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).
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.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Tron is approaching, a wave that’s looking smaller as it approaches shore. The film is tracking poorly; it’s also getting mixed reviews thus far (see here and here) … oh, and the total cost of the film, with marketing? Apparently around $320 million. Plus, people are starting to scratch their heads about the fact that this is the debut feature for the film’s director, Joseph Kosinski (see interviews with him here and here), whose background is in architecture and design rather than in drama or literature – you know, those old-fashioned disciplines that involve human beings.
Boomer New Age morality tale?
So, what are we about to get here with Tron? I’m guessing something stylish and dull – with a dash of retro-liberalism (of the anti-corporate variety) to keep the Boomers happy. (Incidentally, there’s some speculation that this new film may already be subtly setting up the corporate villain for the sequel … )
In the meantime, Olivia Wilde continues to flaunt herself (see here), and otherwise make herself out to be the face of the production. As annoying as she is, that’s probably a good idea given how flat Garrett Hedlund seems, and how spaced-out Jeff Bridges seems in his interviews about the film (see here). Somewhat more fun are the Daft Punk guys, whose “Derezzed” video just hit.
More sinister, however, are inferences from several people (see here and here) that Disney is psuedo-suppressing access to the charming, old version of Tron while the new film gets its marketing binge. That’s certainly an ironic development for a movie that’s supposedly a sub rosa critique of ‘fascism’ and enforced sameness. (In fairness, the old film just got remastered and will be getting a Blu-ray release in 2011.)
Incidentally, whatever happened to that Path to 9/11 DVD, Disney?
Beau Garrett in "Tron: Legacy." Maybe she knows where Disney's "Path to 9/11" DVD went.
I’m not sure how much juice the Transformers series still has, really, but we’ll probably learn something from that trailer. Footnote: Megan Fox is really seeming out-of-sight/out-of-mind right now.
Also, Nikki Finke noticed today that the one-sheet for Dreamworks’ Cowboys & Aliens looks a lot like the one-sheet Dreamworks’ other alien invasion thriller, I Am Number 4. Oops.
They’ve since put out a new poster, although it still has the same feel.
I’m getting bad vibes about this project. Cowboys right now is looking like one of those All Star teams in basketball or baseball that looks great on paper but doesn’t play well. We’ll see.
• Ridley’s Scott’s Alien prequels have been pushed back to 2013 and 2014. What’s more annoying, however, is that Olivia Wilde is suddenly in the mix to play the lead. PLEASE STOP CASTING THIS PERSON. She’s already in Tron, Cowboys & Aliens and the Logan’s Run knockoff Now (which also just halted production) … and now Alien? Look, I haven’t seen Tron yet but I’ve seen enough of House to know that she’s not that good, besides which she’s almost as abrasive as Natalie Portman.
The new poster for "Apollo 18."
• I Am Bored by I Am Number 4, but it’s marketing binge has begun. This alien invader thriller – also from Michael Bay – has a new poster, the film will apparently be converted to IMAX (why?), and there are new interviews out with the director (here) and babes Teresa Palmer (here) and Dianna Agron (here). Basically this looks like another movie about a WASP teenage guy with Special Powers. Never seen that before.
• On the Creature Invasion Front: Troll Hunter will be having its world premiere at Sundance; besides having one of the greatest titles in the history of the cinema, Piranha 3DD now also has a release date (September 16th); and David Ellis’ untitled 3D shark thriller recently got picked up for distribution. So there you go: sharks, piranhas and trolls.
• In the time since our last Invasion Alert!we’ve lost the great Leslie Nielsen from Forbidden Planet. Our condolences to his family; he certainly will be missed.
• On the Home Video Front, some classics from Roger Corman are finally coming to DVD: Not of this Earth, War of the Satellites and Attack of the Crab Monsters (not as bad as it sounds). Also: have I told you people that I caved and bought the whole first season of the new V? I’m definitely enjoying it thus far (here, by the way, is a review of the Complete Season 1 on DVD).
• It was both funny and sad to read about the Skyline guys’ surprised reaction to the torrent of abuse that film received on-line. Apparently they couldn’t understand all the trash-talking because, as they put it, “Brett Ratner liked it!”
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … I finally got around to watching the sci-fi music video “The Ghost Inside” that Christina Hendricks did this summer (see below). It’s a little odd, and slow … but it’s got Christina Hendricks in it as a robot with detachable parts, so how bad could it be – right?
And that’s what’s happening today on the Alien Invasion Front!
By Joe Bendel. Was it possible to thrive under Communism? Yes, for a short while, if you happened to be a rabbit in East Berlin. But their salad days did not last forever. In a story too strange not to be true, a population of rabbits temporarily flourished in the green belt running down the center of the despised Berlin Wall. Part nature documentary and part parable, directors Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosolowski offer a truly original perspective on the Communist experience through the eyes of those East German bunnies in Rabbit à la Berlin (trailer above), a 2009 Academy Award nominee for best documentary short, which opens today in New York as part of a double bill of short docs examining Twentieth Century German history.
During the immediate post-war years, a hearty band of rabbits survived by raiding the garden patches on Potsdamer Platz. Much to their supposed surprise, sheltering walls were suddenly erected around them in 1961. With a nice grassy run, plenty of shade, and precious little human contact the whiskered critters made like rabbits and multiplied. The East German guards even began adopting them to help pass the time.
However, for many West Berliners, especially artists, the rabbits’ ability to burrow beneath the walls made them symbols of something greater—coyote tricksters for their divided age. Then, as escape attempts became more frequent and daring, the rabbits’ peaceful lives were upturned. Their lush grass was destroyed so that fugitive footsteps would be easier to track in the dirt beneath. Formerly their protectors, the guards declared open season on the rabbits, like a red army of Elmer Fudds.
One of Rabbit’s many surprises is the extent and quality of archival film capturing Berlin rabbits in their former environment. Credible simply as a wildlife film (even featuring the smoothly placid narration of Krystyna Czubówna, a well-known Polish voice-over artist for nature docs), it also has a slyly subversive sensibility, particularly when it incorporates news footage of the likes of Fidel Castro and Yassir Arafat come to gawk approvingly at the Wall. Wistful without being nostalgic, it is one of the more inventive and entertaining documentaries to reach theaters this year.
A meditation on the Holocaust.
While the fate of the Berlin Wall rabbit warren is not widely known outside of Germany, the Holocaust and its implications are certainly well established terrain for documentarians. Yet, French-Israeli filmmaker Nurith Aviv finds fresh insights in Loss. Returning to her father’s ancestral home of Berlin, Aviv explores the cultural and scientific losses Germany imposed on itself through the Holocaust.
While relatively conventional in her approach, Aviv superimposes interviews with four prominent Berliners and a vintage television appearance by Hannah Arrendt over sights seen from the S-Bahn train as it makes its way through the city. It makes the talking heads more visually dynamic, and also gives viewers a good feeling for the still-grim looking city.
Frankly, the fifty minute Rabbit was robbed at last year’s Oscars. Highly recommended, it is unquestionably the main event of Film Forum’s Berlin documentary double feature. That said, the thirty minute Loss is also a thoughtful film worth seeing in tandem with Rabbit. Both screen together at New York’s Film Forum, beginning today (12/8).
Former "Baywatch" star Donna Derrico, targeted by the TSA.
By Jason Apuzzo. Former Baywatch babe Donna Derrico, who once posed for Playboy, is apparently angry that she was subjected to a full body scan at LAX airport.
Libertas readers should free to conduct their own ‘full body scan’ of Ms. Derrico above (an extra service we provide here at Libertas). She certainly looks dangerous, doesn’t she?
Well, she’s also hopping mad. According to Fox News:
After being subjected to the scan by TSA agents at Los Angeles International Airport, “I noticed that the male TSA agent who had pulled me out of line was smiling and whispering with two other TSA agents and glancing at me,” D’Errico told AOL News. “I was outraged.”
D’Errico also fumed over the fact that the TSA agent, who did not give her the option of getting a pat-down search instead, had said that the reason she was selected was ” ‘Because you caught my eye, and they’ — pointing to the other passengers — ‘didn’t,’ ” she said.
Leo would be wise to keep an eye on his girlfriend (not a strenuous task), who – given the TSA’s current threat assessments – may be wanting to give Ms. Refaeli a very thorough examination. After all, she certainly seems to fit the TSA’s current ‘threat profile’!
By David Ross. Is Disney finally laying the ghost of its lost decades? To some extent it is. Its last, The Princess and the Frog (2009), laudably reprised the look and feel of the Disney Golden Age (see my comments here), while its latest, Tangled, builds on the example of Bolt (2008) and does its best to mime Pixar. Disney has not mastered what it takes to be the Pixar formula (which it never will because Pixar’s only formula is the rejection of formula), but even so Disney was wise to place itself under the supervision of Pixar chief John Lasseter, who is now chief creative officer of both companies. Disney’s recent films may not be the deepest or most poignant, but they are at least energetic and entertaining.
Tangled is the story of Rapunzel with a revamped plot for an age of campy glitter. In Disney’s telling, Rapunzel is not a peasant but a princess (inevitably), and her hair, which seems to be about fifty feet long, is both magical (cures wounds, reverses aging, etc.) and handy (recollect Indiana Jones with his whip). The old crone Gothel pilfers the golden-haired infant from the castle of her parents and sets her up in a tower as an all-purpose Botox substitute. She is eventually rescued, not by a prince, but by Flynn Rider, a charming rogue supposedly in the Errol Flynn vein but actually in the mugging mode of Brendan Fraser.
There’s no denying that the film is fast paced, action packed, and funny, and that Rapunzel’s hair makes a clever and innovative prop. My five-year-old daughter writhed in laughter throughout, especially enjoying the scene in which Rapunzel beats the crap out of Flynn with a frying pan and tries to stuff him in a closet (an axiom of kiddy humor: traumatic brain injury is always good for a giggle). In a just world, the horse Maximilian – a hilarious version of Hugo’s inexorable Javert – would be standing on four legs at the podium in March receiving the Oscar for best actor while Sean Penn restrains the impulse to clutch the throat of whoever happens to be sitting in front of him and to shake until certain silicone parts pop out of alignment.
What’s subtly wrong with the film is what’s wrong with so many post-Shrek kid movies. Filmmakers insist on a winking referentiality, as if fairy tales are dusty old irrelevancies that must be rescued by pop cultural in-jokes and Lettermanesque (now Stewartesque) insouciance. These Generation X artistes are aware enough to recognize clichés but not inventive enough to transcend them. In the end, the clichés appear in horn-rimmed quotation marks, but they are clichés all the same. In Tangled, every last facial expression and turn of idiom has an antecedent in some movie or TV show or music video. It would take a team of hyper-caffeinated Tarantinos to trace them all, but the aura of tedious familiarity is unmistakable. The tune “Mother Knows Best,” a pastiche of the controlling (Jewish? Italian?) mother delivered in belting Broadway style, gives the tenor:
Go ahead, get trampled by a rhino
Go ahead, get mugged and left for dead
Me, I’m just your mother, what do I know?
I only bathed and changed and nursed you
Go ahead and leave me, I deserve it
Let me die alone here, be my guest
When it’s too late
You’ll see, just wait
Mother knows best
Mother knows best
Take it from your mumsy
On your own, you won’t survive
Sloppy, underdressed
Immature, clumsy
Please, they’ll eat you up alive
Gullible, naive
Positively grubby
Ditzy and a bit, well, hmm vague
Plus, I believe
Getting kinda chubby
I’m just saying ’cause I wuv you
Mandy Moore, who plays Rapunzel, is the perfect pawn of this approach. Her medieval princess is a perky cheerleader type: a young Kelly Ripa in medieval drag. I can picture her wielding an iPhone, but not wielding a scepter.
Tangled is less heavy-handed than Shrek in this regard, and its jokes are somewhat less stupid, but its general approach is so unnecessary and evinces so little faith in the enduring power of mythic narratives. Movies like this entertain in the superficial sense, but at the cost of initiating young people in the traditions of Western imagination. The great Disney fairy tales of yore – Snow White and Sleeping Beauty especially – were unforgettable in their vivid realization of dim pasts and mythic destinies. They belong to the worlds of Grimm and Perrault, but also to the neo-medieval fantasy tradition of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, with Keats and Malory lurking in the remote recesses. Tangled, by contrast, is like a Steve Madden ad set in motion: encephalitic dolls bounce in a color-saturated wonderland that connects to nothing in our collective unconscious.
These objections, admittedly, are unlikely to be shared by anybody who is not on the lookout for signs of cultural demise. The average moviegoer will have no complaints, and the average little girl will resist her next haircut with tears and threats. By its own standards, Tangled is a success; it delivers the promised ‘fun.’
From "The Secret of Kells" (2009).
Tangled has its precise opposite – its anti-self – in the The Secret of Kells (2009), a masterful Irish cartoon that gives an fanciful account of the creation of the Book of Kells, one of the greatest medieval illuminated manuscripts (now housed at Trinity College, Dublin). Under constant threat from the invading northmen, the monks of Kells labor to complete their great book. Brendan, the young nephew of the abbot, is wonder-stricken by this labor and becomes a secret apprentice. He ventures into the forest to locate the necessary berries and there meets the streaming, gliding, shape-shifting Aisling, at fairy at once unsettlingly inhuman and lovable. Even more terrible, Brendan must venture into the cavernous depths to find a prismatic crystal upon which the monks’ work depends; the crystal turns out to be the eye of the snake-demon Crom Cruach, whom Brendan must defeat. In the end, the northmen ravage and burn the monastery and Brendan flees with the manuscript to continue the monks’ labor on his own, in a hut by the sea.
The Secret of Kells ponders the selflessness of the monks who toiled for decades in fire-lit scriptoriums to create their monuments of faith. In this sense, the film stands at the farthest possible remove from our own ethic of not particularly bothering. Beautifully and intricately rendered in the flat stylized manner of the Book of Kells itself, the film is full of dreamlike beauty and horror, evoking a world that has the fluidity and mystery of living imagination.
Tangled is a mirror held up to our silliness; The Secret of Kells is a looking glass in which we may for a time disappear.
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.
