|  Margaret Brown intended to make a narrative fiction film in her native Mobile, Alabama, and set it in Mardi Gras season; when the time came to get down to business she discovered that the local dramas more than outweighed her own imagination and so it become a documentary. The Order of Myths takes its name from a specific Mardi Gras parade and yet it's even more fitting for the film, a thoughtful examination of the racial and economic segregation of the players and legends of Mobile's Carnival -the oldest such celebration in the US - and how traditions are used both as means and reason for the ongoing separation of the classes.
Mobile has two Mardi Gras celebrations; one for the descendants of its European settlers, one for descendants of African slaves. Order introduces us to the King and Queen of both courts, a handful of other players who make the civic aspects of Carnival happen as planned, and a few from the sidelines with helpful knowledge of Mobile history.Brown's own mother was a Mardi Gras Queen and her grandfather are spected Mobile elder, circumstances which gave her access to places no others have ever been allowed to film, and people who might not otherwise talk to a NY film school graduate.
The majority of the court speak openly of their highly mixed feelings on the segregated nature of the event and its people: the white court, a bastion of wealth, power and privilege, knows it's antiquaited but sees little reason to mess with what works; the black court would like to mix it up a bit more, but they also want the comfort of tradition. Having been to one of the few renowned Carnival cities, it's hard to blame them; there is a civic aspect to Mardi Gras that's never communicated by Richard Simmons' bead-throwing TV appearances and The Order of Myths does a terrific job of demonstrating Mobile's pride in its people and the other side of the coin, the downer aspect - so much of that pride falls on one specific group to the exclusion of others.
The most disturbing moments arrive through the players on the sidelines. A thread of self-inferiotic thought evidenced in some of the statements of the African descendants: the little girl who states the white Mardi Gras is probably better; the black formal train designer whose esteem for praise delivered by her white counterpart seems a tad unhealthy; on the other end an ingratiating train designer declaring to a former, no waged (white) Mardi Gras deb, "there is only one Mardi Gras Queen."
What makes The Order of Myths such a great watch (in addition to the very well-shot HD-to-35mm print)is that Margaret Brown shows all this without condemning anyone and without manipulating the viewers into doing it for her (many of at the showing I attended found a good deal of humor). These are her own roots she's examining and trying to reconcile herself to. She's also trying to get a conversation started. Happens easier when no one's yelling.
Directed by Margaret Brown - 97 minutes. Expect audio from an interview in a few days. |
| By now there's not very much that needs to be said about Iron Man I think. Either you've already seen it, you intend to see it but you'll probably wait for pay-per-view, or you're not going anywhere near it.
It's an interesting picture because it represents something new where explosion movies are concerned.
In the world of a young, 1960s comic book reader, the heroes are badass and straight-up, the bad guys are badass but easily dispatched, and the good guys fight for truth, justice and the American Way. The generation that grew up with Robert Downey Jr. was the one that had to, as pre-teens, teens and finally young adults, attempt to process the myths we'd been teethed on in the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, El Salvador and Nicaragua. If not for the awakening to a more nuanced world, delivered by those events and more, we might actually be able to sit down for two hours and, buoyed by Downey's performance as Stan Lee & Marvel's coolest guy on earth and think, 'yeah, could happen.'
Tony Stark is a near anarchist in his personal life and business marketing, but Believes in the order provided by the weapons industry; a brilliant improviser whose mustache is trimmed with such precision one could imagine Stark programmed one of his robots to do the job. He's smarter than any other man alive, better looking, wittier, gets all the girls, too, and yet it takes him getting kidnapped in Afghanistan to figure out that sometimes arms dealers do side business with shadowy rogues? (Say it ain't so!)
Cue the toys: they explode; they focus on many targets at once; they include touchscreens and computerized, working halograms; they take-off into the sky and land with a crash; they do pretty much everything toys that go 'boom' are supposed to do in the movies.
What's different about Iron Man to other action and action hero flicks is that the producers put the emphasis on the characters and hired great actors to give life to them. Tony Stark isn't believable, but Downey is. Bad guy Obadiah Stane isn't really believable either, but you wouldn't know that from watching Jeff Bridges, who seems to have as much fun in a hopped up alloy suit of destruction as he did unveiling the Tucker. Same for Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts. What's brilliant about the casting is the producers know these characters aren't believable, and they know you know it, but they get around it by hiring actors who can take the popcorniest of the popcorn movies and make you care.
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|  Someone viewing Christopher Nolan’s well-earned second stab (this time with co-screenplay author, brother Jonathan) at the Batman franchise looking for a big, dark, violent action-thriller doesn’t need to own a copy of the Principia Discordia
— unless or maybe especially if that person is a movie reviewer who
sets out to be unimpressed. Perhaps it's because I do own a copy that,
in spite of my own penchant for being unimpressed, I found The Dark Knight
both entertaining and rewarding. More about the negative criticisms
later, because they are making the news or at least the ‘sphere.
The
film opens with a bank heist perpetrated by a bunch of clowns; their
ringleader brilliantly set up the job in such a way that each of the
robbers would kill off one of his cohorts in daisy chain fashion, until
the mastermind slips away as the sole beneficiary. And that’s only one
of the many grand entrances made by the villain, Heath Ledger’s
much-talked about Joker. Joker, it is eventually laid out, is an agent
of chaos.
The basic plot: the mob is upset that Batman is
making life difficult for them and wants him gone. An underworld
upstart in clown make-up, with a penchant for destruction, offers to do
the job — for a price. In addition to the money, for his own
satisfaction what he wants more than anything is to see Batman
unmasked. Throughout the film, Joker will present moral dilemmas for
most of the film’s major characters and even more of the many minor
ones.
Batman’s team, meanwhile, is joined by a new player on
the scene: Harvey Dent, an incorruptible idealist dedicated to bringing
down the above-mentioned mob, headed by Eric Roberts. In addition to
their fight against Evil Bad Men, Dent and Batman alter-ego Bruce Wayne
share a romantic interest in Rachel Dawes, this time portrayed by
Maggie Gyllenhaal in a take that’s so sexed up compared to Katie
Holmes’ version 1.0 that it’s no wonder Rachel makes the choice she
does about 2/3 in.
Heath Ledger’s Joker is mesmerizing. The
haphazardly-applied lipstick mirrors his random body movements and
dialog; everything he does and says seems to have been pulled out of
his ass. It’s a truly terrifying Joker owing nothing to Cesar Romero
and Jack Nicholsons' wicked uncles. He's far more the creepy cousin who
never comes out of the attic, showing glimpses of a whiny loser lurking
underneath rationalized malevolence. A psychopathic destroyer and liar,
however, does not an anarchist, make. Not necessarily. This is where
the brothers Nolan fail, but at least they fail on the side of glory.
Although on the surface it seems the film is a meditation on good and evil, the corrupt and the incorruptible, The Dark Knight
is appreciated more fully as a dialog on the varying forces of control
and chaos, with a side trip about the importance of letting people have
their legends and myths.
On the side of negative control are mob
interests and their underworld economy; in the corner for benevolent
control are the representatives of the good people of Gotham City (or
at least their less corrupt representatives, anyway), with Harvey Dent
as white knight and Gary Oldman, in what may be the most subtle
performance of his entire career, reprising his role as Lt. Gordon.
Gordon's the fulcrum between Dent's heroism and Batman's despair; like
Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox, he's a good guy who's cynical enough to
get things done. On the side of chaos, supposedly, we have Batman and
Joker.
There's the sole flaw: Joker isn’t really a chaos
agent. In his own way, Joker is as dedicated to control and displays of
power as Harvey Dent and the double-headed coin he tosses as a way of
deciding his own next move. It's not Joker but Batman who represents
the force of anarchistic, destructive chaos. He blows up what needs
to be blown up and lets others do the rebuilding. This leaves no agent
of constructive chaos, unless you consider Batman's alter-ego Bruce
Wayne - but Nolan only shows us a hint
of this. In the greater scheme, all this isn't that huge a thing
because, really, how many people regularly try to work their way
through control/chaos constructs outside of a few nerdy Discordians?
There’s been some brouhaha on the interwebs; the few critics who’ve given thumbs down and thrown squishy tomatoes at The Dark Knight complain about a few things: its relentless bleakness and violence; it’s too talky on the headier aspects, entering into pretentious Matrix-like territory. Some
even suggest that it veers into apologia for George Bush and the War on
Terror, perhaps thanks to a certain eavesdropping situation. Finally
there are some complaints about action sequences being choppy.
Feh.
There’s
also talk of a posthumous Oscar for Ledger; the odds of any film actor
so embodying such a riveting a character between now and December, let
alone in a supporting role, are crazy low. With the death factor,
though the outpouring expression of loss that accompanied his OD may
have seemed over-exaggerated at the time, compared to his short career
span and seemingly low box-office appeal (mainstream media would have
you think Bubba isn’t going anywhere near the theater for every next
flick made by the Brokeback guy), what was so heartbreaking about his
death was not just the personal tragedy, but losing someone with his
ability to take such heavy risks as an artist and
bring in the publicity machine to create audiences for movies that
dared to inspire, and be inspired by, expression that went far beyond
making things that go ‘boom.’
Posted by Mary Brace
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|     Watching George Lucas & Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - or any of the Indiana Jones movies, for that matter - ought to be required study for every film-maker ever hoping to enter the action/thriller genre. While the franchise offers us as many logic-defying situations as the typical action flick, Lucasberg understands that above all they're here to entertain us and as long as they do that even the most anal of viewers won't mind, for instance, that when told our hero's the father of a young man, he doesn't question the veracity of the statement in the least. Instead of demanding a blood test, he immediately claims paternity and demands the Wild One-era Brando-wannabe get his fannie back in school.That unquestioning faith could be due, in part, because Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones finds out this information while neck deep in a type of quicksand, along with the boy's mother - or it could be because another thing Lucas understands is myth-making and if the world Indiana Jones occupies isn't as wholly a product of Lucas' imagination as Star Wars was, the character is nonetheless a part of America's mythic pantheon for the franchise, alone (reports have it cashing in a $300million + opening weekend at the box office). Spielberg, he's got a few stories of his own that have long ago seeped into American culture lore. Okay, so .... It's the 1950s. Professor Henry Jones has aged a bit; instead of fighting Nazis, he's fending off Hoover's FBI due to evil communists intruding on his day. The story goes, there's a magical crystal skull that, if properly hung in its place, will give the hanger all the knowledge and powers of the universe, more or less. One of Indy's old chums (John Hurt as a kinder,gentler Dennis Hopper) seems to know where it is, and comrade crystal-gazer Irina (Cate Blanchett's turn as a stylistic badass)Spalko wants it In addition to some of the best / most fun stunts and chases the be shot anywhere, the movie has a lot of little, creepy things to make the delicate squirm, just a bit. Not just spiders & snakes, but man-hungry ants the size of golf balls, lots and lots of cobwebs you just know have to be hiding something nasty and dead -- I'm not going to give that particular spoiler away, I think. I was only really disappointed by one aspect of the movie, and thatwas Karen Allen's return as Marion Ravenwood. It's expected Marionwould be a bit like the Tasmanian she-devil, but not expected she'dspend so much of her screen time as Tasmanian she-devil in bride mode. I suspect (hope) there may have been a bit left on the cutting room floor. |
| "Ferocious" is the first word - really the only word - that comes to mind when trying to describe this movie and Daniel Day-Lewis's keystone performance. For the first five-ten minutes, the only sounds heard are Jonny Greenwood's (Radiohead) eerie, pulsing score and miner Daniel Plainview's grunting efforts at extracting gold from eighteen feet under and then, after a mishap, pulling himself out of the shaft and off to market with a broken leg. The rewards are miniscule for those efforts.
The next time we see Plainview he announces himself as a straight-talking oilman, ready to help bring wealth to communities gifted with the asset he seeks. He reminds me a bit of PT Barnum but without the humor, and a bit like Silas Marner but without the redemption. When a Mysterious Stranger offers a tip, he acts on it, eventually buying up enough parcels to keep Standard Oil or any other competitor from making a dime off the score. In the process he makes an enemy of town preacher Eli Sunday, who wants Daniel to cough up money for a church to be built, and later demands glory. The denial of the latter sets up the battle the movie's title refers to.
Like most of Paul Thomas Anderson's films, there's a morality play involved. Who's the bad guy? Daniel, with his deadly greed and ambition or the more subtly manipulative Eli, who claims to serve the Lord but is mostly concerned with matters pertaining to his own ego? |
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