Iris (Cirque du Soleil-- Kodak Center, Los Angeles)

Iris (pronounced the French way, "ee-rees") isn't a movie; it's a Cirque du Soleil show that's playing right now at the Kodak Theater (where they film the Academy Awards) in L.A., the theme of which is the history of cinema and movie making.

Needless to say, when I several months ago first saw the advertisements for this show, I was overwhelmed with enthusiasm and excitement. This buoyant feeling almost immediately (and predictably) devolved into anxiety that Cirque would somehow manage to screw it up and thereby incur my wrath for sullying the subject that has been my passion for quite some time now. Despite my apprehension, however, I ended up deciding to go to the show anyway, because I've been fortunate enough to have seen several Cirque shows over the last ten years and I thoroughly enjoyed them all.

Fast forward to September 11th, 2011 (yes, I'm a little behind on my blogging) and you'll find me nearly moved to tears within seconds of being seated before the show starts, because I can see from the get-go that the crazy French Canadian Guy Laliberte (CEO of Cirque du Soleil) has done yet another mind bogglingly competent job putting together a crazy-weird-circus-fantasy spectacle.

My favorite pre-show attraction was the female mime wandering the crowd with a metal contraption surrounding her body. She solicited several people to spin her curious cylinder-skirt, and when no one would do it fast enough to suit her needs she gave it a yank herself. To the delight of the crowd, her skirt (which resembled a film reel turned on its side) revealed itself to be a working zoetrope showing boxers fighting each other in a short, repeated loop. Rewind to February of 2005 and you'll find a fresher-faced me sitting in my history of early cinema class at UC Berkeley watching a very enthusiastic young professor (Professor Kaveh Askari, a graduate of the University of Chicago (?) if you were wondering) demonstrating much smaller versions of the same pre-cinematic device and others like it. This was probably the moment that I decided I loved film and wanted to learn everything about it, and so for the Cirque show to reference it meant a lot to me. (<-- huge understatement) The rest of the show was no different in terms of its emotional impact. Nearly every single aspect connected to some aspect of film as an art form, film history, or film production. Some of the references made were: - Norman McLaren's "Pas de deux"

- Georges Melies' "A Trip to the Moon"

- Edison's "Electrocution of an Elephant" (part of the Cinema of Attractions)

"The Kiss"

- Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed"

- Dziga Vertov's "The Man with the Movie Camera" or "The Cinematic Orchestra"

- The Al Jolson film "The Jazz Singer"

- And even what I took as a reference to a particular character from a Hayao Miyazaki film (Howl's Moving Castle)

All these references (and many, many more) were integrated with the usual Cirque spectacle of acrobatics, contortionists, a loose, somewhat dubious romantic narrative that ties the show together, wonderful live music, and some silly clowns which Cirque here opted to use to refer to modern day Hollywood industry stereotypes.

My favorite part was the McLaren reference, because it took a series of dancers and placed them in front of an enormous screen that showed their motion trails, just like in "Pas de deux". I also greatly relished the carnival/vaudeville aspect to this particular Cirque show (though I recognize it's a somewhat common theme throughout them and circus in general), because it connected back to the roots of film as a sort of freak show attraction. I also was just as much impressed by the integration of technology into the acts (I'm thinking in particular of one scene that's incredibly difficult to describe, so I'll leave it up to you to go experience it for yourself) as I was by the skill of the performers, some of whom are Olympic athletes.

I can't say whether many people in the audience understood these myriad references to cinema, but whether or not they did is not important to me. I loved the show because it reminded me of a time in my life not so long ago when I was ruled by a singular passion and drive inspired by the art form of film. Though this time isn't very far distant from me, it feels miles away. Because I am acutely aware of the literal (and metaphorical) distance I've traveled since those glorious days of oblivious (arguably naive) infatuation with my chosen subject of study, Iris moved me quite deeply insofar as it helped me reconnect with past moments in the sun, and I know this intensely personal experience would certainly not be what most people experience on seeing the show.

I highly recommend that you see Iris if you love film and you're in Los Angeles. You won't regret it.

Inception (2010)

My feelings toward Inception are not unlike a teacher’s toward the student who sets the curve for the class. Sort of a “hooray, you were totally the best out of the group” attitude balanced with a good dose of “you (and everyone else) really could be doing a lot better.”

That being said, I think the movie had a ton of really impressive aspects to it. The intensity was staggering—I was unable to break concentration for a second, because I felt compelled to fully invest in its details and all the questions it was asking. At the same time, such concentration and investigation was almost immediately rendered irrelevant because we were encouraged to keep diving further and further into the maze without trying to remember the way out. Just as for the main characters, the best way out of the welter was to plunge further in, forgoing any attempt at leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.

I also found that the story felt very personal, but sort of effortlessly so. I wasn’t drawn into it by knowing all the details of the time period it was supposed to be set in, or by knowing each character’s back story. Rather, I suspect that my willingness to go along with the emotions and interests of the characters is the result of a well written screenplay combined with some seriously great acting. I can’t even pick out one performance that I thought was particularly well done—every single actor in the movie delivered on his or her role completely and fully.

And lest you begin to suspect that this is just a fan-girl, stars in her eyes over JGL/Leo workin’ together like some kind of fantasy designed just for me moment, let me point out that my favorite scene of the movie had nothing to do with the attractiveness of anyone, and more to do with the level of thought put into both the dialogue and the acting. The hands down best moment of Inception, for me, was when Cobb takes the dying Mal in his arms and explains to her that she’s not his real wife. He says something to the effect of “you’re not half of what my real wife was, because you’re just my own memory/interpretation/reproduction of a sad shadow of the real her.” Hello awesome metaphor for a lot of stuff! (Film/acting/artistic representation/memory/relationships/etc)

Yes indeed, through and through Inception was a really smart, thoughtful, and creative film on questions that the noir genre has been working through since it first reared its difficult to define head way back in the ‘40s.

Why, then, did I start out this review by saying that it sets the curve but doesn’t go far enough? I don’t really know and it’s hard to explain. I’d definitely give Inception an A when compared to the movies that have been coming out so far this year. However, I’d probably assign it a solid B when compared to my favorites picked from cinema from all over the world since the beginning.

Maybe it was because the dreams weren’t weird enough to suit my fancy. Nolan did an excellent job re-creating the feeling of the dream—the disorientation combined with total normalcy, the changes in perspective, the emotions that were made metaphors of. But I’m the kind of person who has bizarro epic nightmares about being Johnny Depp and a vampire in a movie that I’m also watching. So for me, these ‘dreamscapes’ were surprisingly mundane, in a way.

I’m also not a huge fan of spending gag-inducing amounts of cash on movies for no discernible reason. Yeah, I know that to complain about the industry spending money is dumb. That’s like complaining about concepts with capital letters at the beginning: Capitalism, Sexism, Poverty, Ignorance! Pointless, passé, and actually hugely distracting from fresher, more pressing and nuanced debates. But I watched crews laboriously construct a set (the rooftop set that Mal, Cobb and Arthur appear on in the opening sequence for, say, five minutes total in the beginning of the movie) down the street from my house for approximately three months only to tear it down after one night of filming. The whole thing felt a smidge wasteful.

Anyway, neither of those complaints is really a solid reason for me not giving Inception a wildly enthusiastic review. But I’ll give it a solid one without any debate, because it is definitely a good example of creativity in filmmaking, pretty cool special effects, and really excellent acting. I just wasn’t hugely crazy about it, for whatever reason. Definitely worth watching though, and in theaters too.

But people, I know we can do better. Whether or not we will is a different question altogether. I’ll totally look forward to watching filmmakers try.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

Oh, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You make it so difficult for me to confidently label this post as either favorable or unfavorable.

I loved the lead character named Lisbeth, played by Noomi Rapace. She is a very muscular, highly androgynous, tattooed and pierced young woman who in the first thirty minutes or so of the movie acts out what is (I think) a common retaliatory fantasy against rapists. On top of that, she’s a professional hacker who is fiercely independent, unsentimental, and unemotional, and yet somehow she remains easy to cheer for. And kudos to the filmmakers for making her bisexuality not be a sensationalistic point of interest in the story. It’s just a fact, uncommented upon, plain as day.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the plot, up to a point. With lots of sinister affiliations rolled into one, the whodunit story that brings Lisbeth and a publicly disgraced (but framed) journalist named Mikael Blomkvist together intrigues and entices. Full of brutal details that are kept disturbingly subtle on screen, the 40 year old murder lurches wrenchingly back to life, zombie-like in its horror and its fascination which grips the audience and the characters on screen alike. Extra unsettling moment: when Blomkvist places several old photographs of a missing woman taken in succession together to create a sort of flip-book effect, revealing an important detail about the day she disappeared.

The problem was that while I was wildly enthusiastic about certain aspects of the movie, I became really spitefully resentful toward others. Unfortunately, story-wise, the first two hours were good but the last half hour was just plain dumb. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo started as a great mystery/thriller, i.e. a well paced, interesting (though not necessarily believable) story with very unique characters one could engage with, but then in the last half hour tragically devolved into a frustratingly neatly wrapped up cliché about familial ties and the virtues of heterosexual monogamy. Even the visual aesthetic switched from the cool (though expected) bluish grayish noir with a punk androgyne kicking ass in the beginning to an obnoxiously sunny-happy aesthetic, complete with tearful reunions, stilted confessions of emotional connections, and our (in my view) now fallen heroine sporting a large blonde wig, a business suit, and heels. What the hell.

I can’t even really decide whether the first two hours of the movie make it worth it to watch, either, because I just can’t ignore the flaws of the ending. What I wish is that I could re-watch the movie and just stop it around the point where things start to get ridiculous and add my own alternate ending mentally or something.

Anyway… the only way you’ll find out whether or not it’s worth it is to watch it yourself, which I suppose I can grudgingly recommend, if only for the majority of the movie and not the whole.

Dark City (1998)

I don’t want to go into a lot of details about the plot of Dark City except for the absolute basics; John Murdoch wakes up in a bathtub and realizes that reality isn’t real. Memories are false. The best way to describe life is as a series of ideas that have been injected into people’s heads.

Obviously this movie is pretty heavy, conceptually speaking. I like that it plays with ideas of memory, experience, and “reality.” I find the theories Dark City proposes thought provoking. Not earth-shatteringly interesting—just intriguing enough to produce a couple “hm” moments. The story itself is more than a bit cheesy. The acting does not help to reduce this cheesiness.

However, what bothers me more about Dark City is that despite being made in 1998 it still feels uncannily as if it sprang from the 1980’s. The effects are pretty hokey, even for that year. At first I thought “Oh this has a really nice style to it—very neo noir a la Blade Runner, mixed with the expected eighties aesthetics.” Eighties aesthetics are appropriate (albeit silly) when they come from 1983. Not so much 15 years later.

Overall, I'd say that the best way to describe Dark City is that it dances along the fine line between interesting and ridiculous. You’ll have to decide which side it ends up on for you.

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Up Next:
The Wolfman!