Winter 2005-2006

I already said a few general words about this little DVD magazine. Just wanted to briefly (read: at great length) address the actual contents.

This is not the order in which the DVD menu compels one to watch them, and thus is not the order I watched them. It’s the order they’re listed on the website, which, incidentally, has now made three of the pieces available in their entirety.

Al Gore Documentary directed by Spike Jonze. 13 min.

Like this one. Click here to watch it. Certainly this is an interesting and historically noteworthy chunk of footage. I guess Spike Jonze’s contribution has been to edit it in such a way that we don’t feel he’s pushing any sort of message or ideology on us. It successfully allows us to feel that weird sense of intimacy one gets from being warmly welcomed inside some stranger’s house. Gore comes across, to me, as someone who really doesn’t know how to present himself and only in the abstract understands this to be a problem. Which is a little touching and a little sad. Maybe that’s what his campaign could have used, I don’t know, but I’m not of the mind that this little video would have turned the election. On the other hand, that’s the strange thing about our media-driven elections; a well-placed tuna-fish sandwich can throw the balance. As the old saying goes. But it’s still hard for me to imagine this idiot impressionable voter that pundits are always talking in terms of – like, if you thought it was a problem that Al Gore was stiff, this video shouldn’t change your mind, because he is stiff, on this video as much as anywhere else. But apparently, campaigns can sell discomfort more generally and irrationally than that. If he’s stiff, maybe that means he doesn’t love his family or watch movies or bodysurf. Oh, it doesn’t? Well then!

People get uncomfortable with candidates because they imagine them to be fully knowable; they extrapolate a grotesquely insufficient human being, working only from the single data point of the public persona and extending it to cover everything. When we see one of those crabs get exposed by the waves, then shimmy back into the sand and out of sight, we think, “Well, I can’t see him anymore, but I know what he’s up to. Same thing he was doing when I could see him.” But politicians aren’t crabs; they’re people, and under the sand they probably own VCRs and whisks and whatnot. If it’s true that the citizenry would have found this to be refreshing news, then this, yes, could have been an important video. But maybe this is all a fake, right? Acclaimed director Spike Jonze is just messing with us. What’s Gore really like? Either you believe in the existence of reality or you don’t, but a video isn’t going to help you trust. That’s what I’m saying.

Soldier’s Pay directed by David O. Russell. 11 min.

I haven’t seen Russell’s Three Kings (1999), but part of the point seems to be that the true story in the present documentary resembles the story in Three Kings. This was just talking heads but it still managed to rub me the wrong way. The story, about American soldiers stealing millions of dollars in cash from an evacuated Iraqi home, is what it is, and the soldiers are who they are, and that’s interesting as far as it goes. But underlying the existence of the film at all is the implication that through this proudly unflinching look at the moral grayscale of war, big corruption is getting skewered. And maybe this really is a slam-dunk case of hypocrisy, but that wasn’t totally clear from these brief interviews. More to the point, as a viewer, I felt like I was being asked to enjoy the slam dunk and also admire the fact that this documentary was too respectful, and too real, to slam or dunk anything. Am I just a cranky jerk? I think that given the context, on a hip DVD next to a Turkish sitcom played for kitsch value – see below – I was more sensitive to attitude than to content. It was interesting enough content for 11 minutes. It should be noted that this was an excerpt from a longer short film (35 min.) which I see is properly called Soldiers Pay (2004). That is, without the apostrophe, so as to allow the pun. Exactly like Finnegans Wake. (1939).

Grimm’s Tales 2: Death of the Hen directed by Brian Dewan. 16 min.

I thought this was cute. Maybe deadpan is easy and I should go harder on it – I think Beth did – but I liked the idea and I liked the execution. It was a classroom-style filmstrip, presented as a filmstrip, with the narrator making a “boop” every time the frame was supposed to advance. The story was this, from the Brothers Grimm collection. The cock and the hen set out about their business but the world throws a confused string of complications in their path until eventually everyone is dead. Aarne-Thompson type 2021! The guy’s illustrations were clumsy but in a committed and thus effective way. I think he’s on to something with this filmstrip idea. The deadening formality of filmstrip presentation, well known to fifth-graders, which completely smothers and mutes the potential awe of any grandly important subject – solar eclipses, or the evolution of mankind, or whatever – meshes perfectly with that sense of strangely muted, formalized horror one finds in fairy tales. Why did all these animals have to go through this maddening series of fairy-tale-ish trials just in order to die? What is that vague threat in the air? Just like fifth grade. I like thinking about the worry in fairy tales and the worry in elementary schools, and I liked this piece for making that connection in its quiet way.

I just found this page about a 2003 exhibition at a nearby gallery – a gallery where, it so happens, I once saw a show of my second-cousin-once-removed’s work – of this guy’s filmstrips, presented in a little classroom they set up. To me this is charming and I wish I had been there. I like exhibitions that manage to have an element of make-believe or the surreal but without actually making any pretense to being important in some way that everything that goes on in a gallery clearly is not. Unassuming peculiarity. At least from this piece, this guy seemed genuinely unassuming. It says he’s a musician, and I’d be interested to hear his music.

Are You The Favorite Person Of Anybody? directed by Miguel Arteta; written by Miranda July. 4 min.

Like I said – and said before that too – I think Miranda July means it, so I don’t mind. So far I still like her thing. I like that this little movie has the setup and rhythm of a comedy commercial, except it’s not selling anything; it’s not even selling any particular punchline or non-punchline. It’s just a little bit of dialogue. It doesn’t have a lot of thought behind it, but what thought it does have it keeps hidden, which allows us to feel that the process of feeling our way to the place where she began, in writing it, has been worthwhile.

What I like about Miranda July’s thing is that she embraces flakiness, but always seeming to have approached it from the direction of non-flakiness. The question of whether to allow oneself to embrace flakiness is always going to be a troubling one, and it’s heartwarming to see someone saying “flakiness is so great!” and yet not have to worry that they only think so because they’re irredeemably flaky. She seems to be espousing a tone of thought that is not usually endorsed by people capable of succeeding, as she has, in the real world. That’s why the question is: is she sincere? Because even in this internet age, it’s surprising to think that a sincere expression of flaky warmth can reach from a stranger all the way to me. Much more likely that it’s coming from a spammer in Nigeria. So one has to be wary. But since that very point – about the myriad possibilities for, yet unlikeliness of, connection – was the recurring theme of her movie, and sort of of this short, and certainly of that website, I believe she is sincere. And I’m all for that. Plus it’s only 4 minutes long.

The Writer directed by Carson Mell. 3 min.

You can watch this at the website too. There’s not a lot to this and I get a slightly distasteful vibe off it, but it is kind of funny. The best thing in it is the lion drawing, which he apparently found in a yearbook, so don’t give him credit for that. His actual drawing style and subject matter seems like a practiced imitation of both Dan Clowes and Charles Burns. I couldn’t find the Dan Clowes picture of the guy with the creepy things coming out of his eye sockets just like in this movie, but, anyway, it exists.

The Big Empty directed by J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Siegel. 21 min.

This sucked. It was a performance of everything that’s wrong with the McSweeney’s brand. A lot of money and love went into making the production design look like the equivalent of the McSweeney’s layout – that is, ostentatiously restrained. As for the content, after letting slip the phrase “toxically asinine,” I will let imdb user alpi wan kenobi from Turkey do the talking for me.

This movie is about Alice’s vagina and other characters around her. She has pain in her vagina and during examination very cold tundra place is found in it. During movie a lot of characters( doctor, Eskimo’s, scientists) is entering in her vagina but find nothing. In fact, there is only problem about her,pain. nobody concern about that except a man.

Selma Blair played very successfully in this short movie. She could show the loneliness of Alice. I think everybody that seen this movie can find something about life, especially love.

Therefore George Clooney and Peter Soderbergh are the executive producers of this movie. Finally, this movie should be watched, I promise you would have a nice time.

Except for Peter Soderbergh, he’s got the facts right. In fact he’s pretty well packed it all into that one paragraph. Except he doesn’t make clear that it’s all infused with that American Beauty-style middle-class benign secular transcendence thing. Mystico-materialism, it should be called. Those guys, Alan Ball and Sam Mendes (and Thomas Newman), pretty much invented it outright, as far as I can tell, and now it seems like it’s the fuel driving half of our culture. At least American Beauty was about it, and endorsed it purposefully. I don’t think J. Lisa and Newton Thomas had any conscious awareness of what they were diddling with. But that didn’t stop them from making a smug-ass movie. If it had been selling a minivan I would have understood, but this was supposed to be about human emotion for god’s sake! At the beginning one might think, given that the whole thing is about Selma Blair in well-ironed clothes holding a deadpan and being pronounced completely empty, that it’s all some kind of smirky joke. But by the end it’s all too clear that they haven’t a clue what they’re smirking about. It’s mind-boggling, but the movie is ultimately a celebration of the redemptive power of sex with another clean attractive person, for the utterly spiritually vacuous. With all the shimmering music and CGI that that entails. It was sort of like one of those hateful lavalife ads we see on the subway – where sex is always depicted as twinkling sparklies and offers the only possible salvation for those hipsters fabulous enough to emanate it. Here’s that one where the girl has the magical butt. Oops, looks I didn’t let alpi wan kenobi do the talking for me after all! Okay, let’s move on before I get any more worked up.

Here, in between two of the items, I have a new idea for how to articulate the irksome subtext of McSweeney’s: “Look, we never stop being interested in things. Look, we are open to every possibility, no matter how awesome, for a richly thoughtful life. Sufficiently hip attention makes everything worthy of attention; ours is the hipness of substance. The difference between uncool people and us is that their patterns of thought are bound by convention and thus tend toward disinterest; our playful approach to the world is an approach to the real world and our minds are alive. This is fun – it is in fact the only real fun; the fun of being alive.” This is irksome because it is smug, and also because it creates its own blind spot: the real world as a deadpan mix-tape might well be slightly more attentive than the American status quo, but in the end it’s just as stifling an m.o. as anything else.

That said, I like the fact that they’ve assembled, for me, deadpan mix-tapes like this DVD, which I found diverting and interesting. It’s good that they sell the actual stuff they do. But they are also selling a brand, which as marketing people the world over will tell you, is the real product, and like any well-formed brand, it makes me cringe. Maybe it makes me cringe in particular because I admire the values – attentiveness, versatility, whimsy – that it has aestheticized, abstracted, and sold as an identity.

My long, heartfelt lament for personal identity in this country, which seems more and more uncharacteristically political to me each time I think about it, will have to wait for another time. But brace yourself.

The House in the Middle presented by the National Clean Up, Paint Up, Fix Up Bureau in 1954. 6 min.
You can’t watch this at Wholphin’s site, but you can watch it here. Something that would typically be called “an artifact of the atomic age,” except who says we’re out of the atomic age? I’m still worried. That said, this is certainly an artifact of that peculiar historical time where cultural innocence and loss-of-innocence tried to find a way to coexist. Horrible weapons could kill millions but it’s still important – maybe it’s even more important – to keep your house looking tidy and smart. Those 1954eans weren’t idiots; they missed the absurdity of this sort of thing because it was simply the continuation of two cultural strains that had only begun to battle it out. Clean homes and nuclear war both probably seemed equally likely to be the right thing to be talking about, so here they are in a reassuring, but ostensibly tough-minded, combination. I wouldn’t be surprised if, say, our era’s endless appetite for sarcasm and irony comes off, to some future era, as hopelessly, provincially 90s/00s-ish, and stuff like “The Daily Show,” which seems so sharp now, will seem like a grotesque juxtaposition of philosophical incompatibilities. Anyway, this was interesting enough and, like anything with an atomic bomb in it, a little upsetting.

The Delicious directed by Scott Prendergast. 16 min.
This was very silly. I used to make very silly videos with my sister when we were kids; this was more or less like that. I laughed at it and parts of it are still making me smile when I think back on them, so I think that counts as a complete success. Giggly ideas like this tend to die in the execution and this one was probably a little less all-out zany than it could have been if less planning and care had gone into it, but that’s always a trade-off, of course, and I think the trade-off here wasn’t bad. It revolves around a guy wearing silly clothes and making silly noises and silly movements. When I was eight or nine, the first Monty Python skit I ever saw was this and it made me Roll On the Floor with Laughter, literally. It certainly wouldn’t anymore, and neither does this. But it might have then.

Malek Khorshid directed by Ali Akbar Sadeghi. 16 min.
This was definitely the finest piece on here – Iranian animation from 1975. I believe this one might be translated as The Sun King but I don’t know for sure because it was completely unsubtitled here. There was very little speaking or writing, but there was some and I can’t say that I know what they were saying, or, exactly, what was going on. A mysterious, poetic, save-the-princess legend quest of some sort, with quasi-traditional Persian imagery. The film had a very lovely 70s-lyrical quality and reminded me of old Sesame Street pieces as well as of Yellow Submarine.

The website and liner notes originally listed Sadeghi as “bio unknown” and gave no year of production, so I googled to see what I could find out. To my surprise, there were plenty of sites with info. So much info that I couldn’t imagine why they had settled on “bio unknown.” So I wrote an email to the editor with some links and said (unpleasantly) that maybe their “bio unknown” was supposed to be somehow coy, but if so that seemed disrespectful. He responded (very promptly!), thanking me for the links, but also said, “coy? disrespectful?” I felt a little chastened for my bad attitude toward McSweeney’s and resolved to be more generous in assessing their motivations, and in general to calm down and be nice. Simultaneously I felt like, “don’t play innocent with me, guy! You know exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!” Which might be a sign of mild delusion. But come on! If you type it into google you get lots of hits.

Anyway, their site now has some biographical info about Ali Akbar Sadeghi. I hope he appreciates!

Tatli Hayat (“The Sweet Life”) Turkish sitcom. 25 min.
This is an episode of a recent, reasonably slick Turkish sitcom on the premise of “The Jeffersons” – Ihsan and Sevinc are using their new money to live “The Sweet Life” in a fancy building, but… whatever. This is the one where Sevinc gets jealous on the night they’re supposed to be celebrating their anniversary because Ihsan has hired a new sexy secretary. A nice clear translation is available in subtitles. Then they’ve got five “alternate” subtitle tracks written by American comedy writers. I watched the whole thing with the original text, which was, in a mild way, interesting. Mostly it was interesting how exactly it followed the American mold. There was nothing particularly “Turkish” about it; just a slightly lower budget and a reliance on material that we’ve finally written off as “tired” in the US – “hide in the closet!” routines etc. Is that modern Turkey in general, just TV, just sitcoms, or just this sitcom? I don’t know. There were no funny jokes in it but it wasn’t pitiful, either. It was just a Turkish sitcom. Then I watched a few minutes each of the five alternate tracks. Each writer seemed to take the task slightly differently, but none of them really jumped out as being clever enough to justify another 25 minutes of my time. A lot of the same old stuff I did when I dubbed Friends into German for a project in high school. So maybe I’ll watch them, maybe I won’t. Actually, I did watch one to completion, because it cut off early and played against the image the whole time, doing a sort of stand-up routine instead, independent of the characters. That seemed to be the best one. All in all this seems like an idea that probably seemed brilliant in the pitch but in reality just felt tedious and a little mean-spirited.

Stairway at St. Paul and The Great Escape, directed by Jeroen Offerman. 8 min. + 10 min.
The first of these is the artist singing “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, backwards. I used to do this with Sound Recorder in Windows – recording things forwards, reversing them, imitating the reversed sound, recording that, and reversing it. A video performance of a song is cleverer and this is entertaining pretty much the whole way through. Good idea. Apparently now he does live performances of this stunt and is making a sort of career of it. The second is a video piece of a hovercraft approaching from the distance, landing, letting someone on, starting up again, and returning to the horizon. It takes a long time to happen and so works sort of like a still image that happens to be moving. It reminded me of the Bill Viola video installation I saw a few years ago, except less interesting. Had I not seen that exhibition, I might have gotten more out of this. I think things like this, which are more like painting than film, are among the few things that actually benefit from being seen “disembodied” in a gallery and not on DVD or in a theater.

Also on this disc is an untitled thingy with Patton Oswalt making faces at the camera in a long take… and then the camera eventually follows the guy next to him into a storage facility where we hear music… he opens one of the units to reveal David Byrne with a guitar. I think that was it. It was cold-deadpan, joyless nonsense, with celebrities; in other words: “cooler-than-thou.” I was not surprised to learn that it was the uncredited output of Mr. Dave Eggers himself. How did I find that out? I saw it on the prior version of the Wholphin website. But look! – it seems to have vanished in the interim. I imagine that was an intentional choice. But maybe I should remember the case of google and Ali Akbar Sadeghi and just calm down.

I think Dave Eggers is probably a cool guy in real life – that’s what a friend of his told me! – but obviously I am not happy about something here. That may be all my fault. If I get around to writing that identity-politics entry, I’ll put it there. Anyway, sorry Dave, and sorry Wholphin. It’s just me. Keep it up. I will buy the next one. But I promise not to write about everything on it.

Note: Upon reading this through, I see that I’ve used the word “deadpan” about ten times, which is unacceptable. Still, it’s an important concept for this material and I can’t think of too many good substitutes. Maybe the time has come for our culture to make like an Eskimo in snow and invent a full lexicon of deadpan. The word “irony” is doing duty for a thousand things that deserve their own names. Let’s give it a break and start neologizing, people! Leave suggestions here.

directed by Martin Ritt
screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.
adapted from a group of stories by William Faulkner

That’s what the credits apparently say. Word on the street is that the material for this movie all comes from the novel The Hamlet (1940). Alternately it’s said to be derived from two stories: Barn Burning (1939), the substance of which was incorporated into The Hamlet, and Spotted Horses (1931), which appears essentially intact as a chapter of The Hamlet. However, the character relationships and plotting are, my research tells me, a bit of a free improvisation on Faulkner rather than a direct adaptation. It felt that way, to be honest.

All I know is, it was funny at the beginning when the Hollywood violins zoomed up their golden staircase to usher in the CinemaScope title sequence, and the proud words appeared: “William Faulkner’s THE LONG HOT SUMMER,” with “William Faulkner’s” written in a suave brush script. And then someone starts crooning Alex North’s immortal song, “The Long Hot Summer as featured in Jerry Wald’s production of William Faulkner’s THE LONG HOT SUMMER.” Why was it funny? What is it that’s so ignoble about that possessive? The 1958 audience probably didn’t spontaneously laugh, like we did, when they saw it hanging smarmily above the title. Is it that the silly movie is shamelessly trying to puff itself up with absurd name-dropping? It’s not, after all, that absurd – the stories are by William Faulkner – they are William FaulknER’S. And yet there’s something about that attempt at chumminess, in the apostrophe-S, that seems false and undeserved. It’s a little glimpse of the class struggle between literature and film, which, though we’d like to think it’s been resolved, is still bitter. Film is trying, in its desperate bourgeois way, to cozy up to the aristocracy, and we’re laughing at the oafish transparency of the scheme. The irony of course is that Faulkner himself was for years a working stiff in the film industry. Money can’t buy you class, I think is the lesson, or at least is the motto behind our laughter. Oh, so this is William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet? The William Shakespeare? [long, impressed whistle].

Searched to see what anyone else has said on this subject. This guy is implying, as regards the present case, that the real idea was to capitalize on the William Faulkner brand. Well, right. That’s also embarrassing. And it can’t account for everything. You know who’s gonna love this version of The Odyssey? Homer fans. Let’s put something in there to really catch their eye, let ’em know just whose Odyssey this is.

Okay, well, that’s just silly. Obviously that’s a special case.

Oh, The Long Hot Summer? Right. It was okay. At the time I was watching it I enjoyed it more than that, but it rapidly paled in my retrospective opinion, I think primarily because the plot was so hodgepodgic.* By the end it had become clear that the depth and weight intimated by all that meaty dialogue was a bit of a mirage. During the course of the movie, though, I several times thought: “this all has an old-fashioned, conscientious, cared-for, acted quality and I admire that.” It felt like a good, invigorating evening at the theater. It was written that way, too.

And here is the thought I specifically wanted to record from my watching of this movie: This idea of how people work – people as characters who might well name the very things that define them, if caught at the right moment. This paradigm of people who fall in love with each other, and become murderous when angered, and suicidal when defeated. I understand these things making plots go, and making those amphitheatre-sitting Greeks gasp and marvel, and muse about life. But there’s something odd about this Shakespearean or whoeverean notion that if we take these army-men out of their plotted campaign and just let them sit and talk, their thoughts and feelings are worth our attention too. I’m not sure how to say this because it’s so broad. Something is strange to me about the quintessentially Hollywoodish scenes, of which this movie had several, where two characters storm and struggle against each other, through dialogue, and we are meant to feel that we are seeing something wholesomely real and earthy. Is it just me? Mind you, I don’t actually find this phenomenon troubling or confusing in practice – but during this movie I kept thinking, “but on what grounds are you trying to convince me that this matters, again? It’s something to do with ‘universal human truths,’ right?”

What is that thing, where people pace around rooms and say dramatic stuff to one another? It’s a very odd bunch of conventions. That’s all I’m saying. They did a very good job of it in this movie.

Actually, maybe the peculiarity of the insinuation that we can learn something about life from the melodramatic goings-on in a movie is a direct result of that clash between the high of literature and the low of movies. In a movie, especially a pre-70s Hollywood movie, we see every detail and are thus always aware of the artifice, of how shallow the make-believe goes. Just off-screen is a man with a megaphone; between the lines of the script there is only blank space. In a well-written book, we only see what we are intentionally shown and thus it’s possible for an author to keep alive the thought that whatever we aren’t seeing is real life in all its richness and relevance.

I guess this is one of my problems with modern theater. Or, like, whatever Chekhov is considered. Or O’Neill. Seeing people playing in costumes on a stage, the fakest of fake, doesn’t put me in a frame of mind where I’m ready to believe that the emotional grit is relevant because it’s real. If you know what I mean.

Orson Welles looked like a mess and talked like a coughing animal but I think he made the movie. Or maybe he weakened the movie by being SO huge and blustery that nobody else could compete with his presence. It may well be that the plotting felt arbitrary to me only because my focus had been drawn too far from Paul Newman, who should have been the rightful center of attention. But that said, I enjoyed Orson and I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role. Newman comes off as a natural and someone with a lot more potential than this movie can put on show. Joanne Woodward has a bad haircut and in general isn’t photographed very attractively, whereas Paul Newman looks great. I guess he didn’t mind, though.

Alex North’s music may also have been part of what was keeping me in an unconvinced frame of mind. He did some nice summer-heat things with a lazily tinkling piano embroidering over smooth strings, and, honestly, his song wasn’t so bad, but his dramatic scoring was too forceful. The long scored scene between Newman and Woodward in the middle culminates in some “SHE! JUST! SLAPPED! HIM!” chords that are laughable. Again, a conflict between naturalism and…that other thing. Epic-izing. What’s the word for that?

So in typing out my thoughts I seem to have exposed a common thread: the movie was essentially in the – for want of the correct word – epic style – and by epic I mean some other word entirely, suggestions please – but had some gestures toward naturalism in content and performance that didn’t mesh with that style and created awkwardness. That stylistically unsettled quality characterizes a lot of 50’s dramas, to me – as I’m typing this I’m thinking of On the Waterfront.

That I’ve ended up here is sort of interesting, in light of the (lame) Long Hot Summer DVD mini-documentary, wherein Angela Lansbury talked about the discomfort Orson Welles apparently felt on set being surrounded by all these young “method” actors, whereas he was a proponent of the “old school.” Maybe what I’m saying is that his discomfort was ours as well, and that Hollywood didn’t yet know how to make good use of “the method.”

I haven’t read any Faulkner – yeah, really – so I can’t comment on that, but obviously that would inform all of this in a valuable way. Sorry, everyone. I will.

* According to google, I am the first.

[The Magic Flute]
directed by Ingmar Bergman

screen adaptation by Ingmar Bergman of the opera Die Zauberflöte (1791)
music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder

135 min.

I have some difficulty with opera – like most people, but not like most people who enjoy classical music – and though this charming film version (“congenial,” the Bergman website calls it) was both appealing and comprehensible to me, it was because of the ways that it smoothed over and touched up the weird, barbed edges of the original form. Watching the easy film while listening to the zany opera (so to speak) I was made, perhaps, even more aware of that strangeness that lurks in so much purportedly accessible classical music, distressingly strange because it goes uncommented upon.

Here, hiding under my own little soapbox, I can ask the stupid questions to which I still have no satisfactory answers. It’s really just one big stupid question with many examples. The question is: why doesn’t the music in opera sound like what it should, dramatically? For example, why does the famous second aria of the Queen of the Night (you know, the piping coloratura thing that you’ve heard before) sound like that? It sounds like some kind of birdlike jubilation, no? But the thing is actually “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” – “Hell’s Vengeance Boils in My Heart” – and, by all normal dramatic appearances, it ought to be a threatening, frightening moment. At the very least, even if we disregard the dramatic context, you’d think that, taking a cue from the lyric, it would sound angry. But musically it sounds like, you’ll pardon me, a choo-choo train.

Now, I’m always ready and willing to give art the benefit of the doubt, and try to open my mind. I think that’s my responsibility. Especially when the judgment of Western Civilization As A Whole is more favorable than mine, it seems like some good-faith effort ought to be made. And I can easily concoct a long string of possible justifications for this (and, in general, for this sort of thing), most of which I even find fairly convincing.

1. This is only a part of the aria as a whole. The first few bars of the aria, accompanying the actual “Hell’s Vengeance” lyric, do sound rather angry, are suitably minor-key (as is the conclusion of the aria), and in general make dramatic sense. The central, superficially cheerier section should be seen as added to, not distractedly departing from, this context.

2. The peculiarity is purposeful. The juxtaposition of the superficial musical “cheeriness” against the already-established dramatic/expressive tone of hatred creates an intentionally grotesque effect, suggesting madness and evil. This is heightened by the unnervingly abstract lapse into non-linguistic sound.

3. It’s not really so far off the mark. The music may not be expressing “scary” or “violent,” but it is pretty clearly expressing “intimidating,” “imperious,” and “wild,” none of which particularly necessitates, say, minor chords.

4. The aria is primarily a showcase. The extremity of the vocal display is itself the characterization. The design of the music is only partly expressive, partly a vehicle for this display. In this latter capacity, it might stray a bit from the pure dramatic content of the moment, but one’s attention is meant to be on the spectacular performance, from whence the character flows.

5. The aria is only part of the opera as a whole. Part of the ethereal distinction of The Magic Flute is its overall use of a simple, almost naive harmonic language. The oddity of the present case arises from the choice of this peculiarly uncomplicated “sound world” and should be taken as part of the effect for which the opera is known, of mysteriously innocent resonance.

6. As always, the historical consideration. Back then, dramatic situations played a little differently; musico-dramatic associations were a little different, and, most importantly, those parts of music that were so conventional as to be ignorable were different. Mozart would no doubt wonder why all of our love songs are so violently motoric and have all that percussion in them, which to him would sound Turkish or Oriental. In part, the violence he would hear in our pop is an intended effect, but the effect is muted for us because it conforms so comfortably to stylistic norms. The expressive quirks of the Queen of the Night’s aria would have been similarly muted to a contemporary audience.

7. Of course it seems unnatural; it’s a song. The ideals that seem to me natural regarding the continuity and “realism” of musical expression in a dramatic context are the product of my time, and became part of the culture only in the late nineteenth-century, or even more recently. The far-more-absurd inaptness of “Shipoopi” was still viable as of 1957. Perhaps the only thing lacking from my appreciation of this aria is my readiness to hear it as a “number” in its own right. And yet this is, in fact, how I tend to hear it at first, because of its fame. So maybe that’s right on the money. This film version, by doing something boldly dark during the sequence – the Queen’s face floats past, ghostly and masklike, staring at the camera, as she sings – happened to make this interpretation less natural than it would have been under normal performance circumstances.

As I said, these are all pretty convincing to me. But my point here is that it is still not clear to me which of these are the “real” explanations, since all of them are after-the-fact inventions, and so I am still left having the same authentic reaction to operas time after time, which is: what happened to the drama? Why are you doing… that? and that? and that? And it frustrates me, as it does with classical music in general, when attempts to serve this stuff up to a general audience reassure us that all we need to do is either a) just sit back and trust our reactions, or b) study up until we know the names, dates, and keywords. Neither of which helps me with the harder problem. I’ve come to some of the answers for instrumental music myself, and am eager to try to share them with others, but they’re hard to communicate. But maybe that’s only because I end up formulating the questions on the behalf of uninterested people and then forcing information on them. I think if a person came to me with sincere questions I’d have helpful answers. Is there someone out there who can give me helpful answers to my sincere questions, here, about opera?

As for Bergman, he has, as per his reputation, a sure hand and a very warm touch. The film does a remarkable, loving job of showing us what is universal and humanistic about this thoroughly nonsensical material. Bergman’s affection for the theater itself, for its homey and gentle mysteries, is used to frame and support the opera itself, to excellent effect. We hear the rumblings of scenery moving, get playful glimpses behind the scenes, and during occasional scene-changes, keep cutting back to the little girl in the audience, whose happiness is in itself a part of the message. The opera is some sort of an ode to the ideals (for Mozart and Schikaneder, Masonic ideals) of love and wisdom, and the generosity and humanity of the theater itself is a reflection of its vision. Or so Bergman is saying, and I don’t think anyone would claim that Mozart and Schikaneder would object.

There’s something intimate and suitable about the close-miking of the spoken dialogue. At the beginning, when we hear the three ladies whispering to Tamino, their whispers seem to be coming from extremely close by; much of the sound had that soothing effect of things heard while waking from a nap.

I like the handling of the overture, cutting from audience member to audience member, though one ends up thinking about Swedish racial features more than is probably desirable. The cutting does not strictly synchronize with the rhythmic play of the music, though it suggests it, which sets the stage for the relationship the film will bear to the music throughout – moved by it more than with it. But this is probably appropriate with Mozart. Like I said above, I’m in no position to say how such things should be done. I know that Bergman loved music but considered himself to have a poor ear. The film presumes to join forces with the drama but lets the music itself issue from somewhere above and beyond.

Tamino and Papageno both seemed just right to me. Sarastro’s appearance and voice seemed a little lacking given that he’s supposed to be The Embodiment of The Powers of Goodness and Light. Pamina was a bit chilly. Lovely sets.

This is the second time I’ve seen this. I can imagine myself watching it yet again some time. It has a quiet, children’s book peace to it that seems like it might remain inviting. But not for a while, anyway.

This was Criterion Collection #71. No “extras,” by the way, and though it was apparently from a new print, it still had visible splices in it, plus some odd flickering. It was still nice to look at. The Flowers of St. Francis, which I wrote about in February, was Criterion Collection #293. That leaves 350 that I haven’t talked about. I’ll let you know.

directed by Jon Favreau
screenplay by David Koepp and John Kamps
after the book by Chris Van Allsburg (2002)

113 min.

On a bus. A movie about a fantastical board game is predestined to be flimsy; it’s basically “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”* To this movie we say: a whole bunch of stuff better jump out at me! And it better look like I’m about to hit something and then it falls away at the last second! The movie was scripted to include all these things and so there they were, but they fell flat – too flat to justify the movie, anyway. One problem is that the movie was edited at too slack a pace to evoke a roller-coaster. Another problem is that John Debney’s score refused to pick up any of the slack and just mailed in the usual outer-space choirs of awe, over and over again, to numbing effect. But the main overarching problem was one of attitude. In the movie, an astronaut character, played by one of these post-Generation-X boyish 30-year-old types, emerges from the game and takes on an avuncular role with the little kids whose movie this is. Despite being part of the fantasy – wearing a spacesuit, knowing about Zorgons, and so forth – he doesn’t seem to take it as reality. His manner is, like I say, avuncular; he seems to be Jon Favreau – I’m going to attribute this all to Jon Favreau because it fits with what I imagine his personality to be – playing babysitter and being proud of himself for being such a cool deadpan babysitter. “Okay, guys, the Zorgons are coming. There’s nothing funny about it. This is serious.” And that’s how the movie as a whole felt, like it was saying, “Look how seriously I’m taking this stuff. It’s fun and it’s also exciting. Look how fun and exciting it is when you kids get to hang out with me,” all the while looking forward to getting a beer afterward and saying something about how it’s no big deal to take care of cool kids – chicks eat that stuff up. Steven Spielberg would make this movie from the point of view of the kid – awed and terrified – whereas Jon Favreau made it from the point of view of the awesome babysitter. “Dude, this isn’t funny. This is scary.” Chris Van Allsburg’s books are all about that hovering, textural sense of mystery. I get the sense that there’s no room for that sort of thing in Jon Favreau’s personality. And without it, this premise has nowhere to go.

I’m skipping over the whole “we need a sentimental side story” sentimental side story about brotherly compassion, which was incoherent, and the stupid frame with Tim Robbins doing his best impression of a normal dad, and the kids not wanting to be left alone in this “big old spooky house” which is actually a completely un-forbidding, gorgeous, welcoming dream home. The movie encouraged you to skip over these things.

When it started – and the opening title sequence, featuring the “retro” game board designs, was attractive – I thought, “this is the perfect movie for a bus!” and became genuinely excited about what it might have in store for me. But by the middle, and certainly by the end, I was just bored. I think if I were still a kid I might have enjoyed it anyway. Kids are good at subconsciously filling in mystery and atmosphere on their own. Seemingly unobjectionable illustrations in kids’ books become too frightening to bear because they’re so rife with nightmarish implication. But now, as a jaded boyish 30-year-old type, that power has passed out of my subconscious and into my conscious will, and I don’t feel like putting in the sympathetic work to beef up the atmosphere of every bus movie that gets thrown my way. Of course, maybe that’s the very definition of the crankiness that characterizes the hopelessly grimacing adults in kids’ movies – the reluctance to shoulder too much of the burden in the process of being amused.

So, sure, if I had come to this movie with a fixation on outer-space make-believe, the movie would have provided me with the visuals to fuel my fixation. But I don’t really regret holding the movie responsible for selling me the idea that its premise was potentially delightful, or deeming it to have fallen short. When you’re old enough to know that a movie can be about a board game that takes you to outer space or about a serial killer who cuts the skin off his victims or about the Holocaust or about My Best Friend’s Wedding, you learn that directing your sense of interest is half the battle, and it is, indeed, the movie’s battle to fight. They almost had me there on the strength of the title sequence alone, and then they still lost me, because they weren’t really there themselves.

* By which I mean the Disneyland attraction, and not the latter half of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), from whence the imagery, but not the mechanics, of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”