Movie Review: Benny's Video (1992)

Michael Haneke's second feature film is also the second in his so-called "Glaciation Trilogy," a trio of pictures about the emotional coldness and psychological impenetrability of modern society that began with 1989's barren, antarctic Der Siebente Kontinent. (Calling his first three films a "glaciation trilogy" implies that the rest of Haneke's films don't disturbingly delve into much the same themes, which is an obvious misstatement.)

Benny's Video begins with footage shot on a hand-held personal video camcorder. Farmers straddle a disoriented pig, hold a captive bolt pistol to his forehead, and slaughter the squealing, startled animal in close-up. (Those who have seen No Country for Old Men will recognize the extermination device.) The video pauses, rewinds, and replays in slow motion, savoring the zoomed-in final moments of the pig's life. They say animals differ from humans in that they have no foreknowledge of their mortality, that they are simpler and blissfully ignorant because they do not bear the burden of knowing death. But in slow motion, one sees a horrifying realization flooding the pig's eyes as the bolt enters his brain. This look of awful epiphany could just be a spontaneous reaction to the physical stimulus, but in slow motion and in close-up, in repeated viewings, it's easy for us to project our own feelings of doom, meaninglessness, and vanity on the pig's last panicked expression.

In Richard Linklater's meanderingly philosophical comedy Slacker, released one year earlier in 1991, a social experimenter/cultist obsessed with television images recounts a story of having seen--in person--an angry drunk stumble out of a bar and land on his own knife, an event that means almost nothing to him because he saw it in the chaotic, unpredictable, and vast reality and not within the confines of a structured, symbol-driven, propagandistic television screen. He can't rewind to examine the details. He doesn't know the whole plot, what happened before and what followed after, so there's no context. Maybe he was a bad guy and the death was satisfying or funny. Maybe the death was the result of some cruel, fateful twist of dramatic irony. Maybe he didn't even die--the spectator, after all, didn't even get a close-up of the knife entering the body, didn't get to immediately cut with a sound bridge of ambulance sirens to the emergency room. Even the blood, the real blood, didn't look like the blood he was used to seeing in movies, the blood that carried so much meaning and connotation in his mind. The hue was wrong, and he couldn't adjust the hue.

There's no knowing how many times Benny, the fifteen-year-old cameraman who filmed the pig's death, has watched the snuff film. There's no telling what the video may mean to him, if it means anything at all. Benny doesn't talk very much, nor does his family especially value communication. A typical family gathering involves them seated around the home entertainment system, impassively watching the last grisly news footage from the Bosnian war while muttering the occasional bit of half-hearted chatter. Haneke's lens cleverly remains glued to the television screen during these scenes; just as they'd rather watch the tube than each other, so must we.

Benny also doesn't spend much time in thoughtful meditation or quiet introspection. His life has been arranged so that he constantly has several layers of distraction competing for his attention, a thick protective blanket of white noise to shield him from any troublesome thoughts. While doing homework he blasts loud punk music and watches television. Before drifting off to bed he doesn't stare at the ceiling or at the inside of his eyelids, reliving the day and trying to make sense of it; he watches the latest Hollywood action and horror films, checked out three at a time from the local rental store.

His parents facilitate this thoughtless, high-tech lifestyle, buying him the gadgetry he desires and not caring that his bedroom is a sealed-off, inorganic crypt with a television screen substituting an open window. Benny has trained a camcorder to stare out his window and down to the faceless traffic on the street. Maybe that helps him to attach some narrative meaning to an otherwise meaningless world. Maybe it helps him imagine that some director, screenwriter, or editor is in control of the chaos outside his door.

There's no context for much of the imagery Benny is exposed to, no emotional intelligence or mental maturity to support what he's seen in his young life. Nobody's told him much about death or life, love or hate, rape and murder, responsibility and disappointment, dependability and despair. He knows these things exist, but they all exist in distorted measurements alongside aliens, car chases, mutants, and talking rabbits, and he perhaps understands as much about all of these as he would understand watching a film in a language he's never been taught. One need only look to his older sister for proof; her presence in the film is brief, and we know simply that she is a successful pyramid schemer who lies to her parents to use their apartment as a party headquarters for her scam. When confronted with the truth, her father scolds her only for not letting him know sooner so that he could properly execute the party by hiring a caterer. Maybe she'll be in prison in a year, but nobody in the family seems capable of conceiving this or understanding why.

A typical Haneke shot: people close together physically yet miles apart mentally.

When Benny murders a young girl using the captive bolt pistol he has pilfered from the farm, he genuinely seems not to possess any motive or understanding as to why he has committed the horrible crime. It is a random act of senseless violence, like changing the channel from a boring teen drama to a serial killer thriller. Benny meets the girl at the video store. She also seems neglected and alienated, and she willingly follows him to his apartment for microwave pizza and strange conversation. Benny is oddly dysfunctional throughout their encounter--charming and polite yet also impulsive. When he tackles her while acting out an unfunny joke about cops on the Metro, we realize his complete lack of social decorum, heightened only by his decision to show her (and to re-show her in slow-mo instant replay) his slaughterhouse video. She's just as intrigued and perplexed. What is death all about? He tells her about dead bodies in movies ("ketchup and plastic") and about the dead body of his grandmother, the sight of which he was shielded from at her funeral several years ago. He can see the explosive murder of millions on television, but his parents have prevented him from coming to terms with the sight of the deceased woman he once knew and love.

That's when he pulls out the pistol and dares her to shoot him. She refuses and dares him. He refuses. She calls him a coward, and so he shoots. Not once, not twice, but three times. Until her screaming and struggling comes to an abrupt end. Haneke films this scene not in close-up nor with any intensified continuity or emotional editing; we see through the lens of his camcorder, off-center and static. The camera captures all. And where a Hollywood scene would end, or where an intense score would be cued, or where a horrified close-up would occur, life instead just keeps going on. He tries to clean up the mess, but as a fifteen-year-old would and not in any calculated, cinematic way. He listens to music and does his homework. He strips off his clothes, not so that he can be sexual with the body--other bodies don't much concern him, despite his age--but so that he can keep the blood from staining them. He gets blood on his bare torso instead, and it is while filming his blood-stained skin and then watching the video tape that he gets oddly erotic--the image charged with pornographic autoeroticism even though the actual event was sexless. He takes a phone call from his friend. He goes to a concert. He gets a haircut and takes in a movie. He goes to school.

He has effectively changed the channel. The murder is behind him, and he's moved on to different scenes, different episodes, different genres.

Except he hasn't. The body's still stuffed in his closet, and the memory's still buried somewhere in his mind. Plus, most importantly, he still has the videotape.

Arno Frisch handles the role of Benny masterfully--a handsome and superficial exterior with a touch of radiant menace, offering glimpses into an interior that's largely vacant but not entirely so. And it's that occasional, subtle glimpse of a tiny human interior, bursting to breathe and break free, that makes this film a masterpiece. As when Benny nearly confesses to his friend but instead says nothing, or when he shaves off his beautiful locks in an act of nazirite penance, starting anew with a damaged and frail look to match his inner turmoil.

Eventually he decides that the only way to confess is to speak in the only language he understands. With no preamble he plays the videotape to his shocked and silent parents, who immediately switch into film noir mode with talk of alibis, witnesses, and the graphic, meticulous details of body disposal. Their response, so logical, clear-headed, and well-planned, can only have come from having seen so many perfect murders on television and in the movies. For the first time in their lives, they are movie stars, and the event merits an actual conversation rather than listless mumblings.

After establishing that there were no witnesses, they decide to protect their child, not merely because he's their son but also to avoid truthful accusations of child neglect that might be lodged against them. The father plans to discard the body by chopping it into tiny pieces, flushing it into the sewage system, and burning the bones, clothing, and belongings. Benny and his mother, meanwhile, will vacation in Egypt under the guise of attending a wealthy aunt's funeral. And when they are reunited one week later, everything will be back to normal, the murder will be forgotten, and Benny's brief life of crime will never be mentioned again. The tape will be rewound, ejected, and returned to the shelf.

Except Benny is tired of living life as though channel surfing. Benny wants to understand the most important and horrifying thing that's ever happened in his life. He wants to learn what contrition, sacrifice, and punishment are. Benny doesn't want to erase the tape of his memory, not least of all because a mind cannot simply be recorded over. Some remnant of the murder would stay in his subconscious forever, inexplicable, surreal, unaccounted for, resurfacing in untold ways. By protecting him from discovery and punishment, they want to deny him any chance of remorse and redemption. They want to permanently deny him the opportunity to make sense of his life, his mind, and his lethal mistake. They want to prolong his attention deficit and his emotional disconnect. They want to murder his barely living humanity.

They send him to Egypt, birthplace of Moses, of countless gods, and of ancient civilizations, and he spends the eye-opening experience behind his camcorder, trying to make sense of ancient tombs, of parasailers, of vivid sunsets and holy wars from a detached point-of-view. When his mother tries to capture him in the frame, he is sullen and scared. He doesn't want to be a part of this confusing and disordered story. The vacation is one that would change the lives of many people, but Benny only remarks on the heat and his sunburn. Will Benny always be schizoid and antisocial? Will he ever come face to face with beauty and truth?

When he returns to his videos, his entertainment system, and his corpse-less bedroom, he pointedly refuses to tell his father he loves him even as his father insists on saying that Benny is loved by him. Love is not a frightened and selfish attempt to rob a child of moral responsibility by shielding him from consequences. Love is not insuring that an unknown girl remains eternally forgotten. This may be the first thing Benny ever figures out for himself, even if he can't put it into words.

He goes to the police. He shows them incriminating evidence of his parents discussing the disposal of the body. He explains that even though he could have gotten away with it, he felt the need to go to the police, even if he's not sure why. And so he consciously, actively takes the first step in making sense of a senseless act.

Benny's Video, titled in English despite being an Austrian film (a subtle suggestion of how alien pop culture can be), is a phenomenal film, intriguingly acted by Arno Frisch, smartly filmed by cinematographer Christian Berger, and disturbingly written by Michael Haneke. Critiquing and exposing videotape and television culture was an overplayed genre in the late '80s and early '90s. Benny's Video is certainly the best of these films that I have seen, but recall also the Slacker scene, the surreal Videodrome, the bizarre Stay Tuned, the supernatural Ringu, the ghoulish Poltergeist, Stephen King's "The Tommyknockers," and several episodes of "The X Files" and other science fiction/horror anthologies, just to name a few, all of which implied the demonic horror that was lurking somewhere between the screen and the cathode ray. Some of these tales seem quaint and moralistic now, but it's surprising that an equal number of cautionary tales aren't being made about the present age. The Internet, cell phones, satellites, and the instantaneous, easy-access nature of the digital age have changed our expectations and the way our minds work, making us less patient, less focused, less appreciative, and less able to remember specifics from the constant blur of noise and details that bombards us from every direction at all hours of the day. Are today's filmmakers less technophobic? Have we all been indoctrinated by the hegemony of Google?

Where are the horror fantasies about the Internet?

Benny's Video (1992)
d: Michael Haneke w: Michael Haneke
(Arno Frisch, Angela Winkler, Ulrich Muhe)
10/10

Movie Review: The Seventh Continent (1989) (Or: "Days of the Living Dead," a Michael Haneke Nightmare)

Without knowing it at the time, we spend the first sequence of Michael Haneke's Der Sebiente Kontinent (The Seventh Continent) in the eyes of Eva, a five-year-old girl who is the daughter of the two main characters, Anna and Georg. From the backseat of the family car,Eva watches the backs of her parents' motionless, silent heads as they ride the car through a mechanical car wash. A part of their routine, the complex innerworkings of the car wash, which regularly cleanses the dirt of the outside world off their little shell, no longer elicit any wonder, interest, or conversation. Indeed, little else does either. They remain silent, staring forward, passing through life from one spiritless routine to the next.

The inhuman, disinterested clockwork of the first segment follows through the first ten minutes of the film, with no human faces entering focus in the frame and scarcely a word of conversation. From an alarm clock radio comes a disembodied voice as from the bed march two voiceless bodies, the camera frame decapitating them as intense close-ups linger on their various rituals--washing up, tying shoes, preparing store-bought coffee with an electrical coffee pot, mindless motions of muscle memory. The car leaves the garage through the mechanical door and glare from the sun across the windshield blinds us from seeing into the family's mobile cocoon. Out in the world, Eva goes to school, Georg to work, and Anna to the grocery store. Pedestrians bustle in the distance, hurrying across the frame, their faces blurred. Georg hurries across his workplace and the grinding machinery across the factory floor is far more noticeable than any of the workers' faces. At the grocery store, we gaze at the pristine, identical manufactured goods filling the shelves and not any of the shoppers.

Throughout everything we hear the cold voiceover of Anna reading a letter she has written to Georg's mother--a letter filled with trivialities and empty words in which she describes the recent death of her own mother in terms of the stress that the unexpected event has burdened their otherwise structured lives with: planning a funeral, dividing up belongings, navigating the minutiae of inheritance law. She appends a post-script: Georg sends his love and is awfully sorry about not writing himself, but his life is much too busy.

Georg's main preoccupation is to advance his career, a drive that overworks him to prove his mettle for an advancement that can only come with the removal of his superior, an older man with failing health.

Ten minutes of normal people living their modern, successful lives pass, a long duration in film time, and not one face--the seat of emotion, the usual indicator of character, the most distinguishable and unique attribute of most people--is captured by the prying camera's eye. Not one meaningful interaction is witnessed. Only grocery store aisles, shoelaces, and traffic.

The first close-up is of five-year-old Eva, who frightfully explains to her worried teacher that she can no longer see. Has she been stricken with a brain aneurysm? Is she symbolically stating that she's already seen everything in her life--the car wash, the breakfast table, the traffic--hundreds of times before? Her teacher tests her, and she fails. She really can see. But why would a five-year-old invent such a disturbing lie?

On the heels of this close-up, this moment of personal contact, the film jumps into extreme, abnormal close-ups and a rather uncomfortable moment of intimate contact as Anna, an optometrist, examines the eyes of an older woman who is one of her patients, using retinoscopes, phoropters, and mechanical prods. The eyes are the windows to the soul, and as Anna prods and distorts the woman's eyes into monstrous shapes, we hear a story from the old woman that reveals the ugly landscape of her soul. As a teenager, she and her peers humiliated her best friend for one day showing up to the school wearing glasses. Still unrepentant decades later, the woman blames her own failing eyesight on an act of karmic witchcraft perpetrated by the degraded ex-friend. In a world where intimate friendships can suddenly sour and many personal encounters result in anger and misery, it's easy to see why many may choose to avoid getting to know others, to disconnect from situations that may result in physical or psychological harm, to remain sheltered and private. Not all human interactions, Haneke shows, are beneficial and inspiring. Even Anna, who later recounts the woman's anecdote with her brother and colleague to Georg and Eva at the dinner table that night, does not gain anything meaningful from the tale of betrayal; she uses the anecdote to mock the woman, an amusing bit of workplace gossip offered up and promptly forgotten.

Why trust your bosom buddy when her own vanity and insecurity can be used as a weapon against you? Why trust anyone when you yourself are untrustworthy and self-serving? When Anna learns about her daughter's prank at school that morning, she confronts the frightened young girl, who adamantly denies having pretended blindness. Anna insists upon the truth, promising the five-year-old that no harm will come to her for confessing, but as soon as Eva admits to the untruth, Anna ferociously slaps her. Will the impressionable child, betrayed by her own mother, ever trust anyone again, or will her relationships remain no deeper and no more dangerous than fleeing encounters with a grocery store cashier, whose fingers race across the register keypad with robotic precision and whose words and thoughts are limited to price tags? Is she destined for the emotionless life of an automaton, reciting memorized prayers at fixed times, filling up the car with gas when the meter runs low, and having passionless sex at regular intervals?

Amongst this parade of sterile environments, featureless humans, and well-rehearsed rituals arise several opportunities for meaningful contact as troubled individuals, swallowed by the impersonal society around them yet still struggling to breathe, deviate from the preset parameters, throwing out their flailing arms for a life preserver, a piece of driftwood, or a stable friend to hold onto. But Anna and Georg, skilled swimmers at peace in the ocean of inhumanity, know never to enter the grasp of a drowning man, who will frantically pull you down into the abyss in his desperate clutch before you can save him. When Anna's brother's thoughts turn to their recently deceased mother during dinner--a woman who once mused that we might all be a little more peaceful if we had "a monitor instead of a head to see our thoughts"--and he begins to weep, the family, listening to rather loud American pop music from the stereo rather than talking to each other, tries to ignore him and give him time for it to pass before Anna, rather uncomfortably, rises to place her hand on him. The crying abates without any need for discussion, and the family turns to a more acceptable activity: silently watching television. Better to be fed an image, a message, and a distraction than to try to make sense of the chaos inside ourselves. Better to have a television screen than a brain.

Later at work, in a segment that takes place about one year later after Georg has assumed the position of his older superior who has fallen temporarily sick (and hence unprofitable) and been forced into retirement, Georg has an opportunity to share insights with the man he has only ever seen as an obstacle and never has a fellow human being. When the former boss comes to retrieve his belongings only to learn that they have all been boxed up and shuffled off to some unknown storage facility, he lingers over Georg, yearning to speak. Maybe he wants to warn him that one day he too will become old and less productive and his cog will be easily replaced and forgotten. Maybe he has come face to face with death and has learned something about its purpose. Maybe he wants to explain what it's like to suddenly become unnecessary, or maybe he's just lonely and unoccupied and needs a friend to laugh with for a minute or two. Whatever it is we never learn, as Georg remains stone-faced and unreceptive. The boss exits and Georg returns to more important matters--namely, staring at a computer printout of endless numbers.

Most devastating, however, is the failed opportunity for connection between Anna and Eva. When Anna discovers a sentimental piece of journalism about a girl who loses her eyesight but gains dependable companions amongst Eva's belongings, she begins to suspect what may have motivated Eva's strange prank. Eva isn't some drowning stranger, but her own daughter and progeny, so Anna cautiously approaches her, asking her if she feels lonely or unloved. Eva rather unconvincingly denies this (maybe she's still reeling from being slapped earlier in the day for telling the truth), and Anna too quickly accepts her denial. Her daughter is learning to swim.

In the segment that comes a year later (the same year that Georg rejects his boss), little has changed. Georg is still too busy to write to his own parents. The television and the radio still substitute conversation. The same routines must be carried out ad infinitum. Driving home in the rain while listening to soft rock--the closed windows and the surround sound radio sheltering them from the elements, the traffic, and the outside world--the family passes a car accident and a covered corpse. Rushing to the car wash to cleanse themselves of this close contact with impure reality, the family finally reveals a shred of the humanity and mortality they once did and still do possess. Anna breaks down in tears. Georg, who feels nothing, says nothing. Anna cries harder, turning to the backseat (unlike in the opening segment) and grasping her daughter's hand, smelling it, squeezing it, tasting it, trying to perceive and connect with warm, loving flesh in any way possible. Eva does not withdraw, and eventually even Georg enters the group hug, coldly touching Anna's face with the back of his hand--a hard and cold spot on the body where there are few nerve endings.

Another year passes and despite the breakdown things are worse than ever. At dinner, Eva quickly eats cold, colorless corn flakes in an extreme, static close-up that reveals how little effort and love went into preparing and consuming the meal. Anna's uncontrollable brother no longer attends these now silent meals. In bed Eva hugs a stuffed animal rather than her mother, and in a long shot at a doctor's office waiting room, five people sit quietly waiting without speaking to each other more than salutations.

Georg finally writes to his parents, and the voiceover recitation of this letter contains perhaps more words than he speaks throughout the rest of the film, but the letter is a one-way monologue rather than an invitation to communication, a suicide note that can never be responded to because by the time it reaches his mother he and his family will be dead. The family runs through a checklist of removing themselves from society--withdrawing their money from the bank, excusing Eva from school, quitting their jobs, and selling their car--and they do this under the guise of moving to Australia. The implication is that Australia is the seventh continent of the title, but Australia is more properly the sixth continent. Antarctica is the seventh continent, a frozen, silent wasteland unfit for human survival. Georg and Anna, as frigid, fixed, and speechless as glaciers, are true Antarcticans, and it is to a frozen, barren hell that they prepare to disembark.

Even in death they are "systematic" and emotionally uninvested. Materialistic, they destroy the belongings that mean so much to them prior to destroying their physical selves--dismantling furniture, smashing electronics, ripping clothing, shredding books, records, papers, and photographs, cracking mirrors, and crushing clocks. In a society where the dress shirts you wear mean more than the body that they clothe, it is no longer sufficient to suicide to merely kill the body. One must also murder the accessories, and this murder is done with the same rigid, mechanical organization as all their other routines. As pristine as their actions are their emotions, which remain sterile throughout the complete disintegration of their lives. They do not discuss fears, regrets, or nostalgia. They do not discuss anything at all. When the phone rings, they dismantle it, and when the doorbell rings, they mute the doorbell. Only when Georg kills Eva's pet fish by smashing the aquarium with a sledge hammer do they exchange a few words, but at this point a few words cannot melt the icicles that have crystallized and hardened their souls.

They flush their cash, they have their last silent meal, and they drink poison while watching American pop music videos (ironically, "The Power of Love") on television--the one possession too important to destroy. Eva says her prayers and dies. Anna faces a death as messy as any life should be, though she tried so hard to keep it clean. And Georg, at last as literally alone as he has always metaphorically been, slips into unconsciousness while staring at television static. The chaotic static is a monitor that reveals the thoughts in his head, glimpses of all the people he could have interacted with but never did, all the moments that could have been meaningful but never were--the gas station attendant he could have chatted with, the brother-in-law he could've consoled, the retired boss he could have listened to, the strange dream he could've shared, the daughter he could have learned from, the wife he could've loved.

But these regrets are at best hunches, like flashes of inspiration that come to one in a dream but slip away in intangible threads when light strikes the eyes. In a society where dependence on humans and social interaction is not necessary and is sometimes detrimental to survival, where people work together but separately, always replaceable, and never deviating too far from the normal and productive center, Georg has never learned the language of emotion. These frantic impulses can no more be acted upon than a dream about flying.

Fear of death, of mess, of rejection, of heartache, of loneliness, of meaningless, and of failure forces us to dehumanize ourselves. If we latch on to a world of tangible, permanent objects, if we hoard these objects and make them an important, definitive part of who we are, then we can survive through their permanence much longer than one hundred and twenty years. If we keep them clean and well-polished, our lives can stay clean. If we dutifully fulfill the same obligations and behaviors every day, we can erase our sense of time and by erasing time we can erase our feeling that time is running out. If what we do today is the same as what we did yesterday and what we did the day before and what we will do tomorrow and the day after, then we can imagine that we are timeless, that we will always be able to do these things. If we keep ourselves constantly distracted with these routines and with television and with work, then we need never think about death or despair. People die and force us to think about our own eventual demise; even though we knew them day after day, eventually they ceased to be and so will we. Best not to have people in our lives. Best to keep our noses as close to grindstone as possible, lest the view from above be too terrifying and unfathomable.

Michael Haneke presents a portrait of life in our times that is prophetic and disturbing. With a methodical and exacting eye, he shows that our attempts to prolong life by not living too fully has made life nearly an extension of death. The actions of the family in the third act remind me of people preserving their own tombs and preparing their own bodies for purification and mummification, like a newborn infant crawling into a jar of formaldehyde to stave off decay. Decay, messiness, pain, and death are the price of action, meaning, love, and life. Better to burn brightly and briefly than never to light the flame at all. Through his brutal examination of emotional frigidity, meaningless existence, and alienation, Haneke exorts us all to reenter the realm of the living.

Der Siebente Kontinent isn't on the TSPDT? list of the greatest movies of all time. In fact, none of Haneke's films are. But this one, at least, certainly should be.

Der Siebente Kontinent (1989)
d: Michael Haneke w: Michael Haneke, Johanna Teicht
(Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni Tanzer)
9/10

2009 Cinema in Review

I thought about not bothering with this sort of list this year since my theater experience in 2009 was thoroughly disappointing and--oddly and frustratingly so--very different from the average moviegoer's and critic. But I've been writing these recaps for years now, so why break with tradition?

First I'll list my favorites in various categories, then I'll break down all the films I saw last year in order of merit, with brief reviews.

Best Film: Where the Wild Things Are
Best Male Lead Performances: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart; Max Records, Where the Wild Things Are; Colin Firth, A Single Man; Nicholas Cage, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans
Best Female Lead Performances: Gabby Sidibe, Precious; Carrie Mulligan, An Education; Catalina Saavedra, La nana (The Maid); Alison Lohman, Drag Me to Hell; Zooey Deschanel, 500 Days of Summer
Best Male Supporting Roles: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds; Jim Broadbent, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; Christian McKay, Me and Orson Welles; Robert Duvall, Crazy Heart; Zach Galifianakis, The Hangover
Best Female Supporting Roles: Mo'Nique, Precious; Zoe Saldana, Avatar; Julianne Moore, A Single Man; Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Best Adaptation: Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers, Where the Wild Things Are
Best Original Screenplay: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Up
Most Interesting Directors: Werner Herzog, The Bad Lieutenant; Sam Raimi, Drag Me to Hell
Best Editing: Chris Innis, Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker
Best Artistic Design: Ian Phillips, A Single Man
Best Cinematography: Lance Acord, Where the Wild Things Are
Most Important Documentary: Food, Inc.
Best Animation: Coraline
Best Soundtrack: The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Best Original Song: "Hold on You", Crazy Heart (not "The Weary Kind")
Best Villain: Mrs. Ganush, Drag Me to Hell
Worst Everything: My Bloody Valentine 3D

All the Movies, in order of best to worst
Where the Wild Things Are: An emotionally raw, transfixing, and quietly uplifting fantasy of the responsibilities of attachment and the fear of abandonment.

Precious: Controversial subject matter that's typically reserved for melodrama is handled with a touch of humor and dogged determination that refuses to let it sink into the dredges of bathos, providing real solutions instead.

Up: The mostly silent beginning is one of the most elegantly composed and heartbreaking moments of cinematic history. The Apocalypse Now-meets-talking-dogs middle parts can be a bit silly, but the overall story of seeing every life as a worthy adventure is moving and memorable. Plus, aging, death, fatherhood, abandoned dreams, lost innocence, and a hundred other subjects.

Drag Me to Hell: A perfectly toned blend of comedy, horror, suspense, romantic drama, and capitalist commentary.

Food, Inc.: A quite disturbing condemnation of mindless consumption, urging viewers to remove their gullets from the feeding machine and begin thinking about what they put in their bodies. Even the scene that features a conscientious, organic farmer is horrifying as he butchers a screaming chicken.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Perhaps a little too quickly paced at times and sometimes a bit too quirky for its own good, but this anthropomorphic adventure tale about self-identity and failed expectations is hysterically funny.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans: One of the oddest movies I've ever seen: an unbelievable, over-plotted, melodramatic crime thriller that realizes how ridiculous it is yet plays it straight anyway. Perfect satire--because even if you don't get the joke, then it still works well as a rugged cop mystery.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: The first of the series that I actually enjoyed, this beautifully filmed fantasy blends the magic and the real world, the comedy and the drama more seamlessly than previous attempts.

A Single Man: A heartfelt tale of despair that urges viewers to seek out the beautiful moments in life. Also, one of the few gay movies that isn't obsessed with its gayness.

The Hangover: It's just a raunchy romp, but it's hilariously executed.

Crazy Heart: Believable little touches, excellent performances, and a great soundtrack make a tired, predictable tale of a washed up man's man a standout in its genre.

Goodbye, Solo: A quiet, convincing, and
original story about suicide that doesn't offer trite solutions to a complex problem.

La nana (The Maid): A rewarding little film from Chile in which a woman begins the search for joy and identity amongst the stressful grind of routine, obsession, and isolation.

Moon: A trippy, claustrophobic science fiction thriller that offers interesting observations on the essence of humanity and our short lives.

Teza: From Ethiopia and highlighting its culture and political history of the past few decades, this interesting response to communist tyranny illustrates how the "otherness" and ongoing struggle of dialectical Marxism eventually defeats the aspirations it once had in mind, substituting one bureaucratic oligarchy for another. What's born in violence cannot end in peace, and an ideology focused on a black-and-white opposition between "oppressors" and "oppressed" eventually branches out into endless arbitrary divisions between "true" and "false" communists. A powerful if overlong film, it also examines racism and superstition.

The Hurt Locker: A tense study of bomb defusers in Iraq, this nerve-racking drama never quite took hold of me like it did to many others, though its exploration of life-gambling adrenaline addiction is interesting. In the end, as the main character walks the sterilized, organized aisles of an overstocked grocery store in his hometown before requesting another return to duty, it's an interesting lesson that people who have faced death can never quite return to life the same way.

The Cove: An interesting--albeit too self-serious--examinations on illegal dolphin abuses in a coastal town in Japan and it's deleterious effects on human health, wildlife, and basic justice.

Sugar: From the makers of Half Nelson, another poetically-filmed story about down-and-outs with wasted potential in New York City. Depicts the American professional sports as the horse race that it is, where players can easily be discarded for a broken leg, and where steroid abuse (effectively filmed in a way I've never seen before) is both necessary and prohibited. Sometimes in life the possible dreams are better than the impossible ones.

Bruno: Not as good as Borat, and a bit more stagy than the previous film, but its look at American superficiality and mindless, contradictory homophobia is pretty funny throughout.

500 Days of Summer: Only at the end of this movie do we realize that Summer isn't a villain or a heartless monster. Levitt's character was too preoccupied with himself (his boring, immature self) and too in love with love to spend any time actually getting to know or love Summer. Summer knew this all along and never pretended to offer anything more than friendship. By breaking his childish heart, she provides the sturdiest foundation for his character development. Only at the end does he--and we, through his eyes--see reality as it truly is instead of through the blurred filters of epic romantic comedy. An original story, even if the direction and screenplay have some serious flaws.

An Education: A well-made coming-of-age story (based on a memoir) that provides a conflict between the easy, fun, carefree life and the world of hard work and organization. It's really too specific and on too small a scale to be very memorable or important, though there's nothing particularly wrong with it, either.

Up in the Air: I'm not really sure why people were so taken with this film. The time-sensitive, attention-grabbing scenes of layoffs and economic recession don't really jibe with the main plot, and it's obvious that they were overemphasized later in the film's development as they became more timely. The main story is a predictable, pat set-up: George Clooney is presented as a strong, modern man who has all the answers, but his life philosophy--which involves avoiding all relationships, emotion, and real responsibility in favor of the latest technologies--is obviously destined for failure from the very beginning. When he finally realizes that sometimes pausing for a moment of human tenderness and connection can be a good thing--perhaps the very best thing--is anyone in the audience really surprised? Was anybody really nodding along with his speeches about sharks and severing ties in the beginning of the film? Did anybody really learn anything they didn't already know, or do people just like this film because it reaffirms something they unthinkingly knew all along? The film's quirks were obnoxious, and George Clooney's acting was much better in Michael Clayton, which examined somewhat similar themes a much more exceptional way.

Star Trek: Fun, involving, and original, but really nothing too special, and it never seemed very realistic.

Coraline: Eye-popping stop-motion animation, spectacular set pieces, clever touches, hilarious characters, and moments of genuine horror. Unfortunately, some of the voice acting is weak, and the plot--about a girl who must choose between the doldrums and disappointments of reality and the sinister illusion of utopia--is somewhat jumbled and unconvincing.

Inglourious Basterds: Man, I don't even know what to say about this movie anymore. Some of it I loved. Some of it I despised. Some of it was brilliantly orchestrated. Some of it was self-indulgent and distracting. I think its intent is interesting, and yet I disagree with it. Maybe I'd like it better a second time, or maybe I'd just hate it more.

Me and Orson Welles: You've seen it all before in a dozen similar movies, but at least it's watchable and fun. It comes close to achieving greatness, but it cuts itself short. Two important complexities are missing. First, the movie assumes we already know how brilliant Orson Welles was, and so it spends a lot of time highlighting his flaws without ever effectively showing us just what was so brilliant about his genius. Second, it sets up the talented Claire Danes as a smart woman willing to prostitute herself to succeed, but it never really reflects on the seriousness of that.

The Road: Viggo Mortenson is good, and the book it's based on is beautiful, but the movie's oddly unengaging and the kid can't act.

Watchmen: About the best film that could've been made from the source material, which is to say that the source material is much too expansive to really suit any filmed adaptation, regardless of length. The art direction is good, the casting is mostly appropriate, the violence is cool, the soundtrack is evocative, but I can understand how someone who hasn't read the graphic novel would have no idea what the hell was happening.

District 9: File this with Up in the Air under movies with obvious yet overly preachy lessons. Apartheid is bad. Killing babies is bad. Being ignorant and racist is bad. It's 2009. How many people don't know this already?

Avatar: The last twenty minutes or so are great, but the rest is tedious, calling attention to itself and never really convincing the viewer that it's reality. The acting, except Zoe Saldana, is dreadful. The plot is the same old predictable Chosen One/Messiah parable. The screenplay is awful--it's a couple hundred years into the future, but everyone talks like it's 1998 (eternal literature is written in language that never sounds dated; that's why Burgess made up the Nadsat argot in A Clockwork Orange, because he feared that if he just used normal slang then the future would seem awfully dated after a few years... how is Avatar, with all its annoying slang, going to sound in ten years?). All the characters are caricatures, so it achieves the impressive feat of being offensive from all angles--from a leftist viewpoint, I'm offended that the Na'vi's chosen hero, who they all bow down to, is a white earthling who delivers a rousing speech in his own language instead of theirs (which, clearly, is only done for our benefit, since he can speak their language perfectly fine)--I guess the Na'vi were just a little too primitive to produce their own Messiah. Even from a conservative viewpoint, we see the military, the American government, and American business as wholly evil, capable only of atrocities, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And everyone says, screw that, it was visually captivating! He created such beautiful sights out of nothing! That's never been done before! First off, I wasn't that captivated. Second off, yes it has--Pinocchio was more visually rich, created out of "nothing." Coraline was more eye-poppingly interesting. Beowulf used 3D IMAX technology in a more stirring way, even if it didn't look as realistic. Screw Avatar.

A Serious Man: For me, this was like watching a foreign film without subtitles. A chore to watch, as I constantly felt that everything was going over my head. Is the only lesson "God works in mysterious ways," or is there more? Is that nihilistic, depressing lesson really worth sitting through?

Zombieland: The picture that effectively killed the zombie movie trend. Not a single joke that hasn't been done before in better films. The set design and direction is extremely fake, and Jesse Whatshisface comes across as an unattractive, unfunny imitation of Michael Cera. Just watch Shaun of the Dead instead.

Angels & Demons: It's completely ridiculous from beginning to end, but it's really not so bad. Sometimes making a pizza out of a piece of bread, some tomato sauce, and a piece of sliced cheese and throwing it in the microwave is just what you're craving, you know?

The Soloist: Melodrama.

2012: OMG, I would have loved this movie when I was nine! The end of the world is choreographed specifically for John Cusack's viewing pleasure. For someone lucky enough to narrowly escape imminent, catastrophic death three dozen times, you'd think he'd get better roles. My favorite moments: the majority of the world's population is eliminated (think September 11 times five hundred million), everyone cries for a couple minutes, and then everyone's emotions are back to normal, with ample one-liners; at the very end of the movie, having seen the destruction of America, Brazil, India, China, Russia, and key points in Europe, the scientists realize that Africa has remained completely unscathed. Throughout everything, not one person bothered to check on Africa. Figures.

My Bloody Valentine 3D: Some movie tickets should come with mail-in rebates. It did have the greatest tagline of the year, though: "Because nothing says 'date movie' like a 3D ride to Hell."

Escape from reality, but into what? Eight movies about children's imagination.

Albert Lamorisse's most enduring legacy may be his development of the game of world domination, Risk, in 1957. But almost as well-known is his 1956 short, mostly silent film Le Ballon rouge, which won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay--the only time a short or a dialogue-free picture has ever won in competition with a feature film. The Criterion Collection released the short on a disc that also featured Crin-Blanc, Cheval Sauvage, a 1953 short by Lamorisse that is an interesting and perhaps depressing companion piece to the more well-known movie.

Both movies feature young boys who are cute, persistent, lonely, and innocent who form intimate bonds with non-human and likewise innocent friends against a backdrop of an insensitive and violent world.

In White Mane, (Crin-Blanc), young Folco (Alain Emery) is bathed in soft, radiant light, dressed in unblemished white despite his time spent fishing in the swamps of southeastern France, with cherubic blond hair, clean features, and a face betraying the calm and wisdom of many decades. From afar he watches the roping of White Mane, a vibrant all-white stallion whose strength and determination have made him the leader of his herd. The local ranchers--soiled, grizzled, loud, and harsh--have decided to tame his wildness, to make him submit to their ownership and authority, to crush his freedom and exploit his strength. To their chagrin, he defeats them and escapes. Several attempts fail, and a swearing ranger offers him up to hell in frustration. Folco, watching their struggles and in admiration of the horse, asks if he can now have the horse since they have given up, and they condescendingly explain that he could certainly have the wild beast if he could ever achieve the impossible task of catching it.

Small, harmless Folco armed only with a fishing net, a rope, and his implacable will manages to rope the curious stallion. White Mane cuts loose, racing at breakneck speeds through the watery marshes. Folco holds tight. He is dragged through the mud. His desire to be with the horse is greater than his humiliation, pain, or fear. He must prove himself of the utmost determination in order to gain the horse's respect. White Mane slows, halts, and glances back. This tiny, gentle creature, now slathered in mud but still gripping the rope, doesn't want to whip, conquer, exploit, or abuse him. He merely wants friendship, love, closeness. The bond is formed.

When White Mane suffers an injury from a competitive horse after returning to his herd, he seeks the boy's help. Folco gently bathes his hooves and uses his own clothing to bandage the bleeding wounds. Folco proves himself the best friend out of people and horses.

But men do not keep promises and they are not comfortable with being outshone. The ranchers return, and forgetting that they gave the rights to the horse to Folco, they attempt to take back the seemingly tamed animal. They use their greater size, numbers, strength, and weapons to intimidate the boy, cursing at him and threatening his life. Our two heroes, equally armed with their loving bond, their purity, their resilience, and their strength, flee across the beautiful, sun-bleached dunes of Camargue until they are blocked by the shores of the Mediterranean. Trapped between humanity at its evilest and nature at its most infinite and frightening, the film reaches its climax.

I'll return to the ending later. First, back to The Red Balloon. The plot is simpler: Pascal (Lamorisse's own son) discovers a large red balloon on the streets of Ménilmontant in Paris. The balloon is slightly out of reach at first, but he coaxes it to come to him and it does. Gradually it becomes clear that the balloon behaves in ways counter-intuitive to normal physics, that it, in fact, seems to have its own will and emotions. The boy and the balloon stroll together hand in hand, drawing wonder, envy, confusion, and irritation from passers-by. The relationship is not without obstacles. Soon a trolley conductor refuses to let the balloon board, and the boy walks with it in solidarity. The balloon's desire to be with the boy in the classroom elicits alarm from the teacher, commotion from the classmates, and anger from the principal. Despite adversity, they stick together. But soon the mob becomes unavoidable, society and the corruption it brings closes in, and an army of envy and prejudice rises up against the pair. A band of roaring bullies chases the frantic couple through dirty alleys and murders the balloon in a field of dirt.

But then the reversal happens: balloons of all colors from all across Paris are awakened by the unjust sacrifice and run to Pascal's aid. He grabs on and the enormous, colorful cluster ascends him to the heavens. As the small child floats precariously above the city, the film ends triumphantly.

At the end of White Mane, the horse plunges into the crashing waves of the sea with the boy holding tight. The ranchers know better and, finally expressing some sensibility and caring or perhaps just lying again, yell for the boy to turn back, that their current path in the treacherous deep can bring only death. As the horse and boy disappear into the waves, the storytelling narrator optimistically explains that the horse did not turn back and that the boy held on trustingly and that they eventually reached the "wonderful place where men and horses live as friends, always."

When you think of cluster balloon flights into the stratosphere, you tend to imagine Larry Walters, who in 1982 ascended three miles into the sky over San Pedro, California, in a lawn chair attached to 42 helium-filled balloons. His story is an oft-repeated anecdote about achieving the impossible, reaching your dreams, and overcoming human limitations like fear and gravity. Tellers of the anecdote tend not to mention that he shot himself in the heart in 1993 at the age of 44.

Lamorisse's films offer no practical outlet to his child protagonists. His boys are isolated, silent, unwatched. Pascal's parents, siblings, and nannies are completely absent, and while Folco has a family, the father is old and tired and unable to keep up and the brother is merely a baby. Their only friends are sentient, non-human beings that seem to be sent from heaven, guardian angels that offer protection and the promise of a safer haven--whether high in the sky or on the other side of the sea--that does not exist outside of the fantastical worlds of the films. Maybe the balloons will set him down gently in some nice courtyard. Maybe there really is an island with an equestrian utopia in the waters south of France. But more than likely the kids are about to die. In the world of Lamorisse, society grows increasingly bleak and destructive with time and experience. Children may be born with a tabula rasa, but their relationships with other humans quickly fill that slate with the ugliest ideas. The only way to escape corruption is to escape society altogether, which Lamorisse presents as a transcendent choice.

It's odd that this dark lesson is presented in movies with such beautiful settings, soaring scores, artful cinematography, and cute children. I find it unfair not to allow the protagonists any realistic escape, but Lamorisse is of course not alone in his belief that angelic children cannot escape harsh reality except through death.

In Guillermo del Toro's 2006 El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is torn between two similar worlds: the brutal reality of Franco's post-Civil War Spain and the not-necessarily-true fantasies of her fairy tale books. The adults in her life--her pregnant mother (Ariadna Gil), her army stepfather (Sergi López), her family's housekeeper (Maribel Verdú)--tell her she's too old for make believe, that she should put down her books and face the real world, that such nonsense is only for silly children. These adults, of course, are miserable. Her mother is widowed, lonely, "sick with baby" in a troublesome pregnancy, and married to a man who belittles her and doesn't particularly care for her except for the fruit of her womb, which will provide him with a male heir. Her stepfather, the vicious and single-minded captain of an army outpost in the Guadarrama mountain range, is almost pitiful in his obsessive need to carry on his legacy through a son. And Mercedes the housekeeper, whose brother is one of the Maqui guerrillas fighting against fascism in the forest, is constantly in fear for her own life (she's a spy in the captain's household) and those of her comrades.

The stepfather tortures, kills, and fumes, the housekeeper sneaks and prays and plots, and the mother collapses into a bloody, sedated fever. Ofelia remains unexposed to most of the violence and despair, but as she wanders her new house and its strange surroundings, escaping into her own adventurous imagination, her fantasies exhibit parallels to the violence around her. To prove her legacy as the daughter of an ancient underworld king, she must fulfill three tasks. First, she must destroy the fat, greedy toad that is choking the roots of a once illustrious fig tree (which may have to do with fascist choking the life and culture of beautiful Spain). Next, she must retrieve a dagger from the lair of a horrifying, child-eating monster who sits before a sumptuous banquet (which visually matches a scene of the horrifying, child-killing stepfather, sitting before a crowded dinner table at a party while discussing a new, very strict rationing program he is going to institute in town).

The world of the adults and Ofelia's world remain physically separate (though thematically similar) until the third task, when she is ordered by the eerie faun (Doug Jones) to kidnap her baby brother and take him into the ancient, dangerous labyrinth. Her mother has died. Her stepfather has gone on a murderous rampage. The housekeeper has been discovered and captured by the army. All hope for the real world has evaporated. Ofelia, in hot pursuit by her bloody and poisoned stepfather, steals the heir and flees to the center of the maze, where the faun presents the dagger and explains that the blood of the innocent infant (just a tiny bit!) must be spilled in order to unlock her magical kingdom. Only by sacrificing two drops of blood can she return to her ancient throne as princess of the underworld.

She hesitates. She won't let an innocent baby be harmed. The faun demands: cut the baby and be saved by magic or refuse and return to reality. Ofelia grows up. Fairy tales are for children, and now she must be adult enough to protect the baby. Sometimes, too, fairy tales can be just as ugly as reality. She refuses. Her stepfather catches her and kills her. But as her blood spills into the puddle of rainwater, an illuminated epilogue with a cheery faun and her mother and father resplendently adorned atop luxurious thrones explains that the final task was to sacrifice herself instead of the innocent. As her real body bleeds to death in the dark rain, her fantasy body is crowned and welcomed home, and so the film effectively combines a range of interpretations suitable for both those who care to believe in the redemptive power of imagination and those who see only the evil of the physical world, with an interesting middle range for those who realize that even in fairy tales horrible things can happen and that even on our miserable earth a noble deed such a sister selflessly protecting her brother can occur.

I suspect Pan's Labyrinth was to some degree inspired by Victor Erice's 1973 El espíritu de la colmena. In The Spirit of the Beehive, a young girl (Ana Torrent) in Franco's 1940s Spain is introduced to fantasy, death, disappointment, and fear. Ana's source of inspiration isn't a fairy tale book but a dubbed showing of Frankenstein, in which a pitiful but deadly monster mindlessly kills an innocent girl before being hunted and killed himself. The film, it seems, introduces her to the concept of death, and she begs her slightly older sister to explain to her what dying is all about. Her sister mischievously avoids the questions, insisting that nobody really dies in movies and filling her head with magical tricks she can use to summon the monster, who according to her lives in an abandoned building outside of town.

The days pass. Ana's father is cold and brooding and possibly connected to the Falangists. Ana's mother is miles away in her own romantic fantasies. Ana's sister continues to mess with Ana's mind, at one point pretending to be killed in a prank that terrifies the girl and brings her closer to a conception of death as the ultimate fate for everyone.

Eventually she comes face to face with death. While playing around the building that Frankenstein supposedly lives in, she meets a fugitive republic soldier who has been injured. She brings him food, a watch, a coat, and other gifts. When the watch she'd stolen from her father suddenly returns to his possession, she begins to worry. Returning to Frankenstein's house, she finds only blood, bullet holes, and her father, who has secretly followed her in order to reprimand her assistance to "the enemy." Deeply disturbed, Ana flees into the forest. She sleeps under the moon and communes with the ghost of Frankenstein. Eventually she's found and brought back home--mute, shaken, forever changed, but at least alive. Without asking for it, Ana has been forced into adulthood, into her coming of age which acknowledges the inevitability of death. The meditative, largely silent film does not end with complete despair, however. Ana still retains her hope and her sense of wondrous possibility as she calls out once more to the ghost.

Not all movies with the theme of childhood escape are so death-centric. Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which was later released by Disney's Pixar as Spirited Away helping it to become the largest grossing non-American film of all time, depicts an escape into fantasy land that results not in death or brutal despair but uplifting enlightenment. I won't go into the plot because I think it's mostly nonsensical, with illogical occurrences spinning widely out of control, unexpected obstacles springing from nowhere and just as unexpected solutions being presented just in time. In the end, a supposedly sullen, stupid, and whiny young girl is transformed into a courageous, caring, and vibrant young woman. But I don't think the film, however captivating its animation, is effective. In the too brief exposition we get at the beginning, Chihiro doesn't seem exceptionally whiny or rotten or stupid, though plenty of the ugly adults around her tell her so, so any character development of a character whose real world existence is only loosely elaborated upon is, well, minimal. The movie is a lot like Henry Selick's 2009 Coraline, which at least did a better job of delineating the title character's flaws, strengths, and desires even if the fantastical plot lacked parameters and structure. (And, again, eye-popping animation.)

And then there's Spike Jonze's 2009 Where the Wild Things Are, which may be the only film where the protagonist willingly rejects the lonely world of unreality. Based on Maurice Sendak's popular picture book, the film stars the talented Max Records as Max, a lonely, imaginative kid who's being abandoned by all those he loves. His friends, though never specifically mentioned, bail out on him to hang out with newer, cooler friends. His father, whether through death or divorce, exits the picture. And at the beginning of the film, his teenage sister--his best friend--abandons him for a boyfriend and cool kids with a car. Sad and angry, Max marches his snow-wet boots into his sister's room and wreaks havoc, specifically destroying not her CDs or her cool new things but the loving gift he once gave to her, the symbol of their bond. If he can't have it perfectly, unceasingly, at all times, whenever he needs it, he doesn't want their friendship at all, doesn't want even to remember that it ever existed. He destroys the gift, but he instantly regrets it. As strong and independent as his rage might make him at moments, he needs the love of others, however frangible.

When his exhausted, lonely mother (Caroline Keener) invites home a new potential boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), the last straw is broken. Max erupts into an animalistic rage and flees to the forest (it's always the forest where magic happens, any kid can tell you), where he discovers a boat and sails off to the land of the Wild Things. Jonze handles the camera artfully, allowing more of the imaginary world to seamlessly blossom with each cut. There needn't be any logic, order, or believability because we realize that the world exists entirely within Max's mind. When the Wild Things speak, they are aspects of Max's conscience speaking to other parts of his subconscious, trying to reason out solutions to his problems, trying to figure out why the world is so messed up. In reality, we can picture Max sitting under a tree, playing with sticks, tossing pine cones, kicking the dirt, and talking to himself.

In the movie, however, we see the world of the Wild Things, overgrown, impulsive beasts who say the first thing that pops into their monstrous heads. Insecurity, anger, and the demand for unrequited love boil over. When he makes mistakes, people should still be able to love him. Even if he's not all that special, people shouldn't just abandon him. When people make promises, they should keep them. His nagging doubts and most troubling fears are diced and strewn.

Amongst the Wild Things, Max is elected king. With the new responsibility, he attempts to impose his version of utopia, a world of perfect, eternal love where nobody foreign and unpredictable can enter and nobody can ever leave, where everyone sleeps in one jumbled pile at night, where fun is a requirement, and where friendship is an unbreakable commitment. This works only for a few hours, and soon the messiness and complications of reality start to break through. Utopia means nowhere, and no such perfect world exists. People make mistakes. People grow apart. People need space. Sometimes people can't forgive. Sometimes new people enter the picture who may be scary at first but aren't always bad.

In the end, Max bids farewell to his island kingdom and returns to his home, where his relieved mother feeds him chocolate cake and, in a touching moment, falls asleep smiling at him at the kitchen table. Racked with anxiety by his disappearance, she can finally rest now that her baby is home. In a perfect world, they'd stay up talking and playing and eating cake all night, but in the real world she's exhausted and all she can offer right now is a smile, the unspoken fact that she'll always love him, and a piece of cake. And, in the end, maybe that's better than any imaginary world.

A powerfully effective, emotionally raw, well-acted, and lovingly filmed movie, Where the Wild Things Are was my favorite picture of 2009, having affected me in a manner deeper and more truthfully than most things in my life, along the same lines as In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (which also has similar themes to this blog).

I'll close with Le voyage du balloon rouge, a 2008 feature film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a leader of the New Taiwanese cinema who shot this film in France. Flight of the Red Balloon is not a remake of The Red Balloon; in the first few minutes, the short film is specifically referenced and explained. The red balloon has only a few cameo appearances, there is no mob of angry bullies, and in the end the young boy (Simon Iteanu) isn't whisked away to his imminent suicide. At the very most, Hou's film is a homage. The reflective, real-time film, with mesmerizingly slow scenes where nothing really happens yet emotions are evoked (in my favorite scene, a blind man tunes a piano--a toneless, non-melodic plucking that becomes its own atmospheric score--while the exhausted mother (Juliette Binoche) negotiates a divorce on the phone and Simon, talking to his sister about video games, tries to focus on the positive, with the long scene culminating in the mother drawing herself out of her anxiety to smile at her son, reminding him that she loves him--a scene in which possibly nothing or possibly everything happens all at once as the camera meanders around), is perhaps about a lot of possible things or perhaps about nothing at all. The same dichotomy between the purity of escapist imagination and the frustration of reality is present--here, the bleakness of reality is only a divorce, an obnoxious roommate, stress from work, and so forth (no torture or war crimes, for a change). What's important, though, is that even though the real world isn't always pretty, it's no cause for suicide. Unlike Lamorisse's unsupervised loner, Simon has a mother, a nanny, neighbors, and a sister who love him and care about him. He may be Pascal's spiritual descendant--a good kid who has inherited sadness--but he's not going to be chased through alleys or dangerously dangled miles above the Paris streets. And just knowing that is a powerful calmative.

Le balloon rouge
d/w: Albert Lamorisse
(Pascal Lamorisse)
7/10
TSPDT? #432

Crin-Blanc, Cheval Sauvage
d/w: Albert Lamorisse
(Alain Emery)
7/10

El Laberinto del Fauno
d/w: Guillermo del Toro
(Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú)
9/10
TSPDT? #739

El espíritu de la colmena
d/w: Victor Erice
(Ana Torrent, Teresa Gimpera)
8/10
TSPDT? #204

Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi
d/w: Hayao Miyazaki
(Rumi Hîragi, Mari Natsuki)
6/10
TSPDT? #495

Coraline
d/w: Henry Selick
(Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Keith David)
7/10

Where the Wild Things Are
d: Spike Jonze w: Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers
(Max Records, Catherine Keener, James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara)
10/10

Le voyage du balloon rouge
d: Hou Hsiao-Hsien w: Hao Hsiao-Hsien, François Margolin
(Simon Iteanu, Fang Song, Juliette Binoche)
9/10

Movie Review: To Be or Not to Be (1942)

Inglourious Basterds got its kicks out of rewriting history, attempting to give viewers the cathartic release that reality denied them: Hitler burning, sooner rather than later, in a well-plotted holocaust of his own. In truth, however, the war went on much too long, Hitler exacted a wide-spread and long-lasting influence, and his death like so many others came at his own hand, excusing him from justice and revenge. Tarantino's mission may be well-intentioned, but because it bears no semblance to history and because it doesn't have any practical application to current events, the triumphant release the film's finale may release in us is at best fleeting. I say "us" meaning twentysomething, non-Jewish, American kids who have in no way been directly affected by Adolph Hitler's atrocities in Europe since I think that's the target audience of the film. I have yet to read any responses to the film from people who actually survived the death camps over sixty years ago.

Recently I came across Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be, a film which I assume exerted some influence over the writing of Tarantino's last picture. Both involve resistance groups staging attacks against occupying Nazis while Hitler enjoys a visit to the local theater. Both involve our valiant yet buffoonish heroes sporting silly disguises while improvising taut dialogues with somewhat more clever enemies. Both comfortably assume that the Nazis will be outwitted by the end. The difference between To Be or Not to Be and Inglourious Basterds, though, is that the former film was made at a time when history was actually being written rather than rewritten. In 1942, Hitler's men actually were in Poland, actors and Jews and unhappy Poles actually were being oppressed and killed, the uprising was in effect and could use support of any kind, and the final outcome was still several years to come. In a historical context, To Be or Not to Be really had "something at stake," a crucial element of storytelling according to any writing workshop instructor. That Lubitsch swore by an Allied victory with such certainty was a move of uplifting patriotism.

But even aside from its context, the film is incredible--suspenseful, hilarious, and moving in equal parts. The movie begins with a stage actor portraying Hitler (Tom Dugan) effetely heiling himself after being "Heil Hitler"ed by so many of his men. It's a perfectly-delivered bit of improvisation from the bit actor, but it's roundly attacked by his director Dobosh (Charles Halton), who wants no humor in a serious film about such a grave subject. When Lubitsch's film was released, it too was apparently attacked for making light of the War, but Dobosh and the contemporary audiences seem not to realize the intense power that humor can have in providing a stark contrast to more serious moments. Adding humor to a film emphasizes just how bleak the moments without humor--the non-humor--are. With just one tone, the whole film risks slipping into melodrama.

So when a Jewish actor, having seen Warsaw destroyed, his play censored, and his neighbors killed, quotes the spat-upon Jewish Shylock of The Merchant of Venice to his friend ("If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"), the moment comes across as raw and sincere rather than laughable and trite. We've already roared at Shakespeare and bad acting; we needn't laugh at a man's expression of grief, outrage, and confusion.

To Be or Not to Be is a fine film, well acted by Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Stanley Ridges, and Sig Ruman, wittily directed, fast-paced, and sharply written by Edwin Justus Mayer. A story of intrigue and disguise, it combines a standard love triangle with a thrilling tale of political uprising and assassination. The revenge of a spurned and humiliated lover surrenders to revenge against an occupying invader, and the inflated arrogance of the cuckold proves the most valuable weapon against the arrogance of the enemy leaders. Twists in one plot influence events in the other, and the audience is left always guessing what tricks will be needed for the next narrow escape and--more importantly--always hoping that the narrow escape will be successful. The characters are broad and silly yet always convincing, and in the course of the film their fortunes earned a place close to my heart.

To Be or Not to Be was dismissed in its own time and is largely forgotten today, but it's a terrific comedy and an important installment in World War II cinema. It ranks #72 on the TSPDT? list.

To Be or Not to Be
d: Ernst Lubitsch w: Edwin Justus Mayer
(Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Stanley Ridges)
10/10

WTF, MODERN WORLD.

This may be the most horrifying thing I've ever seen: a prescription drug that helps treat "hypotrichonosis," commonly known as "inadequate eye lashes." I'm not sure what standards said inadequacy will be judged by (I mean, I suppose having no eyelashes at all could pose a problem of some sort, I guess), but now this expensive cosmetic prescription drug, with all of its side effects associated with prescription drugs, is being touted by Brooke Shields and featured in television and Internet advertisements. That's as insane as getting an operation to make your skin whiter. Or injecting botulism into your face.

Apparently, the possible side effects include irreversible eyelid skin darkening (glamorous!), itchy red eyes (sexy!), and a rare condition that would change your eyes--whether they be naturally brown, green, or blue--to a permanent dark brown (throw away those color contacts!).

America, please stop searching for things to waste money on.

Looking back on a decade in the Internet--how the World Wide Web has affected me

I entered the Internet World over a decade ago, on March 23, 1999.

It was not the first time I had set foot in the World Wide Web that was the topic of so much discussion then. I had dabbled at school and at friends' homes, but never for more than brief periods. In early 1996, for example, was the first time I ever saw pornography on a computer screen, standing around a desk in a living room dimmed by drawn blinds beside two boys with a lhasa apso frantically trying to sniff my asshole through my pants. It was suggested in less precise terminology that I imagine the small, hyperactive dog were a woman giving me a rimjob, but I no more wanted to imagine that than I wanted to see the pyramid of faceless vaginas formed by half a dozen nude women lying on top of each other, legs spread.

I'd seen the Internet before. I'd been captivated by the stream of stupid but live remarks that people across the world could post in a chat room. I'd already learned the importance of typing "a/s/l?" when you enter one, though I hadn't quite figured out why the answers to such questions were really necessary.

On my fourteenth birthday, however, with eighth grade drawing to a close, I became a badge-carrying member, and my new official name was El-Queso@webtv.net. My mom had gifted me with a WebTV, a VCR-shaped box that would broadcast a simplified version of the Internet through my bedroom television. It had a small, wireless keyboard that I could only hunt and peck at, and it droned ragtime midis that I actually somewhat enjoyed. The load time was atrocious and the connection would sever anytime the phone rang, but it was the Internet. I finally had the Internet at my disposal. All those alluring URLs that were fashionably plastered on everything back then--www.pepsi.com, www.burgerking.com, www.nick.com--were finally mine to consume. All those, of course, turned out quite dull, but I had also eagerly anticipated IMDb--something I had read about in a section of the Yellow Pages dedicated to surfing the web--and though it wasn't quite the dreamland I anticipated it to be, it's still a website I visit daily even after ten years. I can't say that about any other webpage.

My mom had purchased me the WebTV to help with my schoolwork. It did, of course. My first productive use of the Internet was to research background information for a paper on To Kill a Mockingbird. I learned that Braxton Bragg Underwood, Maycomb's newspaperman, was named for the old typewriter that Harper Lee wrote on, a gift from her father. That had impressed my teacher, who had grown accustomed to giving me less than stellar grades when previous research assignments (define "Moral Majority," define "Big Brother") proved too difficult to complete merely by hunting through indexes at the Kempsville Library.

Research is still a major part of my Internet life. I spent today trying to hunt down literature from the Falkland Islands (there isn't any, except for some short, jingoistic poems), Easter Island (there's none, and the rongorongo glyphs of the Rapanui remain one of the last undecipherable languages, assuming they are in fact a language), the Galapagos Islands (there's nothing native, but a penniless Herman Melville did write a fiction-esque novella about the "Encantadas," which he considered brutal and hellish), Svalbard (in 2007, British novelist Georgina Harding wrote a novel about the Arctic island, called The Solitude of Thomas Cane), and the North Pole (in 1912 Matthew A. Henson published a short memoir titled A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, which (aside from the title) is controversial for two reasons: 1) his associate Robert Peary accused him of being merely a servant and stealing glory from what was rightly his discovery, and 2) some researchers today suspect that Peary (nor Henson) never actually made it to the pole).

But I digress... which is a substantial, though unfortunate, habit that the Internet has accustomed me to: digression. How easy it is to lose oneself in the endless labyrinth of links. One way to kill a few hours is to follow an endless trail of information through Wikipedia. When I'm feeling less studious I use IMDb (trivia for Spider-Man 2! goofs from Pulp Fiction! quotations from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind! an entire message board of jokes about I Know Who Killed Me!).

I even invented my own game that's something like Six Degrees of Wikipedia. Here's how to play. Pre-select a topic--let's make it Patrick Swayze. Go to the Wikipedia homepage. Without typing anything into the search bar, follow the available links until you get to the entry about Patrick Swayze.

Here goes: Nazi Germany--Adolf Hitler--Valkyrie--Tom Cruise--Minority Report--Academy Award--Academy Award for Best Original Song--Dirty Dancing--Patrick Swayze. I'd get a score of 8. Can you do it in less?

I'm sure I wasn't the first person to think of this game. Aside from being an endless distraction that merely bankrupted my attention span, the Internet has also given me firm proof that we are never alone in the world, that most of what we do, when compared on a global scale, is never truly unique, no matter how eccentric or innovative. That can be a disheartening thought--imagine having a great idea for an invention or a story or a website, then searching for similar results on Google and discovering that it's already been done. Almost everything has already been done. Even nonsense phrases have often been said before.

(There's another game--which I didn't invent--that involves typing an unusual search phrase into Google and trying to get one--only one!--search result. I think I've only succeeded once, unless you count "flim flam creature," which is on multiple webpages all citing the exact same quotation. Now that I've typed "flim flam creature," however, it'll be on two separate webpages, which alludes to the evanescent nature of the "googlewhack"--as soon as it's discovered, it ceases to be a rare and hidden creature. I'm still wondering why anyone other than me would ever utter "flim flam creature" other than to affectionately describe my boyfriend.)

It's not always disheartening, though. Sometimes it's very important to realize that we're not alone. It prevents us from feelings of insanity and hopelessness. Since before I was forming memories, I've been a bed rocker. Most of my life I rocked myself to sleep, lying on my back, with my left leg flat, my right leg bent, and my right foot flat on the bed controlling much of the sway. Since I started sharing my bed I've learned to eliminate it; though it used to be impossible, I can now fall asleep without rocking. Sometimes I still do it unconsciously in my sleep, which has frightened unaware boyfriends. It's an embarrassing admission, and for most of my life I considered it a result of some freakish developmental disorder or lurking mental impairment. I still don't know what its etiology is, but I know that it has a name--Rhythmic Movement Disorder, one of several Stereotypic Movement Disorders--and I know that many normal adults share the exact same experience with me. It's nothing to be afraid of.

When we were at the store purchasing the WebTV, the teenage clerk made a half-serious reference to my mother about installing certain security measures on the box that would prevent me from seeing adult material. My mother, trusting in my maturity, assured him that she needn't worry about me doing things I shouldn't be doing, and the clerk--knowing the habits of teenage boys better than my mother apparently did--assured her that she shouldn't be so sure. He was right, but my mom never bothered trying to figure out the privacy measures, instead eliciting my promise that I wouldn't do anything illicit.

That first night, being the fourteen-year-old that I was, I couldn't wait to get my hands on pornography. I had seen pornography before--my brother had found magazines in dumpsters, had stolen magazines from stores, had ordered catalogs from 1-800 numbers, had hijacked the cable box into unscrambling the Playboy channel--but I had never seen the kind of pornography that really interested me. The kind that didn't have any women.

In those first days in March I had a crucial mystery to unravel: I had to determine once and for all why I was more interested in boys and penises than girls and vaginas. I'd been captivated by them since third grade when I realized that Travis, who rode my school bus, was more than just the funniest storyteller. I had tried to unlock the reason Stand By Me made me so sad (it was because I wanted so desperately to hug Wil Wheaton and tell him he'd be okay). I had rationalized why I skipped the parts of my brother's magazine that had just huge-breasted women and went straight for the parts that had men fondling those erections: I merely wanted to compare myself to those men, nothing more! When a boy in my theater class described being sweaty and naked beneath a toga during a performance, I wasn't quite sure why my crystal clear images of his description horrified me so--but I knew that they horrified me. They depressed me utterly. That happened right before Christmas in 1997, and in lay in my dark room staring at the ceiling and crying. Something was wrong. My popularity had been steadily declining for some time, and I knew it had something to do with me being different from other boys, but I had no idea why and the fact that I masturbated to pictures of Leonardo Dicaprio from Titanic didn't quite clue me in.

I knew what "gay" was. It was an insult. I'd had it directed at me (mostly from my brother), and I had directed it at others (one popular game in third grade was to place your hand on a distracted boy's shoulder and quickly start counting out loud; the number you were able to reach before he violently shrugged you off was the percentage of gay he was). It wasn't something that anyone was, any more than people were "dumbasses" or "buttholes." I would no sooner admit to being gay than to confess that, yes, I was an idiot and a dork and I smelled awful.

But then why was I going to websites that openly and proudly announced that they held gay content? Why was I hesitantly violating the law by clicking the link that said "Yes, I am over 18"? (I tried clicking the "No" once and ended up on Disney's website. I quickly backtracked and chose the dirty path.) Why did I know what a "twink" was when I'd never heard it used by anyone in speech?

In those early days of Internet I had to admit--if only to myself--that I was gay. I mildly fought it off at first--refusing to continue my enrollment in theater classes despite loving theater classes--but soon acknowledged that there wasn't much I could do about it. As cool as they could be, I simply didn't want to date girls. And here's where the small world of the Internet came in handy--though I couldn't discover many gay kids at my high school (the ones who were most frequently labeled as gay were also the least cool and the most obnoxious), I could find them on the Internet. I essentially had no friends in real life (except for a boy at my bus stop who, I later learned, was also gay and had a crush on me), but in the cyber world I frequented a chat room for gay teens. I could openly express my thoughts. I could be honest about myself. I even had a boyfriend from upstate New York named travis227, who I shared affection with by hugging him like this: ((((((((((((((travis))))))))))))))).

Looking back I realize that Travis was probably a middle aged married man. My suspicion of that was the reason I broke up with him after a few months. In either case he was probably a lot uglier than the blond soccer player he made himself out to be. Other friends I knew were real, including a handsome older boy in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, who assured me that--despite my present loneliness--one day we could "fuck like rabbits." Our friendship went beyond lewd expressions of sexual desire--but it was important to know that one day I could have someone in my life, even if it meant moving from the barren queer-wastelands of Virginia Beach to the paradise of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, where there was someone else like me.

The Internet taught me to be skeptical and honest. My first night in a chatroom I talked extensively with a stripper from Atlanta who had huge breasts and who had just been beaten by her drunken husband. I was a twenty-nine-year-old film critic who wrote for The Virginian Pilot and was currently working on a column about my Oscar predictions. When I became a regular in a movie trivia chatroom and other regulars started asking about the man behind the El-Queso nick, I adopted the life of a twenty-four-year-old furniture salesman bachelor. At that age it was difficult for me to think of occupations that twenty-four-year-olds could realistically have. Now that I'm twenty-four, I'm glad I'm not a furniture salesman. I do, however, wish that a newspaper would publish my movie reviews.

I became good friends with a woman from Queens named Margaret. She was essentially my best friend in ninth grade, and we would engage in a lot of hijinx online and on the telephone. She was the first person I came out to, technically. We were as close as two people could be on the Internet, but she thought that I was ten years older than I was. Eventually that lie became too much for me to continue handling. I severed the friendship without explanation--not a difficult thing to do on the Internet--and only later, after panicked emails from her, did I confess my true identity, though by that point the friendship was unsalvagable. I remember her fondly and try to never let deception and lies interfere with my personal relationships.

I've broken up with a boyfriend on Myspace. I've met a boyfriend on Myspace. The first isn't worth mentioning, but the second caused six months of my life to be drastically different than they would have been otherwise without the Internet, for better or for worse. I like seeing the bright side of cause and effect, and though there was nothing disastrous about that short-lived romance, its most positive outcome was that it helped me to realize how much I preferred my present love (who was then just a beloved friend) more than all other boys.

I was on the cutting edge of the ebb and tide of Internet trends in high school and college. I started actively listening to music--and, soon after, good music--when I downloaded Napster. Coming from a poor family, I couldn't have listened to much music otherwise, and I already thought lowly of the radio and much of what was on MTV. After Napster, through which I was able to get the entire Elliott Smith discography (after seeing Good Will Hunting, I hopped on Audiogalaxy, which introduced me to Okkervil River, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Belle and Sebastian, Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes, and other bands I would have never heard of in 2000. I followed Audiogalaxy's collapse with KaZaa, and KaZaa with Soulseek, which is still going strong, though my qualms about stealing from artists tend to prevent me from downloading too much music these days. Now I use MySpace Music to listen to music I don't own, and that works pretty well and is legal and free.

I was on Friendster before it got so popular that the server started crashing. In September of 2003, I spent all my time on Friendster. I coined the word "fakester"--to describe a fake Friendster profile--and entered it in the Urban Dictionary. It's been voted on 816 times and was the Urban Dictionary word of the day on March 30, 2007. That's probably the one single thing I've done that's had the widest impact. "Vaginal diarrhea" hasn't had nearly has much staying power in the English lexicon (36 votes, 20 of them positive, though I think a few of those votes are from me).

I transferred to MySpace. I wrote clever things in my About Me, actively thought about what I could change my headline to, bought a camera mostly so I could take profile pictures, bragged about all the cool bands I listened to in my Music section, and befriended all the local bands. Once my profile picture was stolen by somebody in North Carolina, and I learned the simultaneous narcissistic pleasure and impositional discomfort of Single White Female syndrome.

As I've aged I've become more discerning of fads. I joined Facebook only after everyone stopped using Myspace, and only years after it became popular. I originally resisted because it only allowed college students and many of my friends weren't in college. Now it's more egalitarian, but I still think about canceling the account every so often. I'm too verbose to Tweet, and I'm too meticulous about grammar and spelling to use chatrooms. But I do have this blog, which seems to be about the only hope I have that anyone will ever read what I write, and I'm using the infinite resources of Google to improve my life--managing my money responsibly by setting up a budget spreadsheet on Google Documents, using Google Sites to promote my quest to explore and popularize world literature. I use the submissions tracker and the literary magazine database at Duotrope Digest in my quest to publish my fiction. I've watched Wikipedia grow from a poorly written pet project (my first encounter was at my college library while trying to cram the essentials of Indian history) to a massive text with the (almost always accurate) answer to just about anything. I look forward to what Google Books can do to the world of literature. I've saved tons of money by buying used things on the Internet--books and textbooks especially--rather than having to buy them new and overpriced at the store.

I've pretty much stopped watching television, and I've therefore cut off most of my exposure to advertising (I've learned to ignore most of Internet ads), which always bothered me before. I don't even have cable, which is one less bill to pay and one less time-consuming distraction to deal with. Granted I fill a lot of that distraction time with time spent browsing the Internet, but at least now I'm learning more than I would be watching repeats of "Hanging with Mr. Cooper."

The Internet has guided me toward better things--better music, more diverse books, better movies. They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? has introduced me to some great films from history and from around the world, which sure beats watching 88MM and thinking that that's quality filmmaking.

The Internet has instilled in me an obsessive quest for completeness (I can find out infinite trivial things about anything now) and listmania, and those are mixed blessings. It's probably ruined my posture and my eyesight. Rather than make me more reclusive, though, it's introduced me to more people, helped me to bridge social gaps, and allowed me to broaden my interpersonal horizons. It's made me more knowledgeable, more discerning, and more honest. It's saved me much money. And it's granted me extensive laughter by allowing me to countlessly watch the video I've posted below. Looking back on ten years of the Internet, I guess it's been a pretty good friend.