Bright Wall/Dark Room.

WE DID IT! We sent the BW/DR app/magazine off to Apple this...

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:51:00 -0400

WE DID IT!

We sent the BW/DR app/magazine off to Apple this morning (via TypeEngine, our wonderful publishers)!

Filled to the brim with essays, reviews, humor, and even a poem (on Sex & The City 2, obviously)—all accompanied by illustrations from our very own insanely talented Brianna Ashby—I’m so excited to show this thing to you I could almost burst. When I’m not cross-eyed or falling asleep at my computer in the middle of the night, that is. Turns out preparing a magazine is a whole lot of work. But it’s going to be worth it, and then some.

So here is how it will work, once it becomes available to you next week: We’ll be offering you a “mini-issue” (consisting of a Foreword/Introduction to the magazine, as well as essays on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Place Beyond the Pines, and Mad Men) entirely for free, which you’ll receive when you download the magazine app. Don’t worry, we’ll provide links to it all over the place once it’s officialy released. That will always be free to you, no matter what. We want you to see what we’re doing with the magazine before you decide to sign up or pay us a single cent for any of it.

The first official “full” issue will also be available at that same time next week, and will be yours as well, once you choose to subscribe to the magazine. And that subscription is only going to cost you $1.99. For less than you paid for your coffee this morning, you’ll get a whole month’s worth of brand new BWDR content (not previously featured on the site), served up fresh and piping hot to your phones and/or tablets, each and every month!

Once the magazine is launched, the only way to get the very best BW/DR content going forward will be to subscribe to the magazine. We plan to post one full new essay from each month’s issue here on the site, as well as teaser paragraphs from all the other articles, but if you want to get all the goods (7-8 additional essays/reviews/features per month + illustrations and artwork), you’ll have to subscribe.

And we’ll continue to do everything in our power to make that absolutely worth it for you.

—-

We will still maintain a regularly updated site here at BWDR, featuring quality essays that we just couldn’t find a place for in the magazine, as well as incorporating other kinds of interesting posts—links, pictures, videos, quotes, blurbs, etc—that previously had been getting shuttled off to our sister site, Film Projections, but will now start to make their home on the main BWDR site instead. (We’ve been slowly starting to integrate more non-essay content over the past two weeks, and will continue to do so from here on out).

In other words: keep coming back here too, because we aren’t going anywhere!

“If somebody goes out to make a movie that isn’t designed...

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:04:48 -0400

“If somebody goes out to make a movie that isn’t designed primarily to entertain people, then I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. What’s the Raymond Chandler line? ‘All good art is entertainment and anyone who says differently is a stuffed shirt and juvenile at the art of living.’”

—Joel Coen, (shown here directing his wife, Frances McDormand, in Fargo)

"Frank Capra said “Film is a disease”. He went on, but that’s enough for now. I..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:42:40 -0400

“

Frank Capra said “Film is a disease”.

He went on, but that’s enough for now. I caught the disease early on. I used to feel it. And they used to take me to the movies all the time. I used to feel it whenever we walked up to the ticket booth with my mother, my father, my brother. You’d go through the doors, on the thick carpet, to - past the popcorn stand that had that wonderful smell - then to the ticket taker, and then sometimes they’d get - these doors would open in the back and there were little windows in it in some of the old theaters and I could see something magical happening up there on the screen, something special. And as we entered, for me I think now, it was like entering a sacred space, a kind of a sanctuary where the living world around me seemed to be recreated and played out.

What was it about cinema? What was so special about it? I mean I think I’ve discovered some of those - some of my own answers to that question a little bit at a time over the years.

First of all, there’s light. Light is at the beginning of cinema, of course. It’s fundamental - because it’s created with light, and it’s still best seen projected in dark rooms where it’s the only source of light. But light is also at the beginning of everything. Most creation myths start with darkness, and then the real beginning comes with light - which means the creation of forms. Which leads to distinguishing one thing from another, and ourselves from the rest of the world. Recognizing patterns, similarities, differences, naming things - interpreting the world. Metaphors - seeing one thing in light of something else. Becoming enlightened. So light is at the core of who we are and how we understand ourselves.

”

- Martin Scorsese, “Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema”

(2013 National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecture, live at the Kennedy Center)

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:02:00 -0400

AMONG THE WHISPERINGS AND THE CHAMPAGNE AND THE STARS.

by Chad Perman

I can’t handle how quickly modern culture moves. Mostly, I’m simply ill-equipped—needing time to think and reflect and sort out one’s thoughts feels dangerously close to being a handicap in the digital age. But at the same time, I’m in no way immune to the seductive pull of an ever-happening right now, with all the excitement and escapism that provides. I feel the tug of it, but also the need to pull back. Which in the end only leaves me with a kind of free-floating anxiety, an indecisiveness that effectively manages to keep a thing like contentment forever off my plate.

When I saw The Great Gatsby with my mother on Saturday, as part of our early Mother’s Day date, I had an experience with the film that was interesting to me, and I wanted to write about that: how the film I saw was in no way the film I had expected to see, and about how that happens; how I had ended up at a place in my thinking where I had basically already decided I would hate the film before I’d ever seen it; how I had ended up getting the whole thing so completely wrong and how nice that felt, but then, also, how quickly I started to distrust my own judgement on the thing I’d just seen— seemingly because of how I’d felt about it before I’d seen it—and how I started being defensive in my liking almost immediately, despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing wrong with going to a movie on a Saturday afternoon, being swept up in it and marvelously entertained, and that just being that.

But first, before I wrote, I wanted a little time to think more deeply about all of this, to reflect and explore various threads of my experience before trying to pull together an entire essay on The Great Gatsby.

Yet, less than an hour later, I was at the computer trying to write it. And not because I was ready to write about it—I absolutely wasn’t, and have the internet equivalent of a trashcan full of crumpled up paper to prove just that—but rather because I felt I was up against some kind of cultural deadline, and had to get my oh-so-important ideas out into the world, immediately, or risk missing out on the Gatsby conversation altogether. Because the conversation was already going on, all around me. Within 24 hours of the film’s release, it had already been through both critical attacks and then a backlash to those attacks; within 48 hours several insightful thought pieces about the film were already out, and soon after, the weekend box office reports were released, which kicked off another round of debate and conversation about what the film was and if it had succeeded or not. And then the film opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. For about five days, the internet was obsessed with The Great Gatsby. But soon, signs of Gatsby-fatigue began to set in; people were getting tired of hearing about it. Clearly, the time to have a relevant opinion about the film has just about passed (I mean, James Franco has even written a review of it at this point). As always, there are new things to talk about—Is the new Star Trek movie any good?—and the internet is ready to move on. But the internet is always ready to move on, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

So anyway.

“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I’m not entirely sure I can back this up, so let’s just call it a feeling, I have a feeling that a whole lot of critics went into The Great Gatsby expecting to hate it. Or, at the very least, to roll their eyes and/or scoff at its immaturity, much as one would when seeing a bratty child misbehaving in the line at the grocery store. I have a feeling that they had quite a lot of their review composed long before walking into the screening room. I have a feeling that they wanted to dislike this movie for a whole host of reasons—some understandable and others not—before they’d ever seen a single frame. And I have a feeling that all these feelings simply got a bit too much in their way. So, when the movie didn’t actually turn out to be what they had thought it was going to be—the film they were so sure director Baz Luhrmann would deliver when handed the keys to Gatsby(and to be fair, the film’s initial trailer and subsequent advertisements did little to dispel anyone from the notion that Luhrmann was going to get this whole thing spectacularly wrong)—well, then, they weren’t quite sure what to make of it. They wanted to see a disaster, a train wreck, an over-the-top, misguided misfire that disrespected Fitzgerald’s near-sacred novel.

And so that is what they saw.

But none of that really matched up with my own experience of the film, or at least very little of it did anyway. I readily admit that the first several minutes had me worried, what with its inane framing device (Nick Carraway at a rehab center years later, “morbidly alcoholic” and writing about Gatsby at the suggestion of his psychiatrist), followed by the jarring over-intensity and bravado of the next few scenes—all overactive cameras and zoomy close-ups—leaving one wishing that the film would simply slow down and catch its breath for a moment.

And, of course, the party scenes certainly go way over-the top as well—and then some. Crazy, lavish, strange, pulsing, decadent and Bacchanalian; Moulin Rouge via West Egg. But here’s the thing: there are only a handful of these party scenes (even if they comprise 90% of the trailers), and they do exactly what the story requires of them to do. The sensory-overloaded insanity and eye-candied too-muchness that Luhrmann brings to them is, in fact, exactly the point. Fitzgerald wasn’t writing The Age of Innocence, after all:

“…The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath—already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

That’s it, though. The first fifteen minutes, ratcheted up a few notes too high, and the crazy, gaudy party scenes at Gatsby’s, for sure. But the rest of the movie just isn’t the movie that so many critics have made it out to be.

Yes, it’s loud, brash and colorful at times—and the music is either going to work for you or not work at all—but Luhrmann’s Gatsby isn’t empty or shallow (to site some of the most common charges leveled at it). There’s plenty of style on display here, sure, but it’s not without substance; there’s an emotional heft to this thing that one can’t honestly ignore. Thus, some critics seem to be caught in this strange angry place where they are left attacking a straw man of sorts, going after what they imagined Luhrmann would do with Gatsby, as opposed to what he (and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce) actually did. Which is, in fact, to knock it out of the park.

In just the handful of weeks since his passing, there have already been far too many moments in which I’ve missed Roger Ebert. And there will no doubt be many more of those moments, a whole lifetime of them probably. But I’ll always feel it most acutely when a film like this comes out. There is little doubt in my mind that he would have loved this film, likely giving it a full four stars. Ebert’s long-time critical maxim, as simple as it was spot on, declared that “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”

(In fact, this seemed to be the primary reason he didn’t particularly care for the 1974 Redford/Farrow version of the film: “The movie is “faithful” to the novel with a vengeance — to what happens in the novel, that is, and not to the feel, mood, and spirit of it.”)

Hello, I am the most boring film you have ever seen.

But Luhrmann’s Gatsby, for all its bombastic pomp and circumstance, gets the how of things just about right. It is what it is, proudly and fiercely. It’s not Fitzgerald exactly, but it is mostly; he captures the “razzle-dazzle” (in his words) of the book as well as the sense of ambiguity that Nick Carraway felt toward The Jazz Age—a desire to both be a part of the hedonistic decadence and to remain at a slight distance from its brash vulgarity, observing. Nick (Fitzgerald’s stand-in of sorts) has always felt to me like a boy at an aquarium, his face pushed right up against the glass, watching some exotic, deadly fish, unsure if he wants to jump in and swim or just smash the whole damn tank.

In the end, Luhrmann turns in a film that is bombastic in parts, but also appropriately quiet and still—even haunting—in others. He keeps to Fitzgerald’s words almost obsessively, even when they aren’t directly from Gatsby itself. He sticks closely to the novel at nearly every turn, not just to the spine of it, but to its heart as well.

And as a result, even when it’s not quite firing on all cylinders—it’s a film with some flaws, for sure—it still manages to grab and propel you headfirst toward the dark and tragic denouement of the story’s final act. You feel the push-and-pull for Daisy’s wavering affections in that sweaty hotel room, the pit in your stomach as she and Gatsby drive away together, the tragedy that awaits them, and him, and the sad aftermath of Nick’s final days in New York. When the film is over, you know you have been taken somewhere worth going. And, though it might not have been Fitzgerald’s glimmering prose or literary genius that brought you there, it is still first and foremost his story—if filtered through an entirely different artistic sensibility and presented in an entirely different medium—that sweeps you up in its magical, romantic, heartbreaking spell.

Chad Perman is a writer living in Seattle. His mom really liked the movie too. She even clapped at the end.

Parenthood (1989)

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:50:15 -0400

LIFE IS WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU WHILE YOU’RE BUSY MAKING OTHER PLANS.

by Brianna Ashby

I sat on the toilet for at least ten minutes, crossing and uncrossing my eyes, trying to make sure that the faint pink line that had appeared in the window wasn’t a figment of my imagination, or an optical illusion, or some strange shard of refracted pinkness that was magically hovering just over that particular spot. I put the stick on the edge of the tub and watched as the line grew darker and more definite and my heartbeat grew louder and more deafening and I think I said something like, Holy Shit. I left the urine soaked harbinger of change where it lay and walked into the kitchen on legs that felt like petrified wood, and even though the look on my face very clearly said it all, I had to force the words out so I could begin to believe them. After a few minutes of Are you sure? I’m sure. How sure? Four tests sure. Holy Shit, the shock began to soften. We walked the fifteen paces from the stove to the couch hand in hand, and sat, our fingers intertwined and resting atop my unsuspecting belly, the air around us imperceptibly vibrating like a cloud of hummingbirds.

We’re having a baby.

By nature I am a worrier, a perfectionist, and a hypothetical soothsayer; a mild neurotic who thinks she can ordain anything that could possibly happen at any time in the future. (I also find planning ahead tremendously advantageous, which coupled with the aforementioned traits, makes me a real tour de force among obsessives.) So, naturally, the second I saw the fuzzy pink apparition of a line start to appear on my fourth home pregnancy test, my mind took off in all kinds of directions. Having children lends itself quite freely to lying awake at night sick over the pitiful state of the world, the oppressive cost of higher education, and whether or not the paint in your window sashes has been tested for lead, but these superficial worries are nothing compared to the deep intestine-wringing fantods that accompany one particular late night thought:

Am I a good parent?

Shouldering the responsibility of growing and raising a well-adjusted child with all ten fingers and ten toes is staggering, and even the smallest hiccup in the process can feel like the most epic failure. Parents tend to take everything personally, from the mundane to the earth shattering. A toddler’s distaste for spinach or a teenager’s rebellion, those things are the stuff of sitcoms and laundry detergent commercials, and yet, they still resonate as failures, no matter how hilariously insignificant they may be. Any imperfections in our children tend to magnify our own, and so it becomes that, in the pursuit of the very best life for our kids, we set lofty goals and hold to unrealistic expectations that the universe has not only signed off on our plans, but that it’s also going to help us along. And if you’ve ever had any dealings with the universe, you know that this is just not the case.

Watching the trials and tribulations of the Buckman family, as they unfold in Parenthood, is an exercise in humility for those of us trying to raise our kids so that they don’t become serial killers—but it’s not so child-centric a film that it becomes irrelevant to everyone else. We all have people in our lives whose function (or dysfunction) have helped mold us into the human beings that we are, whose both obvious and poorly disguised neuroses become fodder for ribald holiday jesting and future sessions with our therapists. The Buckman children are no different, all products of their upbringing, the sons and daughters of a hard-drinking abrasive father (Jason Robards) and a quiet mostly subservient mother (Eileen Ryan).

Gil (Steve Martin) is an obsessive perfectionist so hell bent on not repeating the same mistakes his father made with him that he would go to nearly any lengths to be seen as a hero to his children, often to the detriment of his own personal and professional aspirations. Helen (Dianne Wiest) is an embittered divorcée whose well of distrust toward men runs deep; her transparent unhappiness and bitter resentment has driven her own son into virtual silence and her daughter intto blatant rebellion. Susan (Harley Kozak) was something of a free-wheeling wild child until she settled down with Nathan (Rick Moranis), whose fastidiousness and controlling nature seemed like the right answer for her aimlessness. At first, she felt grounded, but now she just feels stifled. Larry (Tom Hulce) is your run-of-the-mill no-goodnik. The long haired, leather-clad black sheep baby of the family, Larry shows up after a ten year absence with a chip on his shoulder, as well as a serious gambling problem and an illegitimate son. The one thing that all the adult Buckman children have in common is a wish to do right by their parents, and to do right as parents, both of which are a struggle, if largely against themselves.

When Gil and his wife Karen are faced with the reality that their eldest son is struggling with emotional problems that will effectually bar him from “normal” public school, their immediate reaction is complete denial. People tend to react poorly to bad news, and people who depend on a tenuous façade of perfection to hold it together naturally pretend that whatever they’ve just heard is somehow a terrible mistake. It is infinitely easier to live in a fantasy world than admit that your reality is flawed, so we shift the blame (for lack of a better term) to avoid shouldering any responsibility for what went wrong.

Meanwhile, as Gil is over-zealously coaching Little League and throwing the full weight of his desperation into positive affirmations, Susan is watching with increasing dismay as Nathan drills their adorable chubby-cheeked three-year-old daughter with flashcards to prepare her for the SATs. Nathan’s rather terrifying hyper-involved parenting has made their child into a kind of tiny robot—a toddler who has no idea why a child her age would twirl around and around in circles until they fell down—and his unrelenting pursuit of a tangential Nobel Prize win has left Susan out in the cold. Still, their children don’t have problems. They don’t have problems. Nope. Other people have problems.

Helen has problems.

From the outside, it would appear that Helen, still reeling from the split with her husband, has her hands full with two unruly and undisciplined children that couldn’t give two shits about anything their mother has to say. The other Buckmans take pity on Helen and her kids, seeing them as casualties of our ruthless modern times, but secretly, I’m sure they’re all quite relieved that this textbook case of familial dysfunction exists, if only to divert attention from their own equally dubious issues.

Garry (Joaquin Phoenix, known as “Leaf Phoenix” back in 1989) is frightfully introverted, sullen, secretive, and unresponsive, having retreated inward since his father’s unceremonious abandonment, and Julie (Martha Plimpton) is torturing her mother with standard teenage fare: yelling, slamming doors, acting out, and dating boys that Helen doesn’t approve of, especially “that Tod” (Keanu Reeves). To spite her mother, Julie runs off with Tod, proclaiming that they’re in love! she needs him!, and all of the motherly reproaches in the world couldn’t tear them apart. Tod is a breath of fresh air in what becomes a pretty depressing domestic clusterfuck. Although he’s not terribly bright, he is charming, adorable, and wholly uncomplicated. Until he and Julie end up husband and wife, that is.

Bruised, but not crippled, by the news that her baby girl has married “that Tod,” Helen digs in her heels and allows the newlyweds to live under her roof, and slowly begins to allow Tod into her life. Goofy, approachable, and most importantly, male, Tod is the only person able to penetrate Garry’s defenses, having himself come from a place where he learned early on that “they’ll let any asshole be a father.” Seeing Tod’s ease in dealing with her children, and the ease with which he found himself a place in her family, Helen stops trying so hard to force herself into Gary and Julie’s lives, and realizes that sometimes, just being there is enough.

It’s easy to get sucked into a sort of vortex after a traumatic event, or an extended run of feeling impotent, or stagnant, or unappreciated. And it’s safe to say that the Buckmans are all swirling around right in the very middle of it, totally unable to see a way out. Tod’s introduction into the whole mess provides some desperately needed objectivity, and a shot of hope that catalyzes a series of crucial changes in Helen, and Gary and Julie, and more indirectly, in the rest of the Buckman siblings, who finally begin to own up to their shortcomings as parents, and as people just trying to get along.

Realizing they all have to help themselves before they can truly help their children, Helen and Gil and Susan and the rest start facing their fears head on, each small act of emotional bravery helping to pull them out of the mess they were wallowing in. Admittedly, a shotgun wedding between two clueless teenagers is far from ideal, but it serves as a strong example that sometimes imperfect ideas can become workable solutions.

As adults, we’re burdened with a fear of repeating the past, as well as an anxiety about the future, both of which can be paralyzing. When we’re young, our frame of reference is smaller, and the future is more exciting than daunting, so we’re far more willing to dive into our lives without the hindrance of preconception. We get lost in all of the analysis and over-analysis and introspection and worry, and we have so much wrapped up in the idea of leading a “successful” life, that we tend to miss the fact that sometimes things are what they are and exactly what they need to be.

Parents, as a rule, want to give their kids whatever they want, to give them the gifts and wisdom that will allow them to lead peerlessly wonderful lives. Often, though, we end up burdening them (and ourselves) with all our good intentions. We try to guide our children down the “right” path instead of letting them be who and what they’re going to be, especially if they’re going to turn out anything like us. Everyone has their own insecurities, which even the idea of parenthood tends to exacerbate a million fold, and this self-loathing (mild or otherwise) blinds us to the fact that all we can do is our best—and that our best is good enough. We have to be good to ourselves before we can be good to anyone else, and that means giving ourselves a break. Everyone deserves to be happy, even us, as adults and as parents, and part of that happiness comes from learning to let go of our fears of failure and simply accepting that life is a rollercoaster, not a merry-go-round, as Grandma would say. Our children will find happiness in their own time and on their own terms and all we can do is give them a lantern, or a Tod, to help light the way. The path is up to them.

Brianna Ashby is the surprisingly well-rested mother of a nearly three year old who, since her daughter’s birth, has finally learned to stop worrying and love the bedlam.

The Great Gatsby (1974) as The Great Gatsby (2013).

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:01:45 -0400

The Great Gatsby (1974) as The Great Gatsby (2013).

Our new logo, for BW/DR Magazine, designed by Brianna Ashby.

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:40:51 -0400

Our new logo, for BW/DR Magazine, designed by Brianna Ashby.

Ryan Gosling won't eat his cereal

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:08:57 -0400

Ryan Gosling won't eat his cereal:

Welcome to your new favorite meme (as well as justification for the existence of Vine, finally).

"“…Art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:02:00 -0400

“

“…Art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being—literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you’re experiencing that piece of art, you’re not alone. You’re connected to the arts. So I feel like that can’t be too bad.

Art is also about problem solving, and it’s obvious from the news, we have a little bit of a problem with problem solving. In my experience, the main obstacle to problem solving is an entrenched ideology. The great thing about making a movie or a piece of art is that that never comes into play. All the ideas are on the table. All the ideas and everything is open for discussion, and it turns out everybody succeeds by submitting to what the thing needs to be. Art, in my view, is a very elegant problem-solving model.”

”

- Steven Soderbergh

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:47:29 -0400

by Andrew Root

“At least it’ll give us something to complain about.”

I have a coffee mug without a handle. Granted, it’s difficult to drink anything hot out of it without constantly shifting the cup from hand to hand, or sipping quickly then setting it back down. It’s a warm shade of brown with an intricate mosaic pattern on it, and the interior is a deep aqua. What a thing of beauty! What a pain in the ass to drink from! It never gets offered to guests, and more than a few have wondered aloud why I keep it around. Disappointment over the lost appendage was eventually overshadowed by my fondness for the object as a whole, and I just can’t bring myself to throw it away. The mug still performs its essential functions admirably, and while it’s not perfect, I now have something to say about the thing. A flaw can make a thing precious to some, defective to others — or both simultaneously. And if there’s one thing my generation enjoys, it’s complaining lovingly. We’re drenched in irony, and that means that we’re able to acknowledge that something both sucks and rocks at the exact same time.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World falls into the category of the great, flawed film, and it has excellent company. Scorsese’s Gangs of New York spends hours setting up a brutal landscape peopled by the indelible likes of Bill “The Butcher” Cutting, only to have his grudge match with Amsterdam Vallen (Leonardo DiCaprio) fall into anticlimax. Love, Actually may be one of the best romantic comedies ever put to film, but it can’t be ignored that the entire Keira Knightley subplot centres around a man who (though he claims to be “without hope or agenda”) actively attempts to undermine his best friend’s marriage. Michael Haneke’s Cache is thrilling and richly orchestrated, but only if you have the patience of a saint. A fair share of Christopher Nolan’s films fall apart under close scrutiny. These—and many more like them—are the “above average” movies; classics in their own right that have unmistakable, though not unforgivable, blemishes.

This film, based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, has more than its fair share of elements working in its favour. Director Edgar Wright was fresh off his one-two punch of the rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead and the meta-cop-actioner Hot Fuzz; Arrested Development’s Michael Cera leads a cast that includes the most recent incarnation of Superman (Brandon Routh), the future Captain America (Chris Evans), Academy Award nominee Anna Kendrick, and Tarantino-tested heroine (not to mention possessor of the most dreamy doe eyes in Hollywood) Mary Elizabeth Winstead. The original score was composed by Radiohead super-producer Nigel Godrich, and the soundtrack features new songs from indie-rock royalty and contributions by everyone from The Rolling Stones to Frank Black of The Pixies. Scott Pilgrim boasts energetic and creative fight scenes. It blends comic books, video games, and rock n’ roll seamlessly. It’s a coming of age story, a musical, a romantic comedy, and it features Jason Schwartzman. This movie is fucking cool. So what’s the problem?

“Is the news that we suck, because I really don’t think I can take it.”

Scott Pilgrim (the character) is largely a slacker. His friends talk to him in exclusively acrimonious tones. He plays bass for the mediocre band, Sex Bob-Omb, and at 22 years of age, he’s dating a 17-year-old. His younger sister Stacey, on the other hand, has a job at a coffee shop, is decisive, offers sage advice, maintains close ties with a varied group of friends, and can offer such pithy introductions as “please forgive my brother, he is chronically enfeebled.” When Stacey refers to Scott as her “little brother,” it flips a trope on its ear, upending the well-trodden character definition that age equals wisdom; older siblings must watch out for their younger counterparts. The viewer with insight into the emotional maturity levels of these two characters can fully appreciate that Stacey is the older sister in every aspect save age. Or, y’know, they can smirk because it’s kind of a funny moment.

The quick pacing of this moment is not anomalous, nor is the opportunity for ambivalent audience response. The film takes the seemingly paradoxical stance of embracing up-to-the-minute trends and using them to tell an age-old story of a man fighting to keep the woman he loves. Scott Pilgrim might earn extra lives for vanquishing his enemies in a cloud of coins, but he is essentially caught in a series of duels for the hand of his dream girl, Ramona Flowers. Sadly, these juxtapositions work both for and against the film. It’s difficult to reconcile such an arcane story in an ultra-modern setting (a setting ironically made ultra-modern by the retro gaming and comic book motifs it employs), and with Wright’s high-energy persona in the director’s chair, the viewer can be carried along by the rushing current, the finer points of story and character becoming a blur. There’s little incentive to pause and reflect on the structure of the film, or the subtleties of character when the film bulls on relentlessly. It’s like taking a train past a managed forest: At first glance, it’s an indistinct blur of trunks and leaves; nothing remarkable. But if you keep watching, you can see the trees begin to form patterns and rows. The rider of this train might start to wonder about the intent behind planting that many trees in that distinct a pattern, or whether there was a pattern at all – perhaps it was all in their minds? But the train does not slow, and soon the forest is quickly behind. Maybe the rider will return to the forest at some point to study it more carefully. Maybe not. Who’s got the time to invest in such a fleeting moment? Is it worth it?

“I’m in lesbians with you.”

I once endured a 40 minute lecture on the first two lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III (“Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York”). The professor waxed poetic on the dual meanings of the “son of York,” and displayed several graphs which broke down syllable distribution and the symbolic flow of enjambment. We talked about the difference between an iamb and a trochee for ten full minutes. As he wrapped up his talk, the roomful of exasperated undergrads clamoured to know exactly what the point of all that had been. He summed it up by saying that analyzing the quotation in that much detail reveals that the major themes of the play had been summed up in just the first two lines. As we groaned and half-heartedly scrawled a few notes, clearly underwhelmed, the professor asked “Isn’t that cool?” He was like a cat, dropping off a half-dead bird on the living room carpet. We preferred the moving, living thing that flowed past – brilliant for a second, gone just as quickly. In dissecting the thing ad infinitum, the professor had seemed to rob it of its essence. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, “if you try to take apart a bird to see how it works, the first thing you have is a non-working bird.”

“If your life had a face, I would punch it.”

I’ve come to feel that I was wrong about that lecture. In the years that have passed, I’m more attuned to the idea that if you can analyze a quotation in seemingly endless detail, there must be a good deal of worth to be found. For me, the same holds true for films. I’m a big believer that “not getting” a film is a bogus statement. It usually says more about the viewer than the film itself; users of that phrase frequently can’t seem to articulate why they were confused by (or just didn’t like) a movie, only that they closed themselves off to it at some point. I recently watched Room 237, which is an inquiry into The Shining and all its complexities and subliminal messages. There’s a fascinating section of the documentary which examines the impossible geography of the Overlook Hotel, how windows exist where no windows should be, and lush hotel suites are found within empty walls. I mentioned this to a friend, and he replied “Oh, so they made a mistake when they were making the movie?” NO. Stanley Kubrick - a man with a 200-point IQ - is more than capable of recognizing a simple mistake in a floor plan and correcting it before shooting one of the many, many takes he is famed for. This deliberate “mistake” instead requires some effort — and trust — from the viewer. I trust that I should seek out the deeper truth in Kubrick’s work, rather than write him off as incomprehensible. This doesn’t mean that the analysis is always an enjoyable experience. The fact that a documentary like Room 237 even exists is testament to the levels of obsession to which film geeks can - and have - driven themselves. What’s the point? Where’s the enjoyment? I don’t know if I have an answer for that. Maybe we don’t do these things because we want to, but because we feel compelled to.

Edgar Wright is one of the most energetic, driven, detail-oriented directors working today, and because I have unquestioning faith in his abilities (and his vision of a paradoxical central character driven to obscene levels of self-confidence by the devastation of a broken heart), I’m willing to dive head-first into what may be the shallow end of this pool. Fact of the matter is you can find a lot of stuff in this pool if you look for it.

“Believe it or not, I used to date Scott in high school… He’s an idiot.”

I’ve written thousands of words and talked to anyone who will listen about the issues with this film, from my preference for the original ending (in which Scott and Ramona – two inherently incompatible characters – don’t end up together), to the unfair treatment of Ramona (why is her deliberately shadowy past constantly being thrust into the spotlight by the men she dates? How about some respect?). I’ve also delved into how important it is to know that the script for the film was finished before the source comic books, thus creating a dilemma for Wright when fans of the books didn’t care for his diversions from the still-unwritten material. I’ve also talked about how basically everything Brandon Routh says or does is a stitch, from declaring smoothly that he “doesn’t know the meaning of the word” when his girlfriend calls him incorrigible (he really doesn’t) to his diatribe on the work schedule of cleaning ladies (she has the weekend off, so she won’t be around to clean up the dust he’s going to pummel you into until Monday), to the hilarious send-up of vegan culture (“Being vegan just makes you better than most people”). The film’s visual effects are clever and in many cases absolutely stunning (deservedly nominated for an Oscar). Cinematographer Bill Pope (who famously filmed The Matrix and its sequels, and brings some serious action movie cred to this film) gives beautiful depth to the scenes – I’ve scarcely had such a notion of space in a film that wasn’t in 3D. This is a film that deserves study, and is also incredibly enjoyable. I feel like an apologist for complex filmmaking when I ask you to give Scott Pilgrim a second watch, but perhaps I shouldn’t. This is a film that was made for people like me. I’ll watch it at least once or twice a year for the rest of my life, discovering additional nuance, angrily protesting the changes made to the original story, devouring the disc of special features. This film is an entire emotional and intellectual experience, which speaks to both its artistic strength and its commercial weakness. I mean, who would want to put their full mental energy into analyzing the cultural subtexts of a movie that was - by all accounts - a flop?

Who would want to drink out of a mug with no handle?

“Bye, and stuff.”

Andrew Root is a writer living in Peterborough, Ontario.

Out of Sight (1998)

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:30:37 -0400

YOU’RE A BANK ROBBER. THAT’S NOT A VERY MARKETABLE SKILL.

by Taylor Long

For years, I considered my love for Out of Sight to be a “guilty pleasure,” but I’m not sure why. I don’t remember the first time I saw it – probably on a late night run on HBO, Encore, or Starz – but I know I loved it immediately, the characters and the dialogue popping off the screen, teeming with excitement; it felt better than ordinary life and yet within reach. But no one I knew ever talked about it, no magazines or newspapers or websites ever mentioned it. It wasn’t until long after I had gone through many repeated viewings that I discovered I wasn’t the only person in the world who considers Out of Sight a great film. Far from it, in fact.

On paper, it’s not hard to understand why someone might presume that Out of Sight would be bad. It has a criminal and cop (technically a bank robber and U.S. Marshall) romance, of which there are plenty. The U.S. Marshall, Karen Sisco, is played by Jennifer Lopez, whose film career hasn’t exactly boomed since 1997. It feautres more action than your average romance, and more dark comedy than your typical drama. It doesn’t lean heavily towards any one genre, which can be helpful with regards to setting up expectation. And, as one New York Magazine commenter pointed out on a recent interview with director Steven Soderbergh, it was a box office bomb.

But much like a person, a film can defy the sum of its parts. You might find yourself bored while talking to a graphic designer who loves Terrence Malick films as much as you do, but enchanted by a social worker who lives for horror. This force is generally known as chemistry, and this particular kind has no guarantees. The harder one tries for it, the more elusive it becomes. It’s inexplicable, unpredictable, and impossible to turn away from. And Out of Sight could teach a master film class on the stuff.

Most of us probably know someone like Jack Foley (George Clooney). Someone who can find that sweet spot where charm isn’t cheesy or sleazy, who not only knows what to say and when, but how to say it. These are the kind of people who get jobs and promotions with ease, who can teach you how to sneak into a sold out concert or exclusive restaurant, who always get refunds and discounts.

It doesn’t take much immersion into bank robber lore to see a pattern here. People like Jesse James and the Newton Boys are often credited by their captors for having a wellspring of charisma, and it’s easy to understand why theft might appeal to this type of person. They are constantly in pursuit of a bigger score than the last, some kind of ungettable get—an almost irresistible goal for someone who feels they can get anything (and usually can).

Most of us also probably know someone like Karen Sisco, as well. Someone who is always balancing their need for moral “goodness” with their own understanding and sympathy for those without it. These are the kind of people who will still tip 20% on bad service, who will do a lion’s share of the work without begging for the same amount of credit, and who are bound to give people second chances.

The smallest of Soderbergh’s details bring depth to Jack and Karen. We see Karen with her Dad several times, but early on it’s implied this hasn’t always been the case. So, of course her treasured possessions — a Sig Sauer and a $900 suit — are from him. Because it makes sense that a Dad who hasn’t always been around is going to try to “make up” for it with expensive birthday presents. And one might also say that a woman with an absent cop father would be bound to fall for law-breakers.

Even colors play a role in Soderbergh’s domain. Everything is red, bold, and hot in the first half of the film, when Karen and Jack meet. The lining in Jack’s suit. The light in the trunk of the car that Jack jumps into with Karen after he escapes from prison. The top Karen wears when she visits Jack’s ex-wife. The walls of the hotel Jack and his co-conspirator, Buddy, are staying in before they head on to their next job.

The second half of the film, when the reality of their fate begins to bear down on Jack and Karen, is dark and cold. The lightly snowy evening when they finally re-meet. The black of everyone’s hats, coats, guns. The constant evaporation of hot breath in frigid air. The dim lighting of the cars, the boxing ring, and the mansion, where the details of Jack and Buddy’s “last big score” unfold.

That Karen is a U.S. Marshall and Jack is a bank robber matters about as much as it doesn’t matter. Most bank robbers probably wouldn’t touch Buddy — who confesses every crime he commits to a sister who often reports him — or Glen, who keeps secrets as well as a sieve holds water. But Jack’s loyalty stops him from turning them away. And Karen’s rogue desire for success at almost any cost doesn’t quite fit in with the red-taped and multiple-layered chain of command of government and law enforcement, but would serve her well in a jewel heist. It’s easy to imagine a version of Out of Sight where they switch roles.

During the film’s final moments, a switch does occur. It’s Karen’s tenacity and Jack’s compassion that bring about the film’s end. That a U.S. Marshall is forgiving doesn’t mean she’s emotionally weak. That a thief steals from people doesn’t mean he disregards concern for others. That a force which passes between two people can burn hotter than the Florida sun doesn’t mean it can survive a Detroit chill. And just because a film stars a dancer turned pop singer turned actress, in a cop and robber romantic action dark comedic drama that bombed at the box office, doesn’t mean it can’t transcend all those things, either.

Taylor K. Long is a writer and photographer in Vermont. She stole a small book of stickers from a stationary store when she was six. They were very pretty stickers. You can find her other confessions on tumblr and twitter.

Spring Breakers (2012)

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:08:00 -0400

THE AMERICAN DREAM Y’ALL.

by Christopher Fraser

It’s easy to think of the movie-going experience as passive – you sit down, the lights dim, and for the next hundred minutes or so someone has a direct synaptic connection to you. Whatever happens, you’re the passive receiver, and all you need to do is decide whether you like the content being piped into your brain.

A lot of films operate like this. They have ideologies, firm visual sensibilities, a grand, directorial vision, and all you need to do is sit back and take it. (This, by the way, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) Spring Breakers doesn’t work like this. It’s the first film I’ve seen where the lights came up and I felt almost euphoric – not from the preceding ninety minutes, but from the collective sigh of relief coming from every other seat.

Spring Breakers forces you to participate in it. Harmony Korine presents you with a canvas so rote that at times you’re amazed that the borderline-pornographic sequences on display are leaving you so cold. There are dozens of tits—bouncing and jiggling and covered in liquor and cocaine—but remarkably little titillation. The cinema I sat in was filled with typically brazen adolescent men, but the overwhelming atmosphere was one of discomfort. There was the feeling that all of this was a little too obvious, so by the books that it leaves space for the rest of your mind to conjure up theories about what’s really going on.

And it’s at this point where people start to hate it.

Drab and lifeless, lacking substance, even rape apologia at its worst – a lot of people have weighed in against this film, and it’s definitely possible to read it that way. The film splashes us with lurid colour, paints caricatures rather than characters, and delights in constant repetition. There are no obvious clues; despite all the neon, none of the signs read Satire This Way. There are genuinely funny moments (pink ski masks, a piano, a gangster rapper crooning Britney Spears songs), but even those moments leave you wondering what the point of it all is.

Films like this excite me, because I’m indecisive, and when I’m asked to reach out and complete the contract between the artist and the viewer, I keep changing my mind. At the moment, I think that Spring Breakers is an excellent piece of satire that depicts youthful nihilism and then takes it to horribly logical extremes; tomorrow, I might shrug it off as a stupid, needlessly exploitative and cynical vision of young people.

I’m British, which I think only adds to the confusion in this case. I actually had cause to visit New College of Florida—the primary campus location at the start of the film—back in 2009 (if you look closely, there’s a scene where their 50th Anniversary banners are flying proudly; one wonders if they regret the accidental promotion now). It’s quiet, bookish – there are only a few hundred students (I attended a university with around 15,000), and not the backdrop I’d expect for the kind of decadence on display in Spring Breakers. I met a few people during my visit, and, while they were all perfectly lovely, none of them really seemed the type to disrobe in a heartbeat, run along the boardwalk, and scream “spring break forever, bitches”.

This isn’t to say that the stereotype doesn’t exist – New College, after all, was just a filming location, and it’s reasonable to assume that a tiny, aggressively rigorous liberal arts college probably isn’t the natural habitat for nihilistic softcore misogyny. But it might be fair to say that, for Spring Breakers to really work and make you question its motives, the culture that it apes needs to be worth this level of scrutiny. Essentially, for Harmony Korine to have a point worth making about decadent twenty-somethings—desperately fornicating in the streets and committing casual acts of violence so they have the funds to keep the party going—those decadent twenty-somethings need to already exist.

From my quaint, suburban, sexually repressed vantage point, I can only wonder if they do. Girls Gone Wild and Jersey Shore might be about real people, but they can hardly be considered documentary filmmaking. I have heard horror stories about Ibiza and Magaluf – arguably Europe’s Daytona Beach – but have never witnessed it myself. There’s the real, oppressive sense that the world of Spring Breakers exists, but I’ve only ever seen it on a screen, or heard about it through an anecdote.

Maybe it should be a point of recognition that Korine came from a similar viewpoint – he never went on spring break, so maybe this is all a fever-dream, a dystopian view of what America’s youth might actually be like. I don’t usually spend my time questioning how “real” films are, but here it feels critical. I’ve never been on some wild, decadent vacation in the sun. I haven’t even been to that many house parties. But I still feel that white rapper-cum-gangsters roam the streets in Florida, and that there really are countless girls and boys writhing around hotels and beach parties for a couple of weeks a year—but without the knowledge that they’re really there, it’s hard to be sure that the whole phenomenon needs dissecting.

With all of that in mind, I keep coming back to James Franco. The female leads, despite career history, actually feel perfectly cast – all teen heartthrobs coming out of their shells, shedding clothes and inhibitions and an entire demographic in one stylish swoop. And casting Gucci Mane as a rival gangster rapper works, notably because he already is one. But Franco feels as alien as his character’s namesake. He does a commendable job, and disappears behind the silver grill of teeth and spaced-out drawl, but in a film that largely feels disturbingly close to something real, Franco treads a fine line between slipping out of view and leaping out of the screen.

That might be it, though. A fine line. Heady, disturbing satire, balanced (however improbably) against absurd comedy, never quite figuring out where it wants to sit. It reaches out and asks you to fill in the blanks, then rearranges the pieces every time you try and make contact. It’s thrilling, and infuriating. A dozen meaningless aphorisms that occasionally flicker with charge, but never long enough to allow you to really figure them out. Spring break forever, bitches.

Christopher Fraser is a science fiction writer living in the north of England. He has a website. He hopes there is more to life than bikinis and big booties.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:30:45 -0400

YOU MIGHT BE A KING OR A LITTLE STREET SWEEPER, BUT SOONER OR LATER YOU DANCE WITH THE REAPER

by Michelle Said

I assume that you are familiar with Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan, they of metalheaded duncehood and the time-travelling phone booth. And I will assume that you may be in your 20s or 30s and you may have seen this movie and its predecessor as a child. I will assume it may have been several years since you saw this film and that it is most likely sitting on a shelf in your parents house or maybe your younger brother stole it for his own collection, you’re not really sure what happened to it but you did own it at one point. Maybe you bought a copy for $4 from the bargain bin at Target a decade ago and rewatched it over and over again. Maybe whenever you and your friends played 20 Questions growing up, you always started out with a tank as a warm-up.

I will assume, because I already went back in time and made all of this true for you so that even if you started out this essay without these concrete statements as fact for your own life, they are now true for you as they are true for me and we can all begin this piece on the same groundwork of utmost reverence and dedication to all adventures and journeys, whether they be excellent or bogus.

And if I were to tell you that this movie, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, this movie that is as light and frothy and fizzy as a root beer float, somehow was partially responsible for dissolving my paralyzing fear of death, would you believe me?

Let me explain.

I was an anxious child. Many things scared me — new people, old people, meeting new people, trying new things. I was very content to eat and drink the same thing over and over again because that’s what I knew and what I knew was fine. Beyond that, I was of the opinion that the world was terrifying and out to destroy me. My parents kept moving me around the country as a small child due to new jobs and new homes and I was constantly having to adjust to a new and unfamiliar way of life. I did not like it. It scared me.

Then my grandmother died when I was seven years old. One day she was out in the world, this sweet, lovely lady with a Southern accent who doted on me when we visited her at her home in Little Rock. The next, my mother informed me that we would be saying goodbye to her. Forever.

I wasn’t taken to the funeral but instead stayed back at my grandmother’s house with a family friend. Not realizing what was going on around me, I examined all of her possessions, unable to process how somebody could be gone but their things could still exist. Her television set was there, and there was her rocking chair, there was her cigarette ashtray and her refrigerator full of popsicles she kept for me whenever we visited. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.

It didn’t really sink in until we had returned home to California. And, anxious little me, I sat in the dark with my hands up to my chin clutching my blanket, and realized that my mother’s mother had died. And so that would mean that my mother would one day die. And my father would die. And everybody I knew and loved on this planet would die.

This did not ease my childhood anxiety one bit.

I started crying. A lot. All the time. Eventually I began to cope with this realization and the crying subsided, but I still lived my days out with a cloud hanging over my head, the Charlie Brown of Agoura Hills, California. I wasn’t very fun during those days. My personal motto was: Everything is doomed, nothing is good, and we’re all going to die some day.

I was a big hit at parties.

But then I confronted death. Well, actually, Bill and Ted confronted Death. They played Battleship with him. And Clue. And Twister. And NFL Super Bowl Electric Football.

And suddenly, Death seemed like he was pretty okay.

He could play the stand-up bass and rap.

A little needy, maybe.

But overall he seemed like an okay dude. And if Bill and Ted could face him, then I could too.

I realize this is oversimplifying a very complex subject, but that’s the way children relate to the afterlife. It’s a terrible, terrifying concept. We tell children there is something beyond this mortal coil to cushion the blow, but none of us know the truth. I recently watched an episode of Happy Endings where one of the characters explains the great hereafter to her babysitting wards. “Everything in heaven is magical and perfect and amazing.” “Cool!” they say. “Let’s go die! How do you want to die?”

Putting a silly, happy face on something as petrifying as death was much-needed for me at that time. Humor has always been humanity’s way to deal with concepts that are beyond our comprehension. What happens to us after we die? There’s no way to tell. Is there a heaven or a hell? How do some people teeter on the verge of death and survive? If you can’t understand something, you might as well laugh at it. Remove it of its power. Look it in the face and laugh.

I credit William Sadler’s portrayal of the Grim Reaper with much of this turnaround. The version of death as seen in the movie was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which is pretty awesome source material for what is essentially a preteen movie. He enters the film much as he did in Bergman’s classic but quickly his dour and stern facade dissipates and he becomes an entity that is alternately a poor loser and a clinger-on, loyal and jealous, and always amusing.

So there I was as a kid, laughing in the face of death. All thanks to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Station.

Michelle Said usually gets sound psychotherapy from ’90s science fiction comedies. She tumbls here.

CQ (2001)

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:38:12 -0400

by Keith Krepcho

“I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves. Instead, I’m the one without the courage to bury anything at all. When did I go wrong? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same.” – Guido, Fellini’s 8½

After reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, I decided to take a vow of silence. The reason was simple: I wanted to be an artist. Out of all of Oscar Wilde’s characters it was Basil who most captured my imagination. He became a representation of a true artist, one who is not only capable of perceiving beauty, but also able to understand it to such a degree that he can translate it into his art. Lord Henry, on the other hand, was a picture of a frustrated artist. Perhaps, when he was younger, he may have loved beauty and been an artist himself, but his inability to fundamentally understand beauty in the ways in which Basil did, poisoned him. Much like Salieri in Amadeus, Lord Henry turned and set himself as a predator, actively seeking to destroy and corrupt things of beauty. It was his admiration for Basil’s painting of Dorian Gray that ultimately spurred him to corrupt and then destroy Dorian.

I took away from the story a deep desire to be a true artist like Basil, and determined that in order to do so I would have to cultivate a rich inner life—or be cursed like Lord Henry, able only to talk endlessly, but never having anything much to say. I decided a forced period of silence could work wonders for my spiritual physique and curtail my Lord Henry predilections. However, a week and a half later my vow was broken, and I was none the wiser.

I like to think that Paul (Jeremy Davies) has tried similar gimmicks in his attempt to find and cultivate his artistic voice, and, by the time we pick up his story in Roman Coppola’s CQ, he has finally reached the end of his rope and is ready for more drastic measures in order to achieve the enlightenment he so desperately seeks. Paul is an American living in Paris, circa 1969, working as an editor on an Italian produced sci-fi B-movie entitled Dragonfly. He justifies his time spent on Dragonfly by co-opting some of the equipment so he can work on a personal film documenting his life.

CQ opens with shots of Paul filming his morning routine: his coffee, his live-in girlfriend, Marlene (Elodie Bouchez) sleeping naked in bed, and other random, assorted shots of their loft. Paul has a fundamental belief in the power of cinema, the ability of the camera to capture and reveal an ultimate truth. He believes that by putting his own life under such a microscope, he will force the truth—which has been obscuring itself for all his years— into a corner, where it will finally have no choice but to reveal itself to him.

He is a man searching for an access point into his own life.

Outside of this self-absorption, the world continues to spin. Dragonfly is beginning to experience an identity crisis of its own once the director, Andrejez (Gerard Depardieu) is run off the picture. after declaring to the Roger Corman-esque producer, Enzo (Giancarlo Giannini), that he would like to end the film “not with a bang, but with a whimper”. In the end, Enzo promotes Paul to the director’s chair and tasks him with finding an ending for the film. It is a bit like backing a three-legged horse to bring you home in a race, but Paul sees Dragonfly, a picture in crisis, as a simulacrum of his own situation and decides to accept the job.

Jonathan Richman’s “That Summer Feeling” is playing in the background as I write this, and it reminds me of the tendency people have to romanticize their youth. It also helps bring another aspect of Paul’s crisis into focus: he is still living out his younger days. There is no distance from which he can reflect on it because he is still right there in the midst of it. He is alienated in the adult world. The only safety he can ever seem to find is behind the camera, or within his own imagination.

He begins to have hallucinations of visiting Dragonfly in her lair, or on her ship, where he knows exactly who he is. It is the only place where he is able to experience complete control, and he reaches a level of honesty he can’t even begin to imagine with Marlene. Soon, the lines between Paul’s reality and fantasy worlds begins to blur—but Enzo’s constant haranguing for an ending helps to keep Paul from sliding entirely off the rails.

In a perfect, deceptively simple scene, Paul meets his father (Dean Stockwell) in an airport during a short layover. The scene acts as both a personal and artistic catalyst for Paul, and addresses the relationship and interplay between reality, inspiration, and art. And, after that meeting with his father, Paul’s life begins to pick up momentum: a seed for the ending has been planted in his head, but still needs time to grow. Meanwhile, Marlene is growing more despondent, seeing that Paul is falling out of love with her. It slowly begins to dawn on her that, despite all her love for him, he is lost to her for good.

Soon Paul is called away to Rome to discuss the ending of the film with Enzo. After a brief unhelpful meeting, Paul is whisked off to a New Year Eve’s party where he is eventually left to wander the streets of Rome, in Fellini-esque fashion. It is another one of CQ’s perfectly executed scenes, culminating in Paul witnessing an event that helps him develop and mature his idea for the ending overnight.

Upon returning home from this triumph, Paul finds that Marlene has left. He sets up his camera for an “honest” and “truthful” interview but is only capable of capturing himself as he takes out his loss on the bathroom towels. CQ then cuts to a series of impressionistic images from his documentary: Marlene dancing, Paul crying, a plant, Marlene naked on the bed, etc. It is the first real sense we have that Paul might have inadvertently captured some moments of actual meaning and truth.

In the end Paul realizes that the value of life is in the living of it, that he does not need to force more meaning on the relationships in his life than they naturally carry on their own. The success of Paul’s documentar (69/70) doesn’t prove that truth is found in the mundane details of our lives, but instead demonstrates that it is all these details that give our life its context. A bar of soap is meaningless without its association to a smell and, ultimately, to a person. The same is true of Paul’s shots of the fern in his apartment or his morning routine: the images are lent meaning by their associations. As artists, CQ says that we must be willing and ready to receive our stories whenever they come, and that they are coming at us every day. They are happening each morning around our coffee, when we are distracted, when we are trying to write. The truest stories are staring us in the face, if we simply take the time to notice them for what they are.

Keith Krepcho is the only living boy in Virginia Beach. He tumbls here and tweets when necessary here.

brianna-ashby: A sneak peek of what’s to come in the first,...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:06:17 -0400

brianna-ashby:

A sneak peek of what’s to come in the first, fully illustrated, issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room magazine! Mod goddess, Betty Draper.

Moneyball (2011)

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:30:46 -0400

THE HONESTY MAN.

by Isaac Skibinski

At first, it’s easy for me to think I know what’s going on in a movie. I think I’ve picked it apart. I think it’s predictable. Thankfully, this analytic over-exuberance is an exhausting habit and, eventually, a scene doesn’t quite fit. At which point, I really start to watch, and I stop keeping watch. I can’t say whether unwittingly taking “watching a movie” to mean “keeping an eye on a movie” is a productive or pointless error. Depending on how you define engagement, being confounded and giving up on understanding can either be its beginning or its end.

Moneyball is not exactly the movie I assumed it was. It dramatizes becoming, and not becoming, the person someone assumes you are. More than just assumes, which costs nothing. Bets. It’s a story about picking people, and the “hard” nobility of caring only that they carry out the purpose for which they were picked. It’s about pesky aesthetics that obtrude function, which is pure. It’s about a man, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), whose senses deceive him, and who wants to get to the real thing.

Unfortunately for him, the thing gets in the way of the thing. He can’t obviate the senses entirely. The thing might not behave. Worst of all, he might still be one of those pretty things appreciated by the senses. The pouty lower lip of his youth persists. His job is to pick people, but once, someone picked him.

All of this is cause for violent anxiety. He drives donuts, aggresses at various machines in the gym, chews, and whenever his carefully picked collection of people play their odds, he flicks the radio on and off. The closest he can get to the real thing are numbers on a screen. The trouble with these numbers is not their potential infidelity to the players they represent, but the players’ potential infidelity to the number.

In short, Moneyball is about getting angry at numbers.

I was surprised, then, that the principles outlined above did not operate when he takes his daughter to pick out a guitar to buy. “That one’s pretty,” she says, “I like the red.” He only smiles. He does not tell her, in his pared-down dialect, so direct it’s an affectation, that she ought to buy the guitar that has been proven to sound the best. He does not send her to consumer reports. He does not seem angry at or even miffed by the guitar’s closeness, its immediacy to his eyes and ears. He is not indignant that his daughter chooses the guitar for the “shallow” criterion of its red color. I, however, was unhappy that this scene failed to fall into the expectations I had invested in. Instead, it ended up highlighting the absurdity of what I had expected.

Perhaps, though he does not show it, he is unhappy that she has been given enough money to buy the guitar. (After all, he’s not just fighting to pick unpretty players, but also fighting against teams that have enough money to pick pretty players.) His daughter’s money comes from her mother and stepfather—people he, Billy Beane, finds utterly lacking in substance. They have money, and therefore they’re distanced from the real thing. Their weak, bourgeois souls are prone to empty temptations of the senses. The stepfather’s voice is high and nasally, and his talk is full of what Billy calls “fluff.” The stepfather’s right angle-obsessed house has enormous windows that look out onto the ocean. “Things are peaceful around here,” he says, as the camera stares out a huge window filled with a horizon that’s a soft gradient from grey to blue.

Billy—or as I will now call him, the will—is uncomfortable that he was once willed into being. As you might expect, the will finds a friend in the nerd (Jonah Hill). Himself an unimpressive visage that contains impressive knowledge, the nerd believes in the truth of numbers. (Although Hill’s face is impressive—the awkward twitches, the blank, frightened stares.) The will was once recruited because he was an attractive package—”a good face”—and lives in histrionic fear of the possibility that the package that is him may, in fact, contain nothing.

Their bond is therefore strong—one of those male friendships in which a major and a minor masculinity are bound together on the horizon of adventure. Such an adventure is always pedagogical. The will gives the nerd little lessons in being less minor, more major. The will demands that the nerd take more personal responsibility for the interpersonal fallout of his number-crunching: The nerd is supposed to inform players that they’ve been cut. “Try it out on me first,” says the will. They go through it. The nerd is awkward, conciliatory, and polite. “No,” the will corrects, “no fluff. Just be direct. To the point.”

It’s not just extraneous padding that upsets the will, but the performative nature of being nice. The will does not do things for others. He’s bored and rude in his ex’s immaculate, “peaceful” house because his ex’s current husband is so nice to him. The movie makes a point of showing, with the stepfather’s approval-seeking glance at his wife as she settles onto the couch next to him, that his niceness is a show for her benefit.

The will has a fantasy of removing fantasy from the business of baseball, because he was hurt by the fantasy of himself that the scouts once invested in him. When the scouts came to his family’s house once upon a time, they gave him a speech about confidence. They were confident that he would become someone with confidence. Over the course of a melancholy montage of his subsequent years as a player, this confidence sours. They told him he has the skills to do everything; it turns out he can’t do all that much of anything. The montage has the recruitment speech layered over it. “Once he’s got confidence, that’s when you really have something,” they say of a theoretical baseball player, as the will’s failures play out on screen. It’s this discord of feeling that he wants to eliminate. He wants to close the fissure of uncertainty between ideal and reality, appearance and being, promised future and present.

The sting of being an object of confidence has made him anxious. He wants not just to reverse the direction of the relationship from objectified to objectifier, but to transform confidence into honesty. The model is a man-to-man he has with the highest-paid player on the team. “You’re 37. How about you and I be honest about what each of us wants out of this. I want to milk the last ounce of baseball you got in you. You want to stay in the show. Let’s do that.” The aging player agrees to be lightly deflated now rather than heavily deflated later. The will considers romance a thing to evade: “it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball” (he aspires to be hard). Evading romance is exactly what he romanticizes. Proposing this new “honest” deal is dreaming romantically of restoring truth to relationships, of collapsing mediation.

“It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball” is the other side of my “it’s easy for me to think I know what’s going on in a movie.” What we respectively consider easy is opposed, but the point is to do the difficult thing. In fact, both things that are to be resisted (sentimentality, over-analysis) themselves begin by resisting each other. I idealize movies resisting my foregone conclusions, and yet am as helpless to that same inconclusiveness as I am to writing them off. He says he doesn’t care about anything but ends. When the team has an unprecedented winning streak it’s not enough for him. Anything but winning the World Series “doesn’t mean anything.” I’m worried that what I write will mean something, that uncertainty will be foreclosed.

However, essays have to end, and unfortunately, there is a glaring explanation for the aforementioned scene that surprised me, when Billy takes his daughter to buy a guitar. He’s tolerant, even warm towards his daughter’s aestheticism because he deems her sex the proper place for what he elsewhere treats as pollution. He subscribes to the notion that a girl’s girlhood is to be protected, and wouldn’t dream of exorcizing her fantasies, whatever cruel schisms they might later bring about. He doesn’t try restore her to an honest relation to herself, because as far as he’s concerned, she is fruitful error itself.

When he’s not embarrassing himself on the Internet, Isaac Skibinski tries to be an artful alarmist. Actually, those are concurrent.

We’re hard at work putting the finishing touches on the...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 01:55:27 -0400

We’re hard at work putting the finishing touches on the inaugural issue of BW/DR Magazine, which will officially be shipped off to Apple on April 20th and available in May!

We absolutely can’t wait for you to see this thing!

(Though a little sleep would be nice…)

Do YOU Want to Write for BW/DR?

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:46:15 -0400

Every year, right around this time, we put out an open call for new contributors to the site, and every single year, we get swamped with tons of high-quality essays and pitches—which is humbling, amazing, and entirely wonderful on our end and serves to remind us how many of our devoted readers are also incredibly talented writers just waiting for a chance. In fact, several of our now-regular BWDR contributors started out by answering one of these open calls for writers in years past. This year, maybe that will be you?

Of course, the whole thing is even more exciting this time around, because we’re no longer looking for people to contribute to the site, but rather to contribute to our soon-to-launch MAGAZINE! So, if you want to write for us, and be considered for an upcoming issue of BW/DR, now is the time to let us know!

You can get started by clicking the link below:

Submit an essay or a pitch to Bright Wall/Dark Room

The Office (US; 2004-2013)

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:14:00 -0400

I BRAVEHEART: Why The Office is a scary place.

by Erika Schmidt

“Fear is sort of an odd thing.” —Jack Shepard, Lost, ”Pilot”

Settling for less: fear makes us masters at it. I had a first draft of this essay. It was fine. It talked in circles, about Kurt Vonnegut, my personal experience working in an office, Tim and Dawn, Pam and Jim, and back to Kurt Vonnegut. But in the end it wasn’t right. Reading it felt like shopping in Marshall’s on an empty stomach after having gotten some powder foundation on your contacts: vague and kind of burdensome and ultimately not yielding much.

It took a candid conversation with a close writerly friend of mine for me to work out what was going on: I was afraid to make myself clear. Because I’m not a television writer, because I’m not in the writers’ room of The Office, and perhaps because I’m just a wee bit afraid of stepping back into the arena after some writing setbacks of my own, I held back on that first draft. I pulled my punches. I tried to avoid being wrong. And I made an essay that was fine, but not really mine.

Luckily, this all turns out to be perfectly relevant to what’s happening on The Office. I was afraid to write my Office essay. Pam is afraid to leave Dunder-Mifflin. And the writers of The Office are afraid—have indeed been afraid for years—to break out of their wildly successful world and see what happens if Jim and Pam leave Scranton. And now those of us still watching regularly are worrying that The Office might actually end without addressing the question of fulfillment and courage and demanding more. We’re afraid that The Office might leave us with nothing more profound than a good-old Halpert reunion.

Everyone’s afraid! How meta.

“Bad jobs” are defined not by location, but by how they make you feel. Plenty of people work in offices and feel, to varying degrees, some combination of engagement, purpose, vitality, inspiration, passion. True, they might like to have more fresh air and exercise, or maybe a less traditional work week, but these concerns are nothing compared to the satisfaction they get from their work. These people have “good jobs.” Michael Scott (Steve Carell), Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), and, to a more realistic degree, Karen Filippelli (Rashida Jones), are examples of people with “good jobs.”

People with “bad jobs” can’t even describe their work without, like The Office (BBC)’s Tim Canterbury (Martin Freeman), boring themselves. They find it menial, mindless, or just not their cup of tea. These people spend forty hours a week doing a job that doesn’t do it for them. This is the category to which Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) and Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) have always belonged, and these are the people I’m wondering about.

I’ve had three bad office jobs. The first was for a summer, at a dentist’s office in my hometown. We played Lite FM all day. The second was another summer job, full time. I was hired to complete a specific project, and I realized pretty early on that I was not going to need the whole summer to finish it. I was apparently expected to pretend I required hours that I didn’t actually need. The idea that this time filling might be a requirement for every job, that it might be part of the reality of my future, made me want to cry, kick off my shoes, and marry a millionaire.

The third bad office job was a “real” job, after I graduated college. I took it because I just wanted to have a schedule and a paycheck and not question it. I hoped I could accomplish more outside of work that way. I had my doubts, though. I worried about things like: not being available for auditions; losing my motivation; getting fat; becoming depressed. I had friends from college who were already making money as actors, friends who were doing things that sounded a lot more glamorous than what I was doing, which was putting in my application at a temp agency (terrifyingly named “Solas Staffing”) and accepting the first position I was offered. But I would be paid twelve dollars an hour and I figured I could quit whenever I wanted to. So I took it.

The details of my duties aren’t relevant here. What matters is that I wasn’t interested in them. There were elements of the job that appealed to my flair for organization and problem solving, but that’s as far as I could inflate it, even on my best days. I just didn’t care about it on any level.

Every day I sat next to the same guy. Forty hours a week. Several times a day, he would pump too much lotion into his hands. It made squishing, splatting, wet sounds as he rubbed, rubbed, rubbed it in. He wanted to be friends with me, but I didn’t want to be friends with him. I just didn’t.

There were others on my team that I liked: people who shared my sense of humor and dissatisfaction. Our work day was, as Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) puts it, “a run-out-the-clock situation.” We didn’t behave like adults. We made fun of the know-it-all guy with the obviously fake long-distance girlfriend. We guilted the art school graduate into slowing her productivity so the rest of us wouldn’t be expected to perform at higher standards. If you get x amount done today, they’ll expect us all to get x amount done tomorrow. One person devoted all of her attention to controlling the seating arrangement so she wouldn’t have to sit next to the know-it-all. We all saw what she was doing. I felt a little embarrassed for her, but I couldn’t judge her. When the lotion guy quit, I’d been openly gleeful. We weren’t our best selves.

We had little ways of having fun: every day at three, one woman would email us all a jigsaw puzzle and we would race to finish it. Someone once made a giant platter of bacon and brought it in, and we all ate it together. Once Batman Begins filmed across the street and we watched the stunt men zip lining over the streets to the roof of the old post office that had been transformed into Gotham National Bank. These were happy moments, friendly moments. We bonded over the drabness of our jobs. We all understood we’d each rather be somewhere else, doing something better. We all hoped our association as a group wouldn’t last much longer. I can see how, if two people in that situation felt a romantic chemistry, the oppressive sameness of the office environment and the momentary escapes from it could bring them closer together.

I often wondered during the two years I spent in that job what each of us might be capable of accomplishing if we weren’t wiling away the hours in that office together. What kept us there? Was it only about money? What was it in us that kept us from asking for more?

——

“The people you work with are people you were just thrown together with. I mean, you don’t know them, it wasn’t your choice, and yet you spend more time with them than you do your friends or your family. But probably all you’ve got in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for eight hours a day. And so, obviously, when someone comes in who you, you have a connection with—yeah—and Dawn was a ray of sunshine in my life, and it meant a lot. But if I’m really being honest I never really thought it would have a happy ending. I don’t know what a happy ending is. Life isn’t about endings, is it? It’s a series of moments. It’s like, you know, if you turn the camera off, it’s not ending, is it? I’m still here, my life’s not over. Come back here in ten years, see how I’m doing then. ‘Cause I could be married with kids. You don’t know. Life just goes on.”

—Tim Canterbury, The Office (BBC), “Christmas Special”

Remember why Dawn Tinsley (Lucy Davis) finally left Lee (Joel Beckett), turned that cab around, went back to Wernham Hogg and kissed Tim? It was because of Tim’s Secret Santa gift to her: an oil painting kit wrapped with a sketch she’d done of him. On the sketch, Tim had written, “NEVER GIVE UP.” Knowing he had a chance to say one last thing to her, he chose to tell her, in all caps, to never give up. Not, “I love you Dawn pick me choose me love me remember how great I am have fun in Florida you are the best I want you.” But “NEVER GIVE UP.” Never give up your dreams. Become an illustrator. It’s not too late. Become what you want to be.

It’s a desperate action, this plea: never never never give up. What more spectacular, more selfless display of love could there be, really?

This element of desperation is admittedly more present in the BBC version of The Office than the American. That show could better afford to lean into the meanness of office life and the devastating implications of accepting the status quo. British humor leaves more room for darkness, after all. Furthermore, the BBC show was contained to two six-episode series and a Christmas special. There was, presumably, no pressure to keep the show going beyond its natural end. And so it left on the ecstatic note of Tim and Dawn together, hopefully free from sarcasm and their jobs at Wernham Hogg, on their way to a stimulating life of love and meaningful work. We were spared the experience of watching the writers devising ways of keeping Tim and Dawn in the office for the simple necessity of keeping consistent the stars and the premise of the hit show.

Within that liberated context, the BBC show is relentless in making clear precisely what the stakes are for its young people. Those stakes are not limited to will-they-or-won’t-they. The most resonant moments in that show are the ones in which Tim or Dawn looks on in horror as the other makes concessions for the sake of being safe: Dawn hearing that Tim took the promotion at Wernham Hogg instead of leaving to go to graduate school; the million times Tim watches Dawn allowing Lee to discourage her. It’s never just about Tim wanting to be with Dawn or Dawn wanting to be with Tim. It’s also about each of them wanting the other to push through and get out and demand what they deserve. It’s about personal fulfillment. It’s about the heartbreak of seeing someone you love settle for less.

——

“Dreams are just that: they’re dreams. They help get you through the day. Like the thing about the terrace, it’s nice but, um, I don’t know, it was just something I read in this book when I was twelve. The girl in the book has a terrace outside of her bedroom and she planted flowers on it and I just loved that. It just always kinda stuck with me….It’s impractical. I’m not gonna try to get a house like that. Um, they don’t even make houses like that in Scranton. So I’m never gonna…”

—Pam Beesly, The Office (NBC), “Boys and Girls”

Of all the reasons to settle for a bad job, many have to do with money. Some people have prohibitive students loans. Chronic illness requires others to maintain good health coverage at all costs. Far be it from me to make assumptions about anyone’s motivations or priorities.

But some of the reasons have to do with fear. And fear is something that I feel absolutely qualified to talk about. That’s that thing that keeps you up at night hating yourself, that pushes you to make up reasons not to try things, to justify holding back with lots of reasons why trying is a bad idea: I’m not qualified; I won’t like it; it won’t be what I hoped it will be; I will fail. I’ve talked myself into and out of jobs and projects and commitments and sabotaged myself and second guessed myself and decided not to act many, many times. And I’m only thirty. And I still lose sleep sometimes thinking about all the things I’m doing wrong, and all the things I’m afraid to do. And all the while, there are things I love, that I’d desperately like to spend my days pursuing.

So I get Pam. Who knows how talented an artist she is? She’s good enough to be accepted to Pratt, and that animated Dunder Mifflin logo she made that one time was pretty cool, right? Her talent is not really the point. The point is, she knows what she loves. She has always been able to say: I love to draw and I’d love to one day do something with art or graphic design. And that—that clarity—is a gift. But she refuses to step into the arena.

Watching Pam hedge her bets and work so hard to convince herself that she is satisfied with her life has always been, because we recognize ourselves in her, both sympathetic and infuriating. When she breaks down talking about the terrace she’s always dreamed of, we know she isn’t just talking about a terrace. She’s also talking about Jim. But more importantly, she’s talking about a more fulfilling life, one where he would be only one of many people around her who gets what she’s about. Her public declaration to Jim in “Beach Games” is electrifying because she finally stops qualifying and hedging and backing away. She just speaks her deepest truth, and it enflames her. It took her “three years to summon the courage” to acknowledge her feelings for Jim. It is taking her much longer to take a chance on herself.

The Office hits Pam and Jim’s coming together out of the park. In a lovely reversal of the Tim-and-Dawn conclusion, this time it’s Pam who sends along a note to Jim, and it’s Jim who changes course, comes back to Scranton, and interrupts her confessional to ask her to dinner. And suddenly all the rationalizations and claims of contentedness fall away. The way is clear.

Part of the desperation we felt in wanting Jim and Pam to end up together was the fact that we wanted them to find understanding outside themselves. And from understanding, confidence. And from confidence, a way out of the office. We wanted them to push each other: if someone stands in front of you and tells you you are worth more, it becomes harder for you to deny it yourself. So it started to feel like their only chances were in each other. Declare your love or remain stuck behind that computer until you get diabetes and retire home to watch your mysteries.

So, as with Dawn and Tim, when Pam and Jim dispense with the bullshit and get together already, we assume they are not long for Dunder Mifflin’s world. It is only logical that the bravery they display in choosing each other will extend into the rest of their lives.

But here we are, six seasons later, and they. Are still. At Dunder. Mifflin.

The Office still has to be about something. It’s not about Jim and Pam getting together anymore: that’s already happened. We’re past the anticipation, the frustration, and the celebration of their mating dance. Years past it. The writers haven’t had it easy. They didn’t get to leave us on a high note and let our imaginations fill in the rest. By the time they brought Jim and Pam together, they had a hit show on their hands, and powerful forces expecting them to keep it going for as long as possible.

When I talked to my writer-type friend about this essay, she pointed out something interesting about television writers that I hadn’t considered: they work in an office. They exist in an environment of long hours, unchanging surroundings, and—that’s right—fear. The danger of stagnation is very real. The pressure to maintain the status quo in the ratings can very easily turn into a compulsion to maintain the status quo in the world of the show. So, before you know it, instead of having a show like Mad Men—where Matt Weiner lets the established world come crashing down at least once a season, hurtling the audience toward previously unfathomable changes with abandon—or even Parks and Rec—where the writers trust the strength of the relationships and aspirations of the characters enough to allow the location and focus of the show to shift freely—you have a show like The Office, where any episode that takes place away from the office feels a little gimmicky, and the prospect of breaking the two lead characters out of it is damn near unthinkable.

The characters’ fears only makes sense up to a point; finally, we have to wonder if it’s the fear of the writers that’s holding the Halperts back. What would happen if Pam and Jim had left Dunder Mifflin years ago? If he had taken the job at corporate and asked her to move to New York with him? If Pam had stayed in art school and Jim had followed her there? If she had told him she didn’t want to live in his parents’ house but instead wanted to skip town with him?

What if seeing Michael leave so joyfully had prompted Pam and Jim to throw caution to the wind and leave too?

The sheer sweetness of Michael Scott’s exit from the show took the one character who did love the office and gave him a romantic relationship strong enough to overwhelm his fear and sweep him across the country without a second thought. But meanwhile, the two people who most emphatically never belonged there in the first place saw him tearfully off without wondering where they were going themselves.

It’s almost as if the writers of The Office never knew that we didn’t just want Pam and Jim to end up together; we also wanted them to get the hell out of that office.

——

“I’m ready! I’m ready to make a point!” —Michael Scott, The Office, “Safety Training”

At times over the past few years, it’s seemed like The Office is just going to end without ever tackling the questions we want it to. Do people fall in love and get married only to support each other through decades of these meaningless, colorless jobs? Or is it possible that the affirmation they find in each other could drive them further, push them harder, make them feel safe enough inside to take a risk outside? What does it take to catapult people toward their potential?

When Jim went behind Pam’s back to start his company in Philadelphia, I was exhilarated. This is it, I thought. After years of spinning their wheels, Pam and Jim are going to be forced to test their relationship and themselves and take a risk. Jim’s after-hours phone call is one of those increasingly rare moments of desperation in The Office that hints that the romance of Jim and Pam seem like just the spoonful of sugar helping something more complicated go down. Something about people wasting their lives on irrelevant jobs they never cared about, just disintegrating day by day for no good reason, and about that disintegration being impossible to contain within the walls of the office.

To follow these last episodes of The Office has been to be in a state of suspense, waiting for the writers to reveal their true end game. They have a chance now, to make the conversation about that “something more complicated”. But will they take that chance? Or will they retreat into the settled territory of Pam-and-Jim will-they-or-won’t-they? Will they or won’t they be broken up by a random hot-boom-mic character we’ve never seen before? Will they or won’t they stop being honest with each other? Will they or won’t they begin living emotionally separate lives?

Where things stand now, Jim is behaving in a decidedly un-Jim-like way, either willfully or ignorantly missing warning signs from Pam and plowing through full steam ahead with the life he is trying to build in Philadelphia. He seems to be hoping he can set this thing up and iron out the kinks in his relationship later. For which, after years of watching him languish at Dunder Mifflin, I can’t really blame him.

Pam is offering up a classic Beesly justification for retreat: “I like our life in Scranton.” She has most recently even gone so far as to suggest that Jim’s new interest in his work marks some dark change for the worse in him. It’s unclear whether the writers agree with her or not—whether the story they want to tell is about a couple growing apart or a woman putting off growing up.

We don’t have evidence that Pam finds satisfaction in her job. She doesn’t seem particularly passionate about her occasional Scranton-level successes with mural painting, beyond the achievement she feels in their being assigned to her. She is a loving mother but hasn’t expressed the position that she values her job as a way to better contribute to her family. By her own definition, she has failed as an art student and as a salesperson. Now it seems she will do anything to avoid failing again, including nothing at all.

Who will tell Pam to NEVER GIVE UP? Will Jim do it? Will Michael Scott come back and do it? Will Harry Crane (Mad Men’s Rich Sommer) come back and do it? Or will she just goddam do it for herself? Every episode The Office airs that doesn’t address this question is, at this point, wasted.

We have been raised on American television. We understand the sitcom. We know that Pam and Jim aren’t going to end up apart. They will get their happy ending, probably in Philadelphia. But how will Pam’s deep insecurity and her reluctance to follow her dreams factor in to all of this? How far is The Office willing to go to explore this paralyzing fear of failure—of finding out we are not good enough—with which so many of today’s Americans can identify? I’ve seen plenty of heart-catching romantic endings, two of them courtesy of The Office (who knew that scoundrel Ricky Gervais could spin such a swoon-worthy ending?). I don’t need to see another one. What I need to see is an ending about people confronting their emotional limitations and taking a leap, joyfully and without hesitation. I don’t need sweet, familiar resolution. I need action.

Am I alone here?

Erika Schmidt urges everyone to read “Deer In the Works” in Kurt Vonnegut’s The Monkey House, which says everything she feels, but more beautifully. She’s working on building a new web site; until then you can see her modest blogging history here. She dedicates this essay to Lauren, Carl, and Beyonce.

Reflections on the Passing of Roger Ebert

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:47:00 -0400

Upon hearing the awful, sad news of Roger Ebert’s death yesterday, I sent out a note to all our Bright Wall/Dark Room staff writers, asking them to send along any thoughts or reflections on Mr. Ebert and what he meant to them, which I’ve collected throughout this post. Obviously, being the age most of us are, and doing what it is we do here at BWDR, he was a big influence on a whole lot of us, a formative one in most instances, a guy we grew up with since childhood, a man who taught us a lot, not only about how to watch movies, but about why movies were so important, so central to our modern human existence. And now, with him gone, there’s a huge hole in the critical landscape, as well as in a lot of our hearts. How can movies exist without Roger Ebert? In my own lifetime, before today, they never had to.

Erica Cantoni:

“It probably wasn’t his intention, but for me, Roger Ebert took the snobbery out of films. He taught me there was something nearly sacredly important about the role of movies, and that movies ought to do their best to live up to that power. But there was no need for me — at 12 or 21 or 36 — to feign adoration for the critics’ latest darling. There was no universal litmus test; the point was to find the movies that axed the proverbial frozen sea inside you, and let them keep moving you.

That’s what I took away from “At the Movies” and all the years I’d listen to him tell stories about stories. I’d lie on the indoor outdoor carpet in our finished basement and listen to him teach me how to think critically about whether a movie was worth your time, and why. (So much of which can be applied to books and people and parties…) And I’d wait with my little kid’s breath held in my ribs until the screen flashed the diagnosis: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. I couldn’t imagine the grief of making a movie that earned his disapproval.

There was a real heft to Roger Ebert. A funny grace and wisdom and goodness that tempered his criticism. Even his disesteem of a film seemed to come from a place of honor and never the cheap and lazy modern default to snark.

He was the first person who taught me that movies matter. That fame and Hollywood and glamour may not matter — but the way we use film to connect ourselves to each other and our shared experiences and the infinite number of fantasies and adventures the human mind is capable of? That matters a great deal and is always worth caring about.

“Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman: 

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

- Roger Ebert

Edward Montgomery:

“I was lucky enough to meet Roger Ebert in 2005, while I was participating in the student symposium at the Telluride Film Festival. This was before his jaw cancer, and he was introducing the film Three Times by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Ebert was waiting at the front of the theater, and upon sighting him, I pushed my way out of the already-filled row and dizzily approached the man.

I introduced myself and explained that I was studying English and not Film (like the other students in the program), and that I had always loved his writing. We remarked together on the strange human attraction to negative criticism, and he lamented that even he found it more fun to rage against a film than to write review of one of his favorite films. The small-talk ran its course, I again thanked him, and then excused myself. Ebert soon introduced Three Times as a film he absolutely loved, and yet, I ended up being terribly bored by most of it.

There’s no moral in this, just a difference in taste. I later went back and read Ebert’s review of the film, and to this day it has become one of my favorite pieces of his. The genius of Ebert was that he made it so it didn’t matter if we agreed or disagreed with his opinions—we simply wanted to hear them, all of them. And regardless of his difficulty when it came to writing positive reviews, he still found the words for the things he loved the most. He was the bridge to new levels of appreciation in film, to a clear sense of awe about the power of the movies, and his love of them shined through everything he wrote.

In his review for Three Times, Ebert says, “There isn’t any deep message in this film. Love never has any deep message,” and he’s right. But it is something that is felt, respected, and admired—it is a force that moves all of us. Ebert’s reviews will forever be the touchstone against which I compare my own words and opinions. And while I will greatly miss those reviews and opinions, what I will miss more is the voice of a man who was able to step past the narcissistic searching for meaning in his own passion, and simply shared it with the world.”

“As a child I lay awake obsessed with the idea of infinity and the idea of God, who we were told had no beginning and no end. How could that be? And if you traveled and traveled and traveled through the stars, would you ever get to the last one? Wouldn’t there always be one more?

In my mind there has always been this conceptual time travel, in which the universe has been in existence for untold aeons, and then a speck appeared that was Earth, and on that speck evolved life, and among those specks of life were you and me. In the span of the universe, we inhabit an unimaginably small space and time, and yet we think we are so important. It is restful sometimes to pull back and change the scale, to be grateful that we have minds that can begin to understand who we are, and where are in the vastness.

Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life’s experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer “to” anyone or anything, but prayer “about” everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.”

- Roger Ebert, The Tree of Life

Almie Rose:

“Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls is one of my favorite movies of all time. It was directed by Russ Meyer. It was, as they specified in their trailer and campaigns, NOT a sequel to The Valley Of The Dolls. No, instead it was; “unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” It really was. It’s a film about an all-girl band who encounter sex, drugs, amazing costumes, a character based on Phil Spector, featuring The Strawberry Alarm Clock. And it was co-written by Roger Ebert.

Ebert never apologized for his camp film. Nay, more than camp: this was the campiest camp that ever camped. And it was brilliant. I could quote the dialog every day of my life. Some samples:

“This is my happening and it freaks me out!” — Z-Man, the Phil Spector-esque record producer.

“You’re a groovy boy. I’d like to strap you on sometime.” — Ashley St. Ives, porn star.

“He killed her! And there’s someone else inside…but I don’t know who it is. The head is missing!”

Ebert once wrote about the film in 1980, giving us a peek into this sheer WTF-ery. He freely admits that,

“The character of teenage rock tycoon Ronnie ‘Z-Man’ Barzell, for example, was supposed to be ‘inspired’ by Phil Spector — but neither Meyer nor I had ever met Spector.

The movie’s story was made up as we went along, which makes subsequent analysis a little tricky.

And the movie as a whole? I think of it as an essay on our generic expectations. It’s an anthology of stock situations, characters, dialogue, clichés and stereotypes, set to music and manipulated to work as exposition and satire at the same time; it’s cause and effect, a wind-up machine to generate emotions, pure movie without message.”

Rest in peace, Roger Ebert. I hope it was all your happening and that it freaked you out.”

Andrew Root:

“I came to Roger Ebert’s work indirectly – through parody, in fact. From The Simpsons in which Homer gleefully declares that he loves it when “the bald guy” argues with “the fat tub of lard,” to the terrible 1998 remake of Godzilla in which a grey-haired, bespectacled “Mayor Ebert” gave thumbs down to the giant lizard attacking New York, Roger Ebert was an icon, one I was always aware of, even before I became familiar with his work. My favourite caricature of Roger Ebert came from the 1996 animated series The Critic in which Jon Lovitz voiced Jay Sherman, a woefully unlikeable film reviewer. In one episode, Siskel and Ebert end their partnership, and each critic courts Jay to be the other’s replacement. Despite the absurd tone of the show, Ebert’s persona came across as that of an intelligent, articulate, and passionate thinker; someone who was effortlessly good at their job and didn’t need to take themselves seriously. I remember thinking “what a good sport.” When I earnestly sought out At The Movies I discovered that the send-up was fairly accurate. Ebert knew exactly what he was talking about, and he spoke with wit, grace, and humour. He brought me the movies and he taught me to think about them as a thing that matters. Thanks for that.”

“What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.”

- Roger Ebert, “I Do Not Fear Death”

Letitia Trent:

“Although I didn’t always agree with Ebert (particularly not on his horror reviews), I’ve found myself turning to his reviews whenever I want a humane, intelligent, but unpretentious take on a film. Ebert’s mix of filmic knowledge and accessible language, as well as his ability to deliver a clever zinger (See this great Jezebel article about his 20 best reviews: http://jezebel.com/5993693/roger-eberts-twenty-best-reviews) made him not only a good critic, but also a joy to read. Unlike many reviewers, Ebert seemed like he really liked movies, even movies that were not aiming for lofty goals of awards. His reviews were always sincere and fair, and rarely did he ever trash a film outright without trying to understand the film’s intent. It’s hard to imagine the landscape of film criticism without him, and he will be dearly missed.”

Neil Fox:

“When I first started writing film reviews for my local paper, the first voice I would go to for help and guidance to hone my tone and personal voice was Ebert. His books and column for the Chicago Sun Times helped a young man from a small town just outside London develop the confidence to discuss film on the page. As I developed my voice and found other writers whose words I preferred to devour regarding cinema, I never forgot or lost site of the presence or value of Ebert, a true warrior, and what’s more, I always felt that is what he wanted - more writers developing their own voices and networks of cultural support.”

Erika Schmidt:

“My relationship with Roger Ebert expanded over the last few years. Before, to me, he was just part of this thing that had always existed: TwothumbsupSiskelandEbert. He was the only famous person I ever saw in my hometown, getting ice cream at Oink’s one night after Redamak’s in New Buffalo, MI. I can’t remember ever not knowing who he was.

I didn’t watch the show. I didn’t read movie reviews growing up. But movies: they’ve been a top priority in my life, always. Muppets Take Manhattan. The Wizard of Oz, which turned into everything Judy Garland ever did, which turned into Vincent Minnelli and Gene Kelly and Gone With the Wind and holy shit Vivien Leigh and David Selznick (the “O” was cosmetic) and Rebecca and Alfred Hitchcock and on and on and on, world without end. Splash, which led to Tom Hanks, which in turn led to my mom driving me through a snowstorm to see Philadelphia in 1993 (I was eleven), which became part of the fabric of my understanding of humanity.

I grew up watching and rewatching and talking about and reading about movies, never quite knowing where I would put all the knowledge and feeling I was accumulating.

And then Roger Ebert got sick, and he started blogging and posting stuff on Facebook. And I started reading his writing. And his writing was so beautiful, so unafraid, so unpretentious, so smart and so deeply felt. He loved movies like a little kid and he wrote about them like a poet. He elevated the forms of film and writing and he also posted obscure pictures of old Hollywood stars and challenged his followers to identify them. I concluded: this guy is my hero.

I love movies so much that writing about them feels like just the absolute most self-indulgent thing I could ever get to do. What I’ve learned from Roger Ebert is that that’s a pretty damn good place from which to start.

Two of the most exciting words in the English language: motion picture. Roger Ebert’s writing gave me permission to also embrace them as two of the most important.

Jurassic Park is being rereleased this weekend. I will see it at the IMAX on Navy Pier in Chicago, and it will be truly awesome.”

Sara Gray:

“Before yesterday, I never knew that reaching for the fat, heavy compendiums of Roger Ebert’s reviews, stacked just above the shelves that held my father’s hundred or so laserdiscs, would change my life at the age of twelve. I never knew that watching the few films Ebert gifted with four full stars would educate me more than any classes in film I ever took in college. I never knew that obsessively scouring my Cinemania CD-ROM for Ebert reviews would teach me how to write. I never knew that writing, despite its agonizing, hair-pulling moments of frustration, could be fun. I never knew how deeply I would be affected by another person’s grace and humanity in the face of grave physical pain. I never knew that debating the merits of movies—or of any art form—is a sign that we can, and do sometimes, live in a peaceful, rational, wonderful world. I never knew all that until yesterday, when Roger Ebert passed away, and I realized I had lost a great teacher.”

“There are no guarantees. But there is also nothing to fear. We come from oblivion when we are born. We return to oblivion when we die. The astonishing thing is this period of in-between.”

- Roger Ebert

Rest in peace, Roger.