Roger,
Thank you for what you said about Tony. He and Mitchell have proven to be a great tag team. Even if you don’t agree with them–and I know that some people were surprised by their non-Hollywood 10-best lists and the fact that Mitchell named Hamlet as his favorite movie of the year (way to go!)–this is, as J. Hoberman has said, the most consistently interesting and provocative writing on movies that I’ve read in that paper. On the other hand, Jim, it occurs to me that the lack of push for Gillian Anderson in House ofMirth might be related to Stephen Holden’s pan of her performance when the movie was screened at the New York Film Festival. That’s the downside of way early reviews: When distributors get notices like that in big publications, they think long and hard about investing their limited resources in something as commercially iffy as a Terrence Davies picture. (I speak not having seen it–maybe I’d agree with Holden. There’s a first time for everything.)
“Category A” sounds a tad clinical for my taste, Roger–plus, didn’t the English use that label for stuff like horror pictures in the ‘30s? I think movies have too many labels already: I want to try to dissolve the boundaries between high and low, not create new ones. And where would “Category A” put great genre movies like One False Move, the Carl Franklin thriller that only found an audience in art houses? Would that be a Category A? Would The Limey? The Last Seduction? Would a loftily ambitious Hollywood picture like Cast Away be outside the category, but not a dumb foreign sex comedy?
I admire your acid take on Kiarostami, Roger. I also admire your enthusiastic take, Jim. I don’t know what I think, which is why I took the lame-o’s way out and didn’t write about The Wind Will Carry Us. Parts of it haunted me, and the terraced landscape was endlessly interesting (a good thing, since the movie was endless), but I find too much falsification of human experience in Kiarostami’s distillations to trust his vision. I had an easier time understanding the emotions of Taste of Cherry, although Jonathan Rosenbaum’s case for the ending didn’t convince me. (I was fascinated by Godfrey Cheshire’s dissection of Kiarostami’s movies in a recent Cineaste and look forward to his and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book-length studies.) But it’s important to say again that the media is not keeping anyone away from this director. Almost every publication in New York devoted enormous space to The Wind Will Carry Us, and the majority of reviews were positive. (David Denby, Rosenbaum’s bête noir, was the notable exception–and Denby’s view of the movie came closest to my own.) I’ve told Tony that when I saw the movie at the Lincoln Square Theater, the audience seemed perplexed, but most people stayed with it. Then they walked out and clustered around Tony’s blown-up review. They read it. They looked at one another. They said nothing. I think they were honestly at a loss to say what they felt, but I bet they won’t be lining up for the director’s next two-and-a-half-hour exploration of anomie among the camels. (Racist! There were no camels in that movie! Shame!)
Sarah, your irritation with Soderbergh is a welcome tonic to all the adulation, but I hope you write a long piece for the New York Review of Books or something because I don’t sympathize with your view as stated here at all. If you read Soderbergh’s Richard Lester book (a difficult task), you can see that he’s consciously reaching back to a time when mainstream directors were doing formal experiments with storytelling and the audience was drinking them in. I respond to this not in some fancy, pointy-headed way but as great entertainment: I love the way he’s always pulling the rug out from under me. Every shot in Traffic is meaningful and distinct and unlike any other, but no shot makes you say, “Great shot!” Sure, I was disappointed with some of the wrap-ups (although not Catherine Zeta-Jones’!) and with the fact that the movie builds to Michael Douglas abandoning his prepared text in the manner of hundreds of movie politicians before him. But the line his character comes out with–I won’t reveal it for fear of spoiling the movie–really does cut to the heart of the issue. I agree with you and Roger: Parts of Traffic are libertarian, but Soderbergh clearly thinks that drugs are a threat. And only a good liberal would close with midnight baseball.
Good love stories? Yes, Praise, what a terrific film. But not exactly hopeful. I was very moved by TwoFamily House but had a couple of reservations. Despite its liberal thrust, its “middle-age-crazy” scenario of a man leaving his older wife (a repressive enemy of the life force) for an I-believe-in-you tootsie needs to be challenged more often. A participant in “The Fray” (which is really teeming) mentions Bounce. I thought Gwyneth Paltrow was just breathtakingly great in that, but the movie was evidently compromised by some heavy hands. Chuck & Buck? Nice try, but it seems to me that the lesson of that film is that our inner child is neither good (see Disney’s The Kid) nor evil (see most horror pictures) but just plain infantile–and hungry.
Gotta get lunch. Later.
David
