The Movie of the Year: Overtures

OVERTURES

Three opening sequences have embedded themselves in my mind this year:

Youssou N’Dour’s anthemic call, at the beginning of Elizabeth Chai Versalihis’ ‘I Bring What I Love’ to the young people of Africa, tears streaming down his face, asking his people to be guided by their own vision to unshackle themselves from the dependency fostered by sentimentalized Western views of the continent.

The first section of ‘Up’, which I saw a few weeks before my own wedding in May, the most glorious animation and design fused with a powerfully resonant story: the arc of a love affair, beginning in childhood, and reaching a crisis with the death of one party; whole films have dedicated to this arc, of course; ‘Up’ manages to make you believe it in five minutes; the whole rest of the movie is about what happens next, and how love always outlasts its object.

And the first half hour of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, which manages to invoke the memory of Lee van Cleef, the ‘Hills are Alive’ sequence in ‘The Sound of Music’; and even the face of Stanley Kubrick.  Beyond that, it provides the most credible reason in cinema history for a French and German character to speak English to each other; announces the arrival of a fantastic actor – Christoph Waltz - on international screens; and declares Tarantino’s intention to make Nazi violence look even worse than it has ever done by the very absurdity of its portrayal in his film.

More suggestions?

The Movie of the Year 2009

Earlier in the summer I began an ill-advised attempt at writing haiku over at The Film Talk (what’s the verb for composing a haiku?  Haikuing?  Haiku-tecturing? Haiku-grammising?) in response to some of the films that have intrigued me this year.  The experiment was abruptly ended by an outbreak of good taste, but as we roll into the fourth quarter of 2009, in anticipation of the awards season ‘quality’ epidemic that’s sure to colonise our screens over the next few months, I thought I’d return to reflecting on how intriguing a year this has been at the movies. As the last three months of the year traditionally see the release of Oscar-bait, our vision of the best films of 2009 will inevitably be somewhat skewed toward films that haven’t been released yet.  I’ve mentioned before that Roger Ebert may have made the most sensible suggestion for renewing the Academy Awards in a fashion that would both help films released earlier in the year not to be forgotten, and allow audiences to expect decent movies from January to September.  In that spirit, let’s have a thought experiment: I’m going to attempt having two ‘best lists’ for this year; starting with this last week of the month, I’m going to post my treatment for the film of the year – a quixotic notional endeavour, in which the bits that made me feel happiest to be a film lover are cut together in a genre-bending masterpiece that exists only in my head, because that’s the only place it can exist – you will have your own choices, and I’d love to hear about them here on the site – so please share your own imaginings in the comments section.

We’ll break it down into sections – today I’ve written about the premises that I enjoyed the most; I’ll post again on Wednesday with thoughts on the best intros and moments; Friday will see the best endings and even closing credit sequences (trust me, there are a few) that I’ve seen.

And I promise to return to all of this when the year is done; some of these films will be forgotten in year-end lists, and part of the reason I’m writing this as a reminder to myself. Please forgive the indulgence if you’re not interested; but if you are, I’d love to have a conversation in the comments, starting today with your thoughts on the best premises and/or opening sequences you’ve seen this year.

THE BEST PREMISES OF 2009

Old guy saves the world through non-violence; gives a kid a car.

Middle-aged guy saves world through old movies; gives a guy a scar.

Old guy gets his world back by letting go of a balloon-powered house.

Depressed guy falls in love with both Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw; they love him back.  Kind of.

Depressed artist lives with an incredibly beautiful woman in Argentina but can’t write; learns to love his brother.

Old guy friends try to heal their boredom by failing to have sex with each other but film the foreplay and end up figuring out what happens when a generation is raised on boredom.

Old guy talks about the pictures he took; one of which ended the War in Vietnam.

Old guy runs Italy into the ground.

Old guy and young guy drive around in a taxi.

Guy lives on the moon.

Old guy saves dolphins from amphibocide.

Middle-to-older aged guys play loud music; get big in Japan.

Young guy enjoys bomb disposal; can’t choose between cereals.

The Only Film That Has Everything?

Tarkovsky's  'Andrei Rublev' seems to me to be one of the few films guaranteed to be watched centuries from now, if the art form that captured my heart (and so often betrays it - which means that movies are, in the end, very much like us) lasts past the point when our brains will have been made half synthetic by the friends of Ray Kurzweil.  I finally got to see the film at the weekend; I wanted to wait to see it in a cinema, cued by my old friend the wonderful film critic and art historian Mike Catto who says that watching movies on television is like going to the British Museum to see a mummy rather than visiting the pyramids.  I'm grateful for DVD letting me see films that otherwise would only be evocative titles in my head, but when opportunity arises to get into a theatre, I take it.

And so, 'Andrei Rublev'.

It's a film about resurrection - the central character (who certainly isn't a protagonist in the traditional sense - he responds to circumstances, but doesn't exactly drive the story) is acted upon by the tragic and awful events that can occur when political power and religious law get too tightly bound together; he changes his mind about some things; he loses the comfort to paint the icons that the world knows him for; he fails to intervene to save someone beautiful; he tries to save someone beautiful; he seems ultimately resigned to the world being broken, and to the medieval Russian church being utterly corrupt, but he eventually finds faith that there is a way to let his gift use him.  And, five hundred years later, in the film's coda, it does.

Now, I want you to forget what you just read: because it implies that 'Andrei Rublev' is nothing more than an epic adventure story, comparable to those other two-named eponymous behemoths 'Ben-Hur' and 'El Cid'.  Certainly it tells a story - although the fact that the story seems to include every psychological motivation and consequence known to humanity makes that an understatement so flimsy it might as well be gibberish.  I can't convey how the visual shock of this film affected me - my friend who loves it deeply is right when he says that it's as if Tarkovsky took a time machine back to the fifteenth century and unobtrusively filmed people suffering and praying and living.

It looks that authentic.

And it feels alive.  It has some of the most striking images I've ever seen - the horse rolling over and up at the beginning (which seems to me to be a direct reference to Robert Bresson's 'Au Hasard Balthasar', inverting that film's ending, and an explicit reference to the third day after the Crucifixion), the running of the monks in the rain, the girl frightened and angered by the paint smeared on the wall, the astonishing sequence of horrific pillage, in which one of the most terrifying things in cinema occurs (no more unpleasant than what happens to the bad guys at the end of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', but the tone is so...real?...that you have to look away, and can't ignore what this film is saying about the misuse of power), the tension of waiting for the bell to chime, and the very last image: four horses, alive and representing life itself, a quantum leap beyond the film's earlier equine resurrection.

Like I said, it's a film about life after death, and resurrection of all kinds - the kind that billions of people imagine for the human race, the kind that's necessary to get up every morning, the kind that the medium in which Tarkovsky worked needs with a kind of desperation I'm not sure it has known before. Cinema's a miracle, but has forgotten this

For more on Tarkovsky have a look at my friend Dmitry Trakovsky's lovely documentary.  Meantime?  Life.

Male Violence, the End of Empire and 'Lawrence of Arabia'

I'm seeing David Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia' tonight at the Carolina Theatre in Durham.  Again.  I've been fortunate to see it in 70mm (if you don't know what 70mm is, let's just say that it's what movies used to look like when you were a kid - HUGE and CLEAR and EPIC; and it's a format that's very rarely used these days).  This film is approaching fifty years old, but the last time I saw it - a year ago - it seemed so sure of itself and its themes so universal that it could have been made anytime.

Most of us who know it from TV screenings on wet Saturday afternoons, or because our grandparents told us about it may too easily disregard it; seeming like an artefact from the pre-CGI, pre-Tarantino, pre-indie witticism past.  But if what is past is prologue, then this film - about war, and the effects of war on those who try to make it happen - may demand our attention.

This is a film that evokes the end of the British Empire, and therefore the potential end of the concept of Empire itself; even though it's set during the first world war, it was made in 1962, by which time the notion of one monarch somehow ruling the world was fading into memory, and post-colonial theorists were beginning to make the case that Empire was a bad idea to start with.  The place where I was born and raised was about to take on the mantle of the last vestige of this Empire, and some of its people were about to take a leaf out of the revolutionary playbook that had been put to such awful use in places like Algeria, while tragically ignoring, avoiding or de-emphasising the tactics of the non-violent revolutionaries of India and the US Civil Rights Movement.  Turns out that those who wanted to hold onto Empire, and those who wanted to overthrow it were both wrong.

Killing people to prove that injustice is wrong may be the most contradictory paradox.  To keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, the government turned it into something like a security state; to make Ireland free, Irish people killed other Irish people; to keep Ulster British, British people killed other British people.  For decades.  And then we came inexorably to the conclusion that Empire (or an Independent Ireland) didn't matter as much as ensuring that every citizen has a stake in the governance of the society; that equality of opportunity should be enshrined in law; and that the only way to bring a violent conflict to an end is for someone to stop shooting first.

'Lawrence of Arabia' may have stirred a kind of nostalgic patriotism among British audiences in the 1960s - it is, on the surface after all, largely about how an English soldier helped Arabs defeat the Turkish army.  But it's much more subtle than a simple flag-waving exercise - its examination of Lawrence's psyche is deeply subversive in that it admits something that popular war movies tend to ignore: that killing can be addictive.  It foreshadows the recent amazing film 'The Hurt Locker' in Lawrence's admission that he 'enjoyed it' when called upon to execute a misbehaving nomad - but it actually goes further, in that it's clear that while he enjoyed it, he doesn't enjoy the fact that he enjoyed it.

He's deeply troubled, and at the end of the war is no longer the integrated, Noel Coward-esque wit we saw at the beginning.  Lawrence has 'a funny sense of fun' - and David Lean had a very sharp sense of the brutalisation that so many men embrace in order to feel alive, and how we have mislaid other rituals that used to pronounce and even convey adulthood.  The most well known line in the film is probably 'Nothing is written' - Lawrence's refusal to endorse the fatalism of pre-rational ways of doing religion; the human being is supposed to act on history, not be swept away by it.  I don't watch 'Lawrence of Arabia' to be thrilled by the violence or excited by the military 'victories' - they didn't last; and they certainly didn't produce a lasting peace in the Middle East; geo-politics is still dealing with the legacy of how Britain and what became Saudi Arabia tangoed a hundred years ago.  I watch it because, apart from the fact that it moves with grace and notes and a propulsive narrative, and imagery that has never been repeated, it tells the story of a man who faced a crisis, made a choice, and changed the world.  His was dangerous change.  I need to be reminded that I am subject to the male addiction to transformation through outer violence; because if I don't find a way to transform that violence into something that neither seeks to wound nor colonise others into my own little Empire of Self, my life will be dynamite, and not in a good way.

I'm Going to Minnesota - Wanna Come With Me?

After spending 40 minutes trying to get a travel agent aggregator to tell me the truth about flight prices (which amazingly seem to change just as I try to reserve them; I won't name the site except to say that you need one to get down river) , I've just booked my travel to Christianity 21 in Minnesota next month.  In case you don't know, this promises to be a fascinating event, hosted by my friends Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt, with the purpose of exploring some of the questions arising at the intersection of faith and culture.  21 presenters will have 21 minutes each to ask these questions; and a collapsed hierarchy with boundaries erased between speakers and participants who are invited to talk with and not above or at each other.  I'm genuinely excited to be going, to see old friends, and spend a couple of days thinking in conversation with some really interesting people - the most obvious innovation of this gathering is the fact that all the speakers are women, but it's not - as these speaker lineups usually imply -  a conference aimed at a female audience. This must be one of very few events run on similar grounds, anywhere in the world, if not entirely unique.  The very fact that the event is happening may turn out to be its most significant contribution; the fact that the organisers have not made a big deal about the huge sociological and ecclesial significance of the event is part of the reason why I think it's so important.  It almost doesn't matter what actually gets said at the event - I think Christianity 21 may turn out to be a prophetic statement about the nature of being human, historic gender (and other) inequalities; the fact that I expect there will be some real substance to the conversations is more than enough reason to get to Edina, Minnesota in a little over two weeks' time, if you're able.   Would love to see any readers of God is not Elsewhere there - let me know if you're going.