Put it this way: On one hand there are the gauzily golden scenes where Leonardo DiCaprio, hidden behind his Aviators and Pan-Am pilot cap, marches through the Miami airport arm in arm with a oblivious gaggle of giggling stewardesses, who are absurdly successful in distracting police officers and law enforcement agents who are teeming around in wait for Frank Abagnale Jr., the “James Bond of the sky,” the mischievous young prodigy with quick wits and quicker feet after whom Tom Hanks runs after comically, the boyish charmer who can stroll up to an attractive teller and, with a few choice words, cause her to blush and chortle uncontrollably and fall in love while he extricates various details concerning bank checks (ah, these wonderful years that were…). Catch Me If You Can, when required, operates on a rough but sustained level of comic incredulity that is required from the audience, like a sweet adolescent fantasy.

And yet, inseparably, there is also the story of a privileged, promising young man wrecked apart by his parents’ sudden divorce and financial woes of his father and who runs away from home. He turns to forging checks and swindling millions from the banks with intuitive, innate ease, and proceeds to lie to everyone including his own father. Frank Abagnale Jr. becomes the airline pilot (and the doctor, and the lawyer as well) and flies the friendly skies, but—a telling detail—every Christmas Eve, out of forlorn loneliness, he calls the FBI agent whom he has narrowly escaped from several times to plead to be left alone. This is the epitome of miserableness, and Tom Hanks, on the other line, cackles in glee. Spoiler alert: Frank is eventually caught, and thrown in prison, after having languished for what seems to be a couple of years in a brutal, cold Marseilles lockup. But he’s given a second chance on account of his brilliant mind—working dull office hours for the same FBI department that caught him, analyzing fraudulent checks and other things that he knows. (He accepts.)

One would expect Frank Abagnale Jr., the enterprising, fearless young man who refused to be beat down by the dregs of reality, to pull a Shawshank Redemption and escape to some blue Pacific shore, and he does try—not showing up for work one day and running off to the airport all dressed up in his pilot uniform, in a last-ditch attempt to recapture the now unattainable. But Tom Hanks, wiser than he seems, knows the ultimate truth. The viewer does too, and so does Frank. Everyone knows, which makes it all the more depressing. Only half of Catch Me If You Can is sentimental and sweet, and, in context, it gets swiftly overpowered. The ending might be intended as being a somewhat “happy” one, considering the alternatives, but it is not cheerful nor does it bring a smile to one’s face. At least, it didn’t to mine.

I can’t say the sober, even quite despondent dénouement of this film lowers my opinion of it as a whole, because I can’t say I didn’t see it coming, seeing the emphasis on the non-teenage fantasy parts that forewarned an ending in tune with reality. Steven Spielberg’s love of always-complicated-never-easy family relationships (specifically father-son dynamics, one can argue) in his films has become famous, understandably so, and it manifests itself strongly here. But, although some of the exchanges between Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael Douglas, who plays his father, are touching, even wrenching, why were they there?

The thing is that Catch Me If You Can is never as profound as it could be or thinks it is, if Spielberg had been inclined to steer his ship so resolutely in that one direction, nor is it, ultimately, a fun light-hearted little gem, which, in my opinion, is what it should have been. Why can’t we just enjoy this sweet adolescent fantasy without feeling the weight of the consequences and the knowledge of the causes of Frank Abagnale Jr.‘s daring escapades, so heavy they ground the whole thing irrevocably? I feel fulfilled watching Leonardo DiCaprio charming pretty girls and living the good life while Tom Hanks huffs and puffs after him, thank you very much.

Photo via Google Images.

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That came as a genuine revelation to me, for No Country For Old Men has been acclaimed as nothing short of a modern masterpiece. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find more than one or two negative opinions about it within the boundaries of good film criticism. (However, rest assured that Internet commenters are quick to find it “rubbish,” “overrated,” and ”boring,” among other such delightfully pithy opinions.) More importantly though, I find it difficult to be a convincing contrarian on this matter when I don’t really know what in particular irked me about No Country For Old Men. I watched it a week ago, and would not object to having my memory of doing so obliterated, if only because there was nothing remarkable about it, and so nothing really remarkable about the movie itself.

Maybe that’s not entirely true. I remember some scenes vividly—one where Josh Brolin is sitting on a motel bed with his bag full of $100 bills, waiting with shotgun in hand. He’s right in front of his room door, and behind it is the man who’s been hunting him down, the polite psychopathic hitman played by Javier Bardem. It’s dark save for the light coming from under the door, and only nigh imperceptible creaking and footsteps in the hallway outside disturb the careful silence. The tension is masterfully ratcheted up to near unbearable levels.

That’s a good scene. But on a whole, No Country For Old Men is rather disappointing. Tommy Lee Jones plays the third man, an aging, weary sherif, who seems to mostly sit around in coffee shops and increasingly muse about all the violence and death which he finds he can no longer deal with, because it’s just too much. He feels “overmatched,” as he tells his ex-lawman uncle. He’s the protagonist, I suppose, since Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss is never very likable and Bardem, well, he plays the part of the relentless killer, invoking curiosity with his mannerisms and quirks, “principles” they are referred to in the film, but still quite a villain. Some have enthused at the proposition that it all makes splendid, strange sense in Anton Chigurh’s head under that odd haircut, making him fascinatingly deep and perhaps not as “evil” in the sense of the word. Why? Because he is a man of violence, who understands it, who was bred in this world of death and dying, much like Llewyn—but unlike his prey, he is the creepy personification of it. Perhaps. But I just saw a psychopath with somewhat redeeming qualities attributed to the crazy world we live in now, as such characters are wont to have nowadays onscreen.

No Country For Old Men’s dullness comes from the fact that it doesn’t really have anything to say, and that it takes a long while—an intemittently exciting and generally ploddingly stale, while—to say it. It’s quality filmmaking throughout, yes, but with too few moments of brilliance which we’d expect from the makers of Fargo. From what I heard, it’s pretty faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, which might be part of the problem, but I wouldn’t know seeing as I haven’t read it. And I feel no urge to read the source material either after watching No Country For Old Men, which is a shame, because I do love a good book.

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This scene is one of the few that were shot in location in New York ¹, funnily enough. But I wouldn’t have guessed it. It still reminds me of a stage setting—somewhat enclosed and constricted, with nothing there that shouldn’t be there if the producers said no. The playground wire mesh fences, casting thin, angular shadows, bring to mind a prison courtyard, even. The drab grey hue of the buildings and the street ground lazily meld into one another without much effort.

One of my favorite shots concerning the Jets, the gang of white boys, is the one below. The camera moves along with them, from the other side of the fence, as they saunter along, snapping their fingers rhythmically, looking for something to do. They look somewhat menacing, like the cool kids who are also the schoolyard bullies. (Which I guess, they are.) They are still, visually, constrained in their surroundings.

But then they leave the playground. And we realize the tension has been building up to dance, that pure, carefree expression of happiness and simple contentment for these street kids—physically manifested in their pirouetting bodies and vocally in Riff’s unadulterated cry of joy, “Yeah!” You smile with, and for, them, unexpectedly.

This continues even after some scuffles with the Sharks, the rival Puerto Rican gang. Nothing can hold them back, or maybe it is even some impetus to keep dancing, to keep their feet off that hot, boring pavement that holds them down.

And the narrative ends, in sorts, with this shot of their hands thrust up as one into the sky, hands that soon will be catching a basketball but for now are reaching for the blue, for the beauty, for the unattainable. Forget the ground, look up. The box has been broken out of, and in that moment nothing else matters.

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This scene is fabulous cinema already, but M’s director Fritz Lang layers the situation with more moral and social complexities. It is not a real jury who listens to the confession, but a kangaroo court comprised of a volatile mob of criminals, as well as other townspeople and grieving mothers. It was the criminals who had taken it upon themselves—seeing the police’s inaptitude in apprehending the child killer—to find him and deal with him themselves. They did this not not out of the upstanding moral goodness that lie in their hearts, but rather because the mysterious murderer, and the ensuing police attention, were a disruptive annoyance to their criminal goings-on. Of course, however, once they do catch him they become the noble proponents of swift justice, which is, yes, quite ironic.*

So it has come to the peculiar state of affairs where one murderer is pleading for his life in front of more murderers who all would love to lynch him. Well, perhaps, this scenario is not so peculiar, but I think the peculiarity in this case arises from the fact that we are told to choose between the two evils, one of which is lesser, but still evil nonetheless. It’s also interesting to mull over that the criminals are, deeply afraid and disgusted of the child-killer, not only for the reasons apparent, but because he represents the most vile of their selves, and what they hope will never emerge. He reminds them of their own evil, only worse, so doing him away makes sense. At least, this is before Beckert opens his mouth and exposes his tortured soul, his mental illness against which he has no respite, by which time it, however, doesn’t really matter; the mob thirsts for blood, somewhat understandably so, and for them, in this matter, violence is the most appropriate answer. But of course it’s not as black-and-white as that. I found myself sympathising with the devil, if you will, but also of the opinion that they should kill Beckert, because it would put an end to his suffering and his guilt. That sounds terrible, I know, but I felt compelled to find an opinion in this matter—I did not feel like a distanced onlooker, and this film is mildly hateful for that reason.

And then, there’s the other interesting thing, that in the end M, for all of the questions it poses of what or who is right or wrong, might just be a PSA for mothers to take closer care of their kids. After all, the ending, where the film denies the audience the verdict of the (proper, and official) jury deciding Beckert’s fate, concludes with this odd line of dialogue from a weeping, mourning mother: “This won’t bring back our children. We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children.” I think it somewhat odd, indeed, because it shifts the audience’s attention from the gripping morality questions back to the “core” of the film, which is, I suppose, that for the great majority of its runtime M is a psychological crime thriller—a very great one, perhaps the first of its kind—about the hunt for a child-killer. Indeed, the last twenty minutes or so caught me by surprise, for I was not expecting anything of the sort. But it is, by far, what makes this movie endure, and still resonate, so many decades later.

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Seeing as it is a 1962 thirty-minute avant-garde science-fiction film that is almost entirely comprised of black-and-white images, the irony runs thick indeed that La Jetée, created by the late Chris Marker, struck me as being perhaps the purest, freshest, and most organic piece of cinema that I have seen in a long time. It is uncommonly invigorating and haunting. It’s now one of my favorite movies, which was decidedly an unexpected surprise, since I don’t pretend to have a particular preferment (beyond that which is to be expected) for obscure art-house films that confound as much as they enchant. How to put it?—I don’t practice the assumption, or rather have not developed the general thinking that a work of art that is not able to be enjoyed by a great many must be better to a more sophisticated few, inherently so.

But herein lies La Jetée’s wonderfulness—it is not a “WTF was that” film that you need to watch over and over before you grasp it, before the knot becomes unravelled, if it ever does. You re-watch it because you want to, very much, and because there are things you might have missed the first time around that are worth musing over and marveling at, but certainly not out of necessity, mind. The audience does not feel obliged to find meaning in the obscure less they miss the whole point. The almost holy simplicity of La Jetée is evident without effort, and it is a truly beautiful thing to experience.

The plot, from which countless filmmakers have lifted, and yet apparently not enough, is thus: Our protagonist is a man, a survivor of World War III, but a prisoner of the winning side. Underground, in the gloomy sewer system, he is chosen by scientists to be a guinea pig for time-travelling experiments—to venture back into the past, and eventually into the future. Why him? Because in his memory burns an image of a woman’s face from the past, which will serve as an anchor to ward off the madness that comes with tampering time. He had seen this woman on the Orly Aiport pier before the war, as a child, and he also has the vague recollection of a body falling and a man dying shortly thereafter.

After much suffering, the man is sent back in time, and in a series of dream-like encounters meets the woman whom he does not know. “They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them.” Eventually, his captors deem the time-travel stable enough to fulfill its real purpose—to go forth into the future and find a panacea of sorts to make the post-apocalypse present livable again. It is much more painful, but the man is sent and meets the technologically-advanced human race of the future, who give him the solution.

Upon his return to the now, the man realizes he will likely be killed by his captors, since he has fulfilled his duty as a expendable time-traveller. The people from the future, entering his mind, offer him a place with them, but he declines; he’d rather go to the world of before and find the woman on the jetty, “who perhaps was waiting for him.” So off he goes. And the narration henceforth goes like this:

“Once again, in the main pier of Orly, in the middle of this hot pre-war afternoon where he was now able to settle down, he thought of a confused way that the child he had been was due to be there too, watching the planes. But first of all he looked for a woman’s face at the end of the pier…He ran toward her. And when he recognized the man who’d trailed him since the camp, he knew there was no way out of time, and he knew that this haunted moment he’d been granted to see as a child…was the moment of his own death.”

The last photo fades out. Fin.

That ending, with all its realizations and revelations, is the nicest kind of cinematic contentment you could possibly get. It is just perfect, in all its completeness, and left me walking around for five minutes afterwards savoring the hazy afterglow, muttering “That was so good. That was really good.” I wanted to watch the movie again, and I did the next day.

There, I paid attention to more things. Like the museum that our protagonist and the woman wander around in, “a museum full of ageless animals,” creepy in their frozen immobility, suspended in time. I was intrigued further at the scene where the man points beyond a giant tree and says, “This is where I come from.” Where? Listened closer to the music, the narration, and the unnervingly unintelligible whispers as the scientists prepare the time-travel. Admired the fact that the black-and-white images, arranged in a giant photo-montage, deftly conveyed more emotion and made for a more arresting watch than visuals could possibly. But there’s no sense of pretentiousness or gimmickery in La Jetée. It flows and moves uniquely, like a poem full of flowery language that still cuts through to the core. It’s a marvelous piece of work, one not too distant to be loved. And so I adore it. ♦

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Deakins was nominated for an Oscar. He did not win.

It is my intention that this gross misjudgement, the most recent in a long string of them, be recognized more fully with this photo essay of sorts.

Presented in chronological order

All photos copyright Sony Pictures/MGM, if used please attribute to this site

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The bigger bummer, though, is that the studio that has enchanted generations with Tinker Bell and at least a few plucky princesses has backed a movie that has such backward ideas about female characters that it makes the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” look like a suffragist classic. Which it was, in its charming way: L. Frank Baum, who wrote the 1900 book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and its 13 follow-ups, was the son-in-law of the pioneering feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and her influence permeates the Oz books, which take flight with a brave girl who saves her friends and their land. Baum’s second book, “The Marvelous Land of Oz,” even features a parodic take on the suffrage movement, with a female general, Jinjur, leading an all-girl army equipped with knitting needles.

“Friends, fellow-citizens and girls,” Jinjur declares, “we are about to begin our great Revolt against the men of Oz!” Too bad they didn’t storm Disney next.

I don’t want to go all Glenn Greenwald and start criticizing a film which I haven’t seen, more than I have already (I also feel inclined to say that, although it is no excuse for an demeaning attitude towards women, Disney was not allowed to reference The Wizard of Oz because Warner Bros. owns the trademarks. The books, however, are in the public domain.) If you want a detailed, insightful read into more of Baum’s feminist tendencies, of which I had no idea, this Film.com article by Elizabeth Rappe is a great one.

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Rand Paul has got to feel like he’s won a marathon when done. Getting lots of media attention, fundraising $ and yes, new Twitter followers— Ethan Klapper (@ethanklapper) March 7, 2013

Still, it wasn’t just a silly, selfish spectacle, Paul had accusations and arguments to voice about drone attacks on U.S. soil, the need for transparency and the upholding of American constitutional rights, and the important, fundamentally, thing is he said them—and then repeated them, and then emphasized them again by citing numerous articles—all day long. It wasn’t filled with flowery oratory or raging, rousing speech—where’s Tony Kushner when you need him?—but it was, I guess, just fine, if you count out the more goosy paranoid aspects of Paul’s imagination. It was commendable. The Daily Beast’s John Avlon wrote in his column earlier today:

But in our time of hyper-partisan political kabuki, Paul deserves respect for advancing a serious, principled, substantive debate. This is what filibusters are supposed to be—and one of the lessons learned might be the necessity of real filibuster reform that requires senators to take the floor rather than hiding behind the passing of paper. In addition, it has provided a happy reminder that the word filibuster itself is a Dutch word for “pirate”—fitting because there is something renegade about the capturing of the Senate floor in such a solitary stand. I’d like to think this issue would resonate with the same widespread principled passion if a Republican were president, but given our recent history, I am not convinced that would be the case.

In such a worthwhile debate, one downside is the feeding of militia anxieties about the rise of a tyrannical government. It would be naive not to assume that at least some of the senators who clustered on the floor were looking to score political points and get some reflected glory with TV face time. But Paul’s stand was educational even if some of his colleagues saw it as high-rating political entertainment. These emerging technologies are deserving of serious civic debate, as long as they are grounded in reality and a fair degree of good will from our government. To his credit, Paul largely debated within these wise lines: “I really don’t think he’ll drop a Hellfire missile on a café in Houston like I’m talking about,” he said of Obama, “but it really bothers me he won’t say that he won’t.”

All things considered, it was a good first filibuster.

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Very interesting article from Megan Garber over at the magazine’s website on a subject I had never heard of before—how cities were lit in the last few decades of the 1800s, not with streetlights but with gigantic, artificial “moons,” hoisted high up on towers. The experiment didn’t really last into the 20th century, but must’ve been a very strange and beautiful experience, to say the least.

And so, for a brief and literally shining moment early in the days of human-harnessed electricity, the future of municipal lighting was glowing orbs suspended high above cities — towers, resembling oil derricks, capped with 4 to 6 arc lamps with a candlepower of 2,000 to 6,000 each. These manmade moons made the ultimate promise to the people below them: that they would never again be in the dark…The light itself…was the true attraction. It was, as [inventor Charles Francis] Brush had guaranteed, “picturesque and romantic,” one observer put it. Within the glow of the manmade moons, “the foliage is weird and beautiful. All places within the scope of light are bathed in the faint but fairy-like illumination of the moon in its first-quarter.”

Photo via The Atlantic.

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