PopMatters: Ghost World Revisited

In my latest PopMatters article, I revisit Terry Zwigoff's 2001 film Ghost World, one of my favorite movies of all time: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/145647-ghost-world-revisited/

Enjoy :)

Movie Review: Midnight in Paris (2011, Directed by Woody Allen)

As I wander around great American cities, I am often filled with a vague sense that I am somehow walking on the shoulders of past giants. Strolling through Greenwich Village about a year ago, I couldn’t help but construct an imaginary conversation between Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsburg, and myself at some subterranean coffee shop. Walking across the Midway Plaisance on the University of Chicago campus just yesterday, I was struck with the vibrant sights and sounds of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, all in my mind’s eye and ear, of course. I believe my tendency to romanticize the past is shared by many. This suspicion is given credence by Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the most emotionally satisfying film he has made in some time.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter with novelistic aspirations. As is often the case in Allen’s work, the protagonist finds himself in a creative and personal funk. He is engaged to Inez, a beautiful, yet relentlessly dull, daughter of an oil businessman. While visiting Paris, Gil becomes painfully aware of how insipid his life is, especially when cast against the backdrop of the romantic French city. Through a plot turn reminiscent of The Purple Rose of Cairo, Gil finds himself whisked back to the Paris of the 1920s, a time when such towering artists as Hemingway, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein walked the Parisian streets. The protagonist becomes involved in the lives of these intellectual giants, experiencing their philosophical discussions, romantic entanglements, and personal struggles firsthand. He falls for Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Picasso’s current beautiful, young mistress. As Gil immerses himself more and more into the culture of the Jazz Age, the modern world seems increasingly mundane.

Although this description might make Midnight in Paris seem like a sentimental nostalgia trip, it’s much more thematically complicated than this. While Allen clearly has a passion for the era of high artistic Modernism and is living vicariously through his main character, the film’s message has more to do with the present. In a profound scene near the film’s end, Gil has the realization that every generation longs for the vitality of an oft-imagined past. While it’s beneficial to look over one’s shoulder for inspiration, one is not truly living if one isn’t looking for the beauty and magic of the here and now.

One of this movie’s most distinct pleasures is enjoying the subtle performances from the skilled actors. While it would be so tempting to portray such heavyweights as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Salvador Dali via an over-the-top, larger-than-life approach, the players manage to inject these performances with a perfect dose of subtle humanity. Yes, we are watching Ernest Hemingway on the screen. Because Allen and company avoid obvious clichés, though, we get the sense that we see Hemingway as he might have existed, not as he has become in legend.

Woody Allen has been dutifully churning out film after film, year after year. Watching a new Allen film is often a bit of a chore, since it’s almost universally agreed that his best work is behind him. Midnight in Paris, though, represents a huge exception to this perceived rule. I want to avoid falling into the trap that ensnares Owen Wilson’s character. Rather than merely longing for some imagined golden age of Allen films from the past, I want to see the beauty and truth of those being made now. His latest effort makes this exercise extremely easy.

Movie Review: The Social Network (Directed by David Fincher, 2010)

David Fincher's new biopic of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg proves a sentiment regarding movies articulated by Roger Ebert: what's important isn't what a movie's about, but rather how it's about what it's about. I have no particular interest in computer programming or American business practices. I am only a casual user of Facebook. However, I was deeply engrossed in every last frame of this superlative film.

Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, of West Wing fame, manage to depict, with novelistic detail, what it means to be a 21st-century entrepreneur. If Orson Welles' Charles Foster Kane, based loosely on the publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst, showed the simultaneous beauties and horrors of American ambition in the twentieth century, Fincher and Sorkin's Zuckerberg, based to one degree of accuracy or another on the actual man who runs Facebook, does the same for our times.

The Social Network revolves around two separate deposition hearings in which Zuckerberg is sued for various crimes and misdemeanors, including stealing the very idea of Facebook from a couple of his fellow ivy-leaguers and unfairly cutting his friend and former CFO out of the company's profits. While scenes of characters sitting around and talking have great potential for boredom, Sorkin gives us crackling, fast-paced dialogue reminiscent of the great screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s (think His Girl Friday). The depositions are used as a framing device, much like the journalists' interviews on their quest to find 'Rosebud' in Citizen Kane, which helps us follow the troubled journey by which Facebook came to be. We see Zuckerberg, played with incredible verve and sensitivity by indie favorite Jesse Eisenberg, during his days at Harvard. In one of the best opening scenes I have seen in a long time, all of the film's major themes are established. Zuckerberg chats with a current girlfriend, and we instantly understand our protagonist's arrogance, social awkwardness, and technical brilliance. Zuckerberg's broken heart leads him to not only say nasty things about his ex on his personal blog, but also create an application for Harvard students in which they rate the "hotness" of various girls on campus. The site has so many hits within a few hours that the entire Harvard computer network crashes. Zuckerberg is put on academic probation, but his career built on being an insistent outsider begins.

Along the way, we meet a set of twins, both played by the talented Armie Hammer, who first plant the Facebook idea in Zuckerberg's head. The fact that Zuckerberg agrees to work with the twins on the project and then steals it outright results in one of the framing depositions. Justin Timberlake--yes, that Justin Timberlake--plays the founder of Napster, a Mephastophiles-like figure who advises Zuckerberg on business practices to expand the burgeoning Facebook. Zuckerberg's friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is arguably the only sane character in the film. He works with Zuckerberg on the Facebook in its initial stages but becomes wary of the young entrepreneur's arrogance and unchecked ambition.

The reason The Social Network soars above most standard Hollywood biopics is that Fincher brings creative visuals to the project, and Sorkin brings a complex and tightly constructed script. Fincher depicts the world of future billionaires that is Harvard in a style that alternates between naturalistic and delightfully stylized. Long tracking shots follow Zuckerberg as he darts about the New England campus with his backpack bouncing behind him. Later, he depicts Silicon Valley hedonism with the same careful attention to detail. We get a sense of the quick pace at which the phenomenon that is Facebook developed and spread. We are caught up in the whirlwind inside Zuckerberg's mind.

The Social Network will no doubt deservedly be recognized during awards season. It is rare that a film with such a popular appeal so starkly captures the mood and central concerns of our time. The most obvious antecedent for Fincher's Zuckerberg is Daniel Plainview from P.T. Anderson's There Will be Blood. If oil drove American entrepreneurs to both madness and genius in the early part of the twentieth century, the Internet is doing the same now. Zuckerberg, as depicted in Fincher's film, recklessly chases after the American dream, even while it descends into the American nightmare.

Movie Review: Get Low (2010)

The fact that Get Low is almost watchable at times is a testament to Robert Duvall's unparalleled acting abilities. There is very little from a narrative, visual, or thematic standpoint to keep the viewer engaged in this dull and painfully slow film. I spent much of the movie's running time waiting patiently for Duvall to do something clever or naturalistic. Most of the time, I didn't have to wait long.

Get Low is purportedly set in the American South of the 1930s, although it is conspicuously devoid of identifiable regional details. Duvall plays Felix Bush, a much-aligned hermit shrouded in mystery. The storied actor has come full circle now, since he started his illustrious career playing another loner, the creepy Boo Radley in To Kill a Mocking Bird. Bush has the odd idea of throwing a "living funeral" for himself. He hires Chicago-born funeral parlor owner Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) to make the "arrangements." The intention is for local townspeople to come together and tell everything they know about the eccentric Bush. In reality, Bush has a thing or two to tell the townspeople, namely while he has become a hermit. The film sets itself up for a great Shayamalonesque twist ending once Bush reveals to the local people, and the audience, the deep, dark secrets of his past. The movie's denouncement, though, comes off more lame than revelatory. We are left shrugging our shoulders and muttering 'this is it?'

Nevertheless, I can't emphasize enough that Duvall truly is in prime form. He has never been more truthful and honest in his acting as he is now. I just wish the film's script and visual style could better support his remarkable work.