Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Capote is, as the title indicates, as much (or more) a movie about the writer as it is the crime he wrote about. But the most interesting part of the movie is not the character of Truman Capote, no matter how well-performed, but the book that he writes. And even then, the movie treats it as a side note, even as it's being constantly praised by almost every character.
What I find fascinating about the book, as told by the movie, was that it's based in large part on Capote's own actions--he hires lawyers to keep the subjects alive, cajoles them, plays them against each other--but he is, if I remember correctly, mostly absent from the actual book. This is entirely in keeping with the "true crime" journalism that the piece purports to be, but of course it's as much novel as non-fiction--Capote relied on his memory for quotes and recall of interviews, and he retold large parts of the story, including the internal dialog of several participants.
In this way, Capote points out, the author begins to think of the people in his book as fictional characters--he's increasingly distraught and upset as they refuse to give his work a quick, snappy ending. Eventually he avoids the calls and telegrams coming from the killers, hoping to distance himself from them, just as he distances himself from the events of In Cold Blood within its pages.
Without In Cold Blood, I wonder, would we have missed out on the entire genre of novelized true crime that has now become typical (The Devil in the White City, perhaps, or Under the Banner of Heaven, which bears no small resemblance to its predecessor)? Probably not: a central conceit of journalism for some time now has been the invisible narrator--the reporter is assumed to be irrelevant to the story being reported, by both the readers and the reporter themselves. In some cases this is true, but often it is not. And the device of dramatization allows those latter cases to be hidden behind a thick layer of prose. Who knows how much the observer is actually entangled with the observed--and who cares, when it's such a good yarn?
Which is a bit of an ironic message, coming as it does from a dramatic retelling of the real Truman Capote's character flaws.
13:09 x Thomas x /movies/commentary/drama x link x 3 comments
"I'm going to watch a three hour Russian film classic," I told anyone who asked last weekend, and a few people who didn't. Luckily, Stalker is one of those long films that justifies its own length--and watching it in two sessions didn't hurt. If the running time intimidates you, I'd highly recommend breaking it up into smaller chunks in order to watch it--it's conveniently broken into Parts 1 and 2 for just such an approach.
Like the game of the same title, Stalker is very loosely based on a science fiction story named "Roadside Picnic." It's set in and around the Zone, a dangerous, trap-filled area created through mysterious means. Three men--the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor--enter the Zone in search of a room that supposedly grants wishes. The Stalker is their guide through this territory, and requires them to step through an elaborate series of pathes and tests on the way.
Although it's a high-concept sci-fi film, there are basically no special effects or technological machines in Stalker. It's shot in fields, abandoned buildings, and underground tunnels, and through dialog and character actions these locations are transformed into something unsettling and claustrophobic (although it should be noted that the production involved a chemical plant that probably led to fatal cancer for several cast members). The Zone is used as a hook for the character to expound on their philosophies, their plans, and what they hope to get out of the room at the end of their journey.
This makes the film very "Russian" to my mind, but it's well-written. And the cinematography is exquisite. Director Andrei Tarkovsky, who also directed the original adaptation of Solaris, indulges in slow zooms and long takes that would be excruciating if the images themselves--either in vibrant color or shimmering, gold-tinted black and white--were not so beautiful. I am not an analog film fanatic, but if I were so inclined, this would possibly be the film to convert me.
11:48 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/foreign x link x 4 comments
When did American movies get to be so long? It's hard to remember the last time I got out of a theater in less than two hours--and not just for elaborate dramas, stuff like Atonement, but even action flicks. Transformers was two hours and 24 minutes! For a flick based around giant robot cars!
Casablanca was 102 minutes. And it's been years since I watched it, but I don't remember it being a particularly speedy film. Citizen Kane has a running time of 119 minutes. The Maltese Falcon also manages 101 minutes. Comedies, of course, were generally far shorter.
Maybe it coincides with color, since when I look at a few movies from the 70's (Three Days of the Condor, The Amityville Horror, Marathon Man) they seem to have standardized into our now-customary two hours (Soylent Green, however, is still only 92 minutes--OF PEOPLE!).
Now, this is just a feeling I've got. I'd love to see a graph of average movie running times per year, just to see if I'm right. But I suspect that I am, and that films have gotten longer, steadily or perhaps in bursts with each generation. Which causes problems for me, honestly, because my attention span has only shrunk--or perhaps more accurately, has restabilized at 1:30, about the time it takes to watch two episodes of hour-long television in the age of DVD and DVR.
To play devil's advocate, maybe longer running time is a product of the more elaborate film vocabulary in use. Films are no longer just stage dramas performed onscreen. They have a complicated relationship and interaction with the camera's viewpoint, and that relationship requires more time and energy to develop than the static shots of many early filmmakers. This is a reasonable point.
And yet, it seems hard to argue that today's longer movies are better due to their length, or that they're telling more complicated stories. They're telling longer stories, no doubt, with more events and more intricate film technique. But do they need to be longer? Are we better off for having those extra 20-30 minutes of running time? Could anyone honestly say that Casablanca needed an extra half-hour? And if you made it today, how long would it be? Chances are, probably longer than I'm comfortably able to watch.
12:31 x Thomas x /movies/commentary/classic x link x 2 comments
Microsoft's spoof video of their own marketing, formatted as "Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band," has been making the rounds, giving people an excuse once again to mock the company (John Gruber: "It epitomizes Microsoft's culture and institutional bad taste") by entirely missing the point. But the best Microsoft internal videos are still these British Office spinoffs, which make Gervais' David Brent a "management consultant" after his disastrous Wernham-Hogg career.
There's two more clips here and here.
12:54 x Thomas x /movies/television/the_office x link x 6 comments
Great Names in Direct to Video
"Tinarie Van Wyk-Loots."
That is all.
12:02 x Thomas x /movies/commentary/scifi x link x 2 comments
Some friends and I have signed up for DC's 48-Hour Film Festival. Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth--even the rending of garments, if it feels right--begin among the judges.
The 48-Hour Film project is a lot like National Novel Writing Month for AV nerds like me--complete with the fact that I continually say that I'm going to do it, and then I never do. But this year will be different, obviously. At first guess, I'll probably be doing writing, music, some editing, and possibly some front-of-camera work.
All production has to be done during the two-day period, so I can't write music or scripts now. But I'm working on plans for production that will lend themselves to these particular constraints, which is an interesting challenge in and of itself. And of course, now I've got to hunt down friends in the area that I can blackmail into performing. Who's up for a little humiliation? Call me!
14:42 x Thomas x /movies/unmitigated_disaster x link x 0 comments
If you watched Live Free or Die Hard (verdict: not bad at all), you might have noticed two things. The first, for DC residents, is how little effort they actually put into making the sets look like DC. The taxis here aren't usually yellow, people. Try to actually visit your locations.
Also, in the opening credits, you might have seen that the movie is based on "A Farewell to Arms," by John Carlin. I remember wondering what was up with that--was it a short story that they'd adapted? A novel?
Nope. It's this 1997 Wired article on information warfare preparation. Which is interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is that almost none of it has (as far as I'm aware) come true. Good news for the rest of us, I guess. Bruce Willis isn't getting any younger.
13:25 x Thomas x /movies/commentary/action x link x 1 comment
It's hard to imagine what they were thinking with this one. I watched some of the original animated shorts a while back, just after they released them on DVD. In its original television form, Aeon Flux was bizarre, perversely sexual, and incredibly (almost pointlessly) violent--an utterly-incoherent throwback to Heavy Metal's drugged out wanderings.
So how do you turn that kind of visual candy into a live-action film? Apparently, you don't try. You write a pastiche of future-dystopia, throw in a set of visual non-sequitors, and cast Charlize Theron--who is a fine actress, but simply can't summon the kind of gaunt, sardonic brutality that the role requires. Director Karyn Kusama likewise tries her best, but can't direct an action sequence worth watching. Perhaps this kind of thing is really best done on the cheap nowadays--fans of Equilibrium who watched Kurt Wimmer's disastrous Ultraviolet will note the similar feel of Aeon Flux's panoramic scenery and expansive color palette, which (oddly) rob the gunfights of their impact.
I respect the attempt to turn such a weird little property into something that MTV could license for Burger King soda cups, but let's be honest: it never had a chance of being a good mainstream movie. The only way it could have been great would have been to embrace the genuine weirdness of its inspiration--become something like Naked Lunch with guns and S&M couture outfits. Even then, it probably would have been terrible--the show doesn't honestly hold up well today, particularly in extended viewing sessions--but it would have been a lot more interesting.
14:18 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/action x link x 2 comments
This morning I finished season one of The Wire, HBO's long-running cop show. And if I didn't love it for its pragmatic worldview, its left-leaning sociological outlook, and its flawed protagonists, I would almost certainly love it just for this scene of McNulty and Bunk investigating an old murder scene.
I guess it's not explicitly clear from that scene, but the writing is superb, and usually not composed entirely of profanity.
13:47 x Thomas x /movies/television/the_wire x link x 1 comment
Five years after this documentary was released, its topic of concern--the Amish tradition of letting their kids run wild while they decide whether or not to enter the church--has become a staple of lazy writers on primetime dramas. ER and Law and Order, among others, have both featured rumspringa episodes. Typically, these shows use the Amish angle as a big reveal: those kids can't get their parent's permission for an operation, because they've been shunned! (Dun-dun-DUNNNN! cries the dramatic chipmunk from the back of the audience.)
But if memory serves correctly, television writers exploiting this dramatic device rarely allow the religious tendencies to overwhelm the feel-good resolution of their storyline, either because they believe that people couldn't possibly be so terrible or because there's an unspoken prohibition to hinting that radical religious sects really might just be a little crazy. And the Amish kids depicted, as far as I remember, are usually good citizens who have just landed in a tight spot.
What's noteworthy about The Devil's Playground is that it not only inspired these depictions, but that its takeaway message is so far from those heartwarming moments. If there is a subtle way to point out that the Amish are, in some ways, terribly cruel and manipulative of their children in the interest of "religious freedom," Devil's Playground does so, simply by laying out their actions in a dispassionate--even distant--light.
The filmmakers follow a set of Amish youth who, during this traditional ritual, are no longer required to behave according to the dictates of Amish society. So they can own and drive cars, watch TV, drink, and dance, and their parents do little more than register disapproval of this behavior. Unsurprisingly, like the kid you knew in college who was raised a strict Christian and suddenly let free, the Amish kids go completely overboard. One of them, Faron, is even a meth dealer--one that snitches on a couple of other Amish drug dealers to the local police, earning death threats and social ostracism. I never thought I would write the words "Amish drug dealers" except as a joke, but there you go. The police, it must be said, wearily see the Amish teenagers as trouble.
In theory, the Amish say, this period of teenage rebellion is meant to be a taste of the outside world, so that the kids can make a free decision whether or not to go into the church and remove themselves from the wider world. In practice, The Devil's Playground shows a religious culture that stacks the deck against these kids before they can make that choice. Not only are they tossed with little preparation into an exaggeration of normal life, but (one teenager points out) they're forced to stop schooling in the 8th grade, meaning that they would have no real chance of getting a decent job or going to college. They've got no future in anything other than service-industry or manufacturing jobs. What choice do they really have? Is it any wonder that only 10 percent break free?
I always thought of the Amish as cute, bearded people who make chairs and crafts and raise barns for fun. And granted, they're not violent or overtly ill-disposed. But between their regressive sexual politics and this hazing-like parenting ritual, The Devil's Playground presents a picture that's not nearly so adorable. It does so simply and without any malice towards its subjects--I'm sure the Amish who watch it would feel that they're treated fairly--but it's not flattering. And to some extent, it raises the question of what people should be able to excuse with religion. In any other context, when kids are deprived of their education and then abandoned to their own devices to choose between the horns of a dilemma, would we just let it happen?
23:49 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/documentary x link x 1 comment
