Some thoughts on Caught Stealing

Posted by on August 30, 2025 · Leave a Comment 

Just when I was ready to write off 2025 for good, along comes Darren Aaronovsky’s crime comedy Caught Stealing, with an astounding script, bone-deep comic performances, and production design that literally brought me to tears.
If you have a script like Caught Stealing, where a “normal guy” gets entangled in a dangerous mess with violent thugs, you can make an enjoyable romp like Snatch or Nobody, or you can make a serious, character-based drama like Jackie Brown or Uncut Gems, or you can make a paranoid thriller like The Man Who Knew Too Much or Marathon Man. What Aaronovsky has done is combine all those approaches and then produce it like it was Lawrence of Arabia.
Caught Stealing, most importantly for me, EXACTLY captures the look, mood, textures and atmosphere of the Lower East Side in the 1990s, which is where I spent my 30s. The details are correct down to every sticker, graffito, pile of garbage, cigarette butt and piss stain. It’s a very rare thing for me to be able to smell a movie, but that’s what this one accomplished.
Of course, there weren’t criminal escapades going on on the scale seen in the movie, but, walking the streets of Alphabet City on a Saturday night, one always SUSPECTED things like this were going on. If it’s not a true story, it’s an incredibly true mise en scene. Every character looks like someone I would see on St. Mark’s Place, every song pouring out of every passing car is accurate to time and place, and Austin Butler’s front door is identical to the one I had on 6th St. on Indian Row, in the 1800s tenement apartment I lived in, where the “bedroom” had no window except the one that was a pass-through into the kitchen (which had a bathtub next to the stove), which had been boarded up decades earlier.
The thing that gets me is, the script would have worked in present day. Aaronovsky shoots it in period, on real streets, in New York City, which involves tons of money, and can easily double the budget of the movie. Why did he devote so much time and energy and budget to bringing that time and place to life? Well, of course that was Aaronovsky’s time and place too, when he was making Pi and Requiem For a Dream. And young screenwriters like me would go to see those movies and dream about the movies that we would make when we got the chance. And there was a whole community of artists, filmmakers and writers and performance artists and puppeteers and vaudeville acts and a million other kinds of cultural miscreants, and that was the scene that produced Aaronovsky, and me, and I’m forever grateful that he bothered to remember that time and place, and to recreate it with such an attention to detail and a total absence of sentimentality. The place was a filthy hellhole and the movie presents it as such. Tompkins Square Park was the scene of riots protesting the yuppies moving in, but the yuppies were moving into abandoned buildings that were firetraps and shooting galleries, not sweet little communities where people got along or ethnic neighborhoods that got displaced. They were moving into buildings that were cheap because people had died in them.
There was another layer to the movie that sold it for me, but probably only for me. The plot revolves around this guy, played by Austin Butler, who had been a star baseball player in his teens but had an accident and can no longer play. Instead, he follows the team he almost joined, the SF Giants, and calls his mother, who coached him as a teen, after every game to discuss the game. It’s a movie about loss, and how to recover from it. What does one do when one has lost everything? How does one move on when one’s identity, all one’s hopes and dreams, are erased in a heartbeat? Anyway, at a certain point I realized that Austin Butler’s character is a lot like me. Like him, I almost got the chance to make it big. Ironically, I’ve always looked at my career as never hitting a home run, but always managing to get on base. I wrote a lot of screenplays, and a handful of them were made, and two of them were actual hits, although I was not credited for one of them. Neither has left a cultural footprint, but I did enter the arena and, for a few years, had the opportunity to play, as the movie calls it, “real ball.” At its deepest level, Caught Stealing is an ode to perseverance, about keeping going when there’s nothing left to keep going for, and at a certain point I realized that I was watching a movie by the guy whose movies I used to go see when I was dreaming of being America’s next great writer-director, and I still go to see movies every week even though I’m no longer in the movie business, and I realized that, tonight, I was watching a movie about myself watching this movie.
The acting, by the way, is uniformly great, but I want to give special shoutouts to Griffin Dunne and Vincent D’Onofrio, both of whom vanish into roles that any other actor would have played as stock one-joke characters.

Tags: movies ·

Weapons

Posted by on August 28, 2025 · Leave a Comment 

 
I very much enjoyed Zach Creggar’s newest suspense masterpiece Weapons, but what has really impressed me are the grosses. It has made over $200 million globally, a shocking number for a $35 million movie ($10 million of which went to Creggar for writing and directing, bargain of the century) that is not a four-quadrant marketing juggernaut like Lilo & Stitch or Superman.
It’s been a terrible year for movies, and a terrible year for grosses, especially for projects like this, low-budget movies whose budgets are too high to be considered “indie” but too low to be thought of as “studio.” There is no marketing angle to Weapons, there is no famous IP, there are no plush toys or video-game tie-ins. It’s just a movie that came out and people are responding to it in a way that they have not responded to any other movie this year, with the exception of the also-brilliant Sinners.
The lesson, I’m afraid, is not “quality will out,” not exactly anyway. My personal theory for why grosses have been so low this year is that all the movies that have been released this year were made last year, when the idea of a second Trump presidency was a laughable joke, that Trump was a bad memory we had just shaken off and the world would be ready to forget their troubles at movies like The Amateur or Death of a Unicorn.
So audiences have been going to movies and finding that nothing onscreen captures the anxiety and distress they feel being a citizen of the world under the control of a physically ill, mentally ill billionaire man-child who decided to wreck the global economy because it made him feel good and who can’t think any further than his next photo op or shakedown.
My theory is that Weapons is a massive hit because audiences, as with Sinners, are finally seeing their lives onscreen, adequately filtered through the lens of metaphor.
So, what is Weapons about? Spoilers necessarily follow.
In Weapons, a small town is torn apart because an evil force has invaded the town and is slowly pitting citizens against each other in order to distract everyone from the enormous crimes they’re committing. Nobody knows what the evil force is, but a couple of townspeople are trying to figure it out. Others are just trying to live their lives and make it through the day, and a small minority are actively helping the evil force spread its influence.
How does this evil force manifest itself? The Weapons title card, and the entire end-credit crawl, features a prominent blue triangle, which, I have learned, is the logo for Alcoholics Anonymous. So there is a metaphor of addiction at play in the narrative. This evil force that has invaded the town makes people act like addicts, and if they are already addicts it makes their addictions worse. There are alcoholics and a crack addict in the story, but the addiction metaphor remains a metaphor, and the viewer is not required to “get” the metaphor in order to enjoy the narrative. I certainly didn’t “get” it until after a second viewing, which may give you an idea of how well the metaphor is deployed. There’s a lot going on in the movie, a lot of stories to take in, and, as with Barbarian, the script only makes sense when you realize that Creggar doesn’t think about plot the way other screenwriters do. His first feature, Barbarian, was a brilliantly constructed series of scenes that are connected by theme and only “come together” in the movie’s third act. Weapons has a similar conceit, but the narrative is divided into different sections according to character, so we see the narrative from one character’s perspective, then we back up and see it again from another character’s perspective, and so forth.
(For me, the most brilliant part of the script is that the different characters’ stories are presented in order of “most affected” to “least affected,” so that we’re given an inciting incident (seventeen kids disappear) and we start the movie with the story of the grade school teacher whose kids all disappear, then move to the story of a father whose son disappeared, and then move to the story of a cop who is dating the school teacher and isn’t affected by the missing kids at all, and then a local crackhead who literally doesn’t know that any kids have gone missing at all. The structure makes the audience feel like they’re getting further and further away from a solution for the town’s problem, even as the evidence grows more and more obvious. Then, in its third act, it suddenly gives us the inside story from the one character we had completely forgotten about, pulling all the threads of the story together like the frogs at the end of Magnolia, a movie Creggar cites as a main inspiration for Weapons.)
Anyway, that’s what Weapons is about. An evil force invades a town and creates chaos, which turns all the townspeople against each other as this evil force makes everyone fall back on bad habits, abusive behaviors and chemical solutions to bad feelings.
Which is how we’re living our lives every day now.
The question on your mind is, well, what is this evil force? That would be a major spoiler, but let’s look at the physical manifestation of evil as it is presented in the movie.
Evil is described in Weapons as having a ridiculous haircut, a ridiculous sense of style, a cloying, annoying, boundary-ignoring personality and a penchant for getting under people’s skin. It makes good people doubt their sanity, it pushes sober people to drink, makes law-abiding citizen suspect each other, and creates a culture of fear and oppression that pushes townspeople toward violent solutions to common problems. It spreads evil because that’s how it stays alive. And it literally steals our children’s futures.
Who does that sound like?
How is evil defeated in Weapons? Let’s just say it’s so satisfying that it’s unexpectedly extremely gory and breathtakingly hilarious. To me there is no mystery as to why Weapons is a smash career-making hit: it gives the audience the solution to the problems they face every day.
 
 
 
 
 

Tags: movies ·

11/6/24

Posted by on November 6, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

As I always have in moments of anguish, tonight I turned to art for perspective and comfort. The Criterion Channel is showing nine Coen Bros movies this month, saving me the exhaustive burden of having to reach up to my DVD shelf in order to watch them.

Tonight it was their 2010 western masterpiece, True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges, vanishing into the role of Rooster Cogburn. Bridges has many great performances, but to vanish into a role like Rooster Cogburn, a role that had already served as an Oscar-winning capstone to the career of John Wayne, is nothing short of miraculous. The acting throughout is the best done by all in the cast, including Matt Damon and Domhnall Gleeson, unrecognizable as a nervous, skinny young bandit.

The movie is about a teenage girl, Mattie, who sets out in pursuit of justice. A criminal, Tom Chaney, has killed her father, and she intends to see him hanged or kill him herself. The justness of her cause is clear, but the route to justice is twisted. Everyone agrees that Chaney is guilty, and everyone agrees that he’s a horrible man and should be punished, but no one has the desire or resources to go after him. If Mattie wants Tom Chaney to be held accountable for his crimes, she will have to go after him herself.

The script, as with all Coen Bros scripts, is about economics. Most of their stories are about “the little man” who tries to rise above his station and is punished for it by “capital,” the “big man” at the top of the food chain who gets what he wants because he has the money to buy it. True Grit was their first script where “captial” is actually the protagonist. Mattie, the teenage girl, is the one with the money, and she uses her money to pursue justice, hiring the one-eyed alcoholic US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, and the two of them form an alliance with a Texas Ranger who has been chasing Chaney for years.

So Mattie is pursuing blood vengeance with two men whose motives are entirely financial. What’s more, they are not shining paragons of liberal thought. They are both ex-Confederate soldiers, and Cogburn rode with Confederate war-criminal William Quantrill. He also, like so many legends of the Old West, freely drifted from one side of the law to the other, whenever it happened to suit him, whichever paid more at the time. They’re both fundamentally dishonest and disagreeable men of variable skills, but they come through when the chips are down.

Long story short, the road to justice does not go as planned, and there is much sacrificed in its pursuit. Oddly enough, her life-altering journey does not alter Mattie much at all; we meet her at the end of the movie as a middle-aged woman, and she is exactly the same as she was at 14 — stubborn, opinionated and money-minded. While pursuing justice for her father, she fell in with men she considered disgusting, to pursue men who were no more or less morally upright than her allies. And yet, her adventure with Rooster Cogburn haunts her for reasons she doesn’t fully understand.

What did I get out of this movie tonight? Something about justice, and how it never looks like we think it will, and how economic forces favor the criminal with the most money. And, while it goes unmentioned, the narrative eventually overlaps with The Gilded Age, one of the many times corruption overtook the United States and the wealthy decided it was everyone’s sacred duty to make them wealthier, leading, of course, to the Great Depression, etc. And that the things that stick with us as life goes on are the memories of the people who struggled with us.

The movie is perfect, almost more like a sonnet than a screenplay, without a wasted moment, a superfluous shot or an off-key performance. Even the fancy camera moves and editing tricks that made the Coens famous are absent, giving way to a taut narrative strategy and a stately classicalism that makes the movie feel timeless.

Tags: movies ·

Unexpectedly edifying double feature of the week: The Apprentice and Heaven’s Gate

Posted by on October 17, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

I can fully understand why people would not want to watch a movie about Donald Trump, and I can also understand why people would not want to watch a notoriously panned 4-hour movie about a massacre, but I watched both in a 24-hour period and learned a lot.

The Apprentice is kind of our Young Mr. Lincoln, but instead of Henry Fonda playing a prairie lawyer forming his opinions about injustice in the United States, we have Sebastian Stan playing a born-rich real-estate speculator obsessed with “winning” at all costs. Tired of taking emotional abuse from his father, Donald Trump instead pursues a friendship with Roy Cohn, the lawyer who got the Rosenbergs executed, made McCarthysim mainstream, and, by the early 1970s, was one of the most powerful men in New York and one of the most feared men on the planet for his relentless attacks on anyone he didn’t like.

Both the lead performances are extraordinary, especially Jeremy Strong as Cohn, who is riveting, nauseating and utterly repellent. The world that Young Mr. Trump enters into is one populated by wealthy, powerful men who sincerely, honestly believe that the world belongs to them to do with as they please, and anyone who gets in their way or tries to stop them is “the enemy” and must be utterly destroyed. Attack Attack Attack, never apologize, never explain, and never ever admit defeat. If someone complains that you broke the law, hit them with so many lawsuits that they are forced to retreat or else die broke with their reputations in ruins.

For these men, there are no rules or standards, there’s just “what they want” and “what they can do to get it.” A philanderer preaching family values? A gay man disparaging gay men, while supporting Reagan, while also dying of AIDS? These men see no contradiction, because no rules apply to them, they just absolutely don’t see it. Who cares about contradictions, who cares about truth? They make their own truth.

I’ve read a number of reviews that call The Apprentice a “sympathetic” portrayal of Trump, but I wouldn’t use that word. Trump is presented as a human being, which, I must begrudgingly admit, he is, but the movie isn’t “sympathetic” as much as it is “fair.” It acknowledges that he was never a nice person, was always a shallow, vulgar creep obsessed with status and dominance, but that he became much worse after getting a whiff of the kind of power and wealth that Cohn had.

Anyway, so I was also watching the infamous 4-hour director’s cut of Heaven’s Gate, which is a wonderful movie by the way, and I had completely forgotten that it opens with a very long prologue set during a graduation ceremony at Harvard University in 1870. At this ceremony, Joseph Cotten plays an orator who informs the graduating students that, as Men of Harvard™, they are in a position of privilege that will define their lives, and that their duty is to use that social position to help positively shape the still-new melting-pot nation of the post-Civil-War United States. One student, our protagonist, played by Kris Kristofferson, takes the speech to heart and, after graduation, moves to Wyoming, becomes a landowner, businessman and marshal, and helps keep the peace of a county populated by newly-arrived Slavs, Poles, Germans, Russians and sundry other European immigrants. By 1890, the immigrant farmers are being pushed out, violently, by cattle barons who want the entire state for pastureland. A few immigrants, starving to death, have stolen corporate-owned cattle, which the cattle barons use as an excuse to label the entire immigrant class criminals, anarchists and insurrectionists.

Also at the 1870 Harvard ceremony is Sam Waterston, who does not heed the message of Joseph Cotten’s speech and instead moves to Wyoming and becomes the head of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a cabal of rich fucks who, like Young Donald Trump, sincerely, honestly believe that the world belongs to them to do with as they please, and anyone who gets in their way or tries to stop them is “the enemy” and must be utterly destroyed. In the blink of an eye, his plan goes from “punishing cattle thieves” to a “death list” of every man in the county, and eventually evolves into all-out war on the entire immigrant class, with the help of the Union Army. As he kills more and more people, the remaining folks, on all sides of the conflict, work together to help him out in the fear of worse recriminations. No one wants to stop him because they’re worried he might do worse to them.

So I couldn’t help but see The Apprentice as the “before” picture of the Trump Era, and Heaven’s Gate as a displaced preview of coming attractions. Things really never change.

Tags: movies ·

Joker: Folie a Deux

Posted by on October 7, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

I saw Joker: Folie a Deux on Friday night and liked it a lot, thought it was really well done, but a weekend of reading and listening to men talk about it has made it easily ten times more interesting to me. I don’t want to get into it here because the discourse surrounding movies like this exhausts me, but I will point out one aspect that I feel like has eluded people.

The movie is a musical, and most people think it’s a “half-hearted” musical, or a “musical that’s ashamed of being a musical,” or just a terrible musical. As someone who enjoys musicals and has seen a lot of them, I was curious to see what it was doing with the form, given the wall-to-wall suffocating grimness of the first movie.

The first thing I noticed is that everyone in the movie sings, but in varying degrees of confidence and enthusiasm, and with the backing of the production values. That is, some characters just stand in the background and hum tunes, others are more spotlit and foregrounded, some sing a cappella, some sing with instrumental backing, and still others sing in elaborate “1950s classic musical” set pieces. Everyone sings “in character,” meaning that they sing as people who don’t sing well, except in the big production numbers. It was almost as though the movie is sung through, but the songs were tuning in to a hard-to-locate radio signal, as though the movie is a straight drama where an alternate universe, one filled with musical numbers, bleeds through reality to present a different reality.

That’s a device that was used in another widely-reviled musical bomb, Pennies From Heaven, except there, the dividing line was clear and distinct: life in the “musical” universe was bouncy and peppy and carefree, and “real life” was a horrifying catastrophe full of bitterness, loss and insanity. Joker: Folie a Deux takes that concept and adds the wrinkle of “well, but it’s not that black and white.” The “musical” universe, it says, is always there, and it’s accessible to everyone, but it only occasionally blossoms into full 1950s musical fantasy.

Once I understood that’s what was going on, it occurred to me to ask “Why? What does that mean, narratively speaking?” Well, Joker: Folie a Deux is about a broken man who constantly teeters on the brink of madness, and, in the narrative scheme of this movie, “madness” is revealed by music, a desire to sing out loud. That is, Arthur Fleck, the character at the center of the story, wants to be sane, wants to matter, wants to be loved and appreciated, but he owes all the fame and love that he has to his alter ego, Joker, and we can gauge how tempted Arthur is to give in to Joker by watching how “produced” each song in the movie is. As Joker takes over Arthur’s mind, the musical numbers become more elaborate and more retrograde, reflecting the musicals and TV specials Arthur would have seen as a child (in the care of his abusive, psychopathic mother). Meanwhile, this madness, this desire to leave the gray, suffocating world, is shared by everyone else in the movie, to varying degrees. Arthur’s fellow prisoners sing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and his brutal guard sings “Get Happy.” Those characters don’t get production numbers, but then the movie isn’t about them.

In any case, while it doesn’t surprise me that people don’t like the movie (its message is, essentially, “That guy you came to see? He’s not a good person, you shouldn’t want to see that guy”) I cannot help but think that its conception of itself as a musical has been widely misunderstood.

Tags: movies ·

Trap

Posted by on August 5, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Generally speaking, whenever I go to see an M. Night Shyamalan movie, I spend the first 90 minutes admiring his skill as a director, and the last 30 minutes sighing bitterly about his skills as a writer. He’s always been an astute and inventive director of suspense, but his talents too often work in service of scripts that are embarrassingly jejune and insipid at the conceptual level.

Over the weekend, I read so many takes on his new movie, Trap, that were less about what the movie is and more about the reviewers’ complicated relationship with the writer-director, that my curiosity finally got the better of me. I bit the bullet, lowered my expectations to student-film levels, and braced myself for the worst.

Surprise! Trap is actually quite brilliant.

You may have heard that the plot is ridiculous, that the dialogue is tin, that the characters don’t behave like normal human beings, that the performances range from quite good to found-object. All of those things are true. In spades. With bells on. But it turns out that none of that matters.

David Mamet, in the decades before he lost his mind, wrote a number of excellent essays on the craft of writing. In one of them, he mentioned that the only question a viewer should be asking during a movie is “What happens next?” All the absurd coincidences, staggeringly implausible setups and on-the-nose dialogue in Trap exist for one purpose: to deliver 107 minutes of high-flown, nail-biting suspense. And, because he’s such a superlative director of suspense, the viewer goes along with all the silliness because it keeps the suspense going. In short, Trap is a suspense-delivery machine that never lets up for its entire run-time, something I’ve never seen before. Even masterpieces like Psycho or Body Double give the viewer moments of rest, but I’ve never seen anyone do what Shyamalan does here. Every time you think “Oh, he’s going to do this, but then that will happen,” he introduces a new wrinkle, a new wild idea, a new character, creating almost two solid hours of “What happens next?”

On top of that, the script is, surprisingly, about character. Essentially, it’s about a man who wants to create a memorable day for his teenage daughter by taking her to a concert by her favorite act. His daughter’s happiness is very important to him, and, throughout the first two acts of the movie, he has to balance his love for his daughter with his paranoia about being captured by the police who are after him. In the third act, the action shrinks down to a domestic level, with the daughter fading into the background as the pop star takes a central role. That might seem lopsided, but then Bettelheim teaches us that there are always fewer characters in a story than we think there are. On a conceptual level, the pop star is the woman the daughter wants to grow up to be, so the script addresses both the father’s present with his daughter and also their future. That is, the daughter is the girl who doesn’t know who her father is, but the pop star is the woman the girl grows up to be, the woman who now knows who her father is. The fact that Shyamalan has cast his own daughter as the pop star only underlines the concept.

I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil anything about this deliriously bonkers movie. Suffice to say, if this movie had been directed by Brian De Palma, it would be hailed as an astonishing return to form.

Tags: movies ·

Some thoughts on Furiosa

Posted by on May 31, 2024 · 1 Comment 

BEWARE: spoilers, mostly conceptual, for Furiosa/Fury Road

When I was a young man, a million years ago, my writing teacher explained to me the different scales of storytelling. A drama, he said, is the story of a group of individuals, a saga is the story of a family, told across generations, and an epic is the story of a people. It was an earlier, simpler time, when words meant things. Now, of course, “drama” is when someone acts out at work and “epic” is when you execute a flawless ollie on your skateboard.

I go to the movies every week, and so I will often see the same trailers, week in and week out, for months at a time. The trailers for Furiosa gave the subtitle “A Mad Max Saga” and promised a revenge drama, but the true genre of the movie is suggested by a key line in the trailer, which (spoiler alert) is also a key line in the movie: “Do you have it in you to make it epic?”

On first viewing, I greatly enjoyed Furiosa, but I agreed, with many others, that it lacked something. It does not have the elegant mirror structure of Fury Road, which is the story of a chase scene that stretches out to the horizon of the world and then snaps back like a piece of elastic. It builds and builds toward a tale of revenge, but it’s a revenge drama where the vengeance is visited upon a man who has no idea that anyone was coming at him for vengeance. It’s a revenge drama where the character seeking revenge could have just as easily sat back and done nothing, because the man she hates is doing a great job of undoing himself.

Because I trust George Miller to be a master storyteller, I assumed there must be reasons for the odd narrative choices of the movie’s final act. But, on first viewing, I’d spent 2 1/2 hours priming myself for the satisfaction of Furiosa’s revenge, and when that revenge presented itself in the curiously muted way that it does, I felt slightly dissatisfied. A second viewing, within seconds of the movie’s beginning, erased all those concerns, because Furiosa is not a revenge drama, or a saga, although it contains elements of both those forms. It’s an epic, the story of a people. Or, rather, it is the first two acts of a three-act epic, with Fury Road providing the third act. It is the story of a people, and the people in question is us, you and me, here, in this world, right now, literally today, this day, May 31, 2024.

The question of the movie is not “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” but rather “How does one survive in a world run by horrible, tyrannical men?”

Furiosa is born into a utopia, a “land of abundance,” a hidden valley in the outback where the community has trees, fresh water, windmills and a fierce loyalty to the community. She is wrested from that community and re-born into a scarred, scabbed, ruinous wasteland ruled by tyrants and warlords. It’s important that Furiosa has only a child’s memory of her home, because that’s how people my age all remember our childhoods: we were born into a world where tyrants were unfashionable, where nature was considered a vital part of life on Earth, and where men who overstepped the bounds of decency were investigated and dealt with through democratic means and an independent judiciary. Of course, the world wasn’t that, but that’s what we were taught, and there was enough evidence available to at least suggest that those things were true. Now, we live in a world where words are used only to lie to us, where the truth can be anything our leaders decide it should be.

Furiosa is ripped from her childhood utopia and re-born into The Wasteland, where every relationship is transactional and every conversation is a negotiation. The screenplay is remarkably pure in this regard. Literally every conversation in the movie is laden with tension because any conversational miscalculation in this world can lead to your instant death.

In this transactional world, what is valued? How does one live? That is Furiosa’s real question. The answers are: resourcefulness and competence. Not intelligence, because intelligence is the exclusive provenance of the tyrant. Critical thinking is in desperately short supply in The Wasteland, while blind loyalty and fanatical worship of authority are elevated to a religion, where even dedicated fanatical warriors are tossed aside like fast-food wrappers when it suits the needs of the elite.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The world of Furiosa shows an age of tyrants coming to an end. Because all tyrants fall; that is their nature. The question is, what do we do, as citizens, when their fall arrives?

(The most alarming aspect of Furiosa/Fury Road, for me anyway, is how closely they hew to the story of Antz, a screenplay I worked on myself, about an individual’s response to a corrupt society run by tyrants. In that movie, the individual bolts from society in search of a fabled utopia, and succeeds in his quest, only to find out that the utopia really is a fable and that the true burden of the individual is to abandon notions of a false utopia and change the society you’re in, to make the society you’re in the utopia you seek.)

So Furiosa’s quest is not necessarily “how shall she get her revenge upon the man who tore her from her childhood?” but “What lessons shall she take from the society she lives in to succeed in transforming it?” Because the vast canvas of Furiosa is a tangled web of corruption, strong-arm tactics, transactional relationships and barbarism on an enormous scale.

Miller tells the story, not just of an individual, but a whole culture, where resourcefulness and competence are the most prized attributes. The movie is full of competency porn of the Jason Bourne variety, a series of set pieces where winners and losers are decided by who knows what to do in a given moment.

You would think that such a cutthroat, caustic world would have no room for art, but there is art all over the place in the world of Furiosa. There are artisans who take pride in their work, engineers who toil to make things of beauty. There is fashion, there is folklore, there is makeup, there is interior design, architecture and urban planning, and even forms of theater. There are times when the movie approaches anthropological study.

What Miller has accomplished in this movie is to present all this, all this culture, all this anthropology, as a series of action sequences — chase scenes, daring escapes, daring rescues, daring choices made during daring attacks. The movie suggests that a culture can be fully examined through the actions its people have been trained to take. Friendships and alliances are based on how good (that is, useful) you are in a fight, love is based on one’s ability to rise above squalor, value is based on usefulness. (Repeatedly, characters are given the choice of saving either a fellow human being or saving a valuable piece of machinery. No points for guessing how those scenes turn out.) It’s like Ben-Hur, if Ben-Hur was one long series of chariot-race sequences.

Furiosa, the lost girl who grows into the woman who grows into the ultimate leader of The Wasteland, is the only person in this world who remembers that fabled utopia where there was community and plenty. She knows that the answers that the tyrants of The Wasteland have come up with are not the only answers available to us as a people. When the target of her revenge asks her “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” he means it in the skateboarding sense, but Furiosa takes it to mean its storytelling sense: do you have it in you to make your story the story of a people?

Tags: movies ·

Some thoughts on Civil War

Posted by on April 16, 2024 · 1 Comment 

Like a lot of viewers, I was initially confused and disappointed by A24’s Civil War, because I had brought a host of preconceptions with me. Some of these preconceptions were the product of the movie’s marketing, which made it seem like a war movie, which it is, but only tangentially. I had been warned that it was more about journalism than about our current political climate, but then I was confused even more because the journalists in the movie aren’t the kinds of journalists that are currently covering national politics. What it’s about is, specifically, combat journalism, the stripe of journalists who head toward explosions because that’s where the story is. In that way, it’s a close cousin of The Hurt Locker, insofar as it’s primarily about being an adrenaline junkie and what that does to a person’s soul.

I went to see it again last night, because enough people had been impressed by it that I wanted to go back and see it for what it is instead of what it is not. I found it much better the second time around because I could see the script more clearly and judge it for how well it does what it’s trying to do. What I realized is that the script’s model isn’t Battle of Algiers but Apocalypse Now.

(If you have not seen Battle of Algiers, see Battle of Algiers, one of the greatest movies ever made, about the Algerians throwing the French out of Algiers in 1957. The stunning immediacy of the movie and its documentary “realness” is thanks in part to shooting its key scenes in the actual locations where the battle happened, acted out by many of the people who had been there. It also co-stars Jean Martin as the French general in charge of putting down the Algerian rebellion. It is one of the only filmed performances of Martin, who originated the role of Lucky in Waiting for Godot.)

Like Apocalypse now, everything in Civil War is slightly overstated. It’s not that the movie isn’t lacking in subtlety or realism, but that the writer/director, Alex Garland, wants very much to make sure that everyone knows what’s going on. Also, like Apocalypse now, there is a certain florid, surreal edge to some of the staging of the action set pieces. Most of all, it’s like Apocalypse Now in that it’s not really about the war it’s about, but about a descent into moral chaos.

A number of folks have complained that the movie’s politics are too vague, that the movie doesn’t take sides or give us a road map to what’s going on. On a second viewing, I found I didn’t have a problem discerning the politics of the movie at all. There is a president who has somehow scored himself an illegal third term, disbanded the FBI, orders journalists shot on sight, and, most importantly, describes his own failures as amazing triumphs in the highest possible superlatives, so that he describes his doomed conflict as “some are already saying that this is the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns.” In other words, the president is Trump, and he has done what he’s said he would do: become a dictator.

That much is clear. What that has done to the country is a different story. Our journalist protagonists journey to the heart of darkness, as it were, through an increasingly surreal landscape of poorly defined conflicts, because, apparently, huge swaths of the United States in this movie have become chaotic free-fire zones where nobody knows anything, including who they’re supposed to be fighting. It’s like the entire movie is the Do Lung Bridge sequence in Apocalypse Now, where the protagonist of that movie asks a solider “Who’s in charge here?” and the soldier answers “Ain’t you?”

What seems to have happened in the United States, in this movie, is that, absent a strong federal government, certain areas of the country have turned into brutal fiefdoms where the only clear enemy is whoever is shooting at you at any given time. Looters are tortured, men in uniform shoot at men in civilian clothes and vice versa, and racists with guns round up and murder immigrants under no governance whatsoever.

All of that, it seems to me, suggests a movie where the politics are perfectly clear: a rogue president has created a crisis that has allowed the hatred seething through the veins of everyday American life to flow freely into the streets.

There is a relatively organized military force with actual weapons and vehicles and chains of command and supply lines and so forth, and they are seen as a corrective to the chaos that the president has unleashed. They have rules, they have goals and objectives, they’re not just a bunch of trigger-happy morons gleefully murdering people. I suspect that the controversial “Texas-California Coalition” in the movie is there to address the specific question of “which states would have enough money and materiel to stage an attack on Washington DC?”

The other movie I was reminded of was 1983’s Under Fire, in which a pair of journalists in a war-torn country find themselves increasingly radicalized by the atrocities they’re witnessing, until they are no longer covering the war but participating in it. Civil War doesn’t push its agenda that far, its journalists remain objective, if amused, but its call for journalists to get their hands dirty in reporting our current crises rings true and clear.

Tags: movies ·

The Etruscan Horse

Posted by on February 18, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

 
Hearing more and more about the “incredibly realistic” abilities of AI art, I am reminded of one of the most important stories I know, the story of the Etruscan Horse.
 
In 1886, a museum in Britain procured a rare artifact from antiquity, an Etruscan statue of a horse. They staged an exhibit, with this new acquisition as its centerpiece.
 
One hundred years later, in 1986, the same museum said “Hey, you know what? It’s 100 years later, let’s stage a revival of that show from 1886 that was a big hit for us.”
 
So they set about prepping the revival of the show, and they sent curators into their basement and the curators found the crate that the Etruscan Horse was in and opened it up, and immediately saw, without any special tools of identification, that the sculpture they had put on display at the center of their exhibition in 1886 was an obvious forgery, with all the marks common to metalworkers in Victorian England.
 
The museum staff of 1886 had not been idiots, they were simply unable to see the marks of their own times in the sculpture.
 
I think about the Etruscan Horse on a regular basis, because no artifact can ever be anything but a product of its time. (I make forgeries of 20th-century commercial art for a living, so I think about this sort of thing probably more than other people.) In the same respect, no person can ever fully understand their times, because they themselves are a product of those times. You cannot be part of a vast system and also be able to describe that system from the outside.
 
I watch a lot of old movies, and I’m a student of special effects, and so when I watch an old movie there’s always a little soundtrack in my head that runs parallel to whatever the movie is doing. I’ll sit there thinking “Miniature, water tank, matte painting, miniature, transposition, over-printing, double-printing, enlargement, miniature” etc.
 
The thing is, none of the people who saw those old movies in theaters sat there thinking about any of that. If a movie opened with a shot of a mansion on a tree-filled estate, they accepted it for what it said it was, not a miniature built in a studio somewhere at 1/40 scale.
I remember, as a child, watching the peerless Titanic drama, A Night to Remember, and thinking, as the Titanic sank, “why do the waves look so weird?” Watching A Night to Remember reminded me of Godzilla, where Godzilla would be wading into Tokyo Bay and the waves, similarly, looked weird and blobby.
 
Of course, the water in those movies looked like that because the filmmakers were trying to make a small thing, a model ship or a man in a rubber suit, look gigantic. So they shot their subject at a faster speed, to give the action a sense of scale.
 
The definition of a special effect is a device that makes it possible to show something in a movie that would otherwise be impossible to shoot. Nowadays, of course, special effects are used for absolutely everything, from planets exploding to changing the pen that a character is holding. But the reason that so many special effects work in their time is that the audience, by definition, has never seen what the special effect is showing (a giant ape climbs a skyscraper, an ocean liner turns upside-down, dinosaurs eat people), so they have nothing to judge it by. I’d certainly never seen the Titanic sink, or a ghost, or a superhero fly through the air, as far as I knew that’s what those things looked like.
 
Whenever an effective new special effect comes along, there’s a moment when everyone in the audience says “that’s amazing, that looks completely real.” And then that special effect is used in everything, and then it’s no longer special, it just becomes part of the vocabulary of the form. When Disney+ first started showing their Star Wars shows, they looked amazing, with real actors in real locations interacting with real sets and props. A year later, I started to notice that there was a weird lassitude in those shows and a numbing sameness.
 
The innovation was that Lucasfilm figured out how to build 3D digital environments and then put those on 360° HD screens all around the actors, so that the actors were actually lit by whatever the illumination on the screens was. They appeared to be in a desert or on a spaceship or whatever because, in a way, they were, there were no green-screen lines or digital composition artifacts because it was being shot live.
 
But by the time the third or fourth show came along, I started to notice that, while the actors looked like they were in the environment they were supposed to be in, they never walked to the edge of it. The scenes were always in the center of the room, because that’s how the technology worked — if they were to walk over to fetch something from a table in the background they would bump into the LED screens. So they had to stand in the middle of the room and talk, in the middle of these extraordinary digital sets that looked great but could not be touched because they didn’t exist. And so the special effect that made the show possible also made it boring as hell.
 
AI is going to be that. Any special effect that is “cutting edge” will always — always — look dated fastest. That’s why special effects fans like me always prefer practical effects to digital effects: not because the practical effects look more convincing, but because the light in the scene is hitting everything equally, and the eye can tell that.
 
So when some AI hack says “This is amazing and it will only get better,” I always think of the Etruscan Horse, and how something may look amazing today but will, in just few year’s time, look obvious and clumsy.
 
The latest example touted shows a group of yellow lab puppies romping in snow. Why did the AI people choose that prompt? Because they knew we’d be looking at the puppies and feeling all the things we feel associated with puppies and not noticing all the marks common to Victorian London metalworkers.

Tags: movies ·

Some thoughts on the screenplay for Oppenheimer

Posted by on January 23, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

Spoilers ahoy!
 
The screenplay of Oppenheimer is presented in two parts, labeled “Fission” and “Fusion,” for no particular reason except that that they sound cool and have a vague connection to the subject at hand. The first part of the screenplay is about how Oppenheimer builds the first atomic bomb. The second part of the screenplay is about how Oppenheimer gets his security clearance taken away from him.
 
The two parts of the screenplay are presented concurrently: we get a little bit of Oppenheimer building the atomic bomb, then a little of Oppenheimer getting his security clearance taken away from him, then a little more of Oppenheimer building the atomic bomb, then a little more of him getting his security clearance being taken away from him.
 
Why are the two parts presented concurrently? Because the part about Oppenheimer building of the atomic bomb is really interesting, and the part about Oppenheimer getting his security clearance taken away from him is crushingly, flamboyantly boring, a litany of scenes of men in boardrooms arguing.
 
If the part about Oppenheimer getting his security clearance taken away from him is so boring, why is it in the movie? I have a theory: because, otherwise, the protagonist faces no conflict.
One of the things that took me aback while watching Oppenheimer is how self-congratulatory it is, right from the start. Oppenheimer is a young man, making his way in the world of physics, and yet, everyone he meets has already heard of him, already knows his work, has already formed an opinion of him. In the world of Oppenheimer, everyone knows your name. There are no disinterested parties. Some people think Oppenheimer is a genius, some people think Oppenheimer is a fool, some people are jealous of him, some people adore him, some people want to have sex with him, some people want him to build an atomic bomb, but EVERYONE knows who he is. He is the center of the universe. Everything revolves around him.
 
In his quest to build the atomic bomb, he faces no pushback whatsoever. The army gives him everything he wants. They build a town for him. They gather all the best physicists from around the US to work under him. They build the town near property he owns so that he can feel at home. Everyone works super hard to make sure his dream becomes a reality. He has no enemies of consequence. Even Hitler, who is, theoretically, building his own atomic bomb, fizzles out as an antagonist before the story is halfway done. Oppenheimer is a golden child whom everyone recognizes as a genius who is going to change the world.
 
And then I remembered, Christopher Nolan wrote the screenplay in the first person.
Why? Because the movie is really about himself. Which also accounts for the self-congratulatory nature of the script.
 
A director, especially of Nolan’s fame and prestige, really is a commander of worlds. Certainly everyone that Nolan meets already knows who he is and has formed an opinion of him. Certainly the world’s most beautiful women throw themselves at him. Certainly, if he wishes, an entire town will be built for a movie he wants to make, and, in the case of Oppenheimer, was. Think of that: a movie about a man who gets a town built for his crazy project, and the movie also has a town built for the director’s crazy project. The writer’s intention couldn’t be clearer.
But back to the second part of the screenplay, about how Oppenheimer gets his security clearance taken away from him. To add yet another wrinkle, the writer structures this part of the screenplay as a mystery. Why? I don’t know. It was not a mystery when those events took place. If I had to guess, I’d say that Nolan felt that there wouldn’t be enough dramatic interest in a whole lot of scenes of men in board rooms arguing, so he decided to make it a big mystery: WHO is the nefarious creep who hates Oppenheimer so much that he is working to take away his precious security clearance? WHO COULD IT BE?
 
Could it be, perhaps, THE BIGGEST NAME IN THE CAST?
 
I don’t know what prompted Nolan to make the identity of Oppenheimer’s nemesis a mystery, I’m guessing some studio executive torpedoed a project of his somewhere along the line and this is Nolan’s revenge, but it makes the entire back half of the movie a chore to sit through. Not that the smug, self-congratulatory, biopic-by-the-numbers, cliché-ridden first half was any better.
The movie is about how Nolan feels about himself: the terrible, terrible burden of being an internationally-famous, well-regarded, highly-paid filmmaker who gets to make whatever movie he wants with an unlimited budget and the finest actors on the planet playing even the tiniest of roles. What a horrible situation to find oneself in! Poor Christopher Nolan!
 
If the first part of the screenplay is about making a movie, the second part must be about critical reception. For myself, I’ve always recognized Nolan as a clever director who’s capable of giving dumb ideas a remarkably high-toned sheen: movies for middle-brow moviegoers to watch to feel like highbrows. His one unquestioned triumph, The Dark Knight, is a perfect example. He elevates the source material into a whole other realm with sophisticated writing and direction, aided by an indelible central performance. He then followed that movie with Inception, a movie without a metaphor, about a non-existent device that requires fully half the screenplay to explain the rules of, and then The Dark Knight Rises, which takes all the good will generated by The Dark Knight and squanders it with a Batman movie that Batman isn’t in for most of the runtime.
 
Most importantly, for Nolan anyway, is that Oppenheimer is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a movie about how no one appreciates the terrible burden of genius that will, I’m sure, sweep the Oscars.

Tags: movies ·

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