jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Poodle-in-law Bo needed my loving attention and finely honed dog-walking skills last week, so I only saw three new films along with the never-ending (and frequently repeating) slew of half-watched classics that drifted by on suburban cable TV. Expect this ratio to shift dramatically when I hit the Berlinale next week.

In Bruges. Martin McDonagh, 2008. Review forthcoming. They sent us In Bruges hats, so you know it’ll be a rave! Updated: My About.com review. ****

The Witnesses/Les Témoins. André Téchiné, 2007. Marcy reviewed. ***

London to Brighton. Paul Andrew Williams, 2006. Especially after the grace and humanity of 4 Months, I found this sordid tale of abused women difficult to stomach. *

Also:
The Empire Strikes Back. Irvin Kershner, 1980. *****
One, Two, Three. Billy Wilder, 1961. *****
The Dreamers. Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003. Marcy’s review. ****
Quadrophenia. Franc Roddam, 1979 ****
The Big Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998. *****
The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963. ****

Musical Bonus: As featured in The Witnesses, here’s Les Rita Mitsuko.

Almost serviceable fantasy adventure based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. On the plus side, some nifty ideas (people’s souls walk next to them in animal, or “daemon”, form), spiffy Victorian/steampunk designs, icy Nicole Kidman, and in the lead, an adorable girl (Dakota Blue Richards) with Sarah Polley eyes, trying to save her kidnapped brother. On the down side, it all feels terribly derivative, and most of the CGI isn’t up to 2007 standards — the roar and clang of a climactic ice bear smackdown had the theater cheering but the daemons especially look lousy.

Eva Green descends on a vibrating broomstick to spout fantasy gobbledigook, Sam Elliot and Daniel Craig don’t have much to do, and once you get past the peculiar specifics of Pullman’s world, the story never strays from familiar hero’s journey territory. One key moment is lifted directly from The Empire Strikes Back, a final battle restages Minas Tirith without any emotional investment, and the strained farewell doesn’t have half the rousing ring of the Sam Gamgee speeches it’s trying to emulate. Some of us thought it was a bathroom break, not the ending. There’s just enough talk of religion, authority, and free will to get me curious about the books’ purported atheist attitudes. Opens December 7.

The Golden Compass. Chris Weitz, 2007. **

The trailer:

In anticipation of the sequel, Marcy and I rewatched the original 1998 movie, a solid historical drama with a healthy Godfather finish and an astounding performance by Cate Blanchett. The new film, also directed by Shekhar Kapur, picks up the story where it left off and sees the Virgin Queen through to the defeat of the Armada in 1588. As spymaster Walsingham, Geoffrey Rush is once again trying to outplot the Spanish. Abbie Cornish plays the maid with the bursting bodice who has the “ear of the Queen” and makes love in front of sundry fireplaces. Samantha Morton gets to stick her neck out as Mary, Queen of Scots. And Elizabeth once again suffers for her country, unable to pick a husband or escape — like Helen Mirren’s QEII — from the constraints of her office.

Yes, there’s a good deal of soap opera in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but by the time the fire ships appear, this movie has become something quite different. The beacons of England are lit (cf. Return of the King), a CGI fleet is tossed about in a storm (cf. 300), the Queen harangues the troops on a coiffed horse, and Clive Owen, as the raffish pirate Sir Walter Raleigh, does some honest-to-god swashbuckling. Forget the soap: we have reached the emotional pitch of opera.

Kapur’s sweeping spectacle forgoes all musty pretensions of middle-brow edutainment, and if you expected a history lesson you’ll emerge from the theater deaf and dumb. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is the work of a director who is intoxicated with the power of cinema, and as an aficionado of Revenge of the Sith, I felt right at home in his world. Visually, it’s as overstuffed as any of the Star Wars prequels, bombarding us with new colors, angles, sweeping vistas, and scenery-chewing performances. The soundtrack is every bit as overwhelming as John William’s famous fanfare, and Padme Amidala would have killed for this Queen’s hairdos and extravagant costumes. Elizabeth: The Golden Age opens on October 12.

Elizabeth. Shekhar Kapur, 1998. ***
Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Shekhar Kapur, 2007. ****

The trailer:

Dancing in the Sunshine is Serious Business
Bonnaroo is exhausting. Sixty hours after the last notes wafted into the Tennessee air, my feet, back, legs, skin, and head have barely recovered. In 2004, a tremendous storm left me drenched, tentless, and barefoot in ankle-deep mud. But it doesn’t take a major meteorological event: if the thunder don’t get you, then the punishing heat, sleep deprivation from late night superjams and endless forced marches between Centeroo and your camp site might.

In Star Wars terms, Bonnaroo 2004 was Yoda’s swamp hideout Dagobah. This year resembled Tatooine: a parched, scorched desert where a parade of alien creatures shuffles through blinding sandstorms. Under these conditions, living out of the trunk of your overheating car for four days without electricity, easily available showers, or bathrooms that feature actual running water can be enough to break the toughest Tool fan. (I’ve seen it happen.) Ornette Coleman, who was no doubt helicoptered in and had air conditioning at his disposal, nonetheless collapsed on stage from heat exhaustion. Why on earth would anybody do this thing?

It’s All About the Music, Man
Let’s get one thing out of the way: none of the headliners did much for me this year. John and I used the Tool show on Friday to recharge for the late night sets, but there was no way to escape their brutal sonic onslaught and flashy light show that must have been visible from Mars. Likewise, we only heard The Police run through their hits from afar, and I’m okay with that. Southern jam band Widespread Panic closed out the festival on Sunday. New guitarist Jimmy “Catfish” Herring had some great moments, but the hecklers behind us nailed it: “We don’t really like you! We just stand here because there’s nowhere else to go.” If I’d been consulted, The Roots, Wilco, and Ratdog would have headlined–but I did appreciate the rest Sting afforded us.

Now for the good stuff. Wilco, obviously in grand spirits, played a wonderful afternoon set–I’m especially partial to “Impossible Germany.” The Roots, confined to the same time slot on Friday, threw down hard, but my favorite ?uestlove moment came later that night, during The Philadelphia Experiment in the nifty new jazz tent: somewhere around 3am, after Gina Gershon sat in on the Jew’s Harp, Ahmir Thompson got up from behind his kit to drum on random objects in the audience, including the table I was sitting at. It loses somewhat in the telling, but to have that man banging the living shit out of the spot where you were just about to put your drink was a real kick.

On Thursday, we caught the blazing tail end of Tea Leaf Green and witnessed Rodrigo y Gabriela rock “Stairway” into “Tamacun.” London synth band Hot Chip seemed like they were about to bust out “Being Boring” any minute but never did. Gypsy punk Gogol Bordello was almost as crazy as Manu Chao, Lily Allen covered The Specials and “Heart of Glass,” and in the comedy tent, David Cross and Aziz Ansari made easy hippie jokes. Late Friday night, Bob Weir sat in with Gov’t Mule for “Sugaree” and “Loser,” and I saw Keller Williams doing “Stayin’ Alive” with the String Cheese Incident. Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones came on stage with Gillian Welch, and he later played “Dazed and Confused” and other Zep tunes at the superjam with ?uestlove and Ben Harper. Rumor had it that JPJ’s run of sit-ins came to an abrupt end when his bass was stolen.

Because of the heat, we sacrificed Ratdog for air-conditioned David Murray. Damien Rice sounded oh so sweet but a tad maudlin for my mood. Ween made a lot of crazy noise, Martha Wainwright insulted her father in time for father’s day, Michael Franti told us to end the fucking war. On the Sonic Stage, Jorma Kaukonen played an intimate acoustic set. The Hold Steady surprised me with an enthusiasm not seen at That Tent since The Polyphonic Spree, and the Troo lounge had great smaller acts like John Paul White, Jennifer Niceley, and Salvador Santana. The mutating beats of Sasha & John Digweed kept a rave going until after 4am. From afar, we heard Wolfmother, the Decemberists, Franz Ferdinand, The Flaming Lips, Galactic, the North Mississippi All-Stars, and the White Stripes, and they all sounded good.

All the Freaky People Make the Beauty of the World
And that’s the real secret of Bonnaroo: it’s all good, and not just in that heady bumpersticker way–I mean it literally. There wasn’t a single act that didn’t have something interesting going on, and most I saw were great. Given the music and the conditions, the crowd self-selects, too, and every one of the 90,000 Bonnaroonians I talked to this weekend was joyful, friendly, interesting, and kind: the Iraq vet who helped with our car problem, Sneaky Mike, the coolest cat in Pittsburgh, Matt and Vanessa from Dayton, the woman who described her job as “making sure the passed out people aren’t actually dead,” the naked guys, the hula hoop girls, everyone I photographed, the neighbors who hooked me up with milk for coffee three times like in a fairytale, the people who appeared out of the dust like a fata morgana to share a warm beer.

Bonnaroo is a Temporary Autonomous Zone, a Hippie Utopia where everybody’s cheerful, anything goes, and four or five great concerts are always chugging along at the same time. Permagrins abound. Between the DJ arcade, the ferris wheel, the movie tent featuring appearances by DA Pennebaker and Jim Jarmusch, the silent disco, and a million unscheduled impromptu happenings on every block of Shakedown Street, there are infinite choices at Bonnaroo, and they’re all fun. It’s not a “scheduling conflict“, it’s a blessed moment when, like Miles Davis said, there are no mistakes. Having to pick between Ravi Coltrane and STS9, the Flaming Lips and Galactic, Gov’t Mule and the Philadelphia Experiment is not a problem — it’s an education in abundance.

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Prompted by a comment at The House Next Door, here’s a contribution to Edward Copeland’s Star Wars blogathon: a close reading of the opening minute and a half of Attack of the Clones.

The beginning of Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones isn’t quite in the league of the overhead star destroyer of the original film or the bravura extended space battle take of Episode III, but it sets the scene for a moody second act. The very first shot, the traditional pan toward a planet that follows every Star Wars crawl, moves upward, toward the city planet Coruscant. We see two Naboo fighters and Amidala’s royal cruiser. (In The Phantom Menace, she flies a “yacht” and in Revenge of the Sith a”star skiff,” but they’re always silver.) I adore the deep growl of Amidala’s ship–this sound is the first thing that makes me happy to be watching this movie.

The ships begin spinning around their axes, putting the lie to our idea of up and down. By the second shot, the camera has spun too, and now we descend toward the surface of Coruscant. Right away, this introduces the theme of Attack of the Clones: nothing is what it seems. The Star Wars cycle consists of a tragic half and a comic half (otherwise known as “the prequel trilogy” and “the classic trilogy“), and Episode II is the second act of the tragic half, a time of schemes, subterfuge, and confusion.

Next, in the first of the film’s many stagy interiors that I like to enjoy as intentionally campy allusions to Flash Gordon, a person we only see from behind is addressed as Senator. This makes the first word spoken in this film a lie.

In Star Wars, everything keeps repeating, but with variations. In this case, whenever somebody’s name requires a honorific, it will be unique: Emperor, Boss, Vice-Roy, Supreme Chancellor, Hutt, Princess, what-have-you. By the same token, there are always new planets as well as new vistas of old ones: this time, Coruscant, which we’ve already seen, is covered in fog, again hitting the theme of deception and mystery. The trails left in the clouds by the tips of the cruiser’s wings please me. This shot also echoes the approach to Cloud City, in the second part of the comic half.

The following shot of the landing spaceships plays a peculiar trick on our attention: we think we’re looking at Amidala’s ship, but as it passes, we realize that we were watching the fighter flying alongside all along. And of course: here comes, announced by his signature noise, the first recognizable character in the film, the comic sidekick who knows as much as anyone in the series, the guy who has the first word in Episode IV and the last in Episode III: the real hero of the show, R2-D2. (The mindboggling first shot of Revenge of the Sith comes, after an actual kitchen sink explodes on screen, to rest on him.)

My minute and a half is about up now, but the rest of the scene continues the theme of deception and duplicity. It also caps the decoy storyline that was central to The Phantom Menace. Next to its visual imagination, the iconic success of Star Wars rests on its rigorous but inventive structuring: Lucas often begins and ends familiar stories in unpredictable ways. The belated death of Padme’s double exemplifies this Star Wars principle. For instance, Revenge of the Sith begins with what could have been the climax of Clones--much like the opening forty minutes of Return of the Jedi could have provided a more upbeat ending to The Empire Strikes Back. Each act of the two halves (which wrap around like Moebius strips) corresponds to its counterpart: Menace/Hope, Attack/Strikes Back, Revenge/Return.

My point is this: the first 90 seconds of Attack of the Clones, ominously scored by John Williams, set up the next 8430 very well. They promise more visual splendors, more games played with archetypal structure, more explosions, more tacky dialogue delivered to the hilt. Clones was the film that got me excited about Star Wars again after initial disappointment with Phantom Meance. It satisfies by itself, makes Episode I a better movie, and lays the groundwork for the superlative payoff of Revenge of the Sith.

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. George Lucas, 2002. *****

• Previously: Cleopatra, Sith, Death Proof
• My original review of Revenge of the Sith
• Digg This

Prompted by the grand finale of Rome, we took another look at Cleopatra, which is one of those movies I can rewatch every few years. Compare-and-contrast is a fun enough game, and Marcy, who was never entirely sure which of the HBO characters were fictional, was entertained by noting differences in motivation and plot. Every frame of Cleopatra must have cost more than an entire episode of Rome, but the storytelling is much more contemporary on HBO. The movie nearly bankrupted Fox because it was designed to trump TV by outspending it. Forty years later, it has been shown up by… a TV show. But the images are still twice as wide, and the characters twice as grand.

Here’s what fascinated me, though: the palatial sets, outlandish backdrops, and outsized drama of Cleopatra resemble another, much more recent epic about larger-than-life figures. Along with forties serials, The Hidden Fortress, Ray Harryhausen and all the other usual suspects, there is no doubt that the Cinemascope epics of the fifties and sixties, and specifically Cleopatra, served as a blueprint for the Star Wars films. Archetypes in ever-morphing hairdos and caped costumes acting out eternal tragedies and reciting awkward, overwritten lines of dialogue — especially Revenge of the Sith, the episode in which the galactic shit hits the fan, is the spiritual and cinematic heir of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s four-and-a-half-hour epic.

Read on for more about Star Wars, Grindhouse, and why Jar-Jar Binks is cooler than Stuntman Mike. Also, lots more screenshots.

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In February of 2005, I was in the Guatemalan jungle, on top of what archaeologists have designated Temple IV in the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, standing next to the chamber where the priest-king used to gobble magic mushrooms. Sound Tribe Sector 9 was playing on the iPod.

You’ve seen the view from Temple IV before: it’s the jungle hideout where the rebels regroup for their attack on the Death Star in Star Wars. Tikal was a city designed specifically to align with the Maya’s advanced astronomical knowledge. Rumor has it Sector 9 arrange their setlists according to the Mayan calendar. At the base of the pyramid, our guide Daniello was waiting with far-out theories about the end of the Long Count on December 21, 2012.

Back in New York (a city specifically designed to allow immigrants to make it to work on time), I played around with a bizarre screenplay called Twenty-Twelve for a couple of weeks. Then there was news of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, and I read Daniel Pinchbeck’s follow-up to Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, a daring work that combines personal history with way-out ideas about the nature of time, the emergent noosphere, crop circles, the theories of Rudolf Steiner and Jose Arguelles, and the end of the Mayan Long Count. I shelved Twenty-Twelve.

Tonight I saw Apocalypto, and I’m absolutely dying to tell you what I thought–but Disney embargoed all reviews until the December 8 release, and you know how it is: when the Mouse asks, you don’t refuse–and you definitely wouldn’t want to get Mr. Gibson angry. The most I dare say is this: Apocalypto has nothing to do whatsoever with anything that interested me about Mayan culture in the first place, and Marcy might be wrong about Babel. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll bite my tongue for a week and leave you with some photos from Tikal and a video of Sector 9 playing Tokyo:

I’d love to know what Daniello has to say about Apocalypto.

Apocalypto. Mel Gibson, 2006. (No rating yet.)

• Apocalypto Official Site
• Trailer
• Wikipedia
• Rotten Tomatoes

[tags]sound tribe sector 9, film, mel gibson, maya, mayan calendar, time, guatemala, tikal, youtube, flickr, daniel pinchbeck, tikal, apocalypto, 2012, babel, star wars, quetzalcoatl, noosphere, rudolf steiner, jose arguelles, tokyo, crop cirlces, temple of the jaguar, temple IV, daniello, disney, mickey mouse, embargo, paramount building[/tags]

A more glamorous version of Who Killed the Electric Car, the exuberant story of a failure, and a good-natured indictment of corporate malfaesance and the death of the American Dream. Christian Slater, Joan Allen, and Martin Landau are always welcome; Sofia sweeps through in a party scene, and Dean Stockwell makes an appearance as Howard Hughes. In the title role, Jeff Bridges plays the designer of a forward-looking car that was too innovative for its own good. Only 50 were ever built before the big car companies put him out of business. A flying version of the Tucker appears in Revenge of the Sith:

Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Francis Ford Coppola, 1988. ***

[tags]film, francis ford coppola, 3 stars, cars, dreams, corporations, jeff bridges, preston tucker, star wars[/tags]