Hannibal, Season 3 Episode 8: The Great Red Dragon

Tom Noonan. 

Ralph Fiennes.

Richard Armitage. 

There are the men who have worn the name Tooth Fairy. By this point I've read the novel and seen the two film adaptations of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon and have the plot pretty much memorized. Brett Ratner's adaptation felt like a less interesting copy of Michael Mann's Manhunter rather than a new take on an old story. Yet even with this plot buried in my bones I couldn't help but be excited to see how Bryan Fuller would make the story his own. So far I haven't been disappointed. 

Having Francis Dolarhyde as the series' first new killer makes sense. He plays a foil to Hannibal in a way. He's intelligent and meticulous but unlike Hannibal, he's totally out of his own control. It's interesting too that after having so many long winded villains in the series, the final one we're faced with is nearly mute. He doesn't have a single line in his first episode. His silent nature isn't just a personality trait, it's more deeply rooted in his traumatic upbringing. It shaped him and explains his main motivation. He believes, through killing and "transforming" his victims, he may transform himself from a mentally abused man with a cleft pallet into something else. Something invincible. Something that in his mind has taken the form of the famous figure in William Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, a painting depicting a scene from the Book of Revelation. It is one of a series of four paintings that tells the story of the Red Dragon failing at his purpose to steal the newly born Redeemer, yet revealing that his is not the only threat. Which is, of course, perfect for this series. Because he's not the only threat. In fact, he's barely the real threat at all. That spot will always be held by Hannibal. 

It has been three years since Hannibal's surrender and imprisonment when Francis Dolarhyde begins murdering whole families at the full moon. It is chilling to learn that his targets are always families and even more chilling to learn that Will now has one of his own. This could be looked at simply from an academic, story structure point of view. Will sees families being murdered so of course why wouldn't he go back to a world that almost broke him in order to protect his own. The motivations make sense. But I like to see it more from a prophetic point of view since that always seems to be the stance that this series has taken. Will's life is inevitably always going to wrap itself around or inside of Hannibal's. So when Dolarhyde begins his killings, he does so as an instrument of fate. Will cannot be free. Not while Hannibal lives. Even if he's living in imprisonment. Because let's not forget he allowed himself to be put there. 

Once Will gives the okay to return to the FBI we're quickly reminded why he was so hesitant. He enters the home of the first family of victims, the Leeds and struggles to enter Dolarhyde's design. But once he does we're shown a sequence that might be the darkest the show has ever been. Blood splatters everywhere and Will is shown shooting two children in their sleep. He places mirrors in Mrs. Leeds mouth, eyes, and labia and it's important to note that at this point Bryan Fuller has made what I think is a wonderful decision to downplay the sexual violence that made Harris' novel famous. There is never any direct depiction or even mention of rape in Hannibal. Instead Fuller asks his audience to read between the lines. His restraint makes this series far more palatable but almost a lot more horrifying all at once. Nothing is scarier than our own imaginations.

Speaking of horror, The Descent's Neil Marshall directs this episode, his first time behind the camera on Hannibal. Even though James Hawkinson's eye is essential to the look and tone of the series, Marshall's influence is felt all over "The Great Red Dragon," in particular flourishes with sound design. Most importantly, he's found a way of filming Richard Armitage that depicts his often naked or barely clothed character the same way we've grown so accustomed to seeing the female form portrayed on TV. Blake's painting is immediately visceral and sexual to anyone that takes the time to look at it and it's brilliant the way that this series works to overly sexualize the male form to the point of making it terrifying. The show has always done it but never better than in this episode. It's one of the best changes that Fuller has brought to this familiar story.

On the subject of change, the series' version of Hannibal's experience is probably my favorite. Hannibal's imprisonment is far more interesting to watch because we experience it from his point of view. That is to say, we get to live in the mind of a kind of genius and so we get to watch him share a glass of wine with Alana in a beautifully decorated room for much of a scene before we get Alana's take on everything and see the truth. Hannibal has no wine. No beautiful room. But he's using his mental palace as a way of remaining in control of his situation. Almost every scene that Hannibal occupies begins this way and it's a great little addition to Fuller's legend of Lecter. But of course, the show must go on and so after an entire episode of new plot developments and catching up we get what we were waiting for all along: Will must go and speak with Hannibal. 

In A Lonely Place

"You're thinking like you're back there." says a character whose name I can't even remember in Michael Mann's Blackhat. I know she's played by Wei Tang from the terrific and underrated Lust, Caution. I know this because like Public Enemies, Michael Mann's last film, Lust, Caution was the last film before a director threw up his hands and said "What do you want?" to an audience he no longer knew how to please. The further into discovering digital he's gone - the medium someone else found for him, that he knew would be the future, for better or worse - the further away from audiences he's gotten and the more he's burrowed into a select few critics' hearts. Having worked in a record store that specializes in trade-ins, few directors have their whole catalog traded in with the regularity of Mann, a director I've loved since I was old enough to know what a director is. People don't have the time for him they evidently once did - you can't return a film you didn't buy. And just as Lust, Caution sent Ang Lee racing toward middlebrow, NPR-friendly fare after a fearlessly intimate decade-plus to himself, and Ridley Scott retreated into Gladiator style pablum after the formally abstruse The Counselor was called the worst film of his already polarizing career, the indifference that greeted Public Enemies seems to have broken Mann's stride. Public Enemies was an experiment in a time, place and language that were altogether unfamiliar to him - I know I'm not the only one who thinks that film redefined the possible in digital grammar. I wouldn't change a frame of Public Enemies. It's perfect in its deliberate imperfections; one of the defining films of the 21st century. And when people shrug at your masterpiece it might just hurt your feelings. 

I don't pretend to know what Michael Mann went through in 2009, but a few things seem clear enough - Blackhat's attitude is one of defeat, a movie defined by grief for a world that has changed and will continue changing. Progress means nothing anymore. Mann was likely equally devastated when he returned to Los Angeles - his true home despite that beautiful Chicago accent - and discovered they'd changed the lights on him. The sick yellow glow of the Halogen street lamps he used to play his greys, blacks and blues against has vanished. Replaced by white/blue flourescents. The resulting vacancy in the air was caught expertly by Robert Elswitt in Nightcrawler - the town finally looks like a set in a tv studio. It's anathema to Mann's version of reality; he has a formula for background stylistics being inversely proportional to the stylishness of the action. Chicago looks like a cool neon nightmare in Thief, but the action itself is all purposely grounded. Tough, but real. He met in the middle for Heat. A new LA just won't do. So, like a thwarted moth, he sought a new source of light. There are the neon orgies on the streets of Hong Kong, the dull sizzle of computer monitors blurring and muting flesh, always presented in contrast to the earthy reality of the skin of those watching, and finally the unearthly glow of the banks and towers of harddrives. Mann's recreation of the inhuman space of data traveling through circuitry is all the virtue (and none of the boneheaded mythology) of Tron and Tron: Legacy in one bravura little sequence. And it hints that a resigned Michael Mann isn't someone concerned with people anymore. His hero is a Chicagoan, like Mann himself, and he's only interested in getting every single task taken care of as quickly and efficiently as possible, because the motivation to do them splendidly isn't there anymore. 

Chris Hemsworth's Nicholas Hathaway is a man who forgets what it meant to do things because there is joy in them. He does them because on the other side is the possibility of remembering how to love them. He emerges from prison after the same number of years since the last time Mann has made a film. He hasn't made a film set in the modern world in almost ten years. That's a long break from depicting our world as we know it. Hathaway is shown first listening to headphones, his hearing muffled. The world is now a little too big, a little too fast. Maybe that's why the mouths speaking Mandarin dialogue seem to lag a little behind their voices. Why Hemsworth needs a long second to himself before boarding a plane to LA. The world is bright now, and both perversely bigger and smaller than it's ever been, to paraphrase Transcendence. We're all in the same room, but no one's on the same wavelength. Hathaway/Mann's way of doing things just don't work anymore. The bad reviews that have greeted Blackhat confirm as much. There are hints of the old Mann in here (The action sequences still glue you to your chair, Viola Davis channels Pacino in Heat very effectively, the frenetic camera work of that film returns briefly, though in truth it resembles a hungover pantomime of the precision ambling of The Color of Money), but we're looking at a director looking for new pleasures. He's found only a few. 

I don't think the Chinese setting was arrived upon idly, as the influence of its vanguard is strongly in evidence. Wong Kar-Wai used to juxtapose the deadly serious (cops, traffickers, hitmen) with the lighthearted (clingy ex-lovers and OCD lovers-to-be) and Mann's fused them without too much fluctuation in tone. The discussion about whether an ex-con should be dating a cop's sister crops up right before a police raid, a stray thread that will eventually be woven into the quilt once the focus has narrowed toward the end. There's a scene in a Korean restaurant that has the languid awkwardness in its choreography that calls to mind the delicate dance of space in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times. It's clumsier, but Mann has a heavier footfall. The lightest he's ever been was in Public Enemies. Those days are a distant blip in the rearview. Everything here weighs a ton. It starts with how he chooses to fill a frame. He builds himself a considerable team; Davis, Hong Kong police including Hemsworth's love interest, Hemsworth himself, his minder (played with little fuss and credible workmanlike anonymity by the ever-dependable Holt McCallany, still showing the beauty he wore forever and a day ago as a rapist in Alien³) and whoever else happens to be within arm's reach. Mann arranges them in chaotic patterns and erratic formations, hinting that they aren't united by a purpose, merely by incidental geography. Then he makes this giant crew sprint through the X and Z axis as frequently as he can find a reason to. The running is labored and ugly. It looks strange. Perfunctory. "What'd she say?" "Move fast." They run because they're being compelled. Different from the usual desperation with which Mann imbues his action sequences. They don't live for this. It's a task, like anything else.  When asked what he'll do once he's been freed Hemsworth lamely suggests that he'll fix TVs. The world doesn't need Mann's version of a hero. The world is quiet and his characters have fallen quiet with it. Mann searches the faces of the dead for meaning and finds nothing as sad as Hemsworth, framed alone in worlds moving at an alien pace. Blackhat is a very lonely film.

There is, however, a dignity in the silence, and here is where Blackhat works best. The villain's philosophy, that which is not in front of him does not matter, is what Mann has discovered he's up against. Audience attention span, audience willingness to indulge fetishization, audience's sympathy for an idea that takes a whole film to bloom. That which does not stimulate continuously is not worth considering. That scheme - or is it a fear? - informs the film in every imaginable way. There's the dialogue, recorded haphazardly, fading in and out seemingly at random, forcing audiences to think about whether the content of a conversation matters in a film that's meant to be all momentum. There's the way the team slowly disbands, leaving Hemsworth and his love interest alone. Soon their influence fades and the film begins to reshape into a movie that seemed to be about them all along. Did they have any impact on each other or on Hathaway? It's a film ruled by a tide it can't seem to control, like the Apocalypse Now style festival and its current of bodies that keep Hathaway from his target in the final shootout. The action comes in, forcefully washing away the quiet. The action washes away and the quiet returns. In the quiet, gestures and symbols register. A sleeping man's hand lies on the floor. Hemsworth and his love interest lie together on their sides, facing each other in bed, waiting for a phone call. Three people walk through a bustling marketplace to a secret rendezvous, colours and sounds flaring up all around them, no point beyond seeing them navigate the crowds. Hemsworth's perfect face staring holes  into data-filled screens and the night sky, feeling disproportionately connected to them, mournful synthesizer telling us what he can't ever come out and say. Conversations have no punctuation. When Tang is told by her brother that she's the only one he can trust, she looks away from him and into space we can't see for a small eternity and then turns back briefly to say "when do we leave?" in heavily accented English. Hathaway wants to let suspects walk around and lead them to the next man on the ladder. "I say we let 'em ride" he says to Davis. She sits with the idea for a long, long moment and simply offers a soft "yeah." Nothing clever, nothing memorable, except that the film had led us to believe that something greater was coming. Nothing great comes. Just violence that is all the more destructive for interrupting human contact founded on shared silences and knowing when not to talk anymore. Nothing more spectacular than death awaits them. There is time to stop, talk, and look into each other's eyes. Watching Blackhat is realizing that we can't possibly protect what we imagine to be our future. No government can plan for malevolence with no motive, a lesson some still refuse to learn. The indifference is here to stay. 

I'm Thinking' I'm Back: John Wick and The Return of Action Cinema

I’m a sucker for a lot of things in film. I’m a sucker for sequences that are beautiful or moving like when Joey runs through no man’s land in War Horse or when Martin Scorsese unleashes his own love affair with filmmaking in the guise of two children discovering the identity of George Méliès in Hugo. I’m a sucker for a great song on a soundtrack or a well-used long take, both of which can be handpicked from just about any of P.T. Anderson’s films. Above any specific example though I’m a sucker for filmmakers doing things well. It doesn’t seem like much but most productions these days aren’t populated by anyone being more than adequate at their jobs. So then it falls to a select few to actually prove that when movies are good there’s absolutely nothing better. Now that’s maybe too much praise to start a review of John Wick but I have to make it clear that despite any silliness or absurdity that occurs within its runtime, directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski know exactly what their jobs are: to choreograph and direct some incredible action sequences. And they’re damn good at their jobs.

Action films are a dime a dozen. I shouldn’t say that. Action sequences are a dime a dozen. And they're too often the most boring parts of the films they break up. The water has been so muddied by blasé action films to think anything else. Action in American cinema has boiled down to a set of steps to follow. If one were to cut together action set pieces from the last decade of big budget American films it’d be difficult to tell one from the other. And that’s the problem. Movies that are marketed as action films seem misunderstand the very reason the genre exists. These moments of “action” are supposed to stop the film. Not because they’re bad but because they’re so engrossing by the intensity of what’s happening onscreen that the viewer forgets the rest of the film momentarily. The Expendables trilogy springs immediately to mind. I actually can’t think of a movie that fits the bill more perfectly. Every second of the trailers for these movies are filled with shooting, explosions, and whatever else the editor can grab to make the film look exciting. The problem is it's not exciting. It’s anything but. The action becomes so average that instead of thrilling the audience, they irritate the senses and make viewers wish for them to get back to the quieter parts of the film because at least the dialogue-driven sequences may still afford a surprise or two.

Fans of action films all have their favorites. The ones they stand by. I don’t think I would be alone in saying that the best shootouts on film belong almost exclusively to Michael Mann. Films like Heat, Collateral, Public Enemies, and Miami Vice all managed to lock themselves in my mind as the best of what realistic gunplay on film is supposed to look and feel like. But there’s another side of what guns are capable of onscreen. The more fantastic side. The side reserved for filmmakers like John Woo, Kurt Wimmer, The Wachowskis, and Robert Rodriguez. Movies like Hardboiled, Equilibrium, The Matrix Trilogy, and Desperado make it difficult to not suspend one’s disbelief for the sake of truly enjoying what these filmmaker’s have created: loud, bloody ballets of bullets.

And on that note, enter John Wick. Directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski and writer Derek Kolstad create a world of gentleman criminals and killers that operate in their own personal version of New York City. They have their own clubs, bars, hotels and even currency, realized in the form of gold bullion coins. The world of John Wick is not unlike the worlds that Rian Johnson has created in any of his three features, especially Looper, his latest. Characters interact with codes and lingo that border on ridiculous but because the film manages to realize every other aspect of their fantasy lives, their dialogue never feels out of place. The balance of realistic dialogue versus fantastical world building is one of the easiest ways a film like this can fail. Luckily for John Wick, just the right amount of time is spent realizing what needed to be realized to sell the world that these characters inhabit. I’m not saying that we’re looking at lived-in history and production design to rival Lord of the Rings or Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films (yes, they’re that good). I’m trying to say that the success of John Wick is that we don’t have to rely on the world these characters live in to sell the film. Why? Because this film was directed by two former stuntmen. They wanted to make an action film that harked back to the generic ideal. Films with action setpiecess that take you out of the film entire and have their way with you.

The major action sequences in John Wick are half Michael Mann-realism and half John Woo-surrealism. Keanu Reeves moves with precision and skill and it’s almost impossible to not think of Tom Cruise’s vicious hit man character, Vincent, in Collateral.  But as much as Reeves portrays Wick as a cold, calculated killing machine who is an absolute pleasure to watch deal out death, there is another side of him. A side reminiscent of El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez’s pistol wielding legend played by Antonio Banderas in Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Wick makes quick work of wave after wave of gun-toting henchmen in this film and at no point did I ever question any of what I saw in front of me. I was too busy trying to keep myself from standing on my seat and shouting with excitement at the screen.

Action done right is the best. It’s one of the only things in cinema that you can’t react to while it’s happening. At least I can’t. If I’m watching a perfectly done piece of action I have to reserve all physical reactions until the sequence is over. Then I let loose. I laugh. I exhale. I say “…shit.” as quietly as I can but always a little too loud. The only times I’ve had that feeling in recent memory is while watching Gareth Evans The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2: Berendal, films I consider to be the finest showcases of both martial arts choreography and cinematography of all time. John Wick wisely borrows from these films where it can. Whenever Reeves' character finds himself in combat without a firearm, he’s savagely beating his opponents with the same intensity, though maybe not the same mastery, as Iko Uwais’s Rama in the Raid films.

I won’t say John Wick is a film that’s going to change things. It won’t. But it did give me something I rarely get to see at the movies anymore. Truly thrilling action. Action that made me grip my armrest and move without my knowing it to the very edge of my seat. If every film were able to produce this effect through its action mechanics, going to the movies would undoubtedly get boring, but...having just seen the heights that truly good action choreography can bring me to, I can only hope that were I to have a conversation with quality genre filmmaking, it would mirror the one that John Wick has with his former employer near the end of the film’s second act. “People keep asking if I’m back. Yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back.”

Consider the Image or, "Look At All My Shit"

The following was prompted by these two questions from Noah Lyons: Why did you leave out Spring Breakers from your top 100? Secondly, how do you feel about A Serbian Film?

My experience with Spring Breakers was complicated. As it unfolded I hated it, I loved it, I hated it, I loved it. It's beautiful, it's stupid, it's hilarious, it's monotonous. Wonderful highs, depressing lows. When I walked out of the theatre I thought I'd seen a film I loved. That quickly passed. I still think it's encouraging to see Harmony Korine's imagination taking off in fascinating new directions, as when his gangsta rap Svengali leads the girls in singing Britney Spears before and during a violent robbery. I think his work with James Franco needs to be commended because I can't think of a time when the ubiquitous star was better cast or more enjoyable. The problem was he also seemed to think he was the only person who'd noticed that kids sure are behaving badly these days, what with their materialism and drug use and their cellphones and hula hoops. I can think of six or seven films from last year with the same thesis that didn't wear out their welcome as quickly or feel the need to repeat any shots to belabor a point. One of the film's highlights is a robbery seen from the window of the getaway car, but it's blown when Korine then replays the segment from inside the diner, too proud of his work to let the breathless sequence lie. It's a show-off move that hints at a dire lack of focus. One of my biggest personal rules: if you repeat footage, there'd better a good fucking reason. I take a firm stance on issues of footage manipulation, of directors who disrespect the fact of the image. The other night I watched Ramin Bahrani's massively disappointing new film At Any Cost. A lot of people blame the Dennis Quaid performance, but it's really only behaving the same way the images do on that bland, flattening digital image. Nuance vanishes, these are now actors moving across a room. Quaid is big in the hopes of reaching the threshold of the image's tensile strength. Bahrani thought nothing of what his camera would do to motion, faces or the drama, and the resultant artless bore bears none of its creator's more humane touches because he gave up the image for dead.

Korine cares about his images, let no one tell you different, but enthusiasm overtook motivation. Some striking compositions appear and disappear quickly -  that beautiful shot of his three feral coeds silhouetted in the rain ought to convince anyone he knows what he's doing. The problem is the rest of the film could have used some of the composed nature of its most memorable seconds. Many of the conversations take place in close-ups that feel designed to make the viewer uncomfortable, or, worse, like they were chosen for no practical purpose at all. Too much incident sits at the crux of discomfort and obscenity-for-its-own-sake. Korine can't have it both ways, at least not from where I'm sitting. The frenzied opening montage of topless beach-goers being sprayed with beer is edited to match the rhythms of the dubstep-infused score, but the camera itself has no part to play in this dance. It just heads straight for whatever naked torso is nearest. Too much of the film feels randomly captured, which would be fine, except for those stunning couple of ultra-directed tableaux that are meant to mix with them like they weren't rocks dropped into streams. If he can take the time to compose, not to mention beautifully art direct, a few scenes here and there, his 'Jay-Z music video' aesthetic that eats the majority of the film feels like a cop-out. The plot, when it kicks in, tells us he's having fun with the idea of lost youth, but his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink subject gathering and lack of focus in the edit says he's trying to say something important, hence the repetition. He's too selectively emphatic, and it begins to feel like he hadn't met his running time requirement and improvised in the editing room.

Point of view is another big issue. Korine found subjects willing to take their tops off, which to me says he needs to earn that. Is the film a celebration of go-for-broke youthful indulgence, or a back-handed condemnation? Too many of his girls go home hurt and psychologically damaged for him to fully believe that the ones who stay are making the right choice. I'd frankly have preferred if he'd gone all out, because his moral hand-wringing, presented as a retina-tiring parade of gratuitous young flesh, felt boring at best, hypocritical and irrelevant at worst. A little focus and this could have been a Michael Mann-style thriller about a couple of Disney Princess Scarfaces. And boy fucking howdy would I ever watch that. I can't get that image of a girl leaving Florida on a bus in the early hours of the morning. That's one of the most tragic, retiring and gorgeous scenes of 2013, and it hints at what might have been with a firmer grip on the narrative and a more discerning approach to cinematography. It's the inverse of Mann's Thief in a lot of ways,  trading specificity for vagueness, four girls for one man, ugliness for superficial beauty, a yearning for domesticity for a descent into wildness, a foundation for a dream. One knows exactly what it wants, the other wants everything and settles for nothing. But both have an expansive relationship to their urban environments that transcends genre. Thief is all discipline, Spring Breakers woke up late and then started drinking. Franco's "Look at all my shit" monologue serves an auto-critique. Korine has orchestrated so much and can't settle down to show it all coherently. He wants to see it all, but only succeeds in micro details, when he's calmed down enough to let his work speak for itself. As it stands, Trash Humpers, which grows into a bigger and more important work every time I think about it, was far and away the better film on this subject, and made me much less uncomfortable. My enjoyment of that film wasn't conditional. 

Speaking of uncomfortable: A Serbian Film! I hated it. Once upon a time I reviewed it and though christ is it ever wordy, I still agree with what my younger, angrier self had to say. Something as stiflingly slick as A Serbian Film, not to mention as relentlessly stupid and pretentious, ought not to talk down to its audience like it just read a book on Eastern European history and their first sexual harassment blog. It plays like cold war fan fiction written by Wednesday Adams, though she was eternally more witty and light-hearted than the hapless clowns behind A Serbian Film. Back when I spent most of my time critiquing horror and smut films the edict I adopted was that any filmmaker who outdoes the real-world cruelties they're out to expose shouldn't be making movies. There's a difference between enlightening and punishing, and I happen to think that one can be detrimental to our cultural relationship to history. People can give Dallas Buyer's Club and 12 Years A Slave shit for being what they think a straight, white viewership expects from an issue film, but I'd take that over an ethics lesson from someone who delights in dreaming up creative ways to torture people. Meretricious as they might come off, Jean-Marc Vallée and Steve McQueen aren't condescending, and for the record I think they're both great directors. Srdjan Spasojevic, meanwhile, is insanely condescending and has no moral high ground because he'd stoop to showing infants being raped for the sake of his lesson. What can we possibly learn from someone who takes such glee in depicting something like that? If he's wounded or personally upset by crimes committed against the Serbian people, he doesn't act like it. Films like Men Behind The Sun, Goodbye Uncle Tom, and A Serbian Film all lose their objectivity in the name of recrimination. They aren't crusades, they're empty atrocity exhibitions which expose their makers as decadent, unfeeling bullshit artists.

Approval Rating Down: Roland Emmerich at play

Approval ratings are tricky, as anyone in White House Down can tell you, and no one is more attuned to the elusive nature of public favor than Roland Emmerich. A teutonic Irwin Allen who couldn't blow up enough beloved iconography fast enough to satiate the American public's appetite, Emmerich stepped into the public's crosshairs with 1994's Stargate and hasn't moved yet. Since the success of his follow-up, Independence Day in 1996 he's tested the mettle of two-dimensional heroes against kaiju, the apocalypse, prehistoric animals and hilariously proactive global warming and in so doing raked in hundreds of millions world-wide.

Only heavy-hitters like James Cameron and Michael Bay offered him serious competition at the box office. And like Bay and Cameron, he has a host of virulent detractors. His name appears on dozens of worst director lists and his reviews have ranged from politely tolerant to violent. At Rotten Tomatoes his highest score is 62% for The Patriot and his lowest an 8% for 10,000 B.C. which is actually one of his least problematic films.

With the debate around Vulgar Auteurism running wild it's a bit of a shock that no one in the VA crowd has adopted him. After all he's killed the American president twice, he put Dolph Lundren and Jean-Claude Van Damme together on screen for the first time, used an American flag as a weapon and he destroys the world for pleasure every few years. It doesn't get much more vulgar than that. Yet he remains a critical orphan. Is this because critics don't like his movies or see nothing worth writing home about in his operas of sci-fi destruction?

After all, even fans of his early work must have looked at his most recent disaster (movie), 2012, and seen a director spinning his platinum rims. The script's conception of its characters felt 40 years behind the times ("Download my blog" says Woody Harrelson, playing the kind of cardboard hippie Quinn Martin might have written for Roy Thinnes or Buddy Ebsen to help out one week), its ethnic caricatures would be appalling if they had any conviction, and the all-CGI apocalypse felt lazy and inconsequential even for an action film in the Transformers age. Had he lost his touch? Or was he simply delivering what he thought the terrible screenplay deserved?

If 2012 was Emmerich at the end of his creative tether with nothing but the most limply regurgitated themes and performances emerging amidst the lazily rendered destruction, it was also the inevitable end to a period in his filmmaking. He chose Anonymous as a palette cleanser and karma caught up with him. The box office was the worst of his career and the reviews were typically brutal, but largely based on its ideas rather than anything concrete. Many people have historically found the suggestion of Shakespeare having a ghost-writer insulting and so didn't bother getting into the particulars of the director of Godzilla making a movie in which no buildings are torn down and millions aren't killed by a sea of 1s and 0s.

Anonymous signaled a major change for Emmerich in almost every way. Most impressively and importantly, he was among the first filmmakers to use the then-brand new camera the Arri Alexa, specifically in a period piece, so he was also among to discover what a classical filmmaker could do with newly pristine digital imagery. Some pointed out that Emmerich had a very precise, almost overbearing attention to detail in recreating London for his theatrical potboiler. To me this wasn't the work of a director obsessed with production design so much as the seizing of a new opportunity. In conversation about Michael Mann's Public Enemies, another digital opus by a filmmaker who matured on celluloid, Daniel Kasman hypothesized: "...surely Public Enemies was shot digitally so we could see what tommyguns really look, sound, and feel like." Anonymous' chief artistic aim was to apply that kind of newfound scrutiny to Elizabethan England and Shakespearian performance.

Emmerich spared no expense in recreating the dirt and dust on every inch of London. He and ace cinematographer Anna Foerster explored the muddy, diseased streets with a queasy immediacy, its camera in constant crooked motion as if on loan from Terry Gilliam. Though it isn't simply that they're faithful to how the streets and garments might have looked, it's more about finding the reality of the time and then relaying it as if made up of 24 oil paintings a second, the era's idealization of itself brought low. In other words, how someone used to theatre and art of the age would imagine a film of their lives to look.

The Alexa allowed every location to be lit by candle or torch without auxiliary help. If Terrence Malick's The New World showcased 65mm film's power to most beautifully and faithfully recreate the distant past, Anonymous picked up where celluloid left off. If Public Enemies is about conversing with brand new images of American legends on screen, one could watch Anonymous and feel they're seeing Queen Elizabeth or Shakespeare for the first time, even if the film never shows anything more than a few lines of any play at a time.

Emmerich avoids stylizing the performances the way that Laurence Olivier or Orson Welles did, partly because it's beyond his capabilities to do so and he's far too earnest, but also because he was more interested in utilizing rawness (pixels, data, "A popular hero as nothing but flesh in movement." to once more quote Kasman) to present an era: the honest lighting, the thorough production design, the interaction between the actors and the audience, the peculiar beauty and poignant ugliness of its performers. Shakespearian actors like Mark Rylance could perform as if to their favourite play's first audience, nestled in the narrative they believe about their creation. Anonymous takes great delight in bending the line between audience, actor, play and reality. In its own loud way, its investigation of the past using newly available definition shares a bloodline with Public Enemies, Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, Lars Von Trier's Dogville, Eric Rohmer's The Lady And The Duke and Lech Majewski's The Mill and The Cross.

That's not to say the plotting or editing was as radical or even as interesting as those films. Indeed in structure, editing and blocking, Anonymous is as old fashioned as technicolor. And this is why we need Emmerich, whether we want him or not. Digital was around for almost a decade before major studios bought into it. So while films like Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later... and Mann's Miami Vice began breaking ground and discovering new means of expression, most directors with studios writing their paychecks had to wait until it was safe to go in the water and thus lost many year's worth of getting comfortable in the form. By the time digital was fit for public consumption, it had evolved several generations and no longer resembled the wonderfully crude first wave. There were few people who truly understood what the newest cameras being designed meant for the state of cinema, and even fewer who could afford and know how to use them.

There are many people at the forefront of the workflow revolution - Boyle, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Rodriguez - and they've adapted with the times, becoming post-modernists and futurists thanks to what computerized non-linear editing allows them to do. When a director can edit a scene minutes after shooting it, that inevitably effects the way they shoot. The little details vanish, the bare essentials rise. It may seem like a small thing, but so few people ever walk from one room to another in English-language cinema.

As in the films of the Japanese new wave of the 1960, if Soderbergh or Boyle want you to experience something, you are in the thick of that scene. No set-up, no superfluous exposition. Just you and the actors getting to the bottom of it. Emmerich, whatever his failings, hasn't forgotten the rules of classical cinema, the importance of establishing bodies in a space with definitive boundaries. Look at the number of Die Hard knock-offs released this year? How many remembered that 90% of Die Hard takes place in the Nakatomi Plaza? How many have as keen an understanding of the space they occupy as White House Down, Emmerich's return to his expensively upholstered wheelhouse?

As exciting and important as it is to see what artists like Soderbergh, Boyle and Fincher can do with new technology, they're also free to invent their own narrative and editorial rules. Emmerich has to play by old rules because he never learned new ones. So what we see in White House Down is theory and practice coined by Soderbergh, Mann and Fincher applied (often unsuccessfully) to what might be the world's most popular artistic idiom - the big budget action film.

Emmerich can't or won't evolve and so has to reconcile a distinctly 90s skillset and attitude with still-evolving technology, so the shortcomings of both are plainly apparent. White House Down would be an ordinary action film, except that it sits squarely at the artform's crossroads. It wants to be part of a new cinematic mindset but understands the importance of establishing characters in their environs and quietly getting to know them before the explosions begin. It wants to be solid, clear and legible but it's written in ink that hasn't dried yet so the director keeps smudging what he's just written. The problems inherent in White House Down will be solved very soon because they need to be in order to rediscover classicism after the death of celluloid. Emmerich's films have become mine canaries.

Those problems include but aren't limited to: punches don't hit as hard as they used to, though this could simply be a failure of sound design, another issue. The Alexa, perfect for capturing motivated light in Anonymous or, say stylized low-light in something like Drive, overcompensates in ordinary electric lighting on a sunny day, giving everything a too-perfect sheen, highlighting the plasticity of everything in the movie. No longer bound by the substantiality of image, bodies move too quickly for their own good and Emmerich can't quite keep up with them; his actors often seem in danger of accidentally wriggling out of the frame. To combat this he resorts to too much slow-motion, which no longer works thanks to the high resolution and the flattening of planes. Slowing down the action feels like a denial of inevitable impact, a cheat, rather than a prolonging of an adrenaline rush. And, as in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, another film obsessed with surveillance that attempts to bend the physical world, the interiors and exteriors don't always play well together; nothing kills momentum like an obvious green-screen.

As a test case for new theory on the old blockbuster model, White House Down has birth defects but Emmerich is too good at this to let a ludicrous screenplay and limitations he's only just discovering get in the way. On top of its showcasing new ground for the medium, it's also easily his most fun American movie since Independence Day.

What may end up making all the difference is that in Channing Tatum, he's finally found a hero that the American public cares about. Tatum has quietly become one of the country's most reliable box office draws in the last five years and until discovering him, Emmerich's major American releases have wanted badly for his kind of charisma. Gawky nebbishes like Jake Gylenhaal, Jeff Goldblum, James Spader, Matthew Broderick and John Cusack have either had to carry their respective films or await rescue from more traditional, less fun heroes. Tatum, meanwhile is someone many directors have availed themselves of to investigate motion in digital photography, like a 21st century Muybridge subject. He's all muscle yet capable of melting into a hip-roll at a moment's notice.

Soderbergh used him ably as a sleepy-eyed killer in Haywire and an angsty stripper in Magic Mike, putting his lithe physicality to work both rhythmically and arrhythmically. In White House Down, he's combined those characters in one body, a modest action star fluidly sashaying up to borders that the filmmakers can't cross. His sense of humour is wry and self-deprecating, lifting the film out of self-seriousness. He keeps his emotions close to his bullet-proof vest yet projects immense vulnerability; in other words doing the job of two Emmerich protagonists. He's one of the few action heroes who can threaten to cry and make you hurt for him in the back row. Few actors are more adept at playing the modern alpha male and Emmerich found him not a moment too soon. Of course there's a chance that even with someone as winning as Tatum in the lead, White House Down isn't going to win Emmerich the prestige he's been denied all his life, but it just might boost his approval rating.

Side Effects

Taken as a movie, Side Effects takes a straightforward, very specifically 80s thriller/horror plot (Soderbergh cites Fatal Attraction as his primary influence, but Body Heat and Schrader's Cat People are distantly in its lineage) and outfits it with a moral/political dilemma audiences today can't help but recognize. Anybody with even a hint of awareness about the modern pharmaceutical industry will know the score as soon as the film starts, but the film exists beyond the big-pharma milieu. He's boldly of the moment in his craft, what with his up-to-the-minute digital equipment and tackling time-sensitive bird flu or pharmaceutical intrigue, but stylistically he's outside of time. Soderbergh doesn't make message movies; he makes genre films that can't function without subtext. He understands that if, for instance, you make a movie about male strippers you cannot help but mention the fact that it's an economic neccesity and that most anyone who falls into the line of work is using it as a placeholder. But for cinephiles, the reason to watch a Soderbergh film is because he acts as his own cinematographer and thus has a very intimate relationship to the image. Everything you see is at the forefront of how films can present familiar things. He's been taking advantage of new digital cameras to help reframe cinematic convention and things as basic as architecture and conversation. No one in modern American film, and certainly no one dealing with name actors like Channing Tatum, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta- Jones and product that will play multiplexes, takes the risks he does. He pushes his actors to far corners of the screen, he puts their faces in near total darkness while the backgrounds light up. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky called Magic Mike abstract, but I think it's something more purposeful. He uses the modern world as if it were a studio set from the 50s, and treats faces and bodies like pillars in a building plan. His films would be just at home in a museum, surrounded by beautiful, alienating white walls, treating this form of digital painting as a tool worth admiring on its own. From the deep greens and reds of Haywire to the pale gold of Magic Mike, he's inventing or building alongside camera innovation, testing the limits of lighting for digital, a format that lets him get away with murder, and framing in genre fare; what shapes and angles he can get away with before it becomes 'art' in the public's mind - Girlfriend Experience on one side, Side Effects on the other. Long after the issues in the film change, it will still be a fascinating and timeless look at a director with no real peers. He uses light like only Michael Mann before him (David Fincher uses darkness in the same way), works at a rate practically unique to Americans (Japanese director Takashi Miike, South Korea's Hong Sang-Soo and Brit Michael Winterbottom are his only competition), and none of his films look quite the same. It's only in their relationship to reality, the way that he's presenting the world as it feels, rather than as it looks, that they find commonality.

My Favourite Film Number 4

This is part of my effort to write about my 100 favorite films in two pages or less. This one is still in it's rough stages.

The Last Of The Mohicans
by Michael Mann

In order for one to understand my love for this film, one must know the role it has played in my life. My childhood had a very definite incidental soundtrack; my parents loved music and movies more than anything else I can think of. Along with the music of Richard Thompson, R.E.M., and Talking Heads, there were films that both my mom and dad loved enough to watch regularly. The film that enthralled me most of these white noise pictures was Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans. As a child it was easy to understand why I loved it: the sound of cannons and muskets firing, that visceral score, swordsmen on horseback, chaotic atmosphere, intense fighting with knives and hatchets, what’s not to love? As I got older and began to remember the film, I felt I probably had an incomplete picture as I don’t think I had ever sat down and watched it all the way through. When I finally took the time to view our battered VHS copy, I was amazed there was so much I had missed. It took a few years to appreciate the nature of the romantic direction it takes, the criticism of the colonial mindset, and that the reason I loved watching every second was because of the unbelievably gorgeous cinematography, but I did know that this film was going to last forever because at its core was unbridled passion the likes of which I’d never encountered before and have rarely seen since.

The plot, though idiosyncratic to boot, might be the most satisfying love story ever filmed. In the forests of an America caught in the midst of the French Indian War, a white man raised by Mohawk Indians and the daughter of a Scottish general fighting the French meet by chance. When the English regiment assigned to protect the woman, Cora Munroe and her sister on their way to their father’s garrison, they are ambushed by a Huron war party. The man, Hawkeye (Nathaniel by birth), his adopted father and brother come to their rescue and escort the sisters and Cora’s inept suitor Duncan to the fort. Nathaniel and Cora do not understand each other, and are at odds for a time due to their differences. When they see that perhaps they are not so different, they begin to fall in love, unfortunately this happens to coincide with Nathaniel’s decision to lead the colonial militia stationed at Munroe’s fort to leave the fort to check on their families (the Huron war party has evidently been busy). Nathaniel is nearly hanged for conspiracy to aid sedition, but a brief truce with the French leads the English army out of the fort and into the arms of the waiting Huron. It seems their leader, Magua, has a blood feud with Munroe and wishes to see both the man and his two daughters killed. This proves to be a greater obstacle than British shackles for Nathaniel, who must rescue Cora after she is taken north to the Huron land by force, but it is also the single greatest display of love ever filmed.

As a kid, I got that this movie was different from most others; I returned to this before I re-watched many of the movies intended for my age group. I know that this is due mostly to my love of the film’s soundtrack. Trevor Jones’s half of the score sounds like the musical equivalent of thunder and makes everything on screen ten thousand times as urgent and romantic. It was because of the music that I understood that though the violence is what attracted me to the film, it is the boundless love between the heroes that makes this film transcendent of its time and constraints. The movie is powerful enough, for example, to leave its weak source materials behind (which include James Fennimore Cooper’s unwieldy novel and the 1936 movie starring Randolph Scott). This is a movie that benefited from the time of its conception as much as it did the people who crafted it. There are the two composers (Randy Edelman was brought on due to time constraints to score lighter sections of the film, the standout being the scene in which a courier is dispatched from the fort), Jones’ music being some of the greatest ever written for a film (the source of his recurring theme was a Celtic traditional). The two greatest scenes of the film (Hawkeye’s race across the battlefield to rescue Cora, and the final clash between the Mohicans and Hurons) would be flat were it not for Jones’ compositions. His music is so important because so much goes unspoken. Michael Mann and co-writer Christopher Crowe were smart enough to leave much of the feelings (the resentments especially) silent so that the resolution of these conflicts could be simple and effective. When Magua murders his enemy, he makes a point of telling him why; when he fights with Chingachgook, Hawkeye’s father, they have no need for words. When Hawkeye and Cora first kiss passionately to Jones’s swooning strings, they don’t utter so much as a word. Mann knows that words aren’t always good enough, nor are they always necessary.

Who better to capture the urgency and passion of a man who discovers how much he will do for love than Daniel Day-Lewis. He may have spent 8 months in the woods learning how to run and fire a musket at the same time, but what makes his performance is the fire in his eyes when Cora is in danger. Today’s stable of leading men simply pale in comparison to Day-Lewis, who is at much at home throwing a knife as he is madly declaring his love with what little language his Hawkeye knows. Because we love the character, because we wish him to succeed, we suspend our disbelief. Could three men continually outfight entire regiments of armed soldiers? When the outcome is so pleasing, it’s hard to answer truthfully. With the music pounding, the brilliantly choreographed battle raging in the background, and the heroine in danger, belief is happily given over to the beauty of the film. Michael Mann has always been a master of building tension, and here he shows the simplest way to achieve it; two lovers are apart, one is in danger, the other starts running and will not stop.

Dante Spinotti may not have a lot of other work to his name, but he more than earns his place among the world’s greatest cinematographers here. Spinotti succeeds in making the woods and water that surround the characters as beautiful as the story itself. In a film about an America untainted by capitalism or the age of industry, he shows just how flawlessly and effortlessly gorgeous the natural world is. His footage of the North Carolina woodlands is stunning and has few rivals. While Mann’s compositions are doing their part, it’s the fathomless color of an endless world that captures the eye. From the opening pursuit of a buck, where every flash of moving bodies swims in a chasm of glorious, untouched scenery. The surroundings lose much of their charm when the greedy English occupy the frame (in one striking example, a perfectly composed shot of a bridge and its reflection on the pond below is slowly crossed by horse-drawn carriages). When the soldiers transporting Cora and her sister are ambushed, the scene is dark, dusty, and surrounded by dying foliage. The makeshift road is a pale brown and the forest is enshrouded in gun smoke and the red from uniforms and blood (as in the mesmerizing clash between the Hurons and the English refugees). When Nathaniel and his family take charge and lead the three survivors to Munroe’s fort, they immediately happen upon a small river framed in a rock bed. Between the deep green of the forest that extends for miles around, and the pristine water and stone, it is perfection. The lesson that Cora learns by falling in love with Hawkeye, that one must abandon material foibles and the petty English gentrification of the land, is one that Spinotti’s camera has already taught the audience subconsciously. This is a film that not only celebrates the love between two disparate people, but also declares its love for the land like fire from a cannon.