Thursday’s Child — Caravaggio, Poverty P*rn, and Superhero Wardrobes

Thursday’s Child is what happens when Wednesday Collective runs long or gets pushed a day. The only requirement is that it features a David Bowie song in the opening paragraph. Let’s go with that time he told Trent Reznor how he feels about Americans.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Get to Know Filmmaking’s Most Influential Painter
Stephen Akey

A big part of filmmaking (and critiquing) is knowing your art history. Hell, we wouldn’t have the establishing shot as we know it without Impressionism. Even as a viewer, you never know when that knowledge is going to enhance a movie. Hieronymus Bosch’s carnally oppressive, otherworldly madhouses pop up in thankfully brief, soul-scathing moments of Noah. The first Hunger Games owes its incredibly immediate sense of place to the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange.

War photography – especially from failed wars like Vietnam – has heavily influenced the Mexican-Spanish pulp resurgence. I suspect it reflects the lost wars that led to decades of Fascist rule under the PRI in Mexico and under Franco (after the Spanish Civil War) in Spain. Everything from Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim has found glum, terrifying moments to reflect on their personal ideas of loss, ones that never fail to horrify more than any battle or monster can.

Perhaps no single painter has influenced filmmaking more than Caravaggio: the stark close-ups of Carl Dreyer’s formative 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc; the matter-of-fact, sometimes uncomfortably foregrounded violence of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epics; the precise arrangement of players and light in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather; all the way through to the striking use of color and composition of Zack Snyder’s 300. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, Tarsem Singh’s Immortals, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the list goes on and on.

Martin Scorsese might be the filmmaker who, early in his career, embraced him the most. Caravaggio seeped through the seediest moments of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. The painter was, as Scorsese once told Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon, the entire reason for doing The Last Temptation of Christ.

Caravaggio himself had an interesting life. Not unlike a Scorsese character, Caravaggio had been formed by a violent, hardscrabble upbringing that was both key to his many successes and his strange, historical mystery of a downfall. He found more comfort with gangs, beggars, and prostitutes than he did with high society, and he was exceptionally clever at revealing – both in life and in his paintings – that high society played at that very same, cutthroat level.

Thanks to Chris Braak over at Threat Quality Press for pointing this article out.

What is Poverty Porn?
Tom Roston

Don’t worry, it’s safe for work. I’ve talked a lot about the ‘genre of excess’ that Izzy Black proposed a few months ago. It seeks to make an accounting of at-any-cost stories of social and financial success, but it refuses to judge the characters therein (think The Wolf of Wall Street, Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring).

The inevitable corollary of that is “poverty porn.” As Roston writes, it’s used to describe an image of the poor “that takes on an almost fetishistic quality, wherein the audience savors how miserable people can get. This can happen even with the best intentions, like those extended commercials for charities in which barefoot children from a third world country stare into the camera.” It takes shape in large part when documentary filmmakers each seek to out-bleak each other in the pursuit of funding.

Roston suggests a “poverty porn clean-up crew,” and has an interesting proposition to form it.

Work It, Superman
Lauren Davis

That’s quite a get-up Superman has there. You wouldn’t take him seriously. I wouldn’t take him seriously. Yet it’s pretty standard for women in superhero comics. Why does what superheroes wear matter? What does it tell the youth being brought up on them?

I’m thankful Marvel’s had the sense to mostly skip this sort of fetishism in their film adaptations. For Black Widow’s co-leading role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, she’s mostly portrayed wearing something sensible with a leather jacket. As I’ve said before, her most notable accessory is an assault rifle with an underslung grenade launcher. It’s Captain America who appears in various states of undress and just has to break into the Smithsonian when every federal agency is looking for him. Why? To get the right piece of fashion for saving the world. It’s a refreshing and humorous twist.

What Captain America, RoboCop, and Her Say About Surveillance
Willie Osterweil

I don’t entirely agree with this piece. First of all, never ever start an article off by insulting a large group of people (in this case, liberals) – it signals you’re either playing to a base, or you’re too narrow-minded to consider your opponent as anything other than a hive-mind. Both mean that anyone sitting on the fence, as well as many sensible people who are already on your side, will consider you shrill and discount both your opinion and your effectiveness as someone who can influence others.

Secondly, I don’t agree with many of Osterweil’s points. But that’s no reason not to highlight someone else’s work if he makes those points intelligently.

Osterweil ultimately presents a challenging article about the use and interplay of surveillance and gender dynamics in Captain America, the RoboCop remake, and the Oscar-winning Her.

As an aside that this article touches on, I myself have become increasingly on-the-fence about Spike Jonze as a director. Critical kryptonite, I know. It’s not because of any fault in his abilities – if anything, he might be the best American director when it comes to marrying the various technical elements of film (visual structure, production design, costume, cinematography, editing) to pure artistic flair. More than anything else, perhaps no director has ever used sound as expertly and emotionally as he has. But man, his films’ views of women as creatures too erratic to think of others and as the cause and solution of every problem in a man’s life, no matter how young or old…it grates.

Throw onto that his production and story roles in the Jackass films, which increasingly think hidden camera is meant to be an excuse to sexually harass and abuse women without repercussions, and I have some serious reservations about many of Jonze’s values as a storyteller.

The Price of Rebooting a Successful Franchise
Scott Mendelson

Forbes is a terrible magazine when it comes to knowing what the real world is like. It’s also not often very good at analyzing economic policy, but when it comes to analyzing individual industries, it can actually be quite on-the-money (in this way, it’s the exact inversion of The Economist).

Here’s a rather good article on how Sony originally planned to reboot Spider-Man as a smaller, more personal story focusing on secret identity Peter Parker’s school life, with the action being less extravagant and more intimate. Now, I quite liked The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which could deliver fantastic individual scenes but not an entire, cogent story. The best moments undeniably involved Andrew Garfield’s interplay with Emma Stone and Dane DeHaan, when their characters were just bumming around New York and working out their personal issues. A Spider-Man focused on that? Brave, but with this group I have no doubts they could have made it special.

Instead, Sony (just like Warner Bros. is) got jealous of Marvel’s Avengers canon and – instead of blazing their own path – decided the best financial option would be to copy Marvel wholesale and go as big and multiple as possible. The result is…well, it’s certainly not the windfall Sony imagined, and the franchise may not even have the financial success it could’ve if they’d just stuck with Sam Raimi at the helm and Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man another few films.

On a personal note, Spider-Man got rebooted after five years. It’s been 10 years since the last Blade movie. Get on it, New Line.

Screw the Movie, We’re Making a Production

One of the most successful movies of last year was the critically reviled The Canyons. Now, this takes some explaining. The Canyons was not a good movie. Written by Bret Easton Ellis, directed by Paul Schrader, and promised a film about the future of movies, we imagined the possibility of a searing assault on the conscience similar to Ellis’s previous American Psycho. Instead, The Canyons was a wooden collection of uninteresting psycho-drama, soap opera filmmaking, and borderline soft-core. It cast Lindsay Lohan opposite adult film star James Deen.

One of the most intriguing – and accurate – theories about the film is that the entire production was a piece of performance art by Ellis, that the process of putting the movie together – recorded in painstaking detail by journalists and tabloid reporters alike – was the real commentary. The performance lies in those details and in our obsession and reaction to them, not in anything put on-screen. That a movie was made was just an unavoidable side effect. In that way, The Canyons may be one of the most important efforts in filmmaking we’ve seen in years. It’s just not one of the most important films.

John Patterson at The Guardian writes about The Canyons‘ contemplation on the wreckage of cinema.

Adam Batty at the beautifully titled Hope Lies at 24 Frames a Second writes about Schrader’s transcendental style.

And, of course, here’s Lili Anolik’s brilliant original article, Post-Empire Strikes Back, which lays out the argument for Ellis’s the-production-is-art, screw-the-movie approach to what he wants to say. This article in particular is for mature audiences only.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned That the Most Outlandish Ideas in That Film Were True
Erich Schlosser

Dr. Strangelove is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy about the dangers of nuclear war. It posited a number of ridiculous contrivances – that a general who up and lost it one day could single-handedly launch a nuclear attack with no authorization. That the Soviets had built a “dead hand” system wherein nuclear weapons would be launched automatically if the Kremlin couldn’t be reached.

These were all insane and ribald concepts as to how the military of both countries really worked. Right? They were exaggerations Kubrick and crew made to make a point. Right? Turns out not so much – the reality was far riskier than the insanity Dr. Strangelove proposed.

The Movies We Loved in 2013 – By Friends of the Blog

My goal as a critic is to write pieces that are both functional and artistic, that translate not only a film’s meaning but that have their own as well. A big part of what’s shaped my view on movies are the people I’ve made films with and spoken to about film over the years, so I asked friends whose work and perspectives on movies I admire the most – What was your best film of 2013? I was pleased with how many responded and even more pleased – and moved – by their eloquent and personal responses. Please enjoy:

The World’s End
by Chris Braak

Above and beyond how much I enjoy Edgar Wright as one of the most energetic and playful stylists working right now – in particular, the way he uses every corner of the screen, every incidental movement, in a way that is somehow intricate without being overloaded or over-composed – The World’s End is a brilliantly subversive reversal of a done-to-death science-fiction trope. One of the advantages of satire is that it doesn’t have to pretend to have answers, so The World’s End can quite comfortably take a completely ambivalent approach, simultaneously exposing the moral poverty of cultural interventionism and the nihilistic self-destruction that’s at the heart of much of our cultural sense of rebellion.

What makes it especially brilliant is how neatly and painfully it dovetails with addiction intervention, in a way that’s simultaneously cruel and critical and deeply passionate.

Chris Braak is a playwright and novelist who writes about storytelling and movies over at Threat Quality Press. He and I often disagree, which is exceptionally frustrating because he’s often right.

Gravity
by Vanessa Tottle

Being in the field sucks. It’s supposed to be full of natural romance like I’m John Muir seeing Yosemite for the first time, but camping by the firelight with the same people day in and day out gets passive-aggressive real quick. We imagine making discoveries and naming them after each other, but a month’s dig is more likely to leave me coming away with a broken ankle or hookworm. That and too much time alone to think and miss, and I’m not good at being alone with my own brain.

You see, I had to survive once. It wasn’t in the wilderness or on a dig. It was my family, growing up. Gravity is about a woman being stranded with no outlet. No matter what she does, there’s a force she doesn’t understand out to get her. She has little, but even this is taken away from her regularly. It’s not personal; it’s the way of this big, vast universe she doesn’t understand. That was my childhood. And when this woman is ready to give up, a voice on a radio is what brings her out of her stupor. She hears it by pure chance, in a language she doesn’t understand, and it’s enough to keep her from giving up. When I realized there was another voice out there, nothing was going to stop me from finding more.

Sandra Bullock didn’t play a stranded astronaut. She played me, shoving a dresser against the door when I heard raised voices and wondering why the universe hated me so much. Then she heard a voice that cared and, even if it couldn’t understand, it was enough nourishment for her soul to make her press on. That’s what sci-fi is about, right? A source of hope. Getting better. As a species, as an individual. Now when I break a bone, I’m thankful I’m the cause of it, and it’s because I heard enough voices along the way that I’m doing something I never thought I could, thank you very much.

Vanessa Tottle is completing the approximately 1,000 years of education it takes to become a paleontologist. When she’s not digging up bits of bone in barren landscapes, she’s kind enough to be my primary screenplay editor.

The Act of Killing
by Kevan Tucker

Though 2013 was one of the best years for film in recent memory, The Act of Killing is in a league of its own. It is an exploration of evil unlike anything that’s been made before and could only have been made in the medium of film. It allows us to watch as people who committed genocide take pride in, compartmentalize and regret their actions. We would like to believe that horrifying acts are done by monsters, but The Act of Killing‘s depiction of evil is more terrifying because it is so human. The subjects of the film are as bizarre, funny and relatable as they are horrifying. It shows how their actions actually rest, however uncomfortably, on the normal scale of human emotion.

The Act of Killing is also a testament to the power of art, particularly film. Not only is it a documentary that has created real political change but it is a study of the psychological process of making movies. In trying to recreate their experiences of committing genocide on camera, we get to see these killers-turned-directors unintentionally reveal themselves through each decision of how to tell their stories. As any filmmaker or artist knows, each detail and choice you make is a reflection of your thoughts, perceptions and prejudices. And examining each of those choices forces you to see them in new lights and through different points of view. Throughout The Act of Killing, we see these men’s perceptions of the past change – or stubbornly remain the same – as they present their stories to us. And their bizarre recreations of reality bring us far closer to truth than we would be able to get any other way. It is one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever witnessed, one of the best movies ever made and should be mandatory viewing for anyone interested in history, psychology or film.

Kevan Tucker is the director of the searing, coming-of-age film The Unidentified and the comedy web series Compulsive Love.

Upstream Color
by Alessia Palanti

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, and time is the ontological backdrop of Shane Carruth’s masterwork Upstream Color. The film is a haunting, psychotropic experience. It combs through identity and memory, its gaps and fillings and their reciprocal definitions, only to arrive at their quintessential knottiness. Within the narrative, characters are hypnotized by a mysterious worm: the central element of an unidentifiable experiment that jeopardizes and interrogates identity. Simultaneously, the audience in the theatre is hypnotized by the Deleuzian spirals, where distinctions are the “things in themselves” and undermine the notion of anything existing prior to differences. In other words, the film traverses an elemental spectrum, where Carruth so closely zooms in on nuances that the difference between any one object – or idea, for that matter – is forgotten. And, as memory is key to the film (time, that is, in its personal articulations), Upstream tests on the audience a similar experiment undergone by its characters.

While the film may be reminiscent of the styles of Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and Wim Wenders, Carruth really stands alone. With his previous film, Primer (2005), he cemented his scientific cinematic inclinations, where the viewer is merely a fly on the wall of two friends testing the possibilities and dangers of a time machine apparatus. If you are a metaphysical scientist watching the film, you are in luck; if not, the dialogue is an overwhelming but intriguing mass of jargon. Upstream extends the metaphysics inborn in the director’s thematic choices, but braids them with mesmerizing aesthetics, and – although disjointed – a philosophically anchored narrative.

The film’s complex and enigmatic nature demands multiple viewings. It is a 96-minute vortex of synaesthetic enrapture. And if it leaves your blood shaky and your mind dizzy with questions whose answers you both urgently require and urgently reject, it has, indeed, done its work.

Alessia Palanti knows more about film than anyone else I know (don’t tell her I said that), and is no slouch at classical European lit either. She writes about film theory in independent and foreign-language cinema at Camera Obscura.

12 Years a Slave
by Tim O’Neill

My favorite film of 2013 was 12 Years a Slave, the kind of daring, high profile film that only gets made once in a decade. Steve McQueen’s direction is impervious to melodrama, a crowning feat in and of itself considering the subject matter. The resulting matter-of-fact narrative forces the audience to find it’s own meaning, or lack thereof, buried within the layer of broken characters. Single shots tell complete stories as those characters shift within the ambiguous landscape of survival, submission and sacrifice. Solomon Northup wants to escape back to his family, and for a while I thought he might, but ultimately he must accept the painful fact that he cannot succeed by strength or cunning, only by patience. As the credits rolled, I found myself yearning for a catharsis that was not there, filled with the unsettling feeling that perhaps not all stories, even those about universal cruelty, can be reduced to good guys and bad guys. Rarely has a movie this boldly restrained garnered the attention it so richly deserved.

Tim O’Neill is an editor whose credits range from The Unidentified to the TV documentary Tracker and Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers. And he’s just getting started.

The Counselor
by Shay Fevre

Before I saw The Counselor, one of the smartest people I know described it to me as “frustrating, sick, and unbelievable.” Once I saw it, I decided I agreed with the first two. In the movie industry, it’s very easy to be financially and physically taken advantage of. I act in some risque movies, but I know what choices cross a line. It’s a different line for everybody, but the moment I cross it, I stop feeling at home in my own skin. I quit for a few years because I just had enough. A lot of actresses – A LOT – cross that line for promises of later opportunity. It’s easy to say they were stupid, or senseless, or ignorant, and that people who act desperately are poor and insane and beg and commit crime, right? But those aren’t the people who choose or ask someone else to choose something they normally wouldn’t allow.

In my world, the most valuable commodity is a certain lifestyle. The currency you trade to reach it is self-worth. The chronic, impulse buyers are the ones who have tasted success. It doesn’t matter to them if they’re lifestyle is great – they have a chemical reaction in their brain telling them MORE of that lifestyle will fill a hole that’s created because they already traded so much of themselves away. I think The Counselor is one of the few movies I saw in 2013 that makes much sense of both sides of the equation, and portrays what someone psychologically loses when they realize they can’t go back to how they once were.

Shay Fevre is an actress and model who escapes L.A. as often as possible. She once beat an abusive director up with her shoe. She’s launching her own production company in the coming year.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
by Russ Schwartz

I’m pretty sure that my favorite movie of 2013 is 12 Years a Slave; the only problem is, I haven’t seen it yet. I just didn’t see many movies this year. Until I see it, my favorite movie of 2013 is The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Not because it’s any kind of Great Movie – I mean, I saw Gravity and that was better – but because it somehow escaped its boring, smug, annoying predecessor to become a surprising and exciting fantasy picture that made me want more. I hated the first one for letting you know what it was going to do and then finding ways to drag it out, like one of those sports or rags-to-riches movies where you spend hours of your life waiting for some urchin in hardship to get discovered or make the team or some other bullsh*t, but with kids murdering each other.

But Catching Fire – man, somehow they made it a treat to see Katniss and Peeta forced to think, to deal, to plan! Who knew (apart from those who read the books)? The sequel doesn’t telegraph its structure, giving it an immediacy that made me connect with characters I didn’t give a crap about the first time around. In my favorite sequence, the combatants band together in a show of bad sportsmanship and spin to protest the games themselves, one-upping each other to find ways to beg the audience for their lives. This is the movie where cunning, heart, and imagination enter the series; suddenly, the world of Panem and its heroes matter.

Russ Schwartz is an actor, playwright, and producer who co-founded The Penny Seats Theatre Company in Ann Arbor, MI.

Her
by Keith Ward

Spike Jonze’s fourth feature Her might not be the best movie of 2013, but it was certainly the one that fascinated me the most. Science fiction is at its best when it serves as a critique of the era it was created in. Set at some unspecified date in the future, technology has exacerbated mankind’s introverted tendencies to the point where damn near everybody is constantly plugged into their devices. Our quiet protagonist Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) even feels the need to buy a digital companion. Scarlett Johansson plays Samantha, in what is my favorite performance of the year. Sam is an operating system: a sentient computerized life-form designed to not only fulfill the needs of the person who purchases her, but to evolve intellectually and emotionally in her own right.

Johansson, an actor and model admired for her physical appearance as much as her acting ability, brings her character to life entirely through her vocal performance. Samantha has no body, so we only get to really know and care for her through her voice. The romance that she forms with Theodore feels very much like the equivalent of a long-distance relationship. This all-too common modern phenomenon has never been so uniquely portrayed. There’s only so much that you can do through phone conversations, texting, cyber sex and other conceits of social media to keep the passion alive. Affairs of the heart require some physical contact, regardless of how cerebral and self-possessed the participants are.

Keith Ward works as a Patient Care Advocate by day, actor by night. He’s playing the lead in the upcoming feature Beyond Hello.

Her
by J.P. Hitesman

Without a doubt, the year-end release of Her catapulted its way to the top of my best of 2013 list. I am always the most impacted by stories that explore subjects rooted in humanity, and this film fit that bill in a creative and unpredictable way. It also offered an elegant simplicity with its small cast, taut storyline and emotionally affecting performances. Joaquin Phoenix, starring as the sensitive main character, Theodore, continues to impress with his career revitalization just a year after going to opposite extremes with The Master. Amy Adams (who co-starred with Phoenix in both) exudes a warm versatility that ought to have been more recognized as the film was released practically in tandem with American Hustle. Rooney Mara continues a run of sharp and committed performances. Olivia Wilde appears briefly in a key sequence but seemed better used here than in any larger role I have seen her perform. And Scarlett Johansson ties the film together in a unique way with her voice-only role, which was recorded after principal filming had been completed – with another actress in that part. She maintained a unique and original structure to the story, while playing with the audience’s (possible) expectations of her physical on-screen persona. But I most recall the story of the film, and am considering seeing it again just for that, as it plays with the necessities and wonderment and confusion of our modern age in such a thoughtful way that it’s impossible not to be affected by the humanity, honesty, and emotional realism of Theodore and the women in his life.

J.P. Hitesman is the Renaissance Man of any theatre or stage he steps on. He blogs about theatre and film at TheatricalBuddhaMan.

The Great Gatsby
by Jessica Greenberg

The Great Gatsby directed by Baz Luhrmann has a beautiful production design that appeals to my theatre design sensibilities. Luhrmann has a theatricality to his aesthetic in both design and performance that I’ve also enjoyed in his other films, like Moulin Rouge or Romeo & Juliet. I love the way The Great Gatsby blends iconic 1920’s scenic, costume and lighting elements with a present day editing style and soundtrack.

Jessica Greenberg is a lighting designer and Assistant Professor of Theatre Design at Weber State University. View the impressive scope of her work here.

The Wolverine
by Erin Snyder

I think this is the first time my pick for best of the year is the sequel to something I called the worst movie of its year. But The Wolverine managed to bury the bad memories of sitting through 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine and even redeemed elements of X-Men 3. If you saw The Wolverine and are baffled as to how anyone could claim it was the best movie of 2013, it’s probably because we’re talking about different films. As much as I enjoyed the theatrical cut, I’d never seriously call it the best of the year. The unrated Extended Edition, on the other hand, is the hard-R Wolverine movie that comic book geeks have always wanted. Even the theatrical version delivered the best version of Logan we’ve seen in live-action to date, then overshadowed him with two female characters more interesting and – in some ways – more badass than him. But if you’re a geek and you’ve only seen the PG-13 version, you owe it to yourself to track down the extended edition. In addition to the violence, you’re missing out on a great deal of character development and far superior pacing. But let’s not understate the significance of that violence: this is a Wolverine movie we’re talking about.

Erin Snyder writes The Middle Room, focusing on sci-fi and fantasy movies, and co-writes with his wife a seasonal favorite of mine, the irreverent and addictive Mainlining Christmas.

A few others didn’t get the chance to write something or are still writing it, but named their best films. Writer Bryan DeGuire chose Inside Llewyn Davis, documentary filmmaker Amy Grumbling chose The Act of Killing, musician Azeem Khan chose Fruitvale Station, and graphic artist Eden O’Nuallain chose Side Effects.

My own choice for the best film of 2013 is The Place Beyond the Pines, which I write about in my previous post.