Day: December 10, 2010

Vanity, Thy Name is Jolie: LFM Reviews The Tourist

By Jason Apuzzo. When you’re the biggest female movie star in the world, and your personal man-servant is Brad Pitt, you can order up a film like The Tourist – more or less as you would order up room service at The Ritz.

That’s the ‘truth,’ such as it is, behind the new Angelina Jolie star vehicle that opens today, co-starring – technically, at least – Johnny Depp, and directed (so the advertising claims) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

Because if the phrase ‘vanity project’ has any meaning, then it applies with full force in describing The Tourist.

That’s not necessarily such a bad thing, in so far as Ms. Jolie is a genuine star – albeit, occasionally a star in the same way that Medusa was a ‘star’ of Greek mythology, earning her points by way of force rather than charm. But in the strange world we live in, in which people like Sandra Bullock or Reese Witherspoon are routinely and incorrectly referred to as ‘stars’ (rather than as what they are, which is ‘actresses’) Angelina Jolie is the genuine article, and The Tourist only confirms that. If there ever was a woman the camera loves as she walks into a crowded ballroom, or as she skeptically raises an eyebrow at a would-be suitor, or as she fixes an appraising gaze on a man she intends to possess – and destroy? – then it’s Angelina Jolie.

The problem is, star vehicles don’t always make for good films – and at a certain point, they also corrode the star’s image. (Ask John Travolta about that.) The Tourist is almost – if not quite – a disaster, a woeful and expensive attempt to mimic charming romantic espionage capers of the past like North by Northwest, Charade or Arabesque; and in the generally misogynistic calculus of today’s Hollywood, Jolie likely can’t afford many more films like it.

Angelina Jolie, with some guy.

There’s more to The Tourist than that, though. There’s also a kind of snarky, dismissive tone taken by the film toward America and Americans that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. More on that below. The bottom line is that whereas I was ready to pass this film off as a harmless failure, an expensive lark – now I’m actively rooting for it to fail.

Frankly, I hope The Tourist tanks.

I’ll go through the motions and describe the film’s ‘plot,’ although ‘plot’ in this film is strictly an afterthought. We start with Jolie, who’s in Paris being surveilled by Scotland Yard for reasons as yet unknown. The Scotland Yard team is led by Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton (highly underrated as James Bond, I might add) – just two members of this film’s expensive supporting cast, which also includes Steven Berkoff and Rufus Sewell. Jolie gives Scotland Yard the slip, and finds herself on a train bound for Venice where she picks up Depp as a decoy to keep her pursuers guessing. Complicating matters is that a crime lord (Berkoff) who’s also pursuing Jolie mistakes Depp for a criminal who recently made off with about a billion dollars’ worth of his dirty money. Double-crosses, pseudo-adventure, predictable revelations and passing glances at romance ensue.

What non-chemistry looks like.

A few other things ensue, as well. One of the film’s motifs is that of Depp acting out as a bumbling, graceless and naive American in one of Europe’s most exotic and resplendent cities: Venice. (It’s simultaneously one of Europe’s grimiest and crassly commercialized cities; even Goethe was complaining about it back in the 1790s, long before there were Americans around to ruffle anybody’s feathers.) Depp plays the 2010 version of the ‘ugly American’ overseas, although in this case he’s more like the bumbling, gauche American – and The Tourist tries to play his ‘fish-out-of-water’ status for as many cheap laughs as possible.

It’s pathetic, and none of it works. It also happens to be obnoxious – a ‘look at the dancing American monkey’ routine – and immediately reawakened my dormant contempt for all-things-Depp.

By why restrict my venom to Depp? How about the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck? You can stick a fork in him. His 2007 film The Lives of Others was a breath of fresh air on a challenging, politically incorrect subject (i.e., the legacy of communism in Europe). Whatever good-will he established with that film has now been swiftly squandered – and for what? To play personal valet to big-dollar American movie stars on a European holiday? To indulge in cheap anti-Americanism, so he can fit in better with the Malibu gentry?

A fairy-tale Venice, with no tale to tell.

Donnersmarck does not appear to have ‘directed’ his stars here at all, actually. Perhaps he was over-awed by the talent suddenly put at his disposal. Jolie swans through the film doing her usual routine – which is fine, it’s a good routine, except that she lacks the vulnerability here that she shows in her better roles. As for Depp, he really needed to be directed because – conventional wisdom to the contrary – he is neither Cary Grant nor Laurence Olivier, and needed to bring more discipline to his performance (beginning with cutting his hair, and getting a shave) in order to be convincing as a math teacher from Wisconsin.

The deeper problem here, though, is that Hollywood is long out of practice making films like this – and it shows. The Tourist feels like a tourist ride through other, better films – films with higher stakes (as during the ideological struggle of the Cold War; one thinks here of Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews), or with more style (say, Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik). Donnersmarck doesn’t want to take too many chances here, though, and potentially risk his shiny new Hollywood career; ironically, his career may now get scuttled by this film.

The temptation to ‘go Hollywood’ is a strong one, one that only the most willful and stubborn can withstand. It’s probably very tempting even for an Oscar-winner like Donnersmarck, with serious things on his mind, to become – in effect – little more than another member of Angelina Jolie’s livery.

There are no doubt worse fates, but some of us were hoping for more from him.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 6:14pm.

One City, Three Drivers: Beijing Taxi

By Joe Bendel. It is an open question just how beneficial the 2008 Olympics were to average Chinese citizens. They were a source of pride perhaps, and certainly the well-connected made money through construction contracts and the like. Yet for the city’s working class cabbies, the Olympics – as well as China’s precipitous industrialization – have been a decidedly mixed bag. Indeed, life is not particularly easy for any of the three drivers director Miao Wang unobtrusively follows in Beijing Taxi (trailer above), which opens this Friday at Brooklyn’s reRun Gastropub Theater.

Starting two years prior to the Beijing Games, Taxi documents a city in flux. The games should be a boon to the drivers, what with all the tourists expected. Of course, nothing is so simple in China. Facing new language requirements (ironically, it seems travelers would be more likely to find an English speaking cabbie in Beijing than in New York) and rising costs, Taxi’s subjects are feeling increasingly pinched.

In various ways, the three cab drivers represent the inherent contradictions of contemporary Chinese society. While critical of China’s go-go economic policies, fifty-four year-old Bai Jiwen also fully recognizes his opportunities are limited because the Cultural Revolution permanently cut short his education. By contrast, thirtysomething Wei Caixia embraces China’s entrepreneurial ethos, but she is not so keen on the hard work part. Perhaps Zhou Yi is the most contented with his lot, but he still tries to maintain links to traditional Chinese culture.

Eschewing celebrity narration and talking head interviews, Taxi is not incompatible with the work of China’s so-called “Digital Generation” or “D-Generate” filmmakers. Though in many ways it functions as a critique of China’s comrade capitalism, Taxi is not the gritty, unremittingly depressing cinematic experience one finds in documentaries like Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home. Granted, Taxi’s three central POV figures certainly endure life’s challenges, they nonetheless prove to be quite resilient and even optimistic, at least to an extent.

Their real life dramas are also bookended by a surprisingly cool opening and closing credit sequence, which give the film a bit of panache. Indeed, it is well conceived and executed by the New York based Wang, who immigrated to America in 1990 (one year following the massacre at Tiananmen Square).

Cinematographers Ian Vollmer and Sean Price Williams dramatically capture the pulse and power of Beijing. However, this is a glass and steel urban jungle – which might disappoint viewers hoping to see an ancient and exotic capitol city, much like the underwhelmed tour groups Zhou Yi chauffeurs. Still, the cabbies offer a perfect vantage point for Wang to essentially ask “where are we and how did we get here?”  Considerably more accessible for general viewers than one might expect, Taxi is worth a trip out to Brooklyn when it opens at the reRun Gastropub this Friday (12/10).

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 10:06am.

Rear Window

From Wafaa Bilal's "Domestic Tension."

By David Ross. Here’s the latest odor emanating from the moldering flesh of the art tradition. Wafaa Bilal, a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has in manner had a camera implanted in the back of his head. On December 15, the camera will begin to upload constant footage to a website (www.3rdi.me) associated with the new Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar (see here). The project will raise “important social, aesthetic, political, technological and artistic questions,” Bilal told the AP (see here). According to the AP, Bilal’s recent works “have invited debate and controversy”:

In a 2007 online installation, “Domestic Tension” in 2007, virtual users could shoot a paintball gun at Bilal 24 hours a day. The Chicago Tribune deemed it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him Artist of the Year that year.

A 2008 video game piece, “Virtual Jihadi,” was censored by the city of Troy, N.Y. where it was shown. In it, Bilal inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide bomber hunting then-President George W. Bush. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a claim against the city of Troy for closing the arts center showing the work.

The artist has said the work was meant to shed light on groups that traffic in hateful stereotypes of Arab culture with video games like Quest for Saddam.

In a recent live performance piece titled “…and Counting,” Bilal had his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty. Bilal, whose brother was killed by a missile at an Iraqi checkpoint in 2004, used the piece to highlight how the deaths of Iraqis are largely invisible to the American public. The dots for the Iraqis were represented by green UV ink only visible under black light, while Americans were represented by permanent ink.

The AP story on Bilal’s latest opus generated a mountain of vituperative user comment. Some of this response has a racist and right-wing cast, but most of it indicates deep, genuine, and politically neutral bitterness at the cooption of the arts by leftwing stunt-pullers and theoreticians of the fundamentally empty. The people crave art of the eye, hand, and mind as they have since the cave painters sat in smoky meditation with their berry juice and charcoal. Their comments grope for words like those of Yeats’ great injunction from “Under Ben Bulben”:

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God.

Thomas Kinkade has grown rich speciously filling this void (see here). Why can’t someone fill it genuinely? Where is the Martin Luther of art with his 95 theses? The reviver of the arts will need incontestable artistic genius, intolerable arrogance, and a scathing polemical or satirical tongue. I envision some combination of Beethoven, Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and Wyndham Lewis. He or she will have to clear the way by force, because institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have decades of dubious decision-making to defend, and they are not going to let their multi-billion-dollar collections evaporate in a puff of punctured theory.

Wafaa Bilal and his camera.

There are certain promising developments in architecture, where the brutality of modernism, the juvenility of postmodernism, and the sheer laziness of the strip-mall remainder have been answered by a resurgent aestheticism with both neo-classical (see here) and neo-modernist manifestations. Julian Bicknell’s Henbury Hall (1986), Cheshire, epitomizes the former development, Santiago Calatrava’s Tenerife Concert Hall (2003) the latter. Le Corbusier’s corrosive notion that “a house is a machine for living” seems to be in retreat, and tendrils of extraneous beauty are beginning to peep through the cracks in the modernist concrete.

Might fine art follow this pattern? It’s possible, but there’s the important point that architecture is a relatively unfettered and unmediated arrangement between client and builder (cf. the tale of Henbury Hall), while art is tangled up in the bien pensant folly of museums, government agencies, and universities, and subject always to the media-driven fads of the marketplace.

The Tenerife Concert Hall.

Three salutary if fantastic measures: 1) Fire all the artist/professors, 2) Close the museums of contemporary art, and 3) Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and similar troughs of largesse. Let artists sell their wares in the street and relearn of necessity the language of the human. Let them rediscover how to carve, draw, and shape with their hands, and let them try to create what people might actually covet and save and pinch to own. Let them sketch passers-by in parks and squares, dawn to dusk, until they rediscover what Yeats calls the “old nonchalance of the hand.”

What? Return the arts to the bondage of the masses! The Dutch Golden Age was built on the tastes of burghers and merchants, men who drank beer and drove hard bargains. Turner was the son of a barber, Ruskin the son of a suburban wine merchant. As the comments on Bilal’s work suggest, the “masses” can at least spot a charlatan, which is more than can be said of so many museum mandarins.

In the worst case, Thomas Kinkade and his kind win out. So be it. I prefer juvenile notions of beauty to sophisticated denials of beauty. I prefer a saccharine village scene to a dead shark in formaldehyde. The former can at least evolve in the direction of genuine beauty because it has not broken ranks with the human. The latter is hopelessly estranged; nothing can be built on its example.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 9:43am.