generation X slackers", he filmed the literate adventures of the doomed for mediocrity "Urban Haute Bourgeoisie." They are sans cynicism nor sentamentality. His comedies of manners, BARCELONA and LAST DAYS OF DISCO, could best be understood as updated Jane Austen by way of Woody Allen. The connection to Austen's Mansfield Park is even made point blank in METROPOLITAN with Audrey Rouget's admiration of the novel a focal point of her character; it is her disagreement with Tom over the novel ("You don't have to have read a book to have an opinion on it.") that sparks her romantic interest in him. Intact, too, is Austen's sense of class consciousness. However, Stillman flips it by having privileged youth at the center of his films. For many viewers like myself, it allows for a chance to see how the other half lives, as it were. But, as many critics have noted, it is the characters' own self-awareness of their "doomed future" that allows Stillman to develop his comedies as satire.

A recent debate on the film's IMDB board raised the question "What year did METROPOLITAN take place?" Part of METROPOLITAN's charm comes from its own sense of timelessness. There is a vagueness to the film's New York City. Could it be the 1950s? Is it the beginning of Reagan 80's? Both BARCELONA and LAST DAYS OF DISCO are very time specific films set amidst the "Me Decade." But, Stillman's debut film doesn't need to be about a specific time and place. For all of Charlie's (Taylor Nichols) rants against Luis Bunuel's THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE and Nick Smith's cynical dialogue ("I've always planned to be a failure anyway, that's why I plan to marry an extremely rich woman."), the film is essentially about growing up. The Sally Fowler Rat Pack are growing up during a time of transition, where the UHBs will soon no longer exist -- but more so, where childhood friends become adults. It is with the looming specter of adulthood that Tom is initiated into the fading group.

Whit Stillman may have not made a film since 1998's LAST DAYS OF DISCO, but traces of his work come up unexpectedly (not nearly as unexpected as the asking price for a LAST DAYS OF DISCO DVD though). The seminal post-collegiate film KICKING & SCREAMING is Stillman-esque not just for its articulate characters or its literary quality, but in its casting of Stillman regular Chris Eigeman. Eigeman excels in playing verbose cynics; an actor with a distinct staccato rhythm in his delivery. It is not surprising in the least that another filmmaker would want to take advantage of it. In fact, Noah Baumbach did in his first three films (K&S, MR. JEALOUSY and HIGH BALL). It was just this past year with THE SQUID AND THE WHALE that finally saw Baumbach stepping out of Stillman's shadow.

But, will Stillman ever step out of his own?

Spider in the Snow

Snow Day.

As I sit indoors on what may potentially be the worst blizzard in NY history (global warming wha?), I look back fondly on many of the great snow movies. Not so much films about snow, but movies featuring the fluffy white stuff. It's been 13 years since I've had the benefit of even a two-hour delay, but thankfully today I can liesurely reminisce about some of the great scenes/movies featuring snow.Snow always looks gorgeous when photgraphed. Please contribute your own short lists of snow films.

TOP FIVE SNOW MOVIES.

5. DR. ZHIVAGO.

David Lean's romance epic is no doubt a visually stunning widescreen masterpiece. Every frame is drenched in snow. The frame above demonstrates perfectly how Lean filled his warm film with an absolute coldness. Far from his best, or my favorite of his films, DR. ZHIVAGO is nonetheless an essential winter weather movie.

4. A SIMPLE PLAN.

Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton play brothers who discover a large sum of money buried beneath the snow inside a crashed plane. If the money remains undiscovered by the spring, the brothers and their friend will split it. What does greed do to a person? Sam Raimi's most restrained film is his coldest with the snow-capped landscapes of the North adding another icy dimension to the tragic story of how this money tears apart two brothers.

3. GROUNDHOG DAY.

Bill Murray's Phil Connors incorrectly predicts that blizzard will pass quietly over Western Pennsylvania and relives his February 2nd in Puxsatawney for the next two hours. Harold Ramis' masterpiece is a comedy of second, third and fourth chances where Murray eventually recieves redemption. The blizzard naturally keeps Murray and his news team held up, but a mystical unknown creates the time warp thus making the winter wonderland a literal purgatory for the cynical weather man. With its universal themes of salvation, GROUNDHOG DAY could eventually become a perrenial classic a la IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

2. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG.

Not a "snow movie" per se, Jacques Demi's operatic musical concludes on a snowy night at a gas station where two lovers who have been separated for ages meet again. The reprise of Michel LeGrand's "I Will Wait For You" concludes this romantic-musical on such a heartbreaking note. The steady white snow that falls while the music crescendos acts as a perfect ending to this colorful tearjerking romance.

1. FARGO.

The Coen Brothers' FARGO is a cold-blooded neo-noir. But, due to the movie's Northern setting, cinematographer extraordinare Roger Deakins trades the noir grays and blacks for a stark white, snow drenched pallette. Nowhere is his mastery more apparent than in the scene where a recently-shot Steve Buscemi attempts to hide the loot from the botched fake kidnapping. Somewhere in the Great White North, in the middle of nowhere, Buscemi pulls over and buries the suitcase containing his share of the money under the snow. As he glances to each side, only to see snow and a small wire fence -- he marks his spot with an ice scraper. It is this darkly comedic scene that gives FARGO the title of best movie to feature snow in my book.

The NY Critics Take on 2005.

On Wednesday February 1st, I was fortunate enough to attend the 92 St. Y's MAKOR FILM discussion entitled FILM CRITICS ON THE BEST AND WORST OF 2005. Moderated by David Sterritt, the event was to be a sort of "State of the Union" for the year of film brought to us by our friendly neighborhood critics -- David Edelstein of New York Magazine fame and Entertainment Weekly's film critic tag team of Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman; a sort of live "Slate Movie Club" roundtable discussion. The intimate 75-seat theater was sparsely sat with only the most dedicated of fellow film geeks.

As advertised, the event opened with moderator David Sterritt asking each participant to name both their best and worst film title from 2005. Kicking it off was Miss Schwarzbaum, who again made it no secret how much she loves David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. In a word, she called her top film of 2005 "beautiful." It was at this point that Sterritt, the Chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, interjected that it had been HISTORY, not BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, that had been one vote shy from the NSFC's top prize this year. Surprsingly the honor had gone to CAPOTE after hours of debate amongst critics. Schwazbaum's worst film was spared the fate of a one word review. Instead, Disney's CHICKEN LITTLE was reffered to as being emblamatic of "a real slippage in [animation]." Putting it more bluntly, she called the CGI-film "doo doo." It was not the last that we would hear of CHICEN LITTLE.

Moving over to David Edelstein, he jokingly called the Disney-WAR OF THE WORLDS-parody his best movie of 2005. His playful banter was quite welcoming, especially given the too often percieved idea that critics are often too serious, but this evening was to be more fun and informal. Becoming more serious, though, he called CHICKEN LITTLE "noxious" and proceeded to state that Stephen Speilberg's MUNICH was the best film of 2005. Expecting the film to dominate much of the discussion he initially had few words, but informed the crowd that he recieved more hate mail for the film than any other movie he had reviewed at Slate. Edelstein said that most of the letters had come from Jews that said his praising of the film was born out of self-hatred. Again, the religion card was played when Edlestein spoke of THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE as his worst film of 2005. In a lengthy tirade against the film, the New York Magazine critic revealed that the film's twist was that "medication had gotten in the way of this girl's exorcism." This conclusion, which had literally pitted religion against science in a trial, was insulting. "But, it raises interesting questions," Sterritt exclaimed. "I couldn't call a film that raises some interesting questions 'the worst of the year'," he continued. Edelstein respectfully disagreed.

Owen Glieberman had his opportunity to agree with David Edelstein (the first time of many for the evening) and name MUNICH his number one of 2005. The Entertainment Weekly critic addressed the movie's controversy. Speaking eloquently and at length, Glieberman called the outrage against the film both "outrageous" and "bogus." Paraphrasing his remarks, he called MUNICH's theme that "vengence doesn't work" as rather prescient and the backlash against it "sad." "Controversy can be healthy, though, as was the case with Oliver Stone's JFK," he later stated. Speaking of his worst film of the year, Glieberman named THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY for its "forced smug, whimsical, out-dated, counter-cultural ideas" which proved to be hell for him.

Finally, moderator David Sterritt had his chance to speak about some of his favorites of the year. Sterritt contested that this was indeed a good year for film. CACHE, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, CAPOTE and SARA BAND were a few of the examples he mentioned of strong films that he loved. He was hard pressed to name a favorite. As for his worst film, he was quick to respond with "one film I'm surprised no one has mentioned... NORTH COUNTRY."

The always enlightening Sterritt also spoke of the recently released Oscar nominations by coming out as "anti-Oscar... I actually believe them to be dangerous to our cultural health." The group of critics agreed. While the event description had said that a discussion of the Oscars was to be included, the conversation quickly moved away from the topic.

Instead, conversations about the most critically lauded films of the year -- BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK., A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, and (again) MUNICH -- were to follow. Each critic deabted and discussed the merits and flaws of each film. Owen Glieberman loved the sociological under current of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, whereas David Edelstein believed the film to be too simplistic. William Hurt's clip from A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE preceeded another short conversation about the film; Lisa Schwarzbaum and David Sterritt were decidedly pro-HISTORY, but Glieberman and Edelstein merely "liked it okay."

Hollywood's preoccupation with politics was also an issue discussed. MUNICH's timeliness was stressed by Edelstein and Glieberman. SYRIANA was lambasted by both critics as well for being a film that not just overly complicated but ineptly made -- and proud of it. "If you don't get it, well THAT'S just how the world works!" Then, it was Schwarzbaum who called Hollywood out as being "politically -- very liberal, but artistically -- very conservative."

Looking into the future of film, the privatization of the moviegoing experience closed the evening. Steven Soderberg's BUBBLE had just been released and its unusual release pattern is still being viewed as a potential model for future releases. Numerous reasons were given by each participant for the decline of the theatrical experience whether it be ticket prices or etiquette there is no denying that more and more people shy away from theaters. DVD experience is much more controled, and home theaters sometimes outshine multiplexes. Again, David Edelstein brought up a point that was raised in this year's edition of the Slate "Movie Club," one day the experience of going to the movie theater will be a high-art/academic endeavor much akin to opera with a small handful of educated enthusiasts. Edelstein's prediction does not sound far off, but how soon? It is a slippery slope that will not come over night, of course, but is something that must be kept in mind.

Only one final thought emerged as I exited the MAKOR SCREENING ROOM -- for film, 2005 will be remembered as a year of transition. But, which way will it go? The answer to that question is up to as moviegoers, ticket buyers, DVD consumers and video renters. We ultimately decide which way the market goes -- what films get made, how they get seen, etc. But, after seeing last week's #1 box office draw was WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, I get decidedly pessimistic.

What year will 2006 be?

Is THIS man God?

Exhibit A.

Exhibit B.

Exhibit C.


The Defense rests.

"Me can't quit you."

Thanks to Adam and the COMMENTS posts I thought it would be fitting... No idea where this originated. Enjoy Bloggerinos!

Another one for the Saturday morning cartoon crowd...