An Apology

I just wanted to take this opportunity to apologize to you, dear readers, for a personal failing. In this space, today, you were supposed to have gotten my First Impressions piece about Carlos Reygadas's Post Tenebras Lux, which I watched Tuesday night. But I am unable to deliver that piece to you because I don't feel that what I could tell you about the film would be helpful in any real sense.

Simply put, I did not connect with the movie at all.

I've reviewed films like this before, and I'm sure I could again put together a convincing piece, summarizing the plot and the film's stylistic tics, then detailing my problems with its execution. But I don't think blaming the movie for my own reaction to it would be ethical, in a critical sense, here. In this case, I'm certain that Post Tenebras Lux has merit. It has craft. It plays with ideas and the art form itself. It has received praise from several respected critics, and even I felt as though there was something worthwhile in it. But I had neither the wherewithal nor, more importantly, the desire, to ferret out what that was.

Obviously, were I being paid to write these little reviews, I would have given the film another shot. Perhaps I would have focused better or been more compelled to care. But that's not fair, either. I'm a cinephile. I love movies. I don't watch them because it's profitable to do so—it is, in fact, costly in both money and time. While a paycheck might have motivated me to give you better work, I don't think it would have changed my engagement with the film itself.

The problem, here, is me.

Oz the Great and Unfortunately Gender Politicked

After making an unsuccessful attempt to combat sleep and watch Oz the Great and Powerful last night, I managed to finish it this evening, and it left me with enough thoughts to dust off this blog and write a quick thing or two about it.

Oz is nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be, in spite all of the comparisons previously made between it and Tim Burton's abysmal Alice in Wonderland. While Alice couldn't even be bothered to make something coherent out of its zany Burtonalia and pseudopsychedelia, Oz has a fairly straight-forward, conventional story. Many of its hat-tips to the original Wizard of Oz are fun and well-considered, and the beginning chapters' black-and-white cinematography and Academy ratio are a nice, if slightly forced, homage. I could have done without a lot of the hyper-stylized visuals that accompany soon-to-be Wizard Oscar's (James Franco) time in Oz, not least because they have the effect—often encountered in overly-CGI-heavy films—of making everything seem unreal, weightless, and nonexistent to the point of taking the viewer out of the film. However, the China Girl (Joey King) character is an incredible visual effect, and whenever the film eschewed CGI vistas for small, intimate, emotional moments, I felt far more positively toward it. As with so many films, it's baggy and roughly 30 minutes too long, but it's certainly not a drudge like many others of its kind. It's a passable family entertainment, though one that doesn't quite make up for its flaws or even give itself much reason to exist.

That being said, there is one rather galling thing about the film: its take on gender politics. If you intend to watch it at some point, be advised: SPOILERS BELOW

The King of Comedy - Getting the Celebrities We Deserve

Released in 1983, Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy was a box office failure. Watching the film, even now, it's easy to see why: There is an uneasy frankness about the way Scorsese depicts his characters' obvious delusions. He lets his stalker protagonists, played by Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard, rant and ramble in long, uninterrupted, improvised takes, often keeping the camera at eye level and free from the angles and canting often associated with madness on film. There's not a lot of judgment in Scorsese's choices. He simply invites us to watch.

This matter-of-fact approach makes for tough viewing. Remember, this film came out decades before American Idol and other "reality" programs, where the fantasies of the untalented and (in some cases) plainly deluded are used as fodder for cheap laughs. At that time, viewers would have had a very different frame of reference: King was released only two years after John Hinckley Jr.'s attempted assassination of President Reagan. Hinckley himself had been a stalker, going after Jodie Foster after her appearance in an earlier Scorsese picture, 1977's Taxi Driver. It was his obsession with getting Foster's attention that led to his assassination attempt. So, if the film seems uncomfortable to watch now, it must have been unbearable then.