The Ten Commendments

One of my big regrets about my decision to move from Edmonton to Key West is the drastic transformation my change in locale has caused in my moviegoing habits. When I was in Edmonton, working for Vue Weekly, going to movies was pretty much my main occupation. And despite the comparatively low pay and the occasionally frustrating struggles with the demands of advertisers, it was a dream job. I spoiled myself, spending hours each day absorbing the culture—luxuriating in it, really—and deriving much more pleasure from what I was seeing than pain. If the pace was hectic, it was the pace of someone rushing to get to the whirlpool bath right after their massage was finished.

Now, however, I have a more than full-time job editing a slick monthly magazine, and moviegoing has become a much more furtive activity for me, a treat I squeeze in guiltily between my prime responsibilities. I no longer feel as though I’m on top of the cinema world; a lot of important smaller films never play Key West (for that matter, neither do a lot of big-budget mainstream releases—The Fountain, for instance), and the ones that do arrive here play for such a brief stretch of time—a week at most—that it’s easy to miss them. There’s not even a decent video store near where I live. Movies are increasingly becoming literally a stolen pleasure for me: of the 13 movies on my 2006 Top Ten List (there were a few ties), I had to download eight of them through Bittorrent just to be able to see them.

For what it’s worth, my Top Ten list for the year is as follows:

(1) C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America/When the Levees Broke/Inside Man: a fake documentary, a real documentary and a Hollywood genre crowd-pleaser, all either directed or “presented” by Spike Lee, who re-emerged this year as the most confident and socially engaged filmmaker in America

(2) A Prairie Home Companion: Robert Altman’s farewell film, a graceful, tart-sweet tribute, directed with deceptive effortlessness, to Altman’s favourite type of people: performers

(3) Half Nelson: Ryan Gosling delivers one of the most exciting and original male performances since Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront

(4) Neil Young: Heart of Gold/Dave Chappelle’s Block Party: Two galvanizing, joyous concert films, as much in love with their audiences as with the performers onstage

(5) The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: Tommy Lee Jones’ fascinatingly unpredictable post-Peckinpah Western, with a tone-shifting script by Guillermo Arriaga that finds room for the humour he left out of Babel and 21 Grams

(6) The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: Virtuoso readings of Hitchcock, Lynch, Wachowski and Tarkovsky courtesy of shaggy Slavic-accented cinephile Slavoj Zizek

(7) The Queen: Overrated performance by Helen Mirren, but hugely underrated script by Peter Morgan

(8) The Prestige: The final twist is absurd yet strangely convincing, the plot is labyrinthine yet always lucid, the performances deliberately opaque yet ultimately moving... this crackerjack entertainment by Christopher Nolan was a box-office disappointment but awaits discovery on DVD

(9) Bubble: Steven Soderbergh’s numbed-out neorealist experiment about romance and murder in a doll factory—it sure doesn’t take much to throw the theatre chains into a tizzy, does it?

(10) Little Miss Sunshine: The tougher-minded members of the film-critic academy don’t have much respect for this one, but this exercise in sad-but-soulful indie screwball sure did make me laugh.

No year in which I saw these 13 films could be called a disappointment, and yet I think 2006 will go down in my memory not a year of cinematic discoveries but one in which I could feel film after film slipping through my fingers. As I looked over Indiewire’s 2006 Critics’ Poll (essentially the same survey that used to appear every year in the Village Voice and which tends to favour hardcore arthouse pics like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu over mainstream successes like The Queen), I felt like a 12-year-old at a grownups’ dinner party, trying without much success to follow a conversation pitched high above my level of experience.

It almost seems like a truer reflection of my moviegoing year would be to create an alternative Top Ten List, consisting not of my favourite films of the year but the films that I hadn’t been able to see, and yet which I had formulated such a clear notion of inside my head that I could imagine myself loving them all the same. David Lynch’s Inland Empire would definitely be on that list. And Army of Shadows and Old Joy and Duck Season and Children of Men. Maybe a few “difficult” movies would be on there, too: Battle in Heaven, L’Enfant and Iraq in Fragments. It would be nice to include a few obscurities, like The Aura and The Puffy Chair and Days of Glory and 51 Birch Street, and maybe a contrarian choice like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy as well to round things out.

In a way, these, not the movies I actually saw, are the movies that define 2006 to me. The movies on the high shelf, behind the locked door, in the faraway town. I hope I can steal the time to watch them in 2007.

I Am Jacob Marley

When I moved to Key West, I was determined to bring as few possessions with me as I could. That’s partly because I wanted to minimize the cost of shipping all my stuff down to Florida, and partly because I truly loathe moving. I’m an Arthur Dent, the kind of person who tends to take life, wear a nice comfy rut into it and lie there for a few years until I’m jolted out of it by some huge outside force.

I’d been living at my old apartment for about five years, and I was not looking forward to the task of throwing out all the stuff I wouldn’t be needing anymore. I was on the third floor, after all, and the stairway leading down to the dumpster in the rear parking lot was very steep and narrow. To my great fortune, however, a construction crew was doing some renovations to the building—and they’d parked a gigantic, industrial-size trashbin on the ground directly below me. What this meant was that I could save myself dozens of tiring trips up and down the stairs and literally throw my unwanted possessions out my window.

It was exhilarating. Out they went: old clothes too frayed and stained to donate to charity, piles of Xeroxed play scripts I’d accumulated during my days as a theatre reviewer, half-empty jars of sauces, oils and condiments from the backmost reaches of my refrigerator, even the sad, flattened futon I’d been sleeping on ever since I moved out of university. I even threw a going-away party for myself where I invited my guests to raid my bookshelves and CD piles—anything to lighten the load for my impending trip.

And yet, I found it impossible to surrender anything from my DVD collection. Now, I have a lot of box sets and expensive special editions from the Criterion Collection that obviously I wasn’t about to just give away, but there was some greedy impulse inside of me that refused to allow me to break up the set by so much as one disc. Not even that cut-rate used copy of Runaway Jury I’d picked up at Rogers Video because buying it would have cost only a buck or two more than renting it. The collection must remain intact!

I only brought about 30 books with me to Florida—the rest went into storage—but for some reason I felt compelled to bring all my DVDs with me. They fit into two large boxes. And when I finally lined the discs up on the shelves in my new Key West home, nearly in alphabetical order again, just like in the old days, I felt a tremendous surge of satisfaction. Almost nothing in this new living space actually belonged to me—much of the furniture consisted of castoffs from my new boss’ house—that my DVD collection seemed like the only thing that bore the stamp of my own tastes and personality.

I moved again this week, to a larger and nicer apartment about four blocks down the street from my old one. And so once again I packed my (now even larger) DVD collection into those same two (now battered) cardboard boxes and schlepped them into the van parked in front of my building. Helping me move was Rick, who helps distribute the magazine I now work for, and his son Ricky. Both of them are very sweet, generous guys who are in incredible shape—which was fortunate, because my new apartment is once again on the third floor of a building with those narrow, old-fashioned, paper-clip-shaped staircases that turn carrying couches upstairs into a grueling task that’s like a weightlifting contest crossed with a geometry exam.

My boxes of DVDs were one of the last things that had to be taken upstairs. I hadn’t even been carrying the heaviest items, but I was exhausted—my legs were rubbery, my arms were limp, and my shortness of breath was causing a dull pain in my upper back, like a heavy foot on my spine, just behind my lungs.

Still, I decided to do my part and lug at least one of those boxes to the top. But about a third of the way through my trip, I realized I had gotten myself into serious trouble: my pace was slowing, my thighs were getting heavier with each new step, my hold on the box was getting clumsier and clumsier.

A few steps later, I realized, to my horror, Rick and Ricky watching me struggle a few feet behind me, that this was the precise punishment I could imagine waiting for me in the afterlife. Burdened, for all eternity, like Jacob Marley in his chains, with the ponderous, useless weight of all the DVDs I’d bought in my wasted lifetime—and unable to move because of all the time I’d spent watching movies instead of exercising.

Come the new year, I am going to have to join a gym. Either that, or Netflix.

Unwelcome Guest

Christopher Guest is the only director in Hollywood who’s given Catherine O’Hara the starring roles she so richly deserves. But even that fact isn’t enough to redeem For Your Consideration, a truly awful Hollywood satire on the level of Joe Eszterhas’ Burn Hollywood Burn! Guest literally seems to have poured every ounce of comic imagination into designing the characters’ hairstyles, from the thinning Caesar cut of Eugene Levy’s agent to the idiotic blond fauxhawk of Fred Willard’s TV host. This movie is a disaster, at once feeble and mean-spirited—so much so that for the first time, I’m not looking forward to the next Christopher Guest comedy. Actually, I’m kind of dreading it.

I adore Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman (A Mighty Wind I’m ambivalent about), but I’ve always loathed the way they end. Both Best and Guffman deal with ordinary people trying to succeed in some neglected corner of showbiz—an amateur musical, a dog show. At first, the characters and their dreams seem laughable, but when you see how much these activities mean to them, it’s impossible not to get caught up in their preparations for the big show. It’s an absolutely wonderful moment when Guest and Parker Posey sing “A Penny for Your Thoughts” in Guffman. It’s exhilarating when Eugene Levy steps in at the last minute and wins the dog show in Best. Levy and O’Hara’s climactic duet in A Mighty Wind always makes me cry.

But that’s never the note Guest ends these movies on. Instead, he always tacks on a “three months later” coda in which he shows all the characters, even the ones who achieved some kind of modest glory in the rest of the film, pursuing some new dream so pathetic, and so obviously destined to fail, all you can do is wince in embarrassment. Guest literally seems to be telling the audience, “You know these people who you thought were so lovable? Yeah, turns out they’re really just idiots and losers after all.”

It’s pathological the way Guest systematically undercuts his characters for the sake of a cheap laugh, like when Harry Shearer’s character inexplicably undergoes a sex-change operation at the end of A Mighty Wind. I really hated what he did to Harlan Pepper, the hound-dog breeder he played in Best in Show, whose quietly eccentric dignity made him one of the movie’s most appealing characters—Guest ends the movie with Pepper performing an awkward ventriloquism act to a tiny crowd of unimpressed lodge members. Pepper’s incompetence isn’t even funny. It’s just a cruel way for Guest to assert his superiority (and that of the audience) over him. With the exception of Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock’s hateful Yuppie couple in Best in Show, nobody in Guest’s movies is a villain—and yet Guest seems to feel that they all deserve a comeuppance anyway.

Perhaps with his next film, Guest should consider making a couple of important changes to his approach. As pleasurable as it is to see people like Don Lake, Rebecca Theaker and Jane Lynch pop up in film after film, the size of Guest’s stock company is getting increasingly unwieldy. Guest’s desire to give all these performers their moment in the spotlight is understandable, but starting with A Mighty Wind, his movies have begun to feel overstuffed, sprawling, unfocused. And because each character gets so little screen time, they tend to register not as flesh-and-blood people but as two-dimensional “types”—or (as with Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard in For Your Consideration) as retreads of characters the actors played in previous Guest films. This Is Spinal Tap, the comedy classic that set the template for Guest’s improv/mockumentary format, really had only three main characters. For Your Consideration has at least a dozen.

And speaking of Spinal Tap, let me make a heretical suggestion: maybe it’s time for Guest to reunite with Rob Reiner. I know Reiner’s a notorious cheeseball, but as a director, he also has a professional visual style and a basic sense of story construction that Guest lacks. If Reiner had made For Your Consideration, he wouldn’t have let all the major plot developments happen offscreen. He would have properly dramatized the deterioration of Parker Posey and Christopher Moynihan’s romance. He would have actually shown us some scenes from Home for Purim, the film-within-the-film, after it had been secularized and retitled Home for Thanksgiving.

And maybe he would have also had the generosity of spirit not to ridicule the characters simply for wanting to achieve some success in their chosen profession. Guest ends For Your Consideration by playing a tinny, sourly ironic recording of “Hooray for Hollywood” over the titles. Reiner concludes Spinal Tap with the band playing “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You (Tonight)” to an ecstatic crowd in Japan. You tell me which is the better ending.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Bela Tarr

If I seem a little groggier than usual today—my skin perhaps a little paler, my eyes perhaps a little more bloodshot, my overall demeanour perhaps a little gloomier—I have an excellent explanation. Last week, I passed one of the ultimate film-critic rites of passage. I gave up most of my weekend to spend hour upon hour in the company of a dozen or so greasy-haired, middle-aged, alcoholic Hungarians and wandering the perpetually muddy streets of their depressing rural village.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: I have watched Sátántangó.

Mention the title Sátántangó to a casual movie-watcher and you won’t get much response (except maybe “Wow, that word sure does contain a lot of accents”), but among the festival-going, cinématheque-attending elite of the film world, it’s widely regarded as one of the great directorial achievements of the last 25 years. And the fact that it has been nearly impossible to see in Canada or the U.S. outside of a handful of special museum screenings has only added to its allure. So has the austere stylistic rigour of director Béla Tarr, who constructs the film from a series of unusually long, impeccably choreographed single takes, his camera always on the prowl, exploring his dingy sets with one slow, patient lateral pan or track-in after another.

Also, the film was shot in black and white. And it’s in Hungarian. And it’s seven hours long. Seven and a half, including intermissions.

Now, it’s not every moviegoer who willingly sits down to watch a seven-hour black-and-white Hungarian film—much less one that often seems hell-bent on trying your patience, pushing to see just how close to total stasis a film can get and still be called a “motion picture.” I have to admit, my eagerness to see Sátántangó was probably motivated as much by dumb, masochistic pride as by my interest in the film’s actual content. The moment after I’d absorbed the concluding image of Hour Seven—an extended shot of a fat, aging doctor laboriously boarding up the window of his study—I couldn’t wait for the people at work to ask me how I’d spent my weekend. “I watched a seven-hour Hungarian movie!” I’d cry out. “Top that!”

But my pride was undercut by the knowledge that I’d cheated a little. I hadn’t watched Sátántangó in one mammoth dose of concentrated bleakness, like you’re supposed to; I’d actually split the experience up into three bite-sized sessions over Friday, Saturday and Sunday, like a little kid divvying up the last Brussels sprout on his dinner plate. It felt more like watching three films instead of just one. And so, while two of the movies I watched were a little on the tedious side (albeit intentionally so), the second is one of the most amazing movies I’ve ever seen in my life.

That’s the segment that contains Sátántangó’s three greatest sequences. In one, Tarr’s camera follows the town doctor on an errand to the tavern to refill the gigantic flask of booze he keeps beside the chair he occupies all day long, spying on his neighbours. (His obesity turns this simple task into a quest as daunting as Frodo Baggins’s trek to Mount Doom.) In another, we watch a little girl play in a barn with her pet cat. The mood doesn’t stay playful for long, though—eventually she feeds the animal rat poison and then carries its corpse through the rain to a secluded glade, where she commits suicide by eating some of the same poison herself.

And in the third scene, Tarr shows us a group of about eight or nine villagers in the local pub. One of them is playing a catchy but maddeningly repetitive riff on the accordion, a couple more hit their tables with canes to keep time and two couples dance a clumsy shuffle on the floor while one guy stumbles around shoving everyone and every now and then another guy walks across the room with a stick of bread balanced on his forehead.

This scene goes on for... well, at least 15 minutes—far, far past the point where you’d think any sane director would end it. Way farther. Like, three times as far. It ought to be unendurable (especially since we’ve already watched this scene from the perspective of the little girl, who’s paused to look through the tavern window on her way to killing herself), and yet it’s absolutely hypnotic. And funny and moving and, in a wordless, instinctive way, kind of profound.

I’ve described this scene to my friends, but to my chagrin, I always give up trying to explain why it affects me so deeply and end up just making a joke out of it: “And it just goes on like that... for 15 minutes! It’s awesome!”

But Sátántangó *is* awesome. And if it were any shorter, it would be less awesome. No joke. Next stop: Berlin Alexanderplatz!