No, It’s Not An Established Song : Why ‘Once’ Wasn’t Supposed to Matter and Why It Does
It’s a makeshift band of international rebels that create Once. The actors are untrained and inexperienced, both leads seem to be doing the film a favor rather than relishing in its spotlight. The writer/director used to be a bass player (in the lead actor’s Irish band, The Frames, no less) with only a couple of previous films. The songs seem to be straight off a long lost Damien Rice album floating somewhere between O and 9. It’s an unconventional, untamed, and unconstrained piece of filmmaking that, by the opening credits, blasts its audience with so much singer/songwriter rawness that any person who has every picked up a guitar and strummed feels instantly a part of this Irish busker.
Clothed in shaggy attire, sprouting a great, red half-beard, and hair unkempt, he’s a broken, emotionally compelled vacuum repairman, living with his father, mourning his dead mother, pining over his lost love (wait for “Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy” and subsequent bus song bits) and alternating between playing music on the streets and fixing Hoovers in his dad’s shop. He is also an exceptional musician and lyricist choosing to perform popular songs during the day that passers-by “want to hear” and playing his “not established” songs after nightfall. His only solace remains in the dual pain and peace of these “not established” tunes.
She’s a magazine and flower street saleswoman on the verge of a big job break, cleaning the house of a very wealthy Irish family. She lives with her mother and young daughter in an inner-city apartment. They have the only TV in the building. It’s obvious they are living off of her sparse income. While she remains married, her daughter’s father is still at home in Poland. She’s a shy pianist and songwriter who can’t afford a piano of her own but rather often visits the local music store to stretch out her fingers.
It’s a premise that could either stand for quirky individuality or trite trap. Thank Damien it’s the former.
According to mindless, modern cinema it should have failed. Like really, really failed. Lost on straight-to-DVD shelves at Hastings and used record stores all over the states. Trust me, it doesn’t.
What happens with Once is a phenomenon so rare in film, or any art, that allows some sense of conventional transcendence to permeate its quaint 85 minutes.
Everything falls into place exactly as needed.
Few films rarely ever get everything right. Once does. If the acting, directing, music, photography, or editing had been performed by anyone else or through any other lens, the film would not be what it is. Because musicians are playing parts both in front of and behind the camera, it’s the most stomach wrenchingly honest piece of film about music in recent years, maybe ever.
The movie is about the music. And the music is really about the movie.
It’s not August Rush. It’s not Mr. Holland’s Opus. It’s not (necessarily) uplifting, motivational, or inspirational, even in a good way. And thank goodness.
These are not actors playing musicians. These are musicians writing and playing music and letting cameras peek in. It’s real. So much so that Glen and Marketa have reported, together and separately, being approached and asked about each other, their relationship, and their “record.” All of which are fictional but are portrayed so brilliantly that people really do think this movie is a documentary.
(*Glen and Marketa actually did form a band together after the film calling themselves The Swell Season and currently have two albums out, both of which are quite good, in addition to the film’s Oscar winning soundtrack)
Hipsters, romantics, and your v-necked mountain man boyfriend will all rave about Once. And I’m thankful for that. But Once defies even the tags it may procure given its independent film status and emotionally invested soundtrack. Get any ideas of faux-hip negativity out of your head. This movie has none.
It’s a great little piece of filmmaking, knowing when to be funny, serious, sad, and joyful, all at the right moments, supported by a script and plot so sparsely subtle it’s packed with tiny punches that will leave you full of holes before the credits even roll.
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On the Shores of Our Subconscious : What ‘Inception’ Really Means
I have it figured it out. I know what happens. I understand everything from totems to the gallons of hair gel and I’m here to say that I really don’t think Inception is very confusing.
At least after a second viewing.
After several months of leaving my blog in Internet limbo (the reference was too easy), I have decided to return to posting with the only film in wide release theaters worth discussing; and we all know there is plenty of discussion surrounding the latest mind melter from visionary writer/director Christopher Nolan. However, the purpose here is not to offer an opinion on the elements of which the film is composed, like cinematography, acting, directing, writing, score, and editing, but I wish to return to the infinite reality of the blogosphere with my pea brained interpretation of what really happens in the film, the content itself.
I know what Inception means.
A cross-genre film that will soon hold its place in the annals of sci-fi film history alongside 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and The Matrix, Inception is a beautifully photographed, complexly scripted, and hauntingly acted masterpiece from one of modern cinemas most visionary artists. I fully believe that once Inception gets some years behind it, critics and audiences will find it a definitive work from Nolan that really does change something about filmmaking.
*Spoiler Warning*
The end of Inception has undoubtedly filled water cooler discussion and sci-fi chat rooms with hours of debate. The last frame will go down in film history as one of the silver screen’s most gut wrenching cliffhangers.
Nolan and crew did something right.
The film’s end proves it’s most poignant and climactic moment as the question we ask ourselves the entire movie (Is this all a dream or not?) is answered…except it isn’t.
As Cobb spins his totem (once belonging to Marion, a point which could prove especially important) one last time, we all know what’s coming yet it doesn’t lessen the size of the crater the film’s final frame leaves in our imaginations.
Does the totem stop spinning?
If the answer is yes then Cobb’s reality is true and he has finally made it home safely to his real children with their real grandfather in their very real LA home.
If the answer is no then Cobb’s reality is contained within a dream and his children, their home, and Miles, are all projections of the real individuals themselves, still somewhere in reality, waiting for Cobb to wake up.
But what if it doesn’t matter?
Cobb accepted reality. He allowed himself to see his children’s faces. He didn’t wait to see if the totem was going to topple over, so why should we?
Some will say the top began to look and sound like it was wobbling over and the movie ended just moments before we saw it happen so it must be reality.
Some will say that Nolan only showed his audience what he wanted them to see and we can only assume that the top continues to spin and it must be a dream. The truth is that trying to answer that question only gets you one level deep. We must infer something deeper.
The only thing that actually matters is Cobb’s acceptance of that state as reality. If what was truly driving the plot forward and sideways and backwards and deeper was Cobb’s emotional journey, which I believe it was, then this answer can and does satisfy the viewer. Cobb accepts that reality, whether it was true or not, and so should we. After all, we’ve invested in this grimacing extractor’s journey the whole way through and we should trust him until the very end.
The problem is that both arguments regarding the ending are correct and the real bummer is that both arguments can be supported with evidence from the film.
If you want to believe that the totem topples over and true reality finally belongs to Cobb, the argument certainly exists. We see Cobb’s totem topple over at least twice during the film, once in his hotel room after he escapes attempting to extract information from Saito and once in the warehouse after giving Ariadne her first lesson in dream sharing. Once Nolan establishes the rule that an individual’s totem will always topple over if they are in reality, it can’t be broken. There is no question that reality is seen from at least the moment we see Cobb’s totem topple over in his hotel room to his visiting of the chemist in Mumbai.
If you want to believe the totem spins infinitely on in the film’s last moment you can point to Cobb’s trip to Mumbai as your evidence. To test the chemist’s sedation potency Cobb allows himself to be put into a dream state in the chemist’s underground operation where individuals “come to be woken up.” After Cobb is awoken from this voluntary test, he rushes to the bathroom to slap himself in the face with water where he promptly sees Marion’s image in the mirror. Unsure if he is still dreaming, Cobb attempts to spin his totem but it slips on the wet sink and Saito walks in on him before he can spin the totem again. This is the third and final time we see Cobb spin the totem, the result of which is never seen. If Cobb is indeed still dreaming at the end of the film, in reality he remains asleep on a bed under the chemist’s office.
I think this apparent contradiction is no mistake and Nolan is having a good laugh.
Does the answer lie in what the chemist’s Indian assistant says about those who choose to go into that dream state voluntarily “because it has become their reality and who are you to say otherwise”? Maybe.
Does the answer lie in the tiny detail that Cobb now uses Marion’s totem? Does the usage of another’s totem by someone else negate the rule that an individual’s totem is theirs and theirs alone? Maybe.
Does the answer lie in the children’s apparent lack of significant aging or their mirrored appearance in all of Cobb’s visions of them, even at the end? Maybe.
But even these questions could both be answered yes or no and your interpretation of the ending would have no significant foothold against the other.
Answer these questions for yourself. Argue with your nerd friends or the teenage girls who just wanted to stare at a tortured Leo for the film’s bulky two and a half hours. Go and read someone else’s blog.
But I’m right. And whether or not the totem topples does not matter.
As Cobb’s totem spins so do our minds and the genius of Inception is its ability to do just that, spin the mind of its audience in directions unknown, infinitely on or toppling over as we ultimately throw our hands up and accept the end of the film just as Cobb accepts his reality, without question.
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I Just Like Being a Piece of Furniture in Your Weird Life : Why ‘Juno’ Demands Re-visiting
It’s been nearly three years since Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody plastered silver screens with their indie subdued and sublimely suburban pop culture smash Juno, and we’re still left with its tangy after taste of orange tic-tacs in our mouths.
I recently re-visited the ‘07 comedy starring a fiery Ellen Page and typically numb Michael Cera and upon further inspection found its highest points still tearing me apart. Reitman’s pace perfect and Cody’s wit unfailing, Juno fires shot after shot at its audience, only letting up long enough to suck you into its emotional pitfalls before catapulting itself back into a post-Napoleon Dynamite viewership.
The film’s serious players, a wonderfully subtle (his most endearing on-screen characteristic, no matter who he’s playing) Jason Bateman as Mark and surprisingly vicious Jennifer Gardner as Vanessa, have just enough yuppie quirk to survive a scathing stereotype (although the couple flirts with those blurred lines the entire film). The film’s eccentric players, Reitman staple J.K. Simmons as Juno’s dad Mac and perfectly cast Allison Janney as stepmom Brenda, manage just enough humanity to call to mind your pink flamingo, gnome covered lawn neighbor down the street.
While Cody’s script is not immune to near gag worthy speeches about love and friendship and making others happy, its cheese ball weaknesses are completely overshadowed by its near genius one liners and flat hilarious dialogue. It mixes equal parts emotional realism and comedic drive into a 96 minute gut punch that leaves you in side splitting laughter and stomach wrenching uneasiness as you watch a 16 year old girl carry and deliver her first child.
The Cody penned screenplay in anyone else’s hands but the refreshingly apt Reitman’s could have been disastrous, but Reitman brings enough brevity to his character’s predicaments and reality to their words that we buy it.
Every minute of it.
By assembling a near perfect cast and an even more perfect soundtrack, Reitman knows exactly what the film needs from its opening animated credits to its smile inducing acoustic close. That closing song, as bare and believable as the film itself, begs to make an equally bare statement.
Yet there are only a few moments in the span of the film that ground it, that pull it back into the suburban neighborhood where it takes place. These few moments will be regarding by most as the uncomfortably awkward ones of Juno and introduce a secondary plot line that is never fully addressed or resolved. It’s the moment when Juno calls Mark just to say hi. It’s the moment when they slow dance together alone in the basement. He is a man completely unhappy, trapped in a suppressive relationship (wait for Vanessa to call his shirt dumb). She is a lost girl, pregnant and scared.
They emotionally connect.
The terribly subtle implications are never fully realized but their meanings stick with you until the closing frames. Mark, who we first see as calm and culturally cool, is not entirely perverted but not entirely blameless. Juno does little to help these tendencies. No one’s fully to blame and that’s the point.
While their connection seems irrelevant, it preludes all of the decisions Mark will make throughout the course of the film, ultimately resulting in he and Vanessa’s divorce. In these moments, Reitman finds reality. In these moments, Juno strikes a nerve and begs to reach deeper than our funny bones.
And it does.
Juno, while containing its own unique quirks, is not wholly original. It’s a notch in the recent line of indie romance comedies (see Braff’s Gardenstate, Crowe’s Elizabethtown and, more recently, Webb’s 500 Days of Summer) about young kids searching for something, finding love.
These flicks will always be made.
But re-visiting the Best Picture nominated Juno pulls us back to a place of both comfort and unease, both elements necessary to its truisms. After all, in the words of Juno herself, “It started and ended with a chair.”
Look at the Parking Lot Larry : Why ‘A Serious Man’ Resonates with the Jewish AND Goy Suburban Blues Alike
It seems that since Raising Arizona, the Coens have developed some sort of mathematical pattern for the films they release. For every dramatic piece the Coens generate, they slap together two dark comedies. For every Miller’s Crossing, there’s a Barton Fink and Hudsucker Proxy, for every Fargo (though sadistically humorous in its own right), there is a Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Who really counts Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers anyway?) Fulfilling their own prophetic formula, A Serious Man is the second of two black comedies since the Coens’ Best Picture winning, stunningly crafted No Country For Old Men. Preceded byBurn After Reading, it’s everything its predecessor wasn’t. Touching, sincere, and hypnotically hilarious, A Serious Man makes up for the blunders of Burn After Reading and proves the Coens best comedic effort since Lebowski. (Forgive me O Brother fanatics)
Working off the Coens most personal script to date, A Serious Man addresses a fear (and often reality) of complacent misery in the middle of 1970s suburbia. Larry Gopnik, a magnificent Michael Stuhlbarg, is a Jewish mathematics professor trapped in a stagnant suburban pool. On the outside of his cookie cutter house, Larry sees only perfectly mowed lawns and father and son games of catch. Inside the walls of his home however, Larry’s life is falling apart, and without a bit of his own consent.
His wife is leaving him for another man. His live in brother is a lovably unbearable nitwit. Despite his well-intentioned fathering efforts, his children are distant. Heck, even his TV antenna won’t pick up all the right channels.
How is this funny?
It’s not.
The only reason we laugh is because we see the horrible truth hidden beneath the quick dialogue and zany situations. There are real families like this, totally unconnected, completely numb, and hiding their misery in dinner parties and swimming pools.
The entire story arc consists of Larry taking it and taking it and taking it.
And then he takes it.
With allusions from Job to Jesus Christ, the Coens create a man so empathetic, so easily pushed around and stepped on that we laugh because the alternative emotion is deep pity and tremendous sadness for Larry.
Brushing aside the Jewish/Goy (Jewish slang for Gentile) humor, much of which was lost on this white Protestant, A Serious Man is less a film about religion and more a film about one man’s desperate situation and his steps to an attempted recovery.
That recovery never comes and what we’re left with is the same sad Larry with whom we started.
Just wait for the ending, as equally ambiguous as it is prophetic.
Like all of its 15 odd Coen produced ancestors, A Serious Man has its share of financial intrigue and out-of-nowhere violence, but its less about shock and more about bleakly comic substance.
A Serious Man is haunting. And it’s hilarious. And it’s very, very scary.
We laugh because we see ourselves in Larry, never fulfilling his dreams, but resigning to painted shutters and lawn sprinklers, the truest product of his suburban influences.
We know that our lives may one day mirror that of Larry’s and maybe our upbringings already do.
It’s this that pulls A Serious Man through every one of its brilliant 106 minutes. That and a little good ole’ Coen brothers mischievousness.
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Open the Pod Bay Doors HAL : Why ‘2001’ Will Live Forever.
I can almost smell the pages of the books. The shelves are half full. The new high school library is a work in progress. There it is. 2001: A Space Odyssey. The copy is worn. The cover art is eerily ambiguous. A few months later I had worked my way through all four novels in the Space Odyssey series. It fascinated me.
After finishing the fiction series I discovered there was a film named after that first installment that had captivated me months earlier. Mom drove me to Blockbuster. I went straight to the Sci-Fi section and found a copy. As soon as I got home I put in the DVD.
Twenty minutes later I turned the movie off.
I was bored and disappointed.
I was fifteen years old. I didn’t know who Stanley Kubrick was and I didn’t care. He was just some guy who made a terrible film based on a book I loved. Little did I know that Kubrick and the book’s author, Arthur C. Clarke, had collaborated on both the novel and the screenplay at the same time.
The book was written for the film and the film was written for the book.
Six years later and I understand how blind I was then.
Kubrick is a tortured genius and 2001 is his cerebral masterpiece.
Equal parts emotional ambiguity and detailed logistics, 2001 is the ultimate Sci-Fi epic that breaks filmmaking rules, special effects standards, and screenwriting norms (there’s not one word of dialogue for the first twenty five minutes!) even 42 years after its initial release.
The film plays like an operatic theater piece. The three minute long musical prelude is clue number one. Beginning with the dawn of man and ending in Dave Bowman’s unencumbered rebirth of the spirit, 2001 is more than Sci-Fi, its human drama (watch as Bowman and Poole try to outwit HAL), its societal commentary (watch as Kubrick and Clarke prophesy on the Space Race), its visual poetry (wait for the fifteen minute long stargate sequence).
From the ape’s first bone swinging advancement to Bowman’s psycadelic journey through Jupiter’s stargate, Kubrick not only takes his characters on an odyssey through space but his audience on an odyssey through the mind.
The closing scene is proof of Kubrick and Clarke’s collective genius. A withered Bowman lays dying in the Black Monolith’s hotel room recreation, a man on the verge of freedom from his human restraints and intelligence, about to embark on a spiritualistic journey he could never imagine.
The product of the ultimate space experiment, humanity has advanced to the stage their Black Monolith predecessors had hoped for. And Kubrick advances light years past his contemporaries to make a film that marks a career of masterpieces.
