X does not mark the spot

And this list is brought to you by the letter...

Well, all of them actually. This is an entry in the Alphabet Meme started by Fletch at Blog Cabins (click on the link for all the rules). Yes, there was only one spot between the first two Godfather films, Goodfellas, and Gimme Shelter; meanwhile I had to scour the Internet to discover a forgotten favorite that began with "X" (no such luck). It came down to a contest between an African comedy Xala, which has all the right film snob cred, and X-Men, a perfectly decent superhero movie stunted by an anticlimax. The only problem with the first film was that after the genuinely amusing first half, the rest of it dragged interminably. So I went with the latter movie (though it would have cheered me far more to pick the TV series, if only for that theme music; sadly I don't think that was an option). All in all, I wish I could have moved Gimme Shelter to the "X" spot and killed two birds with one stone (or rather one bird with two).

The list begins and ends with a Woody Allen film; make of that what you will. List resides after the jump (let me know what you think).

Dear Brigitte

One thing I never understood about Little Miss Sunshine was its supposed freshness. To me, it seemed a slight variation on every quirky what-random-personality-twist-can-we-think-up-next indie comedy that had come before. Indeed, forty years earlier, the venerable James Stewart appeared in an early entry into this genre. You think Little Miss Sunshine is precious and eccentric? Dear Brigitte features Stewart as a scatter-brained professor and poet who lives on a houseboat with his his wife, teenage daughter, and 8-year-old son (they spend evenings performing for each other in an impromptu classical quartet). Their neighbors include an artist who's constantly painting his nude wife and a dotty old man who likes to speak directly to the camera as a narrator (he does this even when other characters are around and they look on, confused).

Despite his father's artistic pedigree, the little boy turns out to be a mathematical genius with a secret affinity for Brigitte Bardot. The family decides to use the little boy's accurate race-track predictions (shades of Biff Tannen) to start a family foundation, and soon the money is rolling in. Late in the movie, apropos of nothing, the already confused narrative comes to a halt, and Stewart takes his son to France, so that he can cuddle and pose for pictures with Bardot herself. This is one of those movies that seems like it was assembled from a bunch of wacky ideas (Brigitte Bardot, child geniuses, artists painting nudes, gold-digging teenagers, overzealous psychoanalysts, degenerate gamblers, scenic San Francisco) thrown into a hat, drawn out at random and strung together to form a screenplay. That said, its inherent charm eventually compensates for its fecklessness.

Twin Peaks: May the Giant Be With You

SEASON 2, EPISODE 1
-Episode 8 of the series-
("Twin Peaks" reviews start here)

directed by David Lynch
written by Mark Frost (teleplay), Mark Frost & David Lynch (story)

"This leaves only the third man..."

And who is that third man, the one Agent Cooper says waited outside the cabin to kill Laura Palmer several nights earlier? (Hint: it's not Harry Lime.) After taking the summer off, "Twin Peaks"' second season emerged in a hail of hype as the fall of '90 rolled around. The show had been such an unexpected breakaway success in the spring, and its first season was so brief (starting in March and ending in May) that the media hadn't really been able to jump on the bandwagon yet. But by now the stars had aligned and as season two kicked off, the positive press was in full swing. Kyle MacLachlan appeared on "Saturday Night Live," in a skit that isn't very funny, maybe because "Twin Peaks" is so knowingly absurd to begin with. Meanwhile magazines and talk shows featured interviews with the actors, and Time put David Lynch on its cover. He was just releasing Wild at Heart, a hit at Cannes, in American theaters and it seemed that the decidedly offbeat auteur had crossed over into mainstream appeal without sacrificing his avant-garde bona fides. In its inimitable fashion, Time designated Lynch the "Czar of Bizarre" and proclaimed, "He has proved that an eccentric artist can toil in American TV without compromising his vision," and "The quirky outsider is close to becoming David Lynch Inc."

A scant three months later, Time wrote, in a passing blurb planted amongst capsule reviews, "Cut the hype, lower the expectations: Twin Peaks is not the second coming," and grumbled, "This season's inert, slowly paced premiere (directed with an uncharacteristic lack of flair by creator David Lynch) almost sank the ship before it left port." (Don't follow this link unless you already know who killed Laura.) Apparently "Twin Peaks"' moment had passed, and with it David Lynch's 15 minutes as a mainstream celebrity. Within another four months, the show - having entered a pitiful artistic decline after revealing Laura's killer - would be ignominiously cancelled. A prequel movie, released in the dregs of summer, received some of the worst reviews of the year, left theaters in a flash, and was quickly forgotten. What happened? In part it had to do with Lynch's, and co-creator Mark Frost's, network-induced haste to reveal just who that "third man" was, a fact which Lynch remains bitter about to this day. Yet though this "killed the goose" in Lynch's phrase, it also made for gripping television, and the first half of season two offers up some of the best "Twin Peaks" has to offer.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - America

America was one of D.W. Griffith's most massive undertakings, on par with The Birth of a Nation almost a decade earlier. Like that film, America - with its grand, all-encompassing title - is an attempt to view a grand historical event (in this case the American Revolution) through individual and family melodrama. Griffith shows a continued talent for staging battle scenes, and the cinematography in America is excellent, whether dotting distant landscapes with puffs of cannon smoke, staging massacres amidst sun-dappled trees, or zipping along country roads alongside Paul Revere in blue-tinted tracking shots. Yet somehow America didn't quite work with 1924 audiences; it was a flop for Griffith and (ironically) meant the end of his own independence. (You can read a good summary of America's history at Greenbriar Picture Shows, along with a more favorable perspective on the film.) Individual moments are strong, there was obviously a good deal of care put into the production, and yet somehow America seems to be striving after past glories and its debt to Griffith's earlier masterpiece hamstrings it in fundamental ways.

Three Little Pigs

Blessed with one of the catchiest songs ever sung, Disney's Three Little Pigs asks, "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?" a message that resonated with Depression-era audiences. Perhaps it will resonate again with our own. In fact, Three Little Pigs has elements even more relevant to our financial conditions than those of 1933, when it first came out. For one thing, it's a movie about a housing crisis. Those homes of straw and stick, like the homes paid for through bad mortgages, prove flimsy in the face of Big Bad Mortgage Collectors who come looking for the bill. Actually, Three Little Pigs proves a very Republican reading of economic hard times, appropriate since Walt Disney was an anti-New Dealer, but its "lazy and fun-loving people get what they deserve" message is undercut by various elements of subversion.

The Magnificent Ambersons

"The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In that town in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet and everybody knew everybody else's family horse and carriage. The only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her, while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the 'girl' what to have for dinner and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we're carried, the less time we have to spare."

One of the most remarkable facets of The Magnificent Ambersons is how closely the movie's flaws reflect those of its subject. Seldom has disastrous studio interference (which in this case destroyed the film's final act) yielded such unintentionally and poignantly metatextual fruit. Today, the story of The Magnificent Ambersons' butchery is well-known. Orson Welles completed his second film, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's elegaic novel, on the eve of World War II; he would later ruefully call it "a much better picture than Kane—if they'd just left it as it was." But of course, RKO did not leave it as it was. With Welles out of town, shooting a wartime propaganda film in South America, the studio stepped in and massacred his boy, and the resultant film makes an unfortunate corpse. Yet in that wreckage lies a bizarre sort of virtue, since the movie itself is about a lost golden age, a past that slips out of one's hands until all that remains are shallow, paltry reminders of former glory. Hence it is weirdly appropriate that the bulk of the lost movie must lie in our imagination, and also that the film itself undergoes a dramatic decline over the course of its ninety minutes, mirroring the decline of its antihero and his bygone era. Magnificent Ambersons is a film which fails while one's watching it, yet endures afterward in the imagination, wrapped in a kind of reborn glory.

Election Overlook

In lieu of an October Overlook, this is a survey of the twenty-five posts I fired off in response to election season. Get out the door and vote if you haven't already, but if you have, kick back and check out my election series. Feel free to jump in and comment; these issues will still be with us after today, and I'll respond to anyone who's just catching up with my blog now.

1. Countdown to the Election
"For the moment, politics will be our focus: the good, the bad, the ugly, and yes, on occasion, the idealistic too."

2. W.
"By the end of the movie, we still don't quite understand what's going on in that head, why things came to this point - but the man at the center doesn't really seem to understand either, and we're brothers in confusion."

3. Primary & 4 Days in November
"Ironically, it was the cameramen who captured Kennedy at the dawn of his presidential career who would have been most suitable to record its poignant sunset - along with the intimations of a dark, uncertain night to come."

4. The Candidate
"At any rate, it's difficult to imagine Obama pinning David Axelrod in a corner at an election-night victory party and pleading, almost plaintively (as McKay does in the film): 'What do we do now?'"

5. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
"Jefferson Smith, for all his initial naivete and incompetence, couches his idealism in American history, in the Constitution, America as an ideal, a set of principles, not a geographic land blessed by God out of some arbitrary favoritism. Though admittedly, he has been known to pal around with terrorists."

6. Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?
"Smith, though 30, looks about 5-10 years younger. He's short, slightly awkward, and speaks with a high-pitched lisp. As he drives around in his little car...the candidate admits that even his parents and brother won't donate money to his quixotic campaign."

7. The Contender
"And, given the [Palin pregnancy], it was conservative Republicans who shrugged at a youngster's fornication, slapping a 'Shit Happens' bumper sticker next to the Jesus fish on their SUV."

8. The Weather Underground
"They declare a desire to 'bring the war home' but while Asian hamlets are being napalmed, they hold orgies in order to 'smash monogamy' and destroy any last semblance of bourgeois conservatism."

9. Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater
"McCain could definitely use Goldwater's clarity of purpose and conviction. Say what you will about Barry, he lost by sticking to his convictions rather than abandoning them."

10. Fahrenheit 9/11
"The film stokes paranoia in more subtle ways than mere verbal insinuation. Its electric editing, pervasive musical score, and lingering slo-mo close-ups build a feeling of dread."

11. So Goes the Nation
"[John Kerry's] verbal contusions offered ample ammo for a glib Republican catch-phrase: audiences eagerly chant 'flip-flop, flip-flop' and even dress as man-size sandals to prove their point."

12. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
"In other words, despite his fierce anger and defiant attitude, there's an underlying longing for community and understanding that characterizes this film, and indeed all of [Spike] Lee's work."

13. Sicko
"[Michael Moore's] usual impulse is to storm the citadels of power with his camera and poke it into the faces of those who have devastated average lives...but he holds back. And cathartic as it would be to see him make the insurance company sweat, it would be easy and, in a sense, miss the point."

14. Maxed Out
"Maxed Out saw the storm on the horizon. Watching it today, about a year and a half after it was released, in the wake of the meltdown of the debt-based U.S. and world economy, is an eerie experience."

15. A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash
"One by one, alternative energy sources are considered and brusquely dismissed by the talking heads, especially by one young fellow who seems to delight in throwing cold water on every prospect for hope and a way out of our overreliance on oil."

16. An Inconvenient Truth
"Gone were the turtle suits of Seattle and Davos, replaced by a well-groomed (if slightly stocky) man in a dark suit, travelling around the world, one hand on his laptop like a post-Information Age, nonviolent, Tennessee-accented James Bond."

17. The Devil Came on Horseback
"As hundreds of thousands were killed and millions displaced, it dawned on the world that systematic genocide was taking place in Darfur. And Steadle was there to observe."

18. Inside North Korea
"On the North Korean side of the divide, two guards face one another, ready to shoot the other if he tries to jump over, while another guard stands further back, evenly between them, facing the other way in case someone tries to escape from that direction."

19. Iran: The Next Iraq?
"We see boy soldiers (some as young as 13, though they look even younger) primed for war and a Tehran fountain commissioned with red-colored water - it's supposed to flow with the 'blood of martyrs.'"

20. Frontline: The War Briefing
"Its title frames the issue as something the next president must focus on, and indeed after years of flirting with Iranian strikes, and dealing with the distracting mess in Iraq, we're back to square one: Afghanistan, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Pakistan."

21. Frontline: The Al Qaeda Files
"The image of bin Laden, with the long beard and robes, hidden deep in a cave somewhere on the outskirts of civilization, may frighten many Americans, but it seems supremely calculated to do so: it's an image bin Laden has created himself, not one he was born into."

22. Taxi to the Dark Side
"From a simple, almost thoughtless action, the jotting down of some comments, the typing of a memo from behind a comfortable Washington desk, thousands of people can suffer - and the depth of their experience has no correspondence at its root."

23. No End in Sight
"For Iraq, a war of choice in which we had all the time in the world to think ahead, postwar planning did not begin in earnest until two months before the invasion began. This boggles the mind, but it's only the beginning."

24. Iraq in Fragments
"Now that I better comprehend the big picture, Iraq in Fragments seems more vital, more important, than ever. It is important as an experiment with the documentary form, it is important as a document of Iraq, and it is important as a work of art in its own regard."

25. The Choice
"Both John McCain and Barack Obama have been lifelong tight-rope walkers. Now, at the hour of utmost need, McCain has fallen from his perch and Obama remains, teetering on razor's edge."

The Choice

It is, among other things, a tale of two cities. Or at least, that's how it starts. Not Chicago, not Phoenix, not Hanoi, nor even Washington. "Frontline: The Choice 2008" begins with the party conventions in the late summer of 2004. The Democrats gathered in Boston, one of the birthplaces of America, to reinvent their party and, they hoped, the nation. They would fail, but in that failure, they may have planted the seeds of their eventual success. How much of Obama's famous convention speech was hype, created after the fact by a media looking for The Next Big Thing? All I know is that I missed it, but upon arriving at my family's house to catch some convention coverage, my mother turned to me and said, "I just heard the future president speak." Obama evocatively, and shrewdly, stepped outside the partisan framework of recent elections to declare, "there is not a liberal America, or a conservative America, there is the United States of America!"

Meanwhile, the Republican gathering in New York City - wounded city, site of 9/11, but also big, bellicose, haughty - contained the seeds of division. Republicans lit into their opponent, cast the other side as unpatriotic and weak, and cultivated a sense of Red America rising up to crush Blue America (ironically, this was in the heart of Blue America itself). But though the party seemed united and boisterous in its quest to re-elect President Bush, there were seeds of division in the GOP as well. These were best represented by John McCain, a figure immensely popular with the public, but doubted and disliked by other Republicans. McCain strode onstage to deliver a martial, impassioned defense of his president focused on national security, but one can see in the tepid, strained faces of the audience that there's a disconnect. Nonetheless, McCain is present for a reason. Despite his dislike of Bush, despite his differences with the Republican Party, he has decided he wants to become the party's nominee for president the next time around. This is the first step in that direction.

Iraq in Fragments

Mid-decade, filmmaker James Longley took his small camera to Iraq, where he shot, directed, and sound-recorded, and later composed music for and co-edited, a truly fascinating movie. Insinuating himself into various Iraqi populations, he formulated a graceful, poetic film which feels as different from other Iraq docs as a verse feels from a newspaper article. Iraq in Fragments presents the documentary as art film, in an unusual but captivating approach. Much of the film has the feel of narrative fiction, but by sidestepping continuity - the cutting is impressionistic, the sound design musical, the photography close-quartered and graceful - the movie avoids most of the compromises inherent in documentary form. This is a good movie with which to draw my election series to a close, because it's a reminder of the humanistic and individualistic elements underpinning politics and world affairs...the soul in the body politic.

Iraq in Fragments exists in three fragments of its own. The first fragment follows a little Sunni boy in Baghdad - he has difficulty in school and works for a machinist who is alternatively tough-loving and physically rough. The second fragment does not focus on one individual but rather the collective passion of the Shiites in Iraq's South as they coalesce around Moqtada al-Sadr to discover their post-Saddam identity.The third and final fragment travels to the north, visiting with Kurdish peasants who bake bricks, herd goats, and rush to polling places when they get the chance to vote, hoping to stake a claim on their own land. Each fragment is poetic in texture, ranging from the distracted sadness of the little boy to the fierce, frenetic violence of the militias to the cozy pastoral lives of the Kurds. Form scrupulously echoes content and the free flow of impressions and experiences and images and sounds is liberating and indeed startling after experiencing so many informationally-focused documentaries.

No End in Sight

No End in Sight is one of the best Iraq documentaries because it is isn't powered by justifiable rage but rather sheer disbelief and frustration. Its director, Charles Ferguson, ostensibly pro-war in 2003, does not focus too extensively on the reasons for going to war or even on the subterfuge involved in the preparations. This it leaves to other documentaries (whatever the motives, this plays as effectively as Michael Moore introducing the uninsured in Sicko and then announcing that the movie would not be about them). Instead, No End in Sight chronicles the unbelievably incompetent and damaging way that the arrogant Bush administration, and especially the Department of Defense, conducted the postwar reconstruction. Or lack thereof. Complete lack thereof. In World War II, the plans for postwar Japan and Germany were drawn up two years in advance. For Iraq, a war of choice in which we had all the time in the world to think ahead, postwar planning did not begin in earnest until two months before the invasion began. This boggles the mind, but it's only the beginning.

Taxi to the Dark Side

On December 5, 2002, an Afghan taxi driver picked up several passengers in the small city of Khost. The driver's name was Dilawar and he was a slight man (though 5'9," he supposedly weighed only 122 lbs). He was young, only 22 years old, and had a family in Yakubi, a small village, where he agreed to take the three men. Passing an American base which had earlier been rocketed, Dilawar's car was stopped by Afghan guerrillas guarding the base. Finding an electric stabilizer in the trunk of his car - which Dilawar claimed not to know about - he was turned over to the Americans and held in Bagram Collection Point, where he was interrogated as a suspected terrorist. On December 10, 2002, he was declared dead. He was the second prisoner to die at Bagram within a few weeks.

Frontline: The Al Qaeda Files

With the bogeyman spectre of Osama bin Laden lingering over the Western world's head, the threat posed by terrorism and Al Qaeda specifically - and Osama bin Laden even more specifically - sometimes seems almost metaphysical. John McCain likes to call it "an existential threat," which may be true in its own way, but also implies something unfathomable, almost abstract in its evil. What "Frontline" does, in this series of episodes aired between 1999 and 2005, is lift the curtain a bit and show us what lies behind the organization of Al Qaeda, the events of 9/11, and the terrorist attacks since then. It's a riveting, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing look at a culture often alien to Americans, and also sometimes weirdly familiar.