Dat New New

Dear reader,

Good evening. How are you? Sentimental, I presume? Dec 31st--It's easy for people to get sentimental around this time of year. The traditions of the holiday season encourage as much, be they the earnest appeals of spiritual leaders and loved ones to our better natures or the shameless marketing ploys by engines of commerce (and really, who can reliably tell the difference, anyway?).

On that latter note, I've observed that cynicism is also an especially popular sentiment during such times. I'm sure you've heard your fair share of the denigration of Christmas and gift-giving as nothing more than the hollow gestures of affection demanded by a society built on conspicuous consumption. New Year's too, gets a bum rap sometimes for being ultimately an over-hyped occasion for mass, socially-condoned substance abuse and orgiastic behavior that in the best case, provides only the most fleeting of pleasures.

I hear that view and I understand it to a degree, I really do. I hate walking around the mall like a zombie, desperately wracking my brain for any tiny granule of inspiration that will lead me to the least shitty, affordable thing that I could possibly purchase for my loved ones that I haven't already given them at some point in the past. I hate the typically testy scramble to figure out New Year's plans that don't cut someone important out, don't involve standing around out in the freezing weather for too long, and aren't basically a re-hash of getting drunk at a friends house in high school.

But at the same time, c'mon: Those tasks aren't so bad. They don't take up much of my time, and I doubt they take up much of yours. And aren't all pleasures essentially fleeting, anyway? All the ones I've enjoyed seem to be at least. Fuck if I'm not going to get sentimental about the people I shared them with, wherever they be now.

The year is 2009--the last year of the first decade of the 21st century--or a few moments longer! And however unrealistic it is, I hope that everyone has a chance to enjoy this time while it lasts. I am especially grateful for all the incredible opportunities I've had these years and the people that have been there along the way. I've been more fortunate than most, and I haven't given back nearly enough, not anywhere close to what I've received.

And Christ, we haven't even gotten to my transgressions! If I slighted you at all, I hope you know how sorry I am. I hate myself for causing any harm to you, and I don't ever want to behave in that way again. Whatever foolish reason I had for acting in the way that I did, it wasn't worth it.

You have much to teach me and the world, and I hope that going forward, especially if it hasn't happened already, that you will be recognized and respected and cherished for being here with all of us. I hope that even when things don't go according to your plans, as they are loathe to do, you will still find happiness, satisfaction and meaning, perhaps more through adversity, although again, it'd be nice if some stuff just worked and came easy.

More than this, I hope that however the last years were for you, you're looking forward to 2010. Why shouldn't you be? Especially because, according to the decade summaries and analysis-pieces in the mainstream media, the first 10 revolutions around the sun of the 21st century were a real bust, perhaps the worst 10 ever (…or at least as far back as the Baby Boomers can remember). You know why of course--it's all the usual suspects; terrorism, war, greed, pollution, natural disasters, celebrity culture, reality TV. A general shift in society away from the simple common courtesy that used to guide human interaction, an abandonment of the human decency of years' past. It's the "good old days," scenario has been thrown at every up-and-coming generation of youths by their forbears. Others talented individuals have written about how tired and futile this argument is, and I fully agree.

But I do think there is something to be said for knowing where we came from; all the unsung hard work and sacrifice and yes, even the hell of a lot of bad ideas that have gone into making the world what is today. It's an endemically imperfect world of course, and it will likely always be. But it is also so full of life and passion and possibility, I can't help but be overcome with gratitude to those who made it so. Every (other) time I stop and think about it, I am moved by all that has lead up to this very moment, and I long for what comes next.

Sure sure, the next decade will be filled with really unfortunate, unwelcome, unforeseen twists that will fuck a lot of things up. People will continue to suffer miserably. People that don't deserve to die will. But I also think that the coming years will be filled with unprecedented accomplishment, incredible progress, and awe-inspiring, life-affirming, bone-chillingly crazy innovation. Lest we forget, the century is young! It's been a wild, unruly, undisciplined child so far, but sometimes those kids turn out to be the brightest minds, the true revolutionists, the luminaries. She's just learning, so give her a chance, will ya?

It will be worth it to stick around and see it all go down, I have no doubt. I'll do my damnedest to make sure I can be there, and I hope you will too, but in the end, its not really up to us now, is it? So cheers motherfuckers. A toast to whatever connection, however circumstantial or providential, has brought you to this gleaming pile of mind-vomit. And now, for a second round expulsion of malformed cliches: See you on the flip-side. God Bless America. God Bless the Globe. God Bless Us All, Even My Atheist Friends. Hail Satan! Hail Santa! XX OO

Love always,
Your pal,
Carl

The Best Part of Believe Is Belie

When viewed primarily as a horror film about a modern-day demon possession, Paranormal Activity is satisfactorily thrilling. It is not exceptionally novel; nor could it be--not in the post-Blair Witch, post-Cloverfield era--but it is inventive and engaging enough on its own merits to warrant the $9 or $10 dollars of admission the recession-weary, Halloween-seasoned adult filmgoer will likely hand over.

To the credit of the director and the ultra-slim cast-turned-crew involved, the film consistently achieves a tone of impending, genuinely disturbing disaster. It is an escalating tone of hysteria that one too often expects of, but fails to find in horror films: a tone that begins measured and allows for sufficient levity along the dark, twisting, path of increasing psychological unease; with choice moments of comic relief, and at least one or two self-reflexive references to the inherent foolishness of the situation, all while staying well clear of obvious parody. (More inter-genre comparisons to follow below)

It's a first-rate directing job by newcomer Oren Peli, a former video game programmer who was, according to the IMDB boards, responsible for some super old-school stuff and the 1998 NFL Blitz-wannabe NFL Xtreme. Sufficed to say he has probably, hopefully, found his true calling with this movie. It is an enormous accomplishment to have created, as your first film, a work that is so broadly acclaimed, that has received enormous credit on all three primary fronts: commercial, critical, and indie--not to mention the fact that is falls in such an easily-dismissed genre. It will be especially difficult for him to follow up on such a culturally resonant movie even with the fuller budget and higher-production value that his next film has been allotted, but make no mistake, he's riding on a wave of goodwill right now, and well deserved it is.

According to interviews he's given, Peli's inspiration for Paranormal Activity came about when he moved into his first house from an apartment. The would-be director's imagination soon got the better of him, and he became suspicious of the unfamiliar noises he was hearing throughout the house at night, regular moans and creeks and wind and the ordinary big house noises, accented by the relative quiet of his suburban neighborhood and his unfamiliarity with the situation.. As he is quoted by Cinematical: " That's kind of what made me think how I would go about trying to figure out what's going on and being the techno-geek that I am, my initial inclination would be to get video cameras and set them up around the house to see what was going on. I didn't actually go ahead and do that, but that's what started making me think how freaky it would be if you had cameras running at home while you sleep and actually did catch something."

Thus, the premise that the movie--or the way it is being marketed, that it is instrumentally about demon-possession--is challenged, compounded by Peli's admission that it stemmed from his idea to construct a kind of CCTV security feed in his own home. The conception of the supernatural source behind the noises came about after Peli thought of setting up cameras everywhere.

The film's male-lead, Micah (pronounced Meeka, named for the actor who portrays him) is probably read by some audience members as a director-surrogate anyway, but that the film literally begins with the director's first thought should serve to highlight the similarity further.

The basic idea behind the surveillance experiment itself can be-read several ways:
Either Micah is compunding his girlfriend Katie's (and later his anxieties) by creating a de-facto "reality show" within their own home, replete with narcissistic self-examination and over-dramatization of otherwise mundane activities, which the liberal use of the camera for non-surveillance purposes would suggest.

OR he is using Kate's anxiety as an excuse to gain what he perceives to be more control over his "domain, Katie, which is evidenced by his reluctance to turn to outsiders for help and his possessive comments in the film, e.g. 'This is my house, you're my girlfriend, I'm gonna deal with this,'

OR he is adopting a position of modern, skeptical, quasi-scientific arrogance (indicated by his reliance on technology and the various pseudo-scientific experiments he conducts) in an attempt first to disprove, then later fight, an ancient, undeniably powerful supernatural entity.

OR some combination of the above, which you patient reader have probably already concluded on your own.

The second-to-last point is of special interest to me--One of the most persistent questions I found himself asking as the film drew to its close was why didn't Katie or Micah get ahold of a priest? Where was Father Damien?

The question is too-readily and unsatisfactorily brushed away by deferring to the two psychic-professionals in the film, one who appears on-screen twice and the other who is only mentioned. Of course, neither of these individuals proves particularly helpful, which would seem to support my initial conclusion that our doomed couple are atheists, equating organized religion to parapsychology: why turn to a priest why a psychic couldn't get the job done?

But as I mentioned to my friend Niraj, if our heroes are supposed to be modernists, then they would undoubtedly be acquainted with The Exorcist, or less probably Constantine (Hellblazer), or any number of other pop-cultural references to demon exorcisms wherein Christian religious rites prove at least moderately effective in dispelling demons. Few things bother me as much in movies as when characters conspicuously display lack of cinematic knowledge of the very genre used to categorize their own story. It is especially prominent in zombie films, very few of which even contain the term "zombie" at all. (Shaun of the Dead famously spoofed this tradition.)

Even if the characters are meant to be anti-religious, one would think that their worsening paranormal experiences would finally compel them to reconsider the merits of a man (or woman) of the cloth, or of any organized religious tradition for that matter. Plus, one of the film's penultimate scenes prominently features Katie clutching that overtly Christian symbol and exorcist-tool, the crucifix, indicating exactly the kind of desperate appeal to the protectorate-God I have been advocating.

Let's assume the movie isn't nominally an existential crisis or crisis-of-faith though. Accepting the miniscule budget, Paranormal Activity is not your standard horror-fare, to be certain. The obnoxious hyperactive, jump-cut editing of many modern horror successes (and I implicate the excellent High Tension alongside the atrocious Saw franchise in this regard) is nowhere to be found. But it doesn't exhibit much of the mythology of The Exorcist either, which Peli also cites as an inspiration, or even that of it's modern cousins The Blair Witch or Cloverfield, although it shares their shaky (some [old people] find it nauseating) camera-work.

Most useful to me is the fairly transparent but perhaps overlooked comparison to Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, another movie about a demon pursuing a young woman's soul that came out in theaters earlier this year only to be forgotten all-too quickly.

Now, I'm not the biggest Sam Raimi fan, but I am a vocal defender of the guy's talents. I am proud to say I loved The Quick and The Dead and Spiderman 3, so maybe an uber-fan designation is warranted.

That being said, I wasn't particularly excited for Drag Me to Hell, and the film about met my expectations. But one thing the film did well is something Raimi has been known for since his earliest directing days- establishing and building upon a mythology of evil. Some would argue that it is the actually same meta-mythology across all his films, or at least all of his horror pictures; a mythology where possession, dehumanization, physical deformity and general mortal peril occur with startling regularity.

If that's the case Drag Me to Hell certainly ticks most of, if not all the boxes: The film begins with a seemingly bizarre but undeniably thrilling flashback in which we are first introduced to the film's antagonist, the Lamia. Later revealed to be a goat-like demon, the dark presence of the Lamia is immediately established as a powerful, capable threat; literally pulling its first victim, a small boy, through fissures in the earth down into a fiery hell. After the film's heroine is cursed with the demon, she desires the help of a psychic, much to the chagrin of her skeptical, philosophy professor boyfriend.

It's easy to draw the parallel here to Paranormal Activity, and tempting to go even further still: equating the message of both films as some sort of post-feminist critique of modern heterosexual relationships in which the woman feels so trapped by her surroundings, obligations and her patronizing mate that she is literally driven to a self-destructive mental breakdown. It is an undoubtedly interesting thought, and one that could warrant it's own blog post, but I'll spare you and leave that up to a more capable writer.

What I'm trying to get at it is that Drag Me To Hell exceeds Paranormal Activity in terms of it's commitment to developing a backstory, a compelling mythology. The former film's psychic, Rham Jas, is more than just a throwaway plot-mechanism; he's actually a really enigmatic guy who happens to have a lot of information and skill when it comes to battling psychic evil. Also eventually proven ineffective, his presence still makes the film more complete and in my mind, more authentic than the faux-documentarian gimmick of Paranormal Activity.

The world as most people know it, even atheists, is not irreligious. There is much folklore and superstition built up behind some of the most thoughtless of gestures, e.g. saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. Albeit, modern variants of archaic rituals don't function in the same way as they originally began, but my point is that it is a mistake not to play this up this mystical undercurrent in horror films, a point in which Drag Me to Hell actually does markedly better than most.

People make up backstories for everything in their lives. "Why the fuck did the elevator doors have to close on methis time, when I was running late to the goddamn presentation?! It must not be my day." It's called patternicity; the brain seeks to make order of arbitrariness. Especially in our reality-TV-obsessed world, the most ordinary occurrences take on a mythical quality. Everyone's relationship is Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra etc. etc. Everyone's worst day is the worst day in history, and now, more than ever they can and want to tell you about it.

But maybe this is why the demon in Paranormal Activity is so undeveloped. It's Micah's and Katie's story, after all--the story of their relationship--that should be most important to viewers. But what does it say about their story that they are so unwilling to look to others for help? To get rid of a fucking demon, no less. It's not like they have a bed bug-infestation or something. Although having experienced that myself, I might select the demon.

But there's a case to be made that the demon functions to some degree more like the shark in Jaws, as an evil presence rather than a fully-formed character. It too is both reviled and sought-after. Unlike Drag Me to Hell, where the Lamia was a clear menace from the get-go, Paranormal Activity's demon proves strangely enticing to the young couple, especially the brash Micah, who relishes baiting it, observing it, communicating with it, at least up until a certain point-of-no-return.

This, in-turn, raises a host of other spiritual questions: Why such an attraction to evil supernatural forces rather than "good?" Why would anyone entertain a dark non-entity for so long while denying even the slightest-possibility of salvation promised by the Christian faith? Or any other faith?

Perhaps that is the true dark genius of Paranormal Activity after all: the couple does believe in the presence of organized evil. The irony is that the force feeds off their belief and fear and eventually pulls itself together to horrific effect. If they were true atheists or non-believers, they'd be able to will the demon away by ignoring it, excusing it with other natural phenomena, and generallly not giving it the attention it craves. Thus, I think the movie suffers for a lack of definition when it comes to its own supernatural underpinnings.

Which leads me to my final, tantalizing observation: I think if you want to read Paranormal Activity as a metaphor for anything, it's not relationships or a lack of faith. In the vein of Requiem for a Dream, the movie really seems to be a dramatization of the dangers of chronic drug addiction. Think about it: Micah blames Katie for keeping her "demon" a "secret" from him and pulling him into her web of darkness and paranoia. Why does Katie get up so much in middle of the night? Insomnia is a common side-effect of rampant drug-use. Why is Katie so upset that Micah is filming them? Why doesn't Micah want them to "get help?" We hardly ever see them leaving the house, let alone going to work or visiting with friends. Katie's lone friend seems wain, pallid, and similarly mentally fuzzy. Could she be their dealer? The ending, of course, a tragic OD. And what about the white powder Micah throws all over the ground at one point? That's gotta be... OK-- that last one is a stretch ;-)

In Sum: A surprisingly taut, artistic and visceral film, with a disappointingly undeveloped backstory and unintellectual plot. Recommended, but with a note of caution--it can't possibly live up to it's marketing hype.

"That's a Bingo!" OR "The Shoe Is On the Other Foot"

Photo courtesy Tyler Stout, via We Are Movie Geeks

Fanboys know that Tarantino's WWII flick has been a long, long time coming. The celebrated, controversial, eponymous writer/director announced sometime before the turn of the millennium that he intended to create his own version of the Dirty Dozen (a classic American WWII movie of the earnest, macho 1960's sort, wherein Allied soldiers facing court-martial for various capital offenses are offered the promise of full pardons for undertaking a suicide mission). In the time between this declaration and the eventual release of Inglourious Basterds, a sidelined Tarantino created Kill Bill and the Planet Terror portion of Grindhouse.

I remember very vividly after the release of Kill Bill Pt. 1 in 2003, (which, if generally well-recieved, still achieved nowhere near the universal acclaim of his earlier seminal films Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs) one particularly scathing Internet comment on the film that accused Tarantino of smoking too much weed, watching too much kung-fu and becoming too deluded to realize the difference between quality and self-indulgence in his filmmaking. So if one sect of ultra-loyal Tarantino worshiping fanboys were always unequivocally excited for his WWII project, by the time of Kill Bill, an increasing subset of geekdom was becoming more vocally dubious about his abilities. Can anyone blame them? As it is with any long-in-development project from an artistic giant, e.g. Guns and Roses Chinese Democracy, the more time that goes by, the less likely it is that the results will come anywhere close to justifying the wait.

But of course, the majority of the moviegoing public has minimal-to-no knowledge about this back story. They simply began seeing trailers a few months ago with a hillbilly-accented Brad Pitt talking about killing Nazis and then, FLASH: Tarantino's name, and they either bought into that premise or they didn't.

Fortunately for Tarantino, and, more fortunately for the film's producers, the Weinstein's (who are struggling financially as David Segal expertly reported in the New York Times), Inglourious Basterds looks to be a critical and commercial hit. True, it's not going to match the stellar success of Pulp Fiction - and again, what could? - but it's going to come close, maybe even ascending to his second-highest gross by the time its all said and done. And yet I would argue that the most fortunate people in this whole situation are actually us, the American moviegoing public, fanboys and the less-rabid folk alike. Why's that? Well, the simple truth is that Inglourious Basterds is just a thoroughly well-made film in all aspects. It's confidently written, inspiringly directed, expertly acted, and cleverly edited. It's entertaining, intellectual, insightful, violent, humorous, daring, fun, occasionally romantic and at least in a few notable instances, appropriately tragic. Yes, the film is also occasionally sadistic and gory, but c'mon, that's Tarantino, and, as I alluded to before, you're either down with that side of his work or you're not.

On more than one occasion, as those close to me will attest, I have actually been conspicuously among "you're not" segment of the population, as in I've not always been sold on Tarantino's artistic merit. I found Pulp Fiction to be highly overrated (for a film about hitmen and other unsavory characters, there's more than a few stretches of time where it's damn boring) and Reservoir Dogs to be more gratuitous and nihilistic than it was subversive. I remember vocally criticizing the first Kill Bill for its monotony of violence, but it has grown on me tremendously, especially in light of Kill Bill Vol. 2, which I still personally enjoy the most out of all his films (any director that has the chutzpah to blacken the screen for minutes at a time, relying solely on audio to move the plot forward, deserves my unbridled appreciation).

Yet in the run-up to to Inglourious Basterds I felt a strange sense of excitement, of honest anticipation. Even reading the early mixed-reactions out of Cannes didn't dissuade me in the slightest, in-fact, I felt an even stronger conviction that I would enjoy this film. It wasn't just the marketing that sold me, for some odd reason I was eager to see what Tarantino would do with the setting, with the actors. More on that last point: He is well-known for re-invigorating the careers of actors in deep slumps (see Travolta circa '91, Carradine circa '03), but in this case, he's got a leading man at the top of his game (Brad Pitt) and some notable ascending names (B.J. Novak, Eli Roth).

Whether it was some sort of unnoticed maturation, evolution in my own moviegoing taste or an overall low-quality year of films, or some combination thereof, I really, genuinely wanted to see and appreciate Inglourious Basterds for what I thought it would be: a violent, Grimm-stye adult fairytale set in WWII era France.

So it was that I found myself in the awkward position of defending the picture a day-or-so before it's official release, prior to myself or it's would-be detractors seeing it. What happened was this: At my internship, during a fairly ordinary lunch period on the sun-scorched roof-patio of our office building here in DC, a common discussion about weekend plans ensued. I proposed the idea of getting a group of interns to see Inglourious Basterds on opening (Friday) night, only to be greeted with reactions of harsh distaste, even disgust at the suggestion. Two of my fellow interns, friends of mine, were unapologetic in their pre-determined aversion to and boycott of the film. Amidst my own surprise and rising defensiveness (I thought it was a fine idea for a night's entertainment? No?), I attempted to understand their strong position against it. Apparently, I had neglected to consider the strong, implicit sociopolitical implications of the film: The fact that was set during WWII, that it was not factual but could be misread as such, that it was openly described as being a "Jewish Revenge" fantasy ("Kosher-Porn," according to one notable review), raised a host of problematic issues for those concerned about the present state of Jews, Anti-Semitism, Israel, Palestinians, The Middle East and all other related hotbeds of real-life controversy, to say nothing of the historical legacy of WWII, Nazism and the Holocaust.

"But Tarantino's not concerned with those things," I protested. "Look, you're reading too much into it." I.e. superimposing too many of your own intellectual preoccupations onto the film. "The movie isn't about World War Two, it's a spaghetti-western that happens to be set in World War Two, it uses World War Two as the backdrop." This proved to be an unsatisfactory defense, as the very fact that the writer/director would have the audacity to trivialize the memory of World War II with a fanciful, farcical story was evidence of the film's irresponsibility and lack of taste. I tried in vein to bring up the fact that many other directors and popular entertainment had done just this, creating fictional, humorous plots out of a real tragedy, but to no avail. We agreed to disagree, and that was that.

But I will say I was wrong about one of my latter, pre-viewing assertions: WWII is NOT just a backdrop for the film. Indeed, by the end of the movie, our titular protagonists are thrust into the absolutely most vital position in the Allied offense. The course of an alternate war history is irrevocably altered because of the deliberate machinations of characters and resulting events. This is the simultaneously the most bold and ridiculous aspect of the movie, but it is unabashedly so, as we would expect from Tarantino. Furthermore, I would argue that by not compromising his vision, by deliberately warping historical narrative, with all of the negative connotations that may have on a particular segment of the audience wedded to Saving Private Ryan-style historical reenactment, the filmmaker actually succeeds in making this the most raw, powerful and emotive part of the show.

Meanwhile, devotees of Tarantino-signature dialogue have more than enough to chew on with this screenplay, which employs the various languages of the European front so often that the subtitles become a source of self-reflective comedy. Two of my favorite lines form the title of this review, but it is the second, "The shoe is on the other foot," that really gets at the heart of what is going on in and with this film.

All but the most deliberately disengaged know what it's ostensibly about going in: A squad of Jewish-American soldiers are assigned to massacre, to brutalize, some would say terrorize, as many Nazis as they possibly can in Occupied France. In trailers we hear Brad Pitt's character, the commanding officer, Lt. Aldo Raine, saying he wants every one of the men under his command to be scalping the Nazi soldiers they take down, with each man responsible for producing no less than 100 Nazi scalps. A grim (if you're like me, darkly-comedic, but grim nonetheless) directive to be certain, but the trailers do not evidence how successful, if at all, the men are in this enterprise. But watching the film, we quickly learn that they are stunningly so, enough to rattle Hitler himself. Thus, the shoe is indeed on the other foot- with the overwhelming numbers of Hitler's "master race" irrationally fearing the wrath of a very small number of the very group they systematically objectified, subjugated and exterminated.

I recently claimed, in conversation, that Inglorious Basterds was Tarantino's most mainstream film, and I still stand by this assertion. What is more universally agreed upon than the evil of the Nazis and the righteousness of the Allied forces in taking them down?

But that's just an excuse for Tarantino to mess with us: By inverting the role of the pursuer, making the Nazis the victim of a group of sadistic and yet still undeniably charismatic and "good" American soldiers, the film becomes much more interesting and emotionally complex. The same goes for another hero, the French Jew Shosanna, whose early, horrific escape from the film's principle Nazi villain drives her to plan an epic, cold-bolded massacre of her own. Time and time again, as the plot unfolds, Tarantino reverses the relative roles of the characters in the film- moving them between polarizing positions of dominance and subjugation, of moral superiority and compromise, of power and powerlessness. This is, for me, the chief accomplishment of the film, and the reason it is so satisfying on so many levels, the fact that it is ultimately all predicated on the continuous shifting of power-dynamics. To be certain, it is not very faithful to historical reality at all, but at the same time, I cannot help but think, from my perspective some 60+ years later, that Tarantino is actually being quite faithful to the essence of WWII, with all of its untold moral ambiguity and then-uncertain outcome.

In Sum: A masterful film that is an undeniable, exceptional, rollicking good time, in spite of its sociopolitical baggage. Undoubtedly the best of '09, thus far.