Dear Friends,
No quarrel from me about the excitement of being a film critic in 1999. This was one of those miraculous years like 1974 when new talents, and revitalized old talents, came bursting forth. The year was a slow starter, despite such early exceptions as Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune and Kore-Eda’s After Life, but starting with the Telluride and Toronto festivals there was an unveiling of riches that went on week after week after week.
I agree with the praise for Being John Malkovich and Three Kings–movies that were free. Watching them, we had absolutely no idea what would happen next, and the last half hour of Malkovich was as inventive and unexpected as the first. Having been pounded through the ‘90s with predictable, upbeat film endings dictated by test audiences (“Does Joan really have to burn at the stake?”), I was so exhilarated to see films that gave themselves the liberty to surprise and amaze me.
At year’s end, there was another film like that, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. I would not dream of revealing what happens at the end of that movie, but I wanted to cheer when it did happen, because Anderson was demonstrating in a way both comic and bizarre that all narrative is arbitrary–that no matter what happens next, it need not, and that no director need feel shackled by audience or studio expectations.
I imagine Magnolia will get widely divergent reviews (I know of one national critic who has put it on his “10 worst” list), but I thought it struck the right note to close this season of invention. Yes, some will argue that Anderson’s surprise is cheating, or arbitrary, or a trick–but the way for it is prepared by Ricky Jay’s witty narration at the beginning of the film, which all but tells us to expect learned pigs.
I was disappointed that David, having applauded so much innovation, put Julien Donkey-Boy on his worst list. I think Harmony Korine demonstrates here that he has the soul of a real filmmaker. Yes, the movie is frustrating and aggressive, but after it is over it has revealed a shape and purpose, one suited to its style (the whole story is seen through the eyes of a schizophrenic).
Julien serves another symbolic function this year: It was shot on a video camera, and (if we can judge by the outtakes on the Web site) its style was created mostly in post-production on a computer much like the one I am now using. Julien and The Blair Witch Project are the foot in the door of digital production; these days anyone can make a movie, and if it is good enough, can find an audience for it. Cassavetes would rejoice (maybe not at those two movies–but think how he would have welcomed the freedom of a digital video camera).
I was told last January at Sundance that 1999 would be the last year in which more of the movies had been shot on film than video. We shall see. I am as firmly in support of video production as I am opposed to the alarming specter of digital video projection in theaters–a subject that most movie critics have ignored.
Most people in the industry believe the hype that digital projection is destined for the near future. The fact is that digital projection is nowhere near being practical or affordable, and even if it were–are video and film the same thing? Some perceptual scientists believe video creates a hypnotic mind state, and film creates a reverie state. Why is it that we sense, however, vaguely, a different mental state in a movie than while watching television? How ironic if Hollywood threw out a century of film to adopt a technology that did not evoke the mind-state that people buy movie tickets in order to obtain?
Elvis knows this is an obsession of mine; in Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times I published a long article that questions widespread beliefs about the Texas Instruments digital projection system and extols a much cheaper film projection system called MaxiVision48, which uses existing, proven technology, and produces a picture its patent holders claim is 500 percent better (not a misprint) than existing film or digital projection, take your choice.
As we bow gratefully to this wonderful final year of the first century of film, let us hope it is not one of the final years of celluloid itself.
Roger Ebert
