The Top Ten Films (Maudit) of the 90s.

The 90s. The last era about which the phrase "they don't make 'em like they used to" can plausibly be used. Because, and many people will blame/thank digital replacing or at least competing with celluloid, the medium has changed storytelling. In microcosm, look at Jonathan English's film Ironclad. Here are some characters, here are their weapons, here's the king they oppose, here's a castle, they will defend it and die one at a time, one of them lives, the end. Efficiency? Maybe. It's easy to be efficient when you hire actors so good they're practically stock types and forget character development. Entertaining? Sure, yeah. I don't regret watching it, only that it made me see without doubt that the rules have changed. Ten years ago, Ironclad wouldn't have necessarily been a better film, just one that left a stronger imprint in its goodness or badness; Highlander or First Knight leave no room for meh's. They're fucking awful or you watch them with your friends in rotation next to Point Break and Lost Boys. With film there is a weight to every close-up and the best directors of the era knew it. Robert Redford may have lost his flair for suspense, but he still understands the weight of a shot and how to pace, which is why I didn't hate The Conspirator as much as everyone else did. Not a great movie, but it has the sturdiness of a man who learned the craft several generation changes ago. Gregg Araki still struggles with these very basic concepts; Larry Clark has actually gotten better because he had no idea about how to use film for anything other than image capture; digital's ease with light has made him a more discerning director of images. Gaspar Noe, whatever his faults, I think is still probably capable of weight if he'd slow his fucking camera down a minute. To combat the inherent drop in depth, Leos Carax has actually rooted his usually flight-prone steadicam to focus more on the faces of his protagonists, rather than following them as they float through space or run through the streets like wild animals; he's deliberate on digital in a way he only ever hinted at in his best moments on film. And no, it is not randomly that I use these names. For when the true effect of the close-up diminished by a thinness of the image so goes the power of film to really shock.

Take The Human Centipede, please. How can something that looks less substantial than a lot of senior thesis films have any power to shock or disgust, except by mere suggestion alone. Would I care to undergo the surgery myself? No. Is watching it worth the suggestion? No, because it fails to live up to its outlandish premise in execution and leaves you nothing to think about when the filth's been shed. The only thing I can think of with less formal value or narrative energy is a Jim Wynorski/Roger Corman made-for-syfy cheapie or possibly a straight-to-obscurity Geno Mcgahee horror film. I'd wager good money that the reason Ken Russell's The Devils and the few other films he produced that decade were so truly hated was because Russell's style had remained intact from his productions of The Music Lovers, The Boyfriend and Women In Love. Not only were audiences who wanted him to do justice to classic novels with modern implications disappointed by his move away from romance and into psychedelic torture and scalpel-sharp satire, they were tricked by his images, which had the same texture and moved in the same fleet way as his earlier crowd-pleasers. A fantastic rug-pull from a man who made rug-pulling his life's work. Ditto Carax, whose audiences wanted something with the same joyous air, and were instead rewarded with an accurate representation of what their expectations had done to his psyche. He used their expectations against them and brought them further into his mind than they would have ever asked to go. This was at once the definition of cinema, and so much more.

And now, the inspiration for this piece - The AV Club and Slant firing off dueling best of the 90s lists and Peter Labuza in Film Comment offering his take on the film maudit (for those who don't know the handshake, that means 'cursed film'), using Dennis Lim and Criterion's recent appreciations and restorations, respectively, of Heaven's Gate. I disagree with both of the lists strongly, because for the sake of doing the same that some of our most heralded auteurs do - throwing out the rule book for the sake of it - place the work of Paul Verhoeven higher than people who truly mastered the form to do something more than fuck with you for an hour and a half. I'm not saying Verhoeven isn't capable of great art (Black Book is really fantastic and his best film in my mind is the staggeringly awesome Flesh + Blood) but I resent anyone who tells me that Starship Troopers is a better film than Ed Wood. Subjectively speaking - they're wrong. Objectively speaking - give me a fucking break. Being in on a joke the filmmakers didn't fully comprehend doesn't make the film better, it just makes you on its wavelength, at best. If the director of that bullshit Red Dawn remake had come out and said "I'm a marxist and this is a joke," the movie wouldn't suddenly become a fucking masterpiece. But then, I suppose, that's what critics are here for. To exhume, to re-evaluate, to push their personal films above the accepted canon. Labuza points out that Andrew Sarris probably took greater pride in telling people how much he loved Lola Montès because of how poorly it had fared with critics upon its initial release. And time has vindicated both Sarris and Lola. It's a masterpiece in more than one set of eyes with a Criterion release to go with its new status, just like Heaven's Gate. And for the record I agree. Lola Montès is, to me, Ophuls' most beautiful and heartbreaking movie, and the man made more than a few beautiful, heartbreaking movies.

Which brings me to my real question, and it's nagged at me for months now. There are more film critics today than there ever have been (don't ask to see my research on this bullshit claim) which means that the odds that a film, no matter how wrongheaded, will be Universally panned are impossibly small. I grew up hating people like Paul W.S. Anderson, Michael Bay, Tony Scott and Dennis Dugan and largely the critical establishment had my back, but thanks to the internet, every one of these guys has a champion in 
'print'. In consulting reviews for Pola X from its turn-of-the-century release date, the overwhelming consensus is "it's a failure, but still worth watching." So, my question is, why? Why does a film that does not subscribe to narrative logic as we typically understand it (and film critics ought to have a broader understanding these days), have to be called a failure? Labuza cites Margaret as a film that was rescued from Maudit status in a matter of months. Of the six critics who saw it (which made up something like 34% of its first-run audience) four of them liked it enough to recommend it. The other two found it not terrible but too broad, which they failed to realize was the point. Soon the six became twelve, and so on and so on and now it's very nearly canonized. So, to quote Labuza, "One might wonder if there are even bad movies anymore..." The Kafka-esque truth is almost definitely no. I have a problem with tastemakers martyring Tony Scott, who made one masterpiece and a few good movies besides (not great, merely good) movies in a thirty year career, and lauding Brian De Palma who never once made a good film, while Margaret and Pola X have trouble getting their due because a handful of critics and distributors don't have faith in them. Heaven's Gate was blamed for the Iranian Hostage Crisis in its day; it still has its detractors, but at least now its viewed outside of the context of the curbstomping it received back when. In the age of the internet, as Labuza points out, distributors will have to try very hard to create circumstances where a film needs rescuing and can't get it. Thank god because I'm tired of reading decades old reviews that cost artists their faith in the seventh art. I fear for John Carter and Andrew Stanton, two men I want to succeed more than anything. So, while the obvious choice in response to both of these pieces was to ask my friends for their favourite films of the 90s, I also decided to go one step further. Below their choices, based solely on love and appreciation, are my selections of the best (whatever the fuck that means these days) Film Maudits of the 90s, the last decade capable of producing them. Whatever your thoughts about these 'failures,' they at least had the power to be hated.

First, our personal lists of favourites from the 90s:

Sean Van Deuren

Eyes Wide Shut
Bringing Out The Dead
Groundhog Day
Being John Malkovich
Rushmore
Magnolia
Schizoplis
The Thin Red Line
Sweet And Lowdown
Fargo

Noah Aust

The Celebration
Europa
City of Lost Children
12 Monkeys
Fight Club
Princess Mononoke
Night on Earth
Delicatessen
Being John Malkovitch
Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Tim Earle

Miller's crossing
Fargo
The Big Lebowski
Fight Club
Porco Rosso
Toy Story 1 and 2
LA Story
Schindler's List
Being John Malkovitch
Goodfellas

Fox Johnson

Saving Private Ryan
Pulp Fiction
Fargo / Big Lebowski
Forrest Gump
Se7en
Toy Story
Jurassic Park
The Matrix
L.A. Confidential
Fight Club

Dan Khan

Three Colors: Red
Three Kings
Boogie Nights
Before Sunrise
The Sweet Hereafter
Heat
Pulp Fiction
Goodfellas
Abre Los Ojos
Breaking the Waves

Scout

The Long Day Closes

Sleepy Hollow

The Double Life of Veronique

L.A. Confidential

Rushmore

Last of the Mohicans

Trainspotting 

Pulp Fiction

Heavenly Creatures

Topsy Turvy

And now onto the maudits!

1492
by Ridley Scott

You'd think the man who reinvented/revitalized/restarted Sci-fi in the 80s could do no wrong. But Ridley Scott loves a challenge. Blade Runner and Alien back to back is a feat almost no one in his generation can touch. So we can forgive him picking the script for Legend, if it existed in any other form than cocktail napkin scribblings, because it afforded him the chance to show off majestically. Ralph Bakshi and whoever was manning the autopilot at Disney must have very seriously contemplated faking their own deaths when Legend was released and was nearly the most dazzling and diverting piece of visual art the decade produced. Did it make sense? There was no internal continuity, but that didn't stop Lord of the fucking Rings, did it? Fantasy, horror, sci-fi? What next? The erotic thriller, of course. Not exactly bountiful visual stuff, but at least he could ground them in realism and conduct stake-outs like ballet. Then the 80s action film. Still in Legend territory as far as the script's concerned, but in anyone else's hands it would have been much, much worse. One 'women's picture' later and he's ready to dive headlong back into the big budget period film he made his reputation on. Another challenge, Maestro? Make a film about Christopher Columbus, who may actually deserves the mantle reserved for Jimmy Carter as history's greatest monster, where he's the hero. Easier said than done, according to everyone but me. Do I have a complaint? The Vangelis music. Lightning didn't strike twice on that collaboration. Beyond that, 1492 feels like it was shot in 3D, such is its visual splendor and the ebullience of the sound design. It does manage to be that rare film about hubris that suffers from it, which is its own reward. Thanks to the nightmarish color corrected visuals, the foreign (to its heroes) setting of the main conflict, the practical effects and handcrafted sets, and that truly bizarre electronic score, 1492 has the distinction of being the Sorcerer of its decade. Did the world need a remake of The Wages of Fear? No, but William Friedkin turned in his one bonafide art film when given the task. Did the world need three simultaneous films about Columbus? No, but I would never have professed to being capable of feeling sympathy for the man, either, and Scott made me. That is his genius. Existing in the shadows of major studios, executives, and great big stacks of money, Ridley Scott was the lone artist capable of coming out unscathed, turning standard issue genre fare into human interest stories-cum-films noir. Can't seem to turn down a bad script, but when he can take an idea as misguided as an adventure film about the world's most famous murderer and make you empathize with him (a trick he'd repeat in Hannibal), even feel sorry for the man when his dreams are in danger of slipping away from him, then I forgive his hubris everytime. I should always like to be led astray by something so gorgeous.

Alien³
by David Fincher

Not many people know I have an unpaid internship defending Alien³ on the internet. I get paid nothing and go around looking for people who write it off or disparage it in the vain hope of one day being able to talk to David Fincher about it. This sounds like a joke, but if I could put it in on my non-existent resume, I would. In a heartbeat. Few Hollywood disaster stories interest me as much as that of the third Alien movie. On paper the names they got make sense. Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. At one time or another these men could meld visual artistry with gut-level genre filmmaking that made audiences the world over swoon and empty their pockets in the same gesture. Of course the truth makes far less sense. Cameron has since dissolved into a harmless populist with no better an idea of how films fit together than George Lucas. Jeunet's film founders badly as he was, in a decision that uncannily echoes Anglo hiring François Truffaut over Jean-Luc Godard to direct Fahrenheit 451, picked to direct the most icky and philosophical film of the franchise over his much darker collaborator Marc Caro, who would have committed to the task more fully. Fincher was simply lucky or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. A film student who'd charmed his way into a career directing adverts and music videos was chosen to handle a franchise of such importance, I assume because producer David Giler assumed he'd be grateful for the job and do whatever was asked of him. Not so. Fincher immediately set about claiming his first big budget film for himself. The edit would mangle his baby beyond repair, but the initiated know that the Assemble Cut of Alien³, featuring most everything they removed from the theatrical, is the prototypical work of its creator. With Se7en, The Game and Fight Club he would push his camera beneath the surface of wealthy America (like the one occupied by his Alien³ producer/tormentors) and find the grimy secrets we all keep. His knack for dressing horrific environs was so legendary that in 2003, after Panic Room's release, marking the end of the first phase of his career, Patton Oswalt could reference "a dank, David Fincher-esque kitchen" in a stand-up bit and everyone in his audience knew what he was talking about. That all starts here. Alien³ is a fantastic directorial achievement, even if the script is aimless bullshit written by executives on a deadline. The filthy set dressing is here in full force as are the spiderweb like interiors, the air of helplessness, the sense of a higher power fucking you over for the sport of it and a color scheme that comes out from underneath Ridley Scott's legacy on the Nostromo to become something unique: a gothic fever-dream of orange hue so intense it's as if the prison is lit by Hieronymus Bosch's hellfire. Playing like a big budget sequel to Ghosts...of the Civil Dead with the rough edges sanded down or a Sci-Fi take on Heaven's Gate, Alien³ follows a group of not very convincingly repentant prisoners who've turned to jesus for salvation from themselves as they fight first temptation in the form of a never-hotter Sigourney Weaver and then face her protector/lover/rapist/creator, a phallic alien that runs around on all fours, a bastardized mutant from the first film's more elegant designs. The effects weren't ready for this film and date it badly, the performances range from sublime to dire, and the edit is one of the worst on record (if the film had any more noticeably mismatched ADR, all the dialogue would all be voice over), but none of that is on Fincher. His achievements are myriad and are the reason the film has become something of an obsession for me. Take the genius scene that properly starts the assemble cut: a lone man in a coat deliberately too big for him walks alone on a beach looking tiny next to disused construction and foundry equipment, the air so thick with pollutants it could be Pompeii circa 79. These men are all alone in the universe and Fincher finds the simplest ways of hammering home their existential dilemmas, only ever crossing the leaden symbolism line in the last minute of the movie (which definitely has the feel of a studio note). These are the angry men he'd find later in basements and in police stations. Looking for Fincher in Alien³ is hard but rewarding. David Cairns brilliantly points out that between the baldness,low-angles and oppresive lighting, Fincher was trying to make a sci-fi version of the The Passion of Joan of Arc. Picture Cameron trying that for a second. It's difficult imagining what his experience was like making the film, but when you see his fingerprints in there, it becomes hard to look away. I once watched it ten times in a week, paying careful attention, as I always do, to the stunningly strange climax in the leadworks. I've never been able to adequately explain what about this sequence I find so fascinating. Something about the inevitability of death and the way it manifests itself on the faces of the convicts who've survived everything their god can throw at them, now lining up in a labyrinth to give it away. I think maybe I love it so much because it's endemic of the whole film. Here they are on a deserted planet, underground, no less, doing something that may well save all life in the universe and no one (not even the audience of the movie, thanks to the fucking editing) will ever know about it. No one was aware that the trials of this  misbegotten, ill-advised, unnecessary sequel would pave the way for the spiritual heir to Stanley Kubrick, responsible for more trends in modern cinema than you can count one hand, untold billions of dollars and dozens of Academy Award nominations. Just as the game is about to start, one prisoner casually asks another "do you believe in this heaven shit?" I could picture that line coming from any of Fincher's heroes right on through to Noomi Rapace's Lizbeth Salander. I could picture heaven for Fincher looking a lot like a man being nominated for the highest honor we have for a director in North America, for a film he'd had complete control over. He's learned a lot in the intervening years, but I think the time has come to give credit to the man for turning a nightmare into a work of art and back again.

The Rainbow Thief
by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Of his two final films, Santa Sangre is more obviously the work of its director, Chilean madman Alejandro Jodorowsky, but The Rainbow Thief, its comparatively mawkish companion piece, is a side of the master I can't resist. Back in the 70s and between pre-production phases of his failed Dune adaptation, Jodorowsky directed Tusk, a heartfelt and completely forgotten adventure film that played like Au Hazard Balthasar by way of The Jungle Book. Tt had nothing of its auteur caustic surrealism, which probably killed it. In point of fact it's downright sentimental, something only visible in a half-second's aside in El Topo when the gunslinger cheers up his dwarf lover after they're forced to make love for some gunslingers' entertainment. This movie could have played to kids if it weren't shot entirely in extreme wide angles that destroy any sense of its human characters. They're tiny figures in a huge landscape, the titular elephant the film's only real hero. Santa Sangre is brilliant, but returns to the well that Jodorowsky dug for Fando Y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, but with a different rhythm to guide it. The Rainbow Thief is an unabashed heart-string tugger, even if its filtered through abstraction (long sections pass without dialogue, the side characters never get names or jobs beyond providing bite-sized whimsy, characters' motivations are hardly worthy of the name) and the director himself has disowned it. But I give him more credit than he gives himself. As an avid El Topo and Holy Mountain fan, you can imagine my sensibilities are a little cynical and harsh, but even my heart melts for The Rainbow Thief. How can you not love a film that reunites Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif for only the second time following Lawrence of Arabia and Night of the Generals? How can you not love a film that worships the maligned and forgotten in ways that anticipate The Fisher King and doesn't make you suffer Robin Williams? How can you not love a film in which Christopher Lee plays not only a sympathetic character for once, but a lovable, billionaire whore monger? How can you not a love a film that brings a dog back from the dead? Jodorowsky might not want to own up to having a heart, but here's exhibit A and I respect the man all the more for taking a chance on showing it to us. He may never make another film and that would be tragic, but I feel blessed to have seen the last gift he's given us.


Bram Stoker's Dracula
by Francis Ford Coppola

Nothing I'll ever say will make Keanu Reeves' performance better. There is no healing that scar, forever on the face of this singular achievement. Many people wished it had been silent, that there'd been last-minute casting changes, that Francis Ford Coppola had never stooped back into the genre he'd started his career with, that the whole affair would have been deemed folly and smothered in its infancy. It would have saved them the time and attention they spent killing it later. I don't pretend the film's a misunderstood masterpiece, only that it is the most cinematic and unforgettable adaptation that Bram Stoker's novel received since its first, F.W. Murnau's illegal and bountiful Nosferatu. And as much as I love Nosferatu (by any measure one of the most important horror films in history), its style can't compete with star Max Schreck's performance; Bela Lugosi's hammy pantomime was the most energetic thing about the first film to have the word 'Dracula' spoken aloud; in seven movies, Hammer never gave Christopher Lee a vehicle worthy of his performance as the count; and the less said about the John Badham version, the fuckin' better. Coppola in essence gave the film the mechanized, expressionistic treatment it missed out on by being directed by Murnau, a naturalist, instead of showmen like Robert Wiene or Fritz Lang, as if George Melies himself shot second unit. Coppola and his son did all the effects in camera and their work is nothing short of magic, the kind of thing Scorsese would rhapsodize in Hugo (not many people connected the two films last year, but they're practically siblings). Nevermind the performances, Coppola had the modern equivalents of Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino on his hands, who gives a shit if they embarrassed themselves a little? The film was the thing and it would outlive any single element. Dracula is like one of those giant clocks that Scorsese's boy hero keeps winding. The public knows the time, but can't see the gears turning. All they know is that when they're late it's the clock's fault. So when no one bought what they were seeing, Coppola walked home with the blame. Fine, sure, yeah, but has anyone who's seen this blood red adaptation ever forgotten its more bizarre tangents? Have these moments of pointed unreality ever left your nightmares for good? I'd rather go up river with Coppola anyday than watch someone spin their wheels in a genre they don't appreciate. My time will forever be his to waste.


Dead Man
by Jim Jarmusch

With each passing year I come to see Dead Man as an essential American masterpiece, warts and all. I've also come to see that there may be no such thing as a perfect western. The closest anyone's gotten would be The Searchers, followed closely by The Wild Bunch, which is the more effecting of the two. After that we run into grey areas. Surely Boetticher's paranoid chamber dramas The Tall T and Ride Lonesome deserve credit for their painterly aesthetics and ingenuity? Monte Hellman used the western to throw darts at our psychological complacency in low budget success stories Ride The Whirlwind and The Shooting. Anthony Mann surely deserves a little credit for bringing out the darkest side of Jimmy Stewart in the westerns they made together? Or how about more recent fare? James Mangold's 3:10 To Yuma kicks the shit out of the Delmer Daves original for sheer excitement, craft and performance; it's final minutes are almost too exciting for words. Andrew Dominik seems to captured more beauty in Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford than a lifetime of watching could ever appreciate. I'd argue that if you took the best things from these movies, you might arrive at the perfect western, but who the fuck wants perfection when all these jagged edges are so mesmerizing? Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is his most successful toe-dipping into a genre (Ghost Dog is rough, even for a samurai film; The Limits of Control, however breath-taking, is barely the lone-killer film it masquerades as) and he gets far more mileage out of its inherent elements than he ever could breaking out of jail or into a gangster's mansion. Simply put, the western landscape he drags through is the perfect compliment to his style. Surrounded by dilapidated buildings or beautiful Spanish architecture, your mind could wander from the characters that these vistas dwarf. Not so here, where the land is the crux of its heroes journey. To paraphrase Mike D'Angelo on This Must Be The Place, every new scene is the reason the movie exists. Johnny Depp hops into the wrong bed to find comfort in a town he foolishly believed could hide any, and winds up gutshot for his sins. With the help of a sidekick who knows what it's like to lose the meaning in his life (and is thus almost as much a ghost as the dead man of the title), wanders through an unconventional western expanse to get to his point of departure, both physically and spiritually ready to die. Not for nothing was this the movie that Jonathan Rosenbaum coined the phrase 'Acid Western,' which then slid nicely into critical diction. It's almost too heady for its own good, but between Neil Young's haunting guitar accompaniment (I would also have accepted Nick Cave moaning softly) and Jarmusch turning the forest into the externalized depths of Depp's bruised and impacted psyche, it never gets ponderous; indeed, I was unexpectedly galvanized as Depp learns in his last moments to take up arms against the white men who stood in for the legacy of rape and genocide on which the country was founded. I find that in my memory, the film is simply a flood of images playing slowly over what I remember Young's guitar sounding like; a plaintive piano roll of images forever spinning in my brain. That is the power of the film. Anyone hoping for the jaunty adventures of earlier Jarmusch, the Freudian catharsis of John Ford or Howard Hawks, or the live painting demo quality of Sergio Leone will leave even more philosophically unbalanced and distressed than those with their expectations leveled properly.


Pola X
by Leos Carax

I have yet to encounter an undivided review of Pola X. Peter Bradshaw hated it, Scott Tobias praised its gynmastic camerawork and emotions but still used the word failure. Roger Ebert was the most emphatic in his praise, but even he couldn't come outright and say it, like he was worried what people would think of him if he gave his two digits to this mad chapter of French cinema. Their opinions now seem quaint, unnecessary, as they're the only people who've seen the movie - they were talking to themselves and Leos Carax. You could almost divorce Pola from its cinematic achievements and still this would be a crucial film, a one-of-a-kind artistic autopsy on a still-living subject. From the top, the one-two punch (the sort delivered by Jacques Tati in Soigne ton Gauche) of Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. The former was a cool slice of post-punk co-option; an Epstein-double exposure here, a Bressonian dialogue there. The plot is incidental except that it happens to Denis Lavant and registers on that pouting, once-a-generation face of his. Carax struck harder,  in color and in love with Juliette Binoche, in Mauvais Sang. Here he painted a paranoid, claustrophobic world in Black, Red and Whites for Lavant and Binoche to (literally) spread their wings; Nicholas Ray and Godard in one lithe body. They were so loved that when it came time to send Alex, Lavant and Carax's shared form, on his next adventure, no expense was spared, leading to the heartbreakingly raw, mega-satisfying and unbelievably romantic Lovers on the Bridge. But because of the runaway costs (shades of Cimino) and its refusal to adhere to narrative conventions or New Wave chicanery, it wasn't enough for his supposedly adoring public. This was the film Carax had threatened to make without any constraints and it was insufficiently loved (at least for my liking). It sent Carax into a depression; losing Binoche couldn't have helped. Pola X was what it was like in his mind, and thus while many people point to Lovers as the superior film, to me they're inextricable. The story, despite following the plot of the Melville novel it takes its name and story from fairly closely, is as pure an autobiography as it is a syringe full of pure cinema. The story starts on an estate in Normandy rendered in even more effulgent  detail than the hero's angelic bride. Nothing's happening at first, but it's intoxicating; circumstances built from assured, unforgettable images. Pierre, played by the almost unreally gorgeous Guillaume Depardieu, is due to wed Delphine Chuillot's almost virginal Lucie, until dark haired gypsy Isabelle, played by Yekaterina Golubeva, finds him and explains she might be his sister. And thus he finds the excuse he'd been looking for to shatter his moneyed, complacent existence in one alluring and sexy package. What follows is a descent into self-imposed madness unlike anything ever depicted. Pola X is exactly what was inside Carax's unconscious mind at the time of its creation, rendered in razor sharp detail. When Lovers failed to live up to the impossible expectations the public had built up for it, they all paid for Pola X, which was nothing short of artistic crisis and personal turmoil burned onto celluloid. And in the burning, some unearthly things are captured. Depardieu, who through what cannot be coincidence (Carax has taken my belief out of the very notion of coincidence), looks like the spitting image of Sharunas Bartas, Golubeva's husband, who plays the orchestrator of the commune Pierre and Isabelle hit rock bottom at, and is Pierre with no connection to the outside world, just Isabelle is Marie without money or privilege. When Pierre and Isabelle consummate their impossible, undeniable love, the world seems to cave in on itself. Who are watching? Depardieu? Bartas? Golubeva? Some anonymous body doubles? Who does the director want it to be, fumbling erotically in the near darkness. Carax made sure that if this was the last film he made before being immolated by his own unrequited love and ambition, he was taking the world with him.


Khrustalyov, My Car!
by Aleksei German

Imagining Werkmeister Harmonies directed by Ken Russell would still leave you inadequately prepared for this banquet of paranoia and black hilarity. Sure, there are shades of a dozen films, not the least of which are Zulawski's Devil,  Zbynek Brynych's ...And The Fifth Horseman is Fear and Piotr Szulkin's Ga-Ga - Glory to the Heroes, but there's something else at play here that defies precedent, even in that esteemed company. It seems to come from another era entirely, like it was shot around 1970 while the equipment was free between The Witches' Hammer and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. For all I know the film stock may have expired back when the soviets had to ration it. And in the complex history of Russian cinema, Aleksei German has had a harder time getting his films viewed than probably any of his peers, if he can be said to have any. Knowing that his movies had been banned and almost burned everytime out, he left not a single image or idea on the floor when he entered his fourth decade as a director, meaning that often some of the most brilliantly warped imagery of the 90s is simply tossed off in any given three seconds of Khrustalyov - a dog in a basket stuck to a zipline in a dining room is gone before we've quite realized what we've seen. And perfectly none of this imagery ever interferes with the story, or ever seems to bother its Soviet Superofficial hero. The surreal nature of a falling empire is lost on him, as it would have been on anyone in the inner circle of a madman, as he seeks desperately for how to avoid the fall of an empire adversely effecting his power and dignity. There hasn't been a narrative film like this in many moons (for a while, the darkly comic Nero-fiddled road-movie was almost its own genre in European cinema until digital made tracking shots, the greatest weapon in their arsenal, less impressive), perhaps because by they are by their nature, too ugly? Too honest? Too near the bone? Irrelevant? Whatever the reason, German's film fell on deaf ears and resulted in more Cannes walkouts than L'Avventura. The wounds were still fresh for German who had to make movies under a repressed and deeply ashamed regime's watchful eyes (indeed, many of the film's tangents were based on his own experiences with state surveillance), but the world had moved on. Up the alley, and out of the screening room door. Cannes, for their part, was stinging from Angelopoulos's barbed 1995 dismissal of the jury and had no interest in doing anything but repairing their relationship by awarding the Palme d'Or to one of his least substantial films simply because it was his. If only they'd waited six years, he'd have given them something worthy of the honor. But back to German. Dennis Lim wagered that Michael Cimino would still be working on Heaven's Gate if he could. The same is true of German, for whom My Car! was not just autobiography, but a statement of purpose. His life as improvised roadmap for his camera, ever roving, ever following, along for a ride that seems too impossible to be true. And yet, German planned every second of this movie, and for his sins, all the time in the world to keep making it, even if only in his head.


Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
by Terry Gilliam

There isn't much left to say about Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, which has been all but rescued from its disastrous origins, except to say that it is a case study in adaptation. Look no further than the muted response to Walter Salles' On The Road. Handsome, dependable, even occasionally great, but it never had a prayer of replacing its source material in the eyes of its fans. The reason? Salles is too much of a fan to do it any damage or let his own style (which isn't exactly blinding at the best of times) run roughshod over the prose. So what does it become? A Merchant Ivory film in beat clothing. Harmless. The opposite of what it should be. For the record I enjoyed On The Road, but it's worth mentioning that the best director can do in adapting a book is fill up the space where prose lives between words and actions and replace it with their own demons, neuroses and obsessions, filtered through a style only they can provide. Gilliam's Fear and Loathing did the unthinkable - rendered its source material irrelevant. Hunter S. Thompson's book was nothing shy of a cultural avalanche when it first arrived, apparently coughed out during a hangover in blistering, inimitable style. Now imagine a movie that actually bests it. Gilliam's stylistic hallmarks are at their most voracious here, dutch tilts eating the frame, images of such stark oddity that they deserve whole films to themselves, and the camera all the while attached like a conjoined twin to the vicious lunatic spirits (Johnny Depp giving his best and most iconic performance as the author and Benicio Del Toro, barely recognizable behind a hundred pounds of beer gut, dark glasses and the most threatening mustache of the decade) who serve for two hours as Vegas' worst tour guides. And yet it's also maybe the most faithful adaptation since The Maltese Falcon. Gilliam came to praise Hunter Thompson and the runaway decade that spawned him, not bury them. He didn't throw the book out, he opened his brain up with a hacksaw and painted over the pages with what fell out. If that sounds like something you want to put yourself through, "Get innnn!"


Crash
by David Cronenberg

I didn't get it either when I first saw it, either, so forgive those who condemned it. Joe Bob Briggs brought this film to my attention in his unmissable tome, Profoundly Disturbing (spoiler, Crash is anything but). I watched it, as I did every other film in its pages I'd yet to see, and wondered just what in god's name I'd watched. Why did no one ever raise their voice? Why did no one seem to feel anything, even in the throes of acrobatic sex? Why the pornographic lingering over car crashes? This was before I'd discovered Bresson, mind you. So, after a lot more viewing (including every other Maudit hiding in director David Cronenberg's closet), I gave it another shot. The clouds parted and the grey skies of Toronto had never looked clearer or brighter. Cronenberg had taken the emotions and the behavior of modern North Americans and inverted them. The emotional detachment he and author J.G. Ballard witnessed behind the false smiles of most people was externalized in Crash. Their affect reflected their troubled minds and unrequited libidos. They were all desire and no release - even in a world where random sex was normalzed, politeness and conservatism had forced it underground. So people move about their day at the speed of ignorance and repression. So Cronenberg halts them in their fucking tracks and watches the sparks fly. Note: puns are hard to avoid when talking about this film, but I'll try my best. Many people are going to misunderstand a film that, as Briggs put its, is a love story told through sex scenes, especially in a culture that paved the way for 50 Shades of Grey being a housewife cause celebre. They cannot deal with the subject honestly, let alone when Cronenberg presented it in such stark, cold light. He wasn't going to busy up the frame, nothing to get in the way of the confrontational nature of the discussion of sexuality, which no one can seem to own up to. What chance did a film that uses an underground cult of people turned on by car accidents stand with Newt Gingrich trying to keep women and their periods out of trenches? But more than honest Crash is a much sweeter and more romantic film than its ever given credit for (and frankly it's rarely given credit for existing outside the pages of Film Comment, Cahiers and Senses of Cinema). Is there any more tender image than James Spader licking Patricia Arquette's leg-wound in the backseat of his car? Don't answer yet. Remember that I also think the blood-soaked kiss between two 12 year olds in Let The Right One In is the most heartwarming thing I've ever seen. Crash is a film that goes into our brains to shock us back into feeling, so naturally, we forbid children from seeing it. Heaven help us if they ever realize what we've done to intimacy.


The Hudsucker Proxy
by Joel and Ethan Coen

After years of hearing about what a joyless slog Intolerable Cruelty was, imagine my surprise when I discovered it was a delicious confectionary of expertly crafted wordplay and near-explosive levels of chemistry between its two flappable leads. "How had this happened?" I wondered, while laughing my ass off, "how could a film this good by America's cinematic sweethearts have been swept under the rug like that?" Well, anyway, The Coen Brothers were at least used to that sort of disappointment. After all, they'd made The Hudsucker Proxy. Intolerable Cruelty is a delight, to be true, an homage to Howard Hawks, Leo McCary and Preston Sturges' comedies of remarriage centering appropriately enough on a divorce attorney who tastes his own bitter medicine and as well as it works just as well as tribute and stand alone comedy (George Clooney's comedic prowess never gets enough notice for my liking). Next to Hudsucker, however, Intolerable looks more like the work of Mitchell Leisen than Preston Sturges. Sturges was the genuine article in American comedy. In his best films, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail The Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours (As long as we're sticking up for the underdog here I'll just say that Unfaithfully Yours is a gem and I will hear no one besmirch it), he balanced humour so bold you wonder how it slipped past the censors, scabrous satire of values unique to wartime America and romance that shot past heartwarming into gripping. He had such a perfect hand with sentiment that he could appear to be making fun of the very notion of it, even as he freely indulged. He was one of a kind. But leave it to The Coen Brothers to make a film that pretends to his throne and earns the right to sit there. Painstakingly crafted through nostalgia-colored glasses and set in a place we recognize as our past but in no definite moment, corporate stooge Tim Robbins rockets to the top of a toy company despite having no knowledge of the job or that he's being set up for a literal and metaphorical fall by his handler, a never-sleazier Paul Newman, cashing in on his impossible-to-dislike irascibility and charm. The boardroom antics, Sturges-esque wordplay and bureaucratic chutes-and-ladders are hilarious, but once Jennifer Jason Leigh enters the story, this stops being a comedy no one laughed at and becomes a masterpiece whose failure isn't just baffling, it's a tragedy on par with the sinking of the Titanic, the execution of the Rosenbergs or the cancellation of Pushing Daisies. Leigh's portrayal of a savvy journalist who goes undercover to scoop Robbins' rise to fame mirrors Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town but without hiding her unscrupulousness so disingenuously as Frank Capra does. It's a testament to the Coen's writing and feather-light direction (rendered on resplendent art deco production design, for my money their best, through the prism of Roger Deakins dark-matter heavy photography) that they pursue a route that out-bleaks famous Scrooges like Capra and Sturges, and still manages to seem more lighthearted than Meet John Doe or Unfaithfully Yours, which flirt with murder and suicide as aggressively as Leigh does with Robbins. Leigh's feisty journalist is a more endearing proto-feminist trouser-sporter than Cate Blanchet's Hepburn impersonation; better still, she brings a sexuality to her role that outstrips even the Claudette Colberts and Barbara Stanwycks of the golden age, and again, genuinely. Through the performance, through her palpably masked longing, through her robust personality. She maybe a shade of fast-talking-dames past, but she's a fully realized character, and if you don't want to marry her by the time the credits role, you must be a Franklin Pangborn character. Or worse, William Demarest. I still marvel at the level of detail that went into making Hudsucker Proxy such a loving, feel-good tribute to loving, feel-good comedies so dipped in sarcasm you could drown in it. And that's even without taking into account how fucking funny it is. It's that rare film that gets nearly everything right (wouldn't be on this list if it were actually perfect). When the film failed at the box office, I bet Preston Sturges took a belt for both Joel and Ethan Coen in auteur heaven. "Don't worry, boys. They didn't get me, either."

Let the Sky Fall - Great Bond or Greatest Bond?

Warning: There Will Be Spoilers

I sat there watching the latest bond film in an IMAX theatre just as the filmmakers intended, but it just wasn't going the extra mile. At around the destruction of the subway I thought: "well, this is probably as good as it gets, as far as Bond is concerned. Respectable, sturdy and fun, but this isn't exactly art." I got to thinking about the recent history of the franchise. Same goes. Casino Royale worked beautifully on the big screen and I remember walking out feeling great about the future of the franchise considering it was the only Bond film I'd seen I was prepared to take seriously, but Martin Campbell is no artist. I liked Quantum, too, a good deal, and the editing was practically revolutionary where the franchise was concerned. It had the same structure as an old Bond, complete with a far-away location for the climax and a big, big explosion; I was satisfied where many others were hopelessly lost. But I think we can all agree that it falls a little short of perfection. Blame the editor I loved, blamed the script I applauded for taking my intelligence for granted, blame Forster, who was after the momentum of information and the speed of the world that had turned the old movies into artefacts instead of classics, blame the writers' strike that forced star Daniel Craig and Forster to rewrite as they went along, doing a pretty fucking good job in my opinion.

So, in the midst of this, comes a Prometheus-worthy shot of eyespresso in the form of that gorgeous, come-from-nowhere wide-screen shot of Scotland. Then my expectations shifted. Gone were the upper-register neons of Shanghai, the voluptuous candle-lit Macao interiors, the arid whites of the Japanese ghost town and the moistened, business-like blues, greys and browns of London. Suddenly we were somewhere else entirely and Roger Deakins, not Sam Mendes, was now in control. The rest of the film is in almost total darkness and Deakins uses every trick imaginable to at first sink to zero before using the black sky as a canvas onto which he paints an impressionist sky. He conducts colors and light like they were the string section of his great symphony while Mendes remakes Straw Dogs in the melody. The movie as a whole has problems, not the least of them technical - the sound edit needs work to be as cool as they wish it was, and the CG humans feel like a step backward considering the seamlessness of the motorcycle chase. So this is most definitely a better film and franchise film especially than say the still very sturdy Bourne Legacy, I can't make up my mind as to how it compares to Dark Knight Rises which maintained a more consistent tone and look but felt less human. And as much as I appreciate the wink-nudge references, I don't know they square with the film's back-to-basics story. So I ask you... What did I just watch?

 -Scout

As far as I'm concerned, Skyfall starts when Javier Bardem gets off the elevator. At least, that's where it becomes a Sam Mendes film rather than a Bond film. No one in Bond history has done something so patient as let the villain do a monologue in one shot. Not to mention let the villain hide in the shadows for the first 40 minutes of the picture. Whether or not they let Mendes do any of the writing, I give him most of the credit for making so much of the film about M. No Bond film in history (and honestly, most action films) gives that much screen time to one of the female characters but the movie is arguably more about her than it is about Bond. Not to mention the entire 4th act of the film. Skyfall and Casino are five act films and generally the first two acts are fairly useless. The 4th act finds us at Skyfall and the remainder of the film broke the mold of every Bond film in history. Bond literally never on the defensive until this 23rd film. And its funny because though we've seen this kind of sequence a million times before, its somehow born anew in this film. But yes, you're 100% correct. As soon as the sun sets at Skyfall, and actually earlier if you wanna count the interiors of the hunting lodge, it's most definitely Deakin's show. But what's more is, I really think Mendes did this intentionally.

Shooting a sequence lit entirely by a burning house and making it look that good is no easy feat and I'm sure that scene in the script was the reason they gave the Deak a call in the first place. I also think that Deakins took the job to pay Elswitt back for rocking our worlds with the oil derrick sequence in There Will Be Blood [for which Elswitt won his oscar over Deakins' two simultaneous nominations that year -ed]. But yeah, the movie carries more weight than I've ever really felt in a Bond film before. Casino Royale definitely made us care about the characters but the Venice sequence of that movie is achingly dull. At least Skyfall manages to build upon itself rather than hit a peak and then plateau or come back down. Barring the final scene of course. The winks and nudges were a little too much for me and the whole ending seemed super clunky. I'm happy that MGM managed to not go down in flames because these are great modern action films but the back to basics idea sucks. If anything, they should have built off the emotional power of Skyfall and finished out Craig's Bond run with a two film storyline that uses his extremely fractured psyche because of the loss of M to really drive home Craig as an amazing 007. 

-Fox

Tangent: Let me quickly point out that Elswitt had to somewhere have been contemplating Deakins shooting this when he signed on to shoot Bourne Legacy. I think it's safe to say that Deakins wins this round.

-Scout

For sure. I love the idea of a Amadeus-style rivalry between those two.

-Fox

Ok, let me ask you this: You say 'a Sam Mendes film' and the color scheme of the turning makes perfect sense, but I'm at best a casual Mendes fan. I hate American Beauty, I think Revolutionary Road is extremely (albeit honorably) misguided and borderline unwatchable, I like Road to Perdition an awful lot, but the script occasionally gets in the way of Mendes at his most cinematic and vice versa. So, and I don't at all mean that you should need to defend him or the films I don't enjoy, but when you say that Skyfall becomes more his movie, what does that mean? I could see Perdition in the scenes of M standing at a rain-drenched window making moral calls, but beyond that I do have a feeling my bias/engagement prevented me from looking for his fingerprints.

-Scout

Before I saw Skyfall, I watched the other two Craig Bond films back to back. Literally hours before. I really enjoy both of them. They're fantastic action films. Some of the best in recent memory actually. Casino is well directed and shot and though its a better film than Quantum, the latter destroys it with it's cinematography and editing. And as Skyfall gets off and running it appears just like the previous two films. Fast paced, edited in a manic fashion and visually very pretty but not in a true film way. It's beautiful like a video game. Deakins is never not completely aware of what he's doing so if something looks good you can be damn sure he did it on purpose. But as Silva steps off the elevator the film shifts away from what we've come to expect from the latest Bond films. It stops. Quite literally. The camera doesn't move for a good two minutes while Silva approaches Bond, telling the story of trapping rats on an island. That's unheard of in most action films but the latest Bond stuff especially. It's funny because though I went into Skyfall really excited to have Mendes at the helm, the only real reason for that was Road to Perdition. I absolutely adore that film quite honestly for the same reasons I loved Skyfall.

In a genre filled with car chases and tommy guns, Mendes goes in the complete opposite direction creating a quiet, patient and emotional story. And though I had to laugh at the accuracy of your "Bond loves cars more than women" comment [I wrote on twitter/facebook that I thought it was a little troubling that Bond seems more distraught over the destruction of an antique car than he does when an important female character who he's had relations with is murdered in front of his eyes -ed], Skyfall is most definitely the most emotionally charged Bond film of all and I think that it has a lot to do with Mendes presence. So I guess to simplify all of this jaw whackin' into a few sentences, I feel that Mendes' fingerprints are all over the film once Silva shows up. The film is pretty manic and a tad sloppy up to that point, but once the story becomes focused, I really see Mendes trying as hard as he can to keep it that way. To really draw out emotional connections between Bond and M, Bond and Skyfall, and even Bond and Silva, as James sees himself heading down the same road Silva has, growing older and less useful in the eyes of the Secret Service. I'd be lying if I didn't think Skyfall could have done a lot of those things better but I think Mendes was the perfect director for the script they were working with and despite all the feelings bouncing around they did manage to keep that thing action packed, even at two and a half hours, which is unbelievably long for an action film. So with all that said, though I do credit Mendes and Deakins for whipping up one hell of a picture, I also think that the Bond's producers should be commended for really thinking on their material and picking the right auteur for the job.

-Fox

I couldn't agree more. Let's see just how the fuck they're gonna top this, eh?

-Scout

Understanding The Cause - on Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master

(We wrote this before Philip Seymour Hoffman died, unaware this was his last performance that didn't show the pain in his heart just as brightly as the joy he took in his craft. Rest in peace to a titan, one of the best American actors who ever lived.)

Films aren't often cultural events and granted I'm so deep inside the culture that I don't know what the view from outside looks like, but The Master was an event. The reasons why the average joe knew about the film are so boring I won't go into them - you know why because everyone knows why. It was everywhere. What made it unmissable for us, the people on the ground, was the celluloid. Shot on 65mm, shown in 70mm, like it fucking should be. Or so says I, anyway. Maybe some filmmakers wouldn't know what to do with 65mm, and lord knows some have botched it [ed 2026: they're still botching it], but it truly is a gateway to another part of our history. When Terrence Malick shot The New World in that loving and lovely format, I jumped for joy. It was my first new film in the format, after having seen the text opening so many bygone biblical and war pictures. It's how you do big. It's how you do epic. If the film feels huge even if its home is on the faces of its leads, its because it's on 65mm and because Paul Thomas Anderson is writing in dark, permanent ink. Here is our history, the ugliest parts with its gut out, its limbs jutting awkwardly like the creature Wilfred Brimley can't stop dissecting in The Thing. Joaquin Phoenix is nothing less than the failure of the American dream; a Sterling Hayden or Ralph Meeker brooding, warped, jutting into the present and hooked to the past. Here was the America of Act of Violence. No heroes, just victims and the people who want to help them, even if they bullshit the solution because they like feeling like they can help, like they're in charge. Watching The Master on 70mm in a palatial movie house in Lincoln Square, the kind they just seem to bulldoze today, was to be transported to the same deep recesses of the American unconscious that its hero finds himself in. You can see it in the film exactly when our hero falls asleep in a theatre, like the audience at the start of Holy Motors and someone brings him a wake-up call. "You can't hide. This isn't the past, this is waiting for you as soon as the movie's over." No one says it, but there it is. No one says anything directly, but the message is as clear as if it's sung right at you. Films should be events more often. In the days following the release of The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest opus, to quote another Anderson, I've read dozens of people's reactions to it. 

Kent Jones' free-associative history is still probably the one to beat (ed from 2026, read Adam Nayman's book on PTA). But what I want to address is the notion many people have been floating that it's fundamentally hollow, that's it about nothing, that it wanders too much to be as great as people say it is (ed - 2026: funny to imagine this was ever the majority opinion). Nothing kills a film faster than hype and if there was a film more hyped than The Master this year (The Hunger Games for cinephiles) I can't produce it. We who breathe celluloid are fans of the enigmatic and Anderson's slate cleaning trilogy (Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood and now The Master) has us all ravenous. He'd always been good but now he's inescapably polarizing. He is the future (and past) of the medium. He is a compulsive masturbator taking up three hour chunks of our lives every few years with his untamed rambling. Tucker and myself are in the former camp, and we loved The Master though not without reservation (ed - 2026: those reservations are all gone, mostly because we had this conversation so early and figured the movie out - I give Tucker credit, his final thought opened it like a map). So we decided to pick it apart and find out just what makes it tick. 

Scout Tafoya: I'll start by saying Blood is better only so you don't have to correct your statements about it being the best film ever made [ed 2026 - I disagree]. The Master has improved elements and clearly lives in the same world as Blood but it doesn't have the razor sharp focus. That said it's a fuckin' masterwork [ed 2026: hopefully this was the last time I used that word in my writing but I doubt it]. Mihai Malaimare's cinematography proves what I've known since Youth Without Youth: he's one of the best cameramen we have and he and Anderson make a banquet out of their 65mm compositions. I might still dig The New World as the definitive 65mm filmed painting of the 21st century, but this thing is in a class all its own.

Tucker Johnson: It's a killer film, with beautiful imagery, and some of the best performances I've ever seen, but it's not perfect. It's almost there though. I can't even quite put my finger on what was wrong with it. I think for me and [an ex-girlfriend] it was the ending. The way the film ends is fine but just fine. My endings for the film were either letting Joaquin ride away on the motorcycle, or just cut to black and let Hoffman's singing to him in London carry over into the credits. I'll need your responses to really start talking about this thing but I will say that right now as much as I loved the film, I'm treating it as the best vehicle for an actor's performance I've ever seen. I should say two actors' performances.

Scout: What it's missing is, and this obviously is coloured by our many, MANY viewings of Blood over the years since its debut in late 2007, that it doesn't feel as though it builds to a confrontation. It builds instead to divorce. Which thematically is perfect, but dramatically just doesn't suffice when we know what the alternative is: Daniel Day-Lewis beating Paul Dano to death with a bowling pin. Thus The Master is the more romantic and wistful picture than Blood. Blood is about family, Master's about marriage or anyway a romantic bond between lovers. A family that falls apart or has to lie too much to stay together. It's a Tragedy of Remarriage, to invent a phrase

If Plainview's the father/brother that Sunday never had but needed, and Sunday is the son that Plainview deserves, mirror images of each other, Freddie and Dodd need each other because they fill the gaps in each other's wounded/inflated (and it must be said perfectly and uniquely American) psyches. Their relationship is no different than that between abusive lovers. Though it should be said they're both after women they can't have. Women won't fuck Freddie or make love to Dodd (one angry handjob as proof), so their bond is beyond merely sexual and into something deeper and more important for both of them, but like their sexual desire it can't be consummated while they're propping each other up with their need to be edified. Dodd needs Quell to prove his legend, which is why he snaps at Laura Dern at the second book publishing when she questions his revisionism to his own legend - the old sycophants are no longer what he needs. He needs only to make Freddie believe beyond a shadow of a doubt because he'd worked so hard on him, he needs to work to earn his respect; he's already got or doesn't have the support of people like Dern or poor Kevin J. O'Connor. Freddie is the ideal Dodd aspires to corrupt - he can't really believe in himself without a stubborn blank slate like Freddie. When we see the Cause's spiffing new center in England, teeming with the faithful, it's clear that this work is now just something Dodd can do. It's Freddie who he needed. The challenge of a true lost soul who got so close to being his everything. 

So, that in mind, it's easy to see the film as being about their on-again, off-again courtship. You can see its funhouse mirror in Freddie and the girl who doesn't wait for him when he goes to sea. That's what Freddie is to Dodd. When one leaves, he spends the next several years experiencing their absence and mourning. The film is most electrifying when they're processing each other and it means something (that first interaction is their version of fucking, which is why he tries to process that girl at the end of the film while they're in bed together - it's just one more trick he learned from a former lover, a different position or sensation). And most heartbreaking when Dodd sings to him because it's them remembering that connection they had, which his wife can't understand because she was always along for the ride - whether she believes in The Cause is entirely beside the point. My personal favourite scene, Freddie imagining a room full of naked women as the never-more-red-faced Dodd sings to a willing congregation, is crucial because though he's not the only person in the room, its clear that Dodd is singing just to Freddie. All this easy naked flesh, Dodd holding them in the palm of his hand, showing it to Freddie like the devil asking for his signature. See what I can do? See what I can give you? Only you see it, my friend. You're the one I chose.

Every single interpretation I've read of this scene says that it's Freddie and his libido imagining the women naked because, well... he's horny. I don't think that's true, even if it's funnier than my reading. I think he sees instead the futility of his search for fulfillment with any of the women that Dodd surrounds himself with. Dodd could sleep with any of them (and we suspect he's trying whenever his wife isn't around) and Freddie sees them disrobing for him not because he wants to sleep with them, but because he sees that these people will do anything for Dodd (he's suddenly seeing the futility of passing around "Do you wanna fuck?" notes while aboard the borrowed yacht). The women, especially pregnant Amy Adams, are unimportantly positioned in the scene, they're macabre set dressing; they're less the woman in Room 237 of the Overlook and more like a handful of demons in the penultimate scene in Fantasia. Freddie's gaze is most assuredly on Dodd, because he knows that if anyone's going to figure him out, it's the Master. And Dodd sees right past all the nude tributes to Freddie, who very gets a secret signal all to himself at the end of the song. If he wanted to, he could have any of these women seduce Freddie because they do anything he says, but because Dodd wants something greater for his charge (his own will imposed on Freddie's) his dour acolyte looks past them in their passive nudity, even if it's what he and Dodd both see when they look at the crowd. Together in sin.

What I love is that Freddie clearly doesn't understand The Cause or buy it (he wishes it were real), he just buys Dodd's conviction and sees that this man, with so many followers, believes in the poor damaged vet. That's what keeps them together as long as it can. So the film feels vacant between their meetings because it veers away from the horrifying purity of that connection. The movie isn't as fulfilling in the off hours because the two of them don't feel fulfilled or even engaged by anyone else. It's important to show the downtime because how else do we understand the importance of their connection? That said, yeah, there's no getting around the feeling that we're watching characters hopeless, beached without each other. It is aimless, it feels aimless, but that's also the point, so, I almost feel bad for complaining. Ha! I will say I disagree about the ending only because I absolutely loved the demented fairy tale aspect of those final scenes; that gorgeous shot of Phoenix on his own on the road, the equally gorgeous pasty, chubby english girl who's essentially a female Dodd. I'm torn about the truly unromantic last words "Put it back in, it fell out!" On the one hand they undermine the beauty of what we're seeing and understanding, but on the other they are Phoenix making sure his character gets the last word on the tone of the film. I could have lived without those words but then again it's his film really.

Tucker: My issue didn't even lie with what went on in the final scenes. I think, especially after reading what you had to say on the subject, which I agree with completely, that having the last moments of the film reflect the true power of their relationship together would've felt more conclusive for me. All that said though, it's a brilliant piece and requires several more views on my part to fully make a decision on where it fits into my favorite films canon. Also if you're going to pick a motif, shots of a roiling, swirling ocean due to ship's turbines is most definitely the way to go [ed 2026: why has no shot of the ocean ever topped these?].

It was such an interesting take on the idea of cults. On one hand, PT gives us the prime real estate for starting a cult: war damaged folks like Freddie, who we as an audience can see right away is a wayward soul who probably does need some kind of psychiatric help. The entire time I watched him lash out at people who treat him badly, I sort of wished I was as free. Sidenote: It could've just been me, but as they give the public service announcement to all the veterans who will have to assimilate back into civilian life, I couldn't help but wonder if he was on a ship full of Freddies. In which case, who's going to make that film? You see it in Lancaster Dodd that he wishes to be free the way that Freddie is even while he's trying to change him into a "suitable" human being. But as an audience member, you're never truly upset with the cult. You're too busy watching its two most interesting members have at the rest of the world. The scene where the dissenter comes to the house in New York was incredible because while he's asking logical questions, I took it as a personal affront the way that the other characters do. I found myself furious that this character would get in the way of what I was trying to see.

Scout: Anderson's treatment of Scientology is a fascinating footnote to the story, really. It's the setting and it does right by the ideas, but the story isn't "let's pick on Elrond" because ultimately Anderson finds his brand of megalomania too fascinating to write off or make one-note. If he could make us love Daniel Plainview (and I know I fucking did), than Dodd was no challenge, really. First of all, the movie is not anti-anything. Scientology is explained rationally as something that many people may or may not have needed - religions are all like that. People, especially damaged drifters like Freddie, need guidance, or at bottom, someone who will listen to them. To go from the navy (where he follows orders for a living) to suddenly being forced to live on his own makes him doubly lost - a fuck-up with no one to take orders from. The phrase "the world needs ditch diggers" was coined for people like Freddie. So when he can't fit in digging ditches, what do we do with them in an age where the depth of his psychological problems haven't been mined or explained? Dodd rather touchingly sees Freddie's disabilities as just what makes him beautiful (even if rather un-touchingly, he means to exploit him to a degree for self-actualization/aggrandizement). So it makes perfect sense that The Cause, Dianetics, Mormonism, Shen Yun, whatever, would attract followers. This country has more lost souls than perhaps any on earth , based on sheer tonnage, and no indigenous religion to which we listen. So The Master isn't an indictment, if anything its objective-bordering-on-sympathetic. Dodd is obviously a charlatan, but he is a powerful force to his people. He listens as loud as he speaks. And I'm right there with you about the interloper and his doubts. Anderson makes us feel so deeply for Freddie (or maybe pity is the better word? I prefer to think not, but Phoenix seems to actively seek it through his violent obtuseness and pained, crooked expressions) that when his saviour is questioned and it feels like he'll have no breakthrough, we feel threatened. Beautiful, Norman Bates,car-in-the-swamp reversal of fortune in that scene! Freddie becomes the audience in that scene when he throws food at the poor bastard, who, let's not forget, is right. Dodd realizes in that moment that Freddie is his foil, the only person he can really hope to influence. Those with facts and rationality will see through his bullshit; Freddie feels him on a gut level. When Dodd yells at him like a bad dog, their relationship's first benchmark has been met. Not man and master, but master and faithful companion. Dodd the devil, finally winning over his own Cerberus. Not any mere castaway. This is the biggest fish he's ever hooked. "Teeth! A lasso! Wrestle! Sit, Dragon!"

As for the turbines and the water they stir, I'll attempt to synthesize, but probably miss the mark: the war or progress or any great societal upheaval, leaving people like Freddie in its wake. Hence those fantastic shots of him leaning over various bows on his ship. The boats dragging him into the future, back to society, but he's too spaced out and in his own head and impulses to notice his fellow sailors throwing shit at him to get his attention. To quote Martin Sheen's similarly fried army captain in Apocalypse Now, he's "not even in their fuckin' army anymore." The world can't hold him. It's either prison, which he treats with worse fear than death perhaps because he fears he belongs there (his outburst disproving Dodd's Orson Welles-like reading of the platitude "Man is not an animal!") or Dodd. Either way: a cage. Or so it seems.

Tucker: I never realized while watching the film, but the woman made of sand that they build in the first scene of the film sums up the entire story in one shot. Dodd's movement is tailor made for Freddie. As Freddie sees it, it isn't there to judge him or tell him he's strange. So he latches onto it. Even though none of it is real at all. Dodd's cult is a woman made of sand. And Freddie's interaction with her goes right along with the structure of The Master. When he first meets the woman, he fucks it and fingers it. It's lewd, it's crude, it's Freddie. Much like his first encounter with the cult, he's just there to use these people. Get a bed to sleep in and some free booze. But the film keeps returning to the shot of Freddie curled up with the sand woman. He grows attached. He falls in love, either with the movement or Lancaster himself. Either way, as they keep returning to Freddie on the beach with Sandy it becomes more and more tender. But there's a crucial flashback moment in this. Because the first encounter with the woman on the beach, we learn that other navy men have built her, more as a joke than anything else. But after everyone's gone, Freddie constructs his own woman. She's his own creation. She's there for him alone and she'll never betray him.

Scout: That is indeed the entire story and I admit to having completely missed out on the significance of the woman in the sand until now. See this is why it's best never to write something off when you don't understand it. I think I understood a lot of The Master while walking out and quickly dissecting it with [an ex-girlfriend]. We raced through the dominant images, trying to hang them up like wet photographs in a dark room, trying to make sense of every image in context while we still remembered what, when and why something happened, but sometimes it's impossible without a week to think it through. I found myself blowing up images like David Hemmings trying to make sense of them and only distorting them. The moments that I don't feel need discussion are the things that seemed immediately impressive. We were both stunned by Phoenix and Hoffman's performances in the jailhouse, where they both turn into animals for a moment; Freddie a caged primate destroying everything he can put his body to and Dodd pissing after winning his argument to mark his territory. 

To return to your point about this housing two of the best performances of all time. Their two styles are in full view and equalized by the cage they sit inside. Philip Seymour Hoffman's warped, pink charisma, Joaquin Phoenix's brute demented physicality. People will talk about Anderson provoking these performances for years and they'll be right to do so, but what I love is that moment is that it sits neatly outside the dominant theme. You could draw parallels or figure out what it means in their relationship - Phoenix behaving like a jilted mistress when he finds that Hoffman's master has been untrue (admittedly to a medical school, but fidelity is transitive to Freddie, whose already been cheated enough to remember the particular sting that comes with that feeling; furthermore he doesn't trust doctors, they didn't 'cure him') - but ultimately Anderson stops his story to give them a fantastic moment to command the room and the movie entirely without his help. Their love affair picks up again when they meet on the lawn of the house in Philadelphia and roll around and do everything short of kiss each other in full view of Dodd's family and followers. I'll be seeing The Master again soon with all this in mind and see if I can't make sense of the parts that seemed to pass me by last time. I'll watch it forever, because I believe in the cause [ed 2026: still true].

“In the Future, No One Makes Sense”

A Prometheus Review

It’s hard to look back at Ridley Scott’s films and find some connecting thread. While his brother sits back and makes “Neo-Noir as Moving Instagram” over and over again, Ridley has avoided any obvious gimmicks, or even loose thematic threads connecting his films. His strengths are circumstantial. He has a ridiculous attention to detail and a strong relationship with his actors (he’s directed several Oscar winning performances). But it’s Ridley’s chameleon-like directing style makes him the perfect choice for any science fiction film. He’s competent enough to pull off the vision without letting his own bag of tricks get in the way of the concept. So it should be no surprise that Prometheus is well directed. The visuals are striking, the pace accelerates from pensive to explosive at an exponential rate, and the acting is riveting and drenched in emotion. But for all of Ridley’s sound and fury, there’s a troubled script underneath it all that seems to signify nothing.

It seems on the surface like there are a number of masterfully dramatic personal moments, all building towards some elaborate mystery, but by the time the final curtain is lifted you look back and realize that there was no mystery building. They just wanted to show you all those great dramatic moments. The trick was finding some sinew to connect all the emotional beats and unfortunately the connective tissue is really weak. Fassbinder’s terrificly obtuse android is great but his motivations flip every other scene. Watching Noomie Rapace bounce from one unspeakable terror to the next is loads of fun, but after a while you can’t help but wonder “why is she doing any of this?” To which Damon Lindelof answers, “Because you want to see Noomie Rapace freaking the fuck out in her underwear.”

To which I can only answer, “Yeah. I really do.”

Now, I'm going to shamelessly plug my new film I'm fundraising for. It's gonna be great. Here's the link. Please help us out!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1336875269/abduction

perhaps beauty

The best director alive

The way that some people show me the world is often as thrilling or more so than how I experience it. Minutes into It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi I was in another world. One of primordial darkness and disorienting passage from place to place, the world made flat so that Philippe Grandrieux's camera could pass over its surface with the ease of an air hockey puck across the table. He films the world with more perception, detail, grace and most importantly a sense of appreciation for what it all means in front of his camera. He gets more than we see. This may sound like a rather timid admission; the world's a beautiful, terrifying and stimulating place and I would never say that I'd prefer to see it on a screen than in reality (at least not all the time), but film can show you the world in a way that you can never experience it firsthand. Film can, in certain hands, show a version of the world that is aesthetically specific, and to my way of thinking, better than the way we experience it, if one can quantify these things. It's obvious enough to say that the way we see things will never be as crisp as the cinematography of Roger Deakins. But I mean to go a step further and say that the mark of the greatest filmmakers is presenting life in a sensorily recognizable fashion and doing our point of view and sense one better. In other words it's a version or vision of life that I wouldn't at all mind jumping into. Would that my vision were as clear as Emmanuel Lubezki's camera lens.

 Which is my way of saying I have a rather stiff set of criteria for great filmmakers. I want people whose versions of reality best anything I've ever seen. People who look through a lens and see something the rest of us can't. This leads us down a tricky path; style v. substance. What I'm talking about here probably sounds like I'm more interested in the way somethin shoots, rather than what they shoot. That's only partly true. A simple (if reductive) way of thinking about film is that there are two kinds of great director: John Ford and Orson Welles. Ford thought of the best way to tell the story, Welles used the cinema like it was one more device with which to perform his magic. His most distinctive films drip with his influence, as if he had simply extended his arm and recorded it with his hand like he was casting a spell. Ford had a painter's eye and a way with his actors, but he never threw himself into his work with the same youthful zeal as Welles. He never forced his camera uncomfortably close to his actors, never used the full potential of cinema. Ford does the best job possible; Welles was looking to explode the possible.  You know a Ford film just as you know a Welles film, but you'd never mistake the passion evident in The Chimes at Midnight for that in The Searchers. I love Ford and I love a sturdy, beautiful story, but what puts me in front of a movie screen is the possibility I'll see someone who knows something I don't; who uses the cinema in a way most of us have never dreamed of. If this person also tells a beautiful, sturdy story, all the better. I like a film that thinks, as Kent Jones puts it, that connects with history even as it writes it, a film that changes with every viewing.


So, what exactly are we talking about. There are directors who have a unique voice, whose fingerprints are all over the film, as if they'd sculpted the environs from clay. Wes Anderson, Godard (pre-68 and again post-78), Byron Haskins, Frank Tashlin and Kihachi Okamoto all have perfect, distinct handwriting; Whether through cutting, framing, design, all of those things or more, you know it's them. That's important to me, but what's more is that I connect with them. I appreciate Okamoto's sense of humour, his assured compositions, the way he frames people as if they were gods or jungle cats, I like his machine gun editing and that he shoots like he knows his films will move like someone were changing the reels with a baseball bat. I like that he did this in the face of a Japanese masterclass of filmmakers like Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kinoshita and Ichikawa, whose respective styles weren't so much different from the viciousness of Okamoto's as they were reverse polarity. He engaged with recent Japanese history in a more brutal way than any one of his peers dared to. But what holds him back from becoming the best in my estimation is that he rarely conversed with other filmmakers and other films. He blazed his own trail and did a first rate job writing history in fire, but I'm too in love with the medium to ignore its place in an artist's output. You need to love the cinema as passionately as you make use of it. Okamoto flirted and joked with Japanese film, but the deadly serious business he got up to when he set his mind to it was insular from the tradition he stood outside of. Byron Haskins had a similar problem. Though he filmed with boyish enthusiasm and had an immaculate sense of how to capture his luscious production design, he was telling stories. Pure and simple. He just did it better than most.

I was asked lately who my favourite living director was. Luckily I'd just figured that out a few days ago after my first viewing of Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve. In my opinion, Grandrieux has the most vital point of view of any director alive. Every frame is his, through and through. And he's engaged with the medium. He speaks to it delicately while plowing through norms and constraints. His film on Masao Adachi and his plan to make more films about politically engaged filmmakers proves it beyond my assumptions about his influences. His films echo with the whispers of Jean Epstein, Krzyzstof Kieslowski, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Stan Brakhage, though his voice is loud enough to overpower them. He puts his camera in darkness and places no one else has ever explored. He allows no distance from subject and audience. Faces take up the entire frame, withholding secrets and revealing truths. He uses the medium like no one else on earth and seems to understand something about its potential that escapes the rest of us. In other words, a unique and neccesary voice. The artform would be poorer for his never having picked up a camera, though as I'm sure he'd tell you, that was never an option. That's not to say he doesn't have stiff competition. Terrence Malick essentially invented a kind of artistic American cinema that people will continue borrowing from for decades to come (I count myself among his acolytes/scavengers). Both Agnes Varda and Marco Bellocchio have a way with cutting and framing that makes even their slightest or most confusing stories seem absolutely thrilling. Not to mention that they've made more classics than are produced in a given year, respectively. Varda has a view into romantic and familial relationships that cuts to the heart of any issue, weaving impressionistic tales of longing from our inevitable foibles. Bellocchio has a bite that rivals Okamoto's, but a dark poetry in place of his Japanese peer's assaultive montage and bloody politics. Bellocchio plunges headfirst into troubled waters he knows he can't still; his aim isn't to find cures for the Italian political ills he dramatizes, merely to find an entry point in the discussion. He's essentially performing an autopsy on the Italy he grew up with, and hoping we can prevent the disease next time. But it's not all darkness, he sympathizes and humanizes even the strangest and lowest creations; look no further than Vincere, a story that really has no clear heroes, and see what he makes of every character. No one is simply a villain, nor is anyone without fault or blame. And then of course there is Tomas Alfredson. Having never been able to find a complete version of his first feature, I can't say for sure he's always been a genius, but I can tell you that he, like Grandrieux, gets something that the rest of us do not. His absolute control over his images is unquestionable. He seems to have directed the dust in the air around his characters. He owns all of it, quietly and without hubris or distracting pride. He examines the past and then recreates it perfectly. He makes the world cinematic while seemingly making it ordinary. That's a rare talent.

You can't exactly say "best" about anything, though god knows I do it all the time. Really, what's important is knowing about yourself what you're looking for. You learn a lot about yourself when you realize what you value in artistic expression. And furthermore if you figure out what you love recognizing in the work of others, you figure out what you want to say yourself. Studying Grandrieux and his influences has opened a world of possibilities I wouldn't otherwise know about. When you discover that there are still places unexplored, it revitalizes my (your, whosever) drive to tell stories unlike anything ever told before. I've seen them. I know that there are people making films in ways that I'll never know how to do. It's at times like those, when I've just finished a film by Philippe Grandrieux,  Terrence Malick, PT (and Wes) Anderson, Agnes Varda, Marco Bellocchio, Tomas Alfredson or anyone who pushes the medium into new direction, that I'm most excited to pick up a camera again.

Better Late Than Never: A Latecomer's Season by Season Guide to The Sopranos

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Season 6 Act 2
The final act of The Sopranos carries quite a bit of weight behind it. The show's creators made it quite public that this was the end so everyone's expectations were risen quite a bit knowing that one of the biggest series in television history was coming to a close. But assuredly the question was asked by fans, critics, and me alike. How can they wrap up a show so vast in length, so high in technical and narrative quality in an abbreviated 9 episode season?

Easily, according to David Chase the show's creator and head writer.

The final 9 episodes sees a lot occur. The war between Jersey and New York finally comes to some kind of head as a number of main characters are involved in various shootouts and wind up dead. Some characters meet their demise completely removed from mob violence. I'm looking at you Christopher.

So after 8 episodes we're left with Tony's final hour of television. He's lost a number of great friends and associates. His son is dumber than ever. His daughter is a rising star at a law firm. His wife is finally spreading her wings in the real estate world she's been trying to break into for 3 seasons. But where is Tony? He's pretty much exactly where we found him six seasons ago. And thats the fucking point.

Life is full of experiences. Quite literally every waking moment is an experience whether is memorable or not. The Sopranos was probably the first show I've ever given my time to that really just shows a linear passage of time without ever truly stooping to dramatic storytelling. Any drama that does occur in the series is never far removed from anyone human being's own life. Car accidents, panic attacks, violent and devastating deaths. None of these are reserved for the realms of film and television. They happen every day.

It could be David Chase's supreme love of anti climax that brings the show to its controversial conclusion. Its as if we as viewers are just picking up the show again. We see a man and his family. We know what he does for a living but not really what he's going to do. We know nothing about his friends other than that they work with him. The final scene of The Sopranos could just as easily be the first. Tony sits down in a booth and puts “Don't Stop Believing” on the table's jukebox. He looks around the room seeing a couple and a small troop of boy scouts enjoying their meals. Carmella enters and the two of them discuss where their kids are and how long until they'll meat them at the diner. Tony quickly mentions the state of affairs with his job but the two of them shrug it off. AJ appears eager to order some of the restaurant's famous onion rings. Meadow pulls up outside but can't for the life of her parallel park the damn thing. AJ complains about work and Tony tells him to buck up. AJ responds by saying he should “focus on the good times” a direct quote from Tony earlier in the show. Tony smirks and says “Well, its true I guess.”. Meadow continues to have trouble parking. Tony watches every adult man in the restaurant for fear of mob violence taking place against him and his family. A waitress brings over a basket of onion rings. Meadow runs across the street from her car toward the restaurant's entrance. Tony puts another quarter in the jukebox. He hears the restaurant door bell and looks up.

And thats it. The song cuts out with the picture. The 86 hours of The Sopranos comes to a close.

But what does it mean?!

Well it means whatever the hell you want it to mean. And isn't that the point of art in general? To draw your own conclusions from stimuli? There is plenty to be said about the ending scene for sure. The use of an abrupt cut to black followed by several seconds of silence led many viewers to initially believe that their cable had cut out at a crucial moment. Opposing interpretations soon emerged among viewers regarding the ultimate fate of Tony Soprano with some believing that he was killed while others believe that he remains alive. One argument for the former points to a conversation that Tony had in the Act 2 premiere episode, “Members Only” with his brother-in-law Bobby, in which Bobby comments on how suddenly and without sound death can happen in their lives as gangsters: "you probably don't even hear it when it happens, right?" A flashback to this scene also appears in the final minutes of "The Blue Comet", the episode preceding "Made in America".When questioned on the theory, HBO spokesman Quentin Schaffer stated that the conversation is a "legitimate" hint. The final scene showing a man credited as "Man in The Members Only Jacket" who goes to the bathroom has been interpreted as a nod to a scene in the The Godfather, in which Michael Corleone retrieves a gun from the bathroom before shooting his enemies. Speculation has also linked the jacket to the title of the opening episode of the abbreviated season in which Tony is shot and also as a symbolic reference to membership of the Mafia. Actor Matt Servitto told Entertainment Weekly that in the script, the scene continued with the man in the Members Only jacket emerging from the washroom and starting to walk towards Tony's table before the screen cuts to black, but he preferred the ending that made the final cut of the episode.

But the other side stands to reason as well. Absolutely nothing could have happened. The man in the jacket could simply be the man in the jacket. How do you end a show like this? Whats wrong with simply ending a show about the life of a man? We know he will die. We don't know how but why does it really matter. The most human knowledge is that death comes no matter what and in the grand scheme of things why on earth does it matter how it finds you?

David Chase was hounded (and probably still is) about the end of the show. In an interview conducted by Brett Martin several weeks after the finale's original broadcast, Chase shared his views on the final episode and the reaction to it. On the fans of the show and the demand for an unambiguous and definitive ending, Chase remarked, "There was so much more to say than could have been conveyed by an image of Tony facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head. Or, on the other side, taking over the New York mob. The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people's alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted 'justice.' They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly. The pathetic thing—to me—was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years."

Chase also made comments about the purported lack of finality in the final episode: "This wasn't really about 'leaving the door open.' There was nothing definite about what happened, but there was a clean trend on view—a definite sense of what Tony and Carmela's future looks like. Whether it happened that night or some other night doesn't matter." On the future of the Soprano children, Chase said, "A.J.'s not going to be citizen-soldier or join the Peace Corps or try to help the world; he'll probably be some low-level movie producer. But he's not going to be a killer like his father, is he? Meadow may not be a pediatrician or even a lawyer, but she's not going to be a housewife-whore like her mother. She'll learn to operate in the world in ways Carmela never did. [...] Tiny, little bits of progress—that's how it works."

On moments during and after the final scene, Chase referred to a scene from the episode "Stage 5”: "There are no esoteric clues in there. No Da Vinci Code. Everything that pertains to that episode was in that episode. And it was in the episode before that and the one before that and seasons before this one and so on. There had been indications of what the end is like. Remember when Gerry Torciano was killed? Silvio was not aware that the gun had been fired until after Gerry was on his way down to the floor. That's the way things happen: It's already going on by the time you even notice it. [...] I'm not saying anything. And I'm not trying to be coy. It's just that I think that to explain it would diminish it." Chase also addressed the widespread opinion that the open-ended finale was insulting to the show's longtime fans: "I saw some items in the press that said, 'This was a huge fuck you to the audience.' That we were shitting in the audience's face. Why would we want to do that? Why would we entertain people for eight years only to give them the finger? We don't have contempt for the audience. In fact, I think The Sopranos is the only show that actually gave the audience credit for having some intelligence and attention span. We always operated as though people don't need to be spoon-fed every single thing—that their instincts and feelings and humanity will tell them what's going on.

David Chase had set himself up with a no win scenario. I don't think there's an ending to a show like The Sopranos that more than half the viewership would have been cool with. What I will say is that I truly loved the ending and I applaud David Chase for not copping out. He had his ending and he gave it to you, like it or not.

So on the whole, how would I rate The Sopranos? I'd call it a solid and important piece of television. It is FAR from the best show I've ever seen particularly in its early seasons. But like most long form stories you can't just jump into the later arcs without a solid foundation to work on. So even though I'm not huge on the show's beginnings, they are 100% necessary. I would never say I regret watching the show. In fact, I think I learned a lot about what makes good TV by pushing through The Sopranos. I recommend the series to anyone who has the time to give it a fair run. But be warned. Its not an easy journey.

Final Word:

If there is anything the show didn't give me at the end, its more time with Dr. Melfi. The show's original premise was about a mobster in therapy (IMAGINE THAT!). Melfi became one of the most important parts of the show and though I realize series have to grow and chance I think that the writers simply lost their way with her and I think it does the series a disservice.

If I had to give the show a more comprehensive ending I would only add one thing. The ducks. Tony becomes obsessed with a small family of ducks that live in his pool in the first season. I'm sure it completely contradicts what David Chase had in mind for the end of the show but I truly think that the ducks reappearing in Tony's pool right before he heads off to the restaurant for the final scene would have given the show a strangely complete feel. But hey, thats me. Thanks for reading along everyone. I wish you all-

Better Late Than Never: A Latecomer's Season by Season Look at The Soprano's

Season 6 Act 1 -->

Season 6 Act 1 of The Sopranos comes with quite a lot of weight behind it. It's the beginning of the end. Its the calm before the storm. It's the deep breath before the plunge. So where does it all begin to end? It ends with the episode Members Only and with a man we met in season 3 and who sort of bounced around in the wings between then and now. His name is Eugene Pontecorvo and he wants out. He's inherited 2 million dollars from a deceased aunt and fully plans on moving to Florida with his wife, leaving the mob life behind. And what does he get for his good fortune and his aspirations? He gets Tony up his ass about leaving at this point we learn that Eugene has been an informant for the F.B.I. and they too can't see letting him leave at it would mean a serious loss in information in their case against La Cosa Nostra. So Eugene, paralyzed by the stresses of two immovable objects weighing down on his life, hangs himself in his basement. Good. For a second there, I though The Sopranos might go soft in it's final season. Now we can begin.

Now Eugene isn't the only storyline we follow in the premiere. In fact, in the grand scheme of the season its probably the least important. But it sights precedent and that's whats important. Again we see a person who finds a safe and easy way to escape the life of crime he's lead for so long. But he simply cannot. Whether it be fate or otherwise the stakes end up being too high and they can't get out. Eugene taking his own life is a nice touch. It ties back in quite well with the notion that at the end of the day a criminal only has his or herself to blame for their situation.

The big moment that starts off season 6 takes place at the end of the season premiere. Junior Soprano, increasingly overcome by his Alzheimer's, shoots Tony during a fit of strong memory loss. Tony then spends the next two episodes in a coma. And I'll go out on a limb and say that those two episodes are some of the best the series has ever produced. Tony takes a serious journey through his subconscious. He spends his time there as another man named Kevin Finnerty who is in turn looking for Tony Soprano to return a mistakenly taken briefcase. Tony's journey takes him through some strange adventures. He meets violent monks. He consistently sees a beacon, not unlike a lighthouse, on the horizon. He even meets a few characters who had died in seasons past. Outside of the coma, Carmella, AJ, and Meadow all struggle with Tony's situation and do all in their power (well...maybe not AJ) to be as supportive and positive as they can. On the mob front, everyone begins to wonder if Tony will actually ever come back and start to figure out who'll run the show if Tony does pass. But it all takes a serious back seat to Tony's dream experience. The key scene in Tony's coma comes when he gets to a giant house part out in the woods. The house is lit up like a Christmas tree and is filled with guests. Tony as Kevin Finnerty runs into Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi) who is playing a waiter at the party. He comes to learn that this house is heaven and Blundetto is playing the role of St. Peter. Tony is very hesitant about entering the house and is even more put off when he sees a shadowy figure, no doubt a woman, standing just inside the doorway. Its pretty clear that we're looking at Livia Soprano and it makes sense that Tony would be especially put off at the idea of seeing her again.

Tony does escape the coma by the end of the 3^rd episode (to my disappointment) and we the audience are told exactly what this season is about. Tony's survival is a blessing and now he plans to live with that constantly in the front of his mind. But, this is The Sopranos we're talking about. Thats not the way things work. And sure enough, not long after Tony is recovered he heads right down the same road. He comes very close to cheating on Carm, though doesn't actually, and makes so attempt to clean up his life or his business practices.

Now a big focus of the first act of season 6 is Vito Spatafore. Vito's always been around but early in the season the entire cast learns that Vito is gay. He makes a sad but smart decision and runs to New Hampshire knowing that at least some of his fellow gangsters will be so offended by his sexual orientation that they'll come after him in a violent way. Audiences really weren't happy about this side plot. They found it a tad contrived especially this late in the game. I don't see it that way at all. In fact, I think it hits home better than a lot of the series' attempts to show the dangers of living a life of crime. Vito's homosexuality becomes a character flaw as far as his associates are concerned. They feel they can't trust him because he's lied to them for so long about it, though with good reason. Vito runs north, falls in love with a small town firefighter and actually moves in with him. But he can't escape the mob lifestyle and more importantly, his love for it. He runs back to Jersey after spending nearly the entire season in New Hampshire. Before he's even back he kills an innocent bystander to avoid an encounter with the police and finally meets Tony in secret to apologize and show that he can still be quite valuable to the crime lord. Tony is reluctant but accepts his proposal. Unfortunately Phil Leotardo, who's taken the most offense to Vito's lifestyle, finds and kills him in a motel room not long after he returns home.

I'm sure audiences were happy to see this subplot finally come to a close. I was happy but not because it was over but instead because of how it had ended. The Sopranos didn't disappoint. Vito's homosexuality wasn't his job. It wasn't how he earned money. It was him more than anything else ever could be. It was his truth. And he found an escape and true love, love that he'd never been able to fully experience or enjoy before because he'd finally admitted this truth to himself. But like so many before him he simply could not escape because of his ties to crime. And like Eugene his death was his own fault. He didn't take his own life but if he never went home to Jersey there's a great chance he could've lived as close to happily ever after as anyone in the series' universe ever could.

There's plenty of other subplots going on across the twelve episodes that comprise Act 1 but most of them are pretty much fluff. Only Carmella's brief but potent trip to Paris in the penultimate episode really rings home as being important but even that sort of falls to the wayside when measured against Carm's experiences in the the beginning of the season and the end of the previous one.

What Act 1 is really about is the idea of redemption. So many characters are given the possibility of a second chance. Tony being chief among them. What The Sopranos tries to say is that redemption doesn't simply happen to anyone. They have to work for it. They have to earn it. And frankly, they have to want it.