Goddamn Florsheim Shoe

Sometimes I watch Terry Crews for comic inspiration...

2011-11-13T04:11:00.000-08:00

That thing he does with his head at the 37 sec. mark....

Halloween II (Rob Zombie, 2009)

2011-11-01T20:35:00.000-07:00

Brief Update

2011-09-20T16:57:00.000-07:00

Due to being quite busy for once in my life, I haven't really had time to update this blog. But here's some quick thoughts on some recent viewing:

-Vincente Minnelli was, like, the greatest. Pure expression, the likes of which I haven't seen equaled. An American in Paris is one of cinema's key masterpieces, and expression of expression, of love and art and dreams. His camera is effortless, moving with grace. And his color, goddamn.

-Watched Breaking Bad, seasons 1-3, which proves that AMC has the two greatest shows on tv (along with Mad Men). Hilarious, Bryan Cranston's a genius. But also strangely intuitive at times, conjuring Lynchian images, from the extreme close-up of the blinking red light on a smoke detector, to light filtering through bullet holes, illuminating drifting dust.

A little De Palma for your Monday night....

2011-09-12T22:36:00.000-07:00

Jaws: Fear in America

2011-08-20T18:28:00.000-07:00

As I was watching Jaws last night, I was struck by just how Hitchcockian it is. This is no new revelation. Since it's release, much has been made of Spielberg's expert handling of suspense, giving way to many comparisons with the master. Such comparisons are earned, but it's relation to Hitchcock goes deeper than that.

Bruce, the shark, is rather like Hitch's birds, in that he is a manifestation of something psychological. In his case, it is fear, rather than Hitchcock's sexually significant avians. Bruce is fear. Bruce is Brody's fear, of the water, of uncertainty. His drunken words, reflecting on being a cop in New York City, lends even greater significance to Bruce. Brody laments that, in Manhattan, he never felt like he was accomplishing anything. Bruce embodies Brody's fear as a police chief, the fear of being obsolete, useless.

But the fear goes beyond Brody. Bruce is the town's fear, the nation's fear. The first attacked are the youth, the leftovers of sixties culture, partying on the beach at night. The optimism of the youth is the first victim of shark. But the fear radiates outward. The 4th of July, the embodiment of American ideals, values, patriotism, is assaulted at its core by the unknown. The 70s were a greatly uncertain time in America, and Bruce fulfills that uncertainty. The citizens of Amity Island are exploited by their leader, the mayor. The people are caught between an untrustworthy leader and the void of the shark.

It is Brody, the common man, the least eccentric of the three on a mission to kill the shark, that must conquer fear and uncertainty. Quint, the figure of obsession and wisdom, is ultimately futile in the struggle against Bruce. The intellectual Hooper also proves futile. It is the common man who must rise to defeat the shark.

This is my first post on Jaws. The next will focus on Spielberg's extraordinary technical achievements.

Memory, Fantasy, & Dreams in Once Upon a Time in the West

2011-08-07T00:49:00.000-07:00

After several viewings, I feel I finally understand Sergio Leone's opus, Once Upon a Time in the West. It's hyper-stylized surface has made this a film of pure fun for so long, but I now realize how wrong a summation that is. This is a tragic film, a desperate film. The characters are desperate, holding onto memories and fantasies, chasing illusions across the deserts of The West. They express themselves through death.

Cheyenne (Jason Robards), ruminates over the memories of his mother, "...the biggest whore in Alameda and the finest woman that ever lived. Whoever my father was, for an hour or for a month - he must have been a happy man." Cheyenne, arguably the character with the lightest heart, is afflicted with the specter of an absent father. It's only mentioned once, almost a joke, but the words remain.

Mr. Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), a train tycoon, dreams of reaching the Pacific with his railroad, but is hindered by "tuberculosis of the bones" (?!). He stares wistfully into his painting of the Pacific, and hears the crash of waves he'll never see, as his eyes well up with tears. The expressive sound of waves, reaching across the landscape and through time, urge Morton forward. In death, he crawls towards a puddle of muddy water, and the waves return once more, almost a lament.

The Widow McBain (Claudia Cardinale), standing alone at the station, waits for a carriage that will never arrive. She has escaped a life of prostitution in New Orleans, to live on the homestead of Bret McBain. She hires a carriage to take her to Sweetwater, McBain's home, and arrives to see a mournful crowd. The family has been slaughtered. This manifests itself into anger and sheer will, but like every other character, she ends up alone.

And then there's Harmonica (Charles Bronson). The stoic, dusty man, haunted by blurry visions of a man, on a quest nobody understands. His is the path of revenge, as his blurred memory manifests itself into a tragic tableau.

The central evil here is Frank (Henry Fonda), the coldest man on Earth. He is a cold sociopath, an affliction the world has to bear. In reality, Morton would be the villain, but his humanity is clear in the presence of Frank. The death Frank has dealt connects the story's threads.

But there is no true happy ending for our heroes. They're like ghosts drifting through the landscape, with no definable home.

2011-07-15T21:09:00.000-07:00

A Night Alone: A Scene from Albert Brooks' Modern Romance

2011-07-11T00:16:00.000-07:00

Simply put, over the last month or so, Albert Brooks' 1981 masterpiece Modern Romance has become one of my favorite films of all time (see my top ten on the right side of this blog).

Albert Brooks is one of the few filmmakers that I'd easily dub a genius without hesitation. His comedies, especially Modern Romance, Defending Your Life, Lost in America, and Real Life represent some of the strongest America cinema ever created. But Modern Romance is special. It is real life. It is men and women. It is romance (and anti-romance). I've never seen a better film about the relations between men and women.

A sequence early in the film struck a profoundly resonant chord with me. Our central protagonist, Robert Cole (Albert Brooks), returns home after deciding not to work, being that he just broke up (again) with his girlfriend, Mary Harvard. Robert has just popped a couple quaaludes, and the night unfolds pitifully, honestly, achingly, and hilariously before him.

Brooks' style here is essential. He is reserved, favoring long takes, often at a safe distance, and when he pushes in for a close up, it isn't used for a cheap reveal. Robert makes a call to his coworker, complains about the ludes not working. He tries to sleep, fails. The ludes start working. He turns on music, talks to his bird, calls people he barely knows.

This sequence is genius because of its humanity, its reality. Anyone who has experienced a lonely night alone on substances can relate. Brooks is an extraordinary director because, while always working towards laughs, he gracefully slides painful and real humanity underneath the laughs. Often, one cant laugh at a hilarious Brooks joke because of how true it is.

These embarrassing phone calls, these accidental dates, these false professions of love, all fit into Brooks brand of comedy. Brooks is a genius precisely because he deals with people as people, which is something many great comedic filmmakers fail to achieve. Also, as this sequence and the rest of the film demonstrate, he is no slouch with the form. Shots linger in one's mind: Robert's sustained phone call to a relatively unknown woman, or a personal favorite, as he gets into his car to drive, and falls asleep to Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust", all in restrained long shot.

Robert's night alone is one of the funniest/loneliest sequences committed to film, and one of the greatest.

The Blur: Michael Bay's Transformers

2011-07-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

Writing about Michael Bay proves a difficult task. Gross, predictable vilification will only obscure his merits as a filmmaker, as it has done to Tony Scott, Rob Zombie, and many others. But I must also be hesitant, because Bay, for all of his worth, is not the artist Scott or Zombie is. These are pointless comparisons though; saying one artist is superior than another leads nowhere.

Michael Bay isn't exactly an artist. As had been stated by many superior writers, he's more akin to a CEO, using his vast, materialistic resources, and hurling excessive amounts of money at the screen. But there is artistry in Bay, especially in his "Blur", the dazzling color and movement he's been working towards perfecting since the first Transformers (for my money, his first "important" achievement). For the record, only the latest, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, is actually a good movie. The first is strikingly boring at times, and idiotic/hateful in its ideals. The second, Revenge of the Fallen, is an improvement, but is so unwieldy that it goes down like gasoline. This third installment runs like clockwork compared to the others, and features Bay's grandest achievements in style yet.

Bay's action sequences have appropriately been called "incomprehensible" by the bulk of mainstream critics. This is largely a true assertion, but not something I'd fault Bay for at this point, because, as of this last installment, he's got the process so thoroughly figured out that he has created something unique. Frenetic is the easiest and most honest word for describing these giant robot battles. Bay pushes the bright, ecstatic digital colors of the Autobots (Bumblebee's ridiculous yellow, Optimus's blue and red) through the screen at high speeds, clashing them against the darker, bland hues of the Decepticons, and finds a beautiful sort of chaos. Two robots battling isn't a fight in the way kung-fu is, with two clear opponents striking at each other, but is rather a loud, clanging abstraction, with eye-popping splashes of orange fire and deeply immersive sound design (Bay's sound men are among his greatest assets). Maybe it doesn't work as conventional action cinema, but it is something startling on its own.

One showstopper comes in a more human-focused sequence, as elite soldiers drop from the sky in wind suits. It's quite visceral and riveting, and benefits from Bay's frenetic style. Instead of using clear spacing, Bay employs a highly mobile camera, and fast cutting, to submerge the viewer in the experience of these soldiers. It also has a firm sense of pacing and rhythm, as the ever-decreasing survivors descend through various levels of chaos. Up to this point, it's the best action sequence starring people Bay has yet produced.

Bay also has a eye for visuals outside of these battles. Dark of the Moon has these in spades: the gorgeous, resonant image of a spacecraft exploding just after liftoff at dusk, the genuinely apocalyptic skulls rolling down Chicago's streets, the interior of a collapsing skyscraper, etc.

Of course, Bay's film is as disgusting and sexist in its humor and ideology as ever. Bay hilariously tries to one-up his introductory shot of Megan Fox in Revenge of the Fallen with a cut to a tracking shot of Rosie-Huntington Whiteley's ass as she walks to her bedroom. And, despite dropping the completely horrible Twins from the last film, he has added a smaller robot to befriend the New Yorker-bot from Revenge, who comes complete with idiotic humor. Ken Jeong's cameo is ludicrous and annoying, and John Malkovich feels needless and even a bit distracting. Frances McDormand, on the other hand, carries herself well. Which brings me to Rosie-Huntington Whiteley. I have to disagree with a majority of critics: I think she was an improvement on Fox. Neither are master-thespians, but Whiteley actually delivers lines, as opposed to Fox's method of puffing her lips and draining all emotion. Whiteley isn't a good actor, but she tries.

But these issues of actors and lines are largely irrelevant. The stars are the robots.

2011-06-28T17:44:00.001-07:00

Anticipation...

The Tree of Life: Terrence Malick's Rosetta Stone

2011-06-27T00:21:00.000-07:00

Let me get this off my chest and out in the open immediately: The Tree of Life is a masterpiece.

Now, to stop being effusive and explain what I saw in the film.

Rather than this being a culmination of everything Malick has done to this point, this feels more like a return to the primordial ooze of his existance, reflected upon by the wisdom of age. It isn't youthful (this is surely and old-man's film), but at the same time, it remains at the beginning. The style is a further progression into abstraction, but the emotions, and the man, are clearer than ever before. This is a man bearing his soul as an artist and a being.

Malick is exploring and revealing himself here. By filtering his transcendentalist philosophies through his own childhood, and bracketing it with the history of the universe itself, Malick is explaining, or showing, his artist's soul. His weaving of the personal with the transcendental helps to understand better his other work, from Badlands through The New World.

The universe segments have been controversial, accused by some as being screen savers. I find this dismissive and shallow, and based on a misunderstanding. To call it arbitrary would be to think Malick threw those in as literal depictions in an attempt to connect childhood to the cosmos. Rather, this is the contextualization of the cosmos in the artist's mind itself. This is a memory piece, more than anything else, and Malick's evocation of the universe is his own. Rather than being arbitrary, it is key to understanding how he considers himself in the order of things, and therefore how he expresses himself in cinema.

This is not to say Malick's film's sole worth is as a memory piece. He draws masterful parallels, and creates such a vibrantly sensual texture, that this is surely an expansive work of art, without clear borders. As someone who admires all of Malick's work, but is a tad skeptical of certain films in his filmmography, I have to say that I found Malick's achievements here to the greatest in his career so far, and match what his most ardent fans have expressed in the past for the first time.

The children on the playground dovetail wonderfully with the primitive life of the earlier segment. The blades of grass brushing against the bicycles. The flashlight in a boy's mouth, illuminating his cheeks. The cracked driveway, weeds poking though, in the early evening. Two wet blades of grass on a woman's foot. You can practically smell the fragrences of summer wafting off the screen. It's an immersive experience.

The Goddamn Introductory Mad Men Post

2011-06-11T22:07:00.000-07:00

Mad Men is something I anticipate returning to often on this blog. It has been a source of inspiration, reverence, joy, and excitement to me, and is, as a whole, one of my absolute favorite works of art of all time. Its resonance for me is unequalled in any form of narrative, be it written or filmed. But I cant get ahead of myself. Writing about a series is different than writing about a film. I don't want to summarize; I don't want to try to cram everything in here. I have time and unlimited posting potential to chart the drama of Don Draper and company. So I'll start here with a general, introductory piece, to shed light on why the series is so important and revelatory to me.

Mad Men is about identity; to be more specific, it is about the quest for identity, told through the cypher of the enigmatic Don Draper. The rejection of a false self in a search for a true understanding of oneself. Simply stated, this is the most interesting theme for me, and occupies my thoughts often. Mad Men is the single greatest take on this theme I've yet seen.

Don Draper, initially the uber-confident, brilliant ad man of Sterling Cooper, is a facade, a shell constructed as a defense against internal demons and external shame (and crime). Dick Whitman is the man underneath, a figure beaten into submission by this construct. But the real identity is not firmly rooted in either persona. Rather, this man is Don/Dick, a by turns strutting master of his domain and melancholy loner. Don Draper may be a construct, but real keys to identity lie there. The confidence, swagger if you will, is real, and part of the elusive true man he seeks inside himself. But Dick Whitman, and the past he brings with him, is equally important and integral to the real self. The central dramatic thrust for the show is his quest to reconcile both sides to forge a true identity. Mad Men is a delightful ensemble piece, but it's really Don Draper's show.

The Favorites: Red Line 7000 (1965)

2011-06-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

Howard Hawks is known for his group, or Hawksian Unit, films, which revolve around the interactions and duties of a tight knit group of men, usually with a central figure (often John Wayne). These films, Only Angels Have Wings, Rio Bravo, Hatari!, El Dorado, etc., are not as concerned with forward narrative motion so much as the relationships within the group, and the various symbolic or simple acts that are performed between the members. These men usually work dangerous jobs, whether it be flying mail planes in the mountains of South America (Only Angels Have Wings), keeping a murderer in jail (Rio Bravo), or hunting wild beasts in Africa (Hatari!), and it is this danger that gives birth to the dynamics of the group, which are based largely on professional responsibility, stoicism, and loyalty.

Women, in these Hawksian Unit films, often come from the outside, and have to force themselves in, such as Jean Arthur in Angels or Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo. Though the men may be resistant initially, Hawks' women prove their worth on equal ground with the male characters, and are integrated into the group.

Hawks 1965 film, Red Line 7000, is the perversion of his ideal group, and perhaps his most negative vision. Unlike the more utopian groups in Rio Bravo or Hatari!, his unit of race car drivers and their lovers owes more to the melancholy life of his pilots in Only Angels Have Wings. In Angels, Hawks approaches death with the sober eye of an atheist, with no consolation provided to the friends of yet another pilot absorbed by flame and twisted metal. The absolute lack of ideas of salvation and an afterlife casts a deep melancholy over the film, which is also present in Red Line 7000.

Red Line 7000 casts its focus on three racers, Mike Marsh (James Caan), Ned Arp (John Robert Crawford), and Dan McCall (Skip Ward), and their three lovers, Holly McGregor (Gail Hire), Julie Kazarian (Laura Devon), and Gabrielle Queneau (Marianna Hill), along with the manager of the racing team, Pat Kazarian.

Hawks begins and ends with a crash, as Holly's former boyfriend dies in an accident on the track. The frequency of death and injury leaves emotional baggage with each character, fracturing the group. In fact, though it appears to be one of his group dramas initially, the film dissolves into three pairs, Mike/Gabrielle, Ned/Julie, Dan/Holly. And the characters themselves are more neurotic, unpredictable, and frail than those of his other unit films. Holly remains an emotional wreck, submerging her pain below the surface as the film progresses, only to have it manifest itself as superstition, as she believes herself a bad luck charm (we learn that other lovers also died in the past). Mike, who may appear as the film's most Hawksian character, stoic for much of the running time, reveals himself to be a man prone to paranoid, even dangerous jealousy. Julie, who lies in bed with Ned, seeks verbal validation from her lover in one of the most fragile moments for any Hawks character. Ned is a self-serving asshole, unable to return Julie's affections, and unable to serve the group as a whole. Only Dan, the most underdeveloped of the racers, seems to be a stable personality, but even he spreads pain, as he dumps Gabrielle almost immediately upon their arrival, in favor of Holly.

Hawks develops the man/car relationship subtly, and completely through his terms. Hawks' men are committed to their jobs, and in this case, their jobs are their cars, unreliable heaps of metal prone to exploding on the track. This precarious relationship with the machine again echos Only Angels Have Wings, but here the connection is even deeper. In Only Angels Have Wings, the planes themselves were not integral to the character's emotions. Rather, they were what the men strived to be, vessels of a purely professional nature. In Red Line 7000, the cars hold a far more personal place in their driver's souls. When Mike first courts Gabrielle, he takes her, upon request, to the racetrack, where he lets her take the wheel for nighttime drive. Here his car does not intrude into the personal, but was already a part of it. When Ned Arp first tries out for his spot on the team, his race around the track not only represents his professional audition, but his audition for Julie's affections as well, a bond sealed by rubber and steel. Holly's first true encounter with Dan happens after she comes upon his flipped car, and gives him a ride back to the hotel where the team stays. The cars form and cement the relationships of the film's three pairs.

Hawks offers no real consolation or promise of stability for any of the pairs. In the final scene, after each pair as broken apart and then reformed, seemingly stable, Hawks gives his final dialogue to the three women, sitting in the stand, lamenting/accepting their stressful lives, as the three men race around the track. Suddenly, a loud, violent crash fills the soundtrack as the women gasp and stare on in horror. Hawks freezes the frame on the ruined wreck, and the film ends, in what may be his bleakest moment as a filmmaker. The identity of the crash victim is unknown, given no time for reflection or lamentation. Nor does the identity matter. In an instant, Hawks brings the mortality of these characters back to the forefront. It doesn't matter if the plot has favored them, or that their relationships are momentarily stable; they are bound to these machines and this track. There is only dust and fire.

Lists!

2011-05-31T17:22:00.000-07:00

Another list, prompted by list-making-mania.

The Ten Greatest American Filmmakers Working (or Directors Working Primarily in America)

1. Michael Mann

2. Clint Eastwood

3. James Gray

4. Steven Spielberg

5. Abel Ferrara

6. Martin Scorsese

7. Terrence Malick

8. Tony Scott

9. Paul Thomas Anderson

10. Rob Zombie

Close, but No Cigar:

-Kathryn Bigelow

-Quentin Tarantino

-Brian De Palma

-Greg Mottola

-M. Night Shyamalan

-Kelly Reichardt

-Mark Neveldine/Brian Taylor

-Steven Soderbergh

-Sylvester Stallone

-Wes Anderson

-Matt Reeves

-David Fincher

-Judd Apatow

-Adam McKay

-Spike Lee

-David Lynch (tentative, being that I heard he may not make another).

Most Overrated: Joel & Ethan Coen

Most Underrated: Rob Zombie

Best Actors' Director: Clint Eastwood

Most Daring: Michael Mann

Look-Out For: Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor

Most Interesting Hack: Michael Bay

The King of Comedy: Judd Apatow

Worst of the Worst: Ron Howard

Expansion

2011-05-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

In order to pump creativity/productivity into my blog, I will be expanding its scope to television, music, and literature (and whatever the hell else suits my fancy). And what better way to celebrate this than a list?

My Ten Favorite TV Shows

1. Mad Men

2. Twin Peaks

3. Freaks and Geeks

4. The Wire

5. The Simpsons

6. Arrested Development

7. The X-Files

8. Firefly

9. Lost

10. Beavis and Butthead

One Paragraph Thought/Reviews: Speed (1994)

2011-04-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

Anyone ever think about Jan de Bont's Speed? Just how incredible it is, how minimalist an action picture it is? It's a man trying to save a bus that cant slow down! Keanu Reeves battling Dennis Hopper in the form of a walkie talkie, until their fateful final meeting on the subway. de Bont's confidence seems born of his work with auteurs such as John McTiernan (Predator) and Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct). His pacing, his sense of editing rhythm punctuated by blasts of violence, is derived from the subject, one of the most brilliantly contained action ideas ever: the bus the will explode if it drops below 50 mph. And Keanu. That's a whole other subject, one worthy of its own post, maybe many.

Rob Zombie's Halloweens

2011-04-11T16:54:00.000-07:00

I'll begin this with a simple statement: Rob Zombie's two Halloween films are the finest achievement in American horror cinema since The Thing.

Zombie has had a tough run so far with the critics, being lazily and irresponsibly lumped in with the torture porn lot of Eli Roth and company. This points either to a great misunderstanding of his work, or a critical prejudice due to Zombie's celebrity. I feel that some combination of both is likely the true cause of this gross underestimation. Zombie's Halloween films need to be viewed outside of John Carpenter's original masterpiece; they are simply an entire different kind of filmmaking, and operate by a drastically different horror philosophy. Zombie obviously holds a great deal of reverence for the 1978 film, but he has a different agenda.

The first feature goes where the original film never went: into the years between Michael Myers first childhood crime and his ensuing escape from a mental hospital 15 years later to kill once more. We begin with him as a child, living a grungy, lower class life. The first sign of his looming violence is revealed when he secretly kills his pet rat. Soon after, he murders a school bully, and on that same night (Halloween), he commits his notorious first murder, killing his step-father, older sister and her boyfriend, leaving only his infant sister alive. His mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) returns to find the grisly scene, and Michael is detained, moved to an asylum under the care of psychologist Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell).

This is the film's true heart, and it's quite remarkable. In fact, it acts as a better biopic than any of those Oscar-grubbers that critics are so often taken with. Zombie reinvents and investigates an iconic fictional character, and in the process changes the film's emotions. Carpenter's film was a precise and masterful display of formal technique, used in the service of horror. The mythos of the central character is not tied to a strong central emotion, whereas in Zombie's films, we are seeing a more personal tale, not a perfect formal object. The horror is in the personal and physical conflict, as opposed to Carpenter's abstract and mysterious horror: Michael Myers is no longer "The Shape".

We progress through the years by following Loomis's many sessions with the young Michael, and are witness to his deterioration, highlighted by snippets of Loomis's psychological-profile voice-overs. Zombie quickly skips across time, but we glean all we need to know, as we watch Michael slip further into his own skull, constantly and obsessively designing masks to conceal his face. He even grows distant from his mother, who visits him. The breaking-point comes when Michael assaults a nurse with a fork. Unable to face the despair of her creation, Michael's mother kills herself, leaving her young girl behind.

Cut to 15 years later. Michael escapes on October 31 (via bloody massacre of asylum staff), and makes a beeline for Haddonfield, Illinois, to return to the scene of his old crimes. Cue teens Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), Annie Brackett (Danielle Harris), and Lynda Van Der Klok (Kristina Klebe), three high school friends, enjoying an idle day at school, planning on various Halloween night escapes. Needless to say, Michael Myers throws a wrench in their plans.

This is the more troubled section of the first film, but still contains often sublime filmmaking. Zombie simply does not have the formal sense for suspense that Carpenter possesses, the precise eye for framing, and the keen use of empty space on the frame as a realm for intrusion and therefore horror. This is not to say that the third act isn't effective. Zombie's horror grows from brutality, and the ensuing, agonizing aftermath.

One scene in particular leaves a deep, gut-level feeling of unpleasantness and horror. Laurie's (adopted) parents are viciously murdered by Michael Myers, with savage efficiency. The violence of the sequence is gritty and highly unpleasant, but not gratuitous (as Zombie admittedly can be at times), and leaves precisely the desired effect. Zombie's Myers is not the sleek death machine of the old films, but rather a lumbering, destructive giant. The violence is more visceral and upsetting. Watching these two individuals get snuffed out almost instantaneously, without the buildup of suspense, is exactly the kind of horror Zombie is aiming for. The new Halloween films find their horror in violence and its aftermath, not the waiting for violence.

The following attacks are for the most part approached the same way, with varying success. Lynda's death is rather shallow and cheap, and is easily the lowest moment of the film, reduced to basic titillation, and her lover's demise rather lazily reuses one of Carpenter's strongest images to much lesser effect. Annie's beating is set to follow the same course, but instead is left off-screen. We find her broken but alive, an effective restraint by Zombie. Her damaged, but mysteriously spared, form is key to some of the most haunting aspects of the next film.

The final climax between Laurie, Michael, and the late-arriving Loomis is handled well, if less excitingly than Carpenter's finish (but with a more bleak final shot). Laurie's torrential screams after she puts a bullet in Michael's head finish the first installment with a haunting punch to the gut; lost innocence, shattered ideals, dead loved ones, and mental/physical scars loom over the next film.

Halloween II (2009) is the masterpiece of the two films, a haunting coda that cuts directly to the soul, one of the most remarkable horror films in terms of style and emotional heft ever made. Now, after that bit of effusive praise, time to actually write about the film.

We pick up directly where we left off. Laurie, injured and wandering the streets with a gun in her hand, is picked up by Sherrif Brackett (the excellent Brad Dourif, and father to the character Annie). She, and the other two survivors, Annie and Loomis, are rushed to the hospital. The gruesome detail is presented soberly by Zombie here as doctors rush to mend the wounds suffered by the survivors. The rest of the film charts Laurie's psychological damage, with a sideplot about Loomis using the Myers case for celebrity. Michael survives his wounds, and escapes. His body's disappearance is constantly referred to throughout the film, and one gets the sense that none of the characters can truly have faith in his apparent death. It's been two years since the events of the first film, and Laurie, her parents dead, stays with the Bracketts on the outskirts of Haddonfield.

This film is more-specifically about the aftermath of violence, the various means with which people cope (or don't cope) with it, and the scars, physical, mental, and emotional, it leaves on the surviving victims. It also hones in on a sense of mortality rarely seen in horror cinema; the survivors, rather than being spared as the killer heads off to a sequel with different characters, are tracked down once more by the alive Myers, making their plight more poignant, and the violence waged against them more authentically upsetting: indeed, this is one of the most despairing and dark films I've ever seen (Lars von Trier's 2009 "horror film" ain't got nothing on this).

The opening scene is followed by a expressionistic nightmare sequence, that lets us in on the interior state of Laurie. It also serves as the first introduction for Zombie's more virtuoso style employed in this installment, changing to hazy 16mm to capture a more surreal and grubby atmosphere, while delivering in stunning and powerful imagery. To top it off, he lays on The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin", creating an ethereal and terrifying encounter with Laurie's subconscious, punctuated by violence, ambiance, and music.

We are informed that this is a regular occurrence for Laurie, letting us in on the first evidence of the characters' scars. When she awakens from the nightmare, and stares into her face in the mirror, we see the accompanying physical scars on her face. She is haunted by the events in both her waking and asleep lives. Annie, in the next scene, also carries scars on her face, but reverts back to her old personality, another form of dealing with the trauma. The third survivor, Loomis, takes a different route. He transforms the events into celebrity, giving lectures on Michael and writing books on the subject. This recalls our country's morbid obsession with the survivors of grisly occurrences. Loomis is accused of profiteering off the misery of others, and his celebrity begins to spiral downwards.

Michael meanwhile wanders the countryside, living off animals, now sporting a shaggy beard. Zombie pushes into his mind this time, showing us his hallucinations of his mother, clad in bright white, and a white horse. She urges him on to finish his killing, eventually leading him back to Haddonfield.

The driving force for Laurie's psychological turmoil is her secret (unknown even to her) relation to Michael. She is his younger sister, adopted after their mother's suicide. Indeed, she is visited by the same images of her mother and the white horse, hinting at impending psychosis, and driving her feverish decent into depression, rage, and drug-addiction.

The film progressively becomes more erratic and furious as it closes in on its conclusion, and the survivors face doom once more. When the first contact between Michael and a previous victim occurs, it holds enough dramatic weight to become overwhelmingly horrific and desperate. Sherrif Brackett sends a man over to guard Annie on Halloween night, even though, the year prior, Michael did not return and it ended up being a pointless exercise. The guard is quickly killed, and Michael subsequently assaults Annie once more, in the same fashion, by brutally beating her rather than knifing her as he would with most of his victims. This is once again left off screen, as we only see Annie, in slow motion, rushing away from Michael, before cutting away.

Zombie's repetition of fate for Annie lends the sequence a deeply haunting quality, as we so desperately don't want to see the most innocent of the three survivors go through another wrenching ordeal. The recurrence of violence, coming back to the survivors, cannot not be prevented, and Annie's agonizing death, in the arms of Laurie, is hard to watch simply for its sheer emotional impact, and the resonance it has within the film, as death returns for those who escaped prior. The certainty of fate here elevates Halloween II to the level of masterpiece, as we feel ourselves tied inherently to those who previously made it. Their own impermanence echoes our own in reality. It is here, in death's certainty, that Zombie finds the deepest horror of all.

When Sherrif Brackett arrives on the scene, he collapses at the sight of his daughter's corpse. This is so well handled that the grief in inescapable for the audience, bringing home once again the emotional core of the film. Zombie inserts a few shots from a home video of Annie as a child into Brackett's grieving, and the sense of parental lost and despair is palpable. It's in moments like these that Zombie proves himself a master filmmaker.

The climax, with Michael, Laurie, and Loomis all gathering at a rural shack, the police surrounding, believing a hostage situation to be underway, offers no consolation or solace, and instead concludes with an apocalyptic, torrential display of death and moral destruction. Zombie suggests that violence cannot be overcome, and that its traces will always remain on those who perpetrated it, or those who were victims of it. Halloween II is Zombie's most empathetic film, as he connects emotionally with his characters' suffering, but ultimately cannot silence the void that has grown beneath them, swallowing them and the film whole. We end in bright, blinding light, a hell disguised as heaven.

Michael Mann: Heat (1995)

2011-02-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

Writing about Heat is like, well... I'll quote David Bowie: "...dancing about architecture." This is a film of emotions and intuitions so powerful they consume the mind, and leave words rather useless. One can write a book about the meticulous formal construction of Michael Mann's 1995 masterpiece; his smooth pans, his expressive and jarring sound design, etc. But what's key to Mann, what's always made him more than a stylist and detail-obsessed maestro, is the feelings his cinema evoke. A Michael Mann film will always be recognizable from his craft, but also, more importantly, from its intuitions. Mann is an emotional filmmaker of the most powerful kind, and the intensity of said emotions drive his pictures.

The cat-and-mouse plot of Heat is a typical cops vs. robbers tale. Ace detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), with his crew (including Ted Levine, Wes Studi, & Mykelti Williamson) hunt down a skillful unit of thieves lead by Neil McCauley (Robert Deniro, his crew being Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, & Danny Trejo). The plot also concerns itself with the romances of the two leads: Hanna's wife (Diane Venora) and McCauley's new-found girlfriend (Amy Brennemen), who does not know he is a thief. The film charts their various escapades and the melodrama that inherently follows.

Prior to Heat Mann's films followed a more rigid, image-based style, dictated by evocative, concrete visuals that stood, frame-by-frame, each as their own miniature worlds. The images in Thief (1981), The Keep (1983), Manhunter (1986), and Last of the Mohicans (1992) are crystalline and pure, and dictate the film and its mood more than the other way around. But Heat marks a changing point in Mann's filmmography, a shift towards something more intuitive. The film's are now driven by feelings and sensations, and the images are spawned from these elemental sources of emotion. Rather than being controlled by the images, Mann now erases the distinctions between the visuals he creates and the feelings that gave rise to them. His earlier films were angry existential tales filled with impressive, often jaw-dropping displays of style, but he's been working on an entirely different plane since Heat.

In Heat, and his films since, we, as the audience, are seeing the world much like an archetypal Mann-character does, rather than observing them from behind glass. This immersion, via Mann's intuition, into the headspace of a Mann-character creates allows for a much more empathetic connection to the characters. Rather than watching the fury of James Caan in Thief, we are feeling the lost disconnect of Deniro in Heat.

In a short, key sequence, we are given an understanding of the McCauley character greater than that provided by any of his trademark Mann dialogue. The thief returns to his empty, seaside apartment, places his gun on a glass table, and stares into the Pacific. This is the Mann-shot, the protagonist (and despite his profession, Neil is one of them), starring into an expanse, often the ocean. The deep, nighttime blue of the sequence reflects both the somber existence of the character and perfectly captures the film's mood (for all of its operatics, this is a melancholy drift of a film). Mann's flawless, ambient soundtrack highlights the eerie stillness of this man's isolation: the clink of his pistol on the surface of the table, the brief jingle of his keys, and, most importantly, the calm, yet powerful rush of the waves. It's the most quiet moment in the film, yet the most evocative and effective (watch for a capsule version of it in Miami Vice (2006)). "I am alone. I am not lonely." says McCauley to Amy Brenneman in the film, but this sequence bares his soul. It is important to note that Mann character's are masters of self-delusion: McCauley truly believes what he is saying, but it is hardly the truth. Mann's men have been lying to themselves since Manhunter (Thief, as energetic and masterful as it is, is perhaps his most immature film, as Caan's character is truly and honestly a then-Mann ideal, without the self-delusion).

Vincent Hanna's angst, and isolation, is revealed more through his encounters with death. Consider the sequence in which he surveys a crime scene. A young prostitute has been killed by the psycho Waingro (truly one of cinema's most disgusting assholes). The girl's mother arrives at the scene, and begins having an emotional collapse. Hanna embraces the woman, his face ghostly, suppressing his own emotions. The mother's screams and plaintive cries dominate the soundtrack, as Hanna stares forward, his face as still as Deniro's apartment. It is a haunting moment, and considering that these occurrences dominate the character's life, it allows great insight into the drifting soul of Hanna. He wades among the dead (or "sifts through the detritus" as his wife says), isolating and distancing him from the life of the living.

The key of Heat, and often the key of many Mann features, is the equality implied between two characters, and the respect that follows. Both are always professionals, and highly solitary. Both often have units of fellow professionals, but never do these units fill the void these characters so desperately need filled. They are always doomed romantics, reaching out to strong women, but always alienate or lose the love they gain. Ultimately, it is their equal, their other side, that provides the greatest connection. Manhunter had Grahame/Dollarhyde, Collateral had Vincent/Max, Public Enemies had Dillinger/Purvis. Heat is the apotheosis of this Mann ideal, the entire film flowing from this connection. The spare, yet lonely headspace of Hanna/McCauley lead to the spare, lonely visuals of L.A.'s luminous nightscape.

Mann highlights the equality of Hanna and McCauley in the film's most famous sequence through a simple shot/reverse shot structure. The two men, after days of tracking each other, meet on the freeway when Hanna pulls McCauley over (note how Mann underlines their instinctual reach for their guns). They then go for a coffee, sit down, and talk. They talk more frankly than anywhere else in the film, and more honestly. They are honest with each other, and, more importantly, honest with themselves. They discuss dreams, Hanna's of seeing dead crime scene victims, McCauley's of drowning, and in turn speak honestly of themselves for the first time in the picture. It takes the presence of the equal in a Mann picture to bring out self-honesty in his protagonists. Notice how, after this sequence, the characters are able to converse more honestly with others (Hanna's discussion with his wife after his step-daughter's attempted suicide, McCauley's heart-felt plea to Brenneman after she discovers the truth of his profession).

The strength of Heat, and always the strength of any Mann picture, is his sublime ability to condense moments and emotions into tiny gestures. Mann is a melodramatic filmmaker, but he is also a master of tiny moments, moments that greatly enrich the theatrical plot points. In Heat, the wounded thief Chris (Val Kilmer), is attempting to return home to his wife Charlene (Ashley Judd). Unbeknown'st to him, cops are inside cooperating with Charlene, waiting to apprehend him upon his arrival. He drives up, steps out on the street, his appearance changed (his long hair cut short), and stares up at the balcony to see his wife. She stares at him with an expression both of love and pain, tears in her eyes. He exchanges with a smile, greatly overjoyed to see his wife after the hell of the film's earlier gunfight. As he begins to move forward, however, Charlene gestures, quickly and discretely with her hand, for Chris to stay away. He stands stricken, and, after getting directions from a nearby basketball player, drives away. Now, my words are a pitiful attempt to explain the sheer power of the sequence. The entire spectrum of emotions from their scenes prior are represented in one stroke of a hand; she is saving him and leaving him to the wilderness, a kind gesture and a cold one. Mann's tenderness and restraint in this sequence are incredible.

These gestures, these small moments, are built around the gigantic ones. The tale of equality and respect between a cop and a robber comes full circle to one of the most shattering conclusions in the history of cinema. Mann ends this film with a bang and a small gesture, an intuition and a fury, leaving the viewer only with messy, uninhibited emotion. The two protagonists inevitably square off, in a near-mythic dreamscape courtesy of LAX, and find a moment of beautiful clarity, Mann again condenses the feelings of the entire film into one image, both utopian and tragic. But my words are inadequate. Mann's long since left them behind. An American Masterpiece.

The Favorites: Dazed and Confused (1993) & Adventureland (2009)

2010-12-08T22:54:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it is a small wonder that the two best American films about youth are ostensibly comedies. Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused is a teen-party comedy, while Greg Mottola’s Adventureland is a youth-virginity and job-from-hell comedy. From this standpoint, both films can be shuffled into the detritus that is the American Youth Comedy, but both stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. An honesty of emotion, a sensitivity for the subjects, and a nuanced depiction of the mundane and ordinary lend these films a humanistic bent, and withhold the obviousness that make other youth films so shameful in their representation.

Dazed and Confused and Adventureland are not exactly of a piece; rather, the latter is a continuation of the former. If Dazed and Confused presents a sober vision of teens spinning their wheels, drunk on the intensity of experience, then Adventureland displays the dismaying listlessness that follows the confusion, when the world of adulthood is suddenly a reality, and the chasm it represents sends the mind reeling. The characters of the films may not be exactly compatible, but a bridge of relateable experience exists between them. After the characters of Dazed roll up the hill to nowhere, they plummet into Adventureland. The drugs are still there, but their mentality has changed. Suddenly the truth about Matthew McConaughey’s iconic (and brilliantly performed) Wooderson is devastatingly clear. His desperate attempt to hold onto the immortality of youth becomes sad, but never pathetic. Linklater and Mottola are both too wise to allow their characters to be pathetic. In fact, Wooderson jumps the gap and is rephrased and adapted as Ryan Reynolds’ Connell, another man older than the principle characters, also trying to retain his hold on a sense of abandon and youthful freedom.

Dazed and Confused is more of an ensemble piece, but semi-leads can be discerned. Jason London’s Randall “Pink” Floyd, a football player in conflict over his identity, and Wiley Wiggins’ Mitch Kramer, a freshman rapidly initiated into the high school culture of their Texas town, are, essentially, the two points around which the film evolves. Mottola’s picture is more of a boy-meets-girl story, with Jesse Eisenberg’s James Brennan finding salvation in Kristen Stewart’s Em, a girl damaged by a warped home life. The films are also different structurally. Dazed takes place during the last day of school, all through the night, and into the dawn the following day, constructed simply arounf teens hanging out, riding on the flow of the characters’ high. Adventureland is streched out over an entire summer, and is more conventionally plot-oriented.

Despite the structural and character dissonances between the two films, it is the honesty of their approaches that connects them. Neither Mottola or Linklater resort to the John Hughes over-obvious character development signals. Rather, the characters progress (or dont) naturally, arrising from the conditions of their existence, not drastic developments shoehorned in through weak and flabby contrivances. When it is stated above that Adventureland is the more plot-conventional, it is not meant to convey that it resorts to the same plot points of most youth fllms. It simply means that it is more story-oriented, a boy spending a summer working a terrible job, and coming to natural and realistic discoveries about himself and relationships. Adventureland never resorts to the obviousness of a Hughes’ picture.

Both films are extremely tender in their depiction of youth emotion. In the flux of the night in Dazed, the character don’t eloquently express their feelings. Rather, what emotions they are experiencing are expressed physically, through the eyes or small, throwaway gestures, which Linklater’s patient and understanding camera rests upon. Each character contains their own stock of physical signifiers, and the emotions arrise naturally through observation, not through pretensious contrivance. We are only glancing at this one tumultuous night, but we glean multitudes, or perhaps, inversely, we glean a beautiful and honest simplicity. Every character here is human, and is in a state of performance, playing roles to appeal to their classmates. As an audience we are able, through careful observation, to see through the facades, via the physical. What we find is incredibly identifiable; the feel of Dazed perfectly captures the experience of high school, the rush of the teens, the attempts to alleviate the boredom always present. The characters here are not making profound leaps and bounds like those in many other teen pictures. They are spinning their wheels, drinking beer and smoking pot, becoming part of a rather melancholy town tradition. The teens feel as if though they are daring and audacious, but they are merely assimilating into their town’s soceity. Linklater’s glimpses of adults, a kindly but daft shopkeeper, an angry old man, a bumbling beer delivery guy, irritated parents, and bitter cops, display a future of unextraordinary mundanity for our characters. They are zooming in their fast cars straight for average, ordinary lives, trapped in suburbia. Even the college bound intellectuals are soon to leap into something less exceptional than they expected: Adventureland.

Adventureland picks up a few years after Dazed concludes. Interestingly enough, it’s the 80s to Dazed’s 70s. Mottola narrows the focus, and begins by subverting the hopes of his central character, Eisenberg’s Brennan. At the beginning of the picture he is promptly dumped by his girlfriend, forced to give up his post college Eurotrip, and looses his funding for graduate school. He is then dropped abruptly back in Pittsburg (his home town) and into a boring job at the cheap amusement park, Adventureland. The possibilities of excitement are eroded, and replaced with a mundane reality. So begins Brennan’s progress. He is more eloquent (in fact, most of the characters are) than the teens of Linklater’s piece, though that comes as a result of the age difference. Still, a great deal of emotional truth is contained in the physical. As Brennan and Em ride in her car, listening to Husker Du, the awkward, but gentle, physical gestures and responses between them convey more than their words ever could. As the park workers stand in the parking lot after closing, their rambling conversations, augmented by uncertain physical posturing and movements, reveal a group of young people sharing a moment of communal revery. Mottola’s delicacy here is staggering. The dialogue of the film feels so naturalistic that it puts most Hollywood productions to shame; these people sound real, look real, and move real.

An essential element of both pictures is their respective moral neutrality. Neither film denies the existence of assholes, but in both these characters are people, not celluloid monsters. In the hands of lesser filmmakers, characters like Dazed’s O’Bannion and Adventureland’s Connell and Lisa P. would be dehumanized. O’Bannion is an asshole, but he is also a human, and his humiliation is real, Connell is a womanizer and liar, but he has a soul, and Lisa is not an ice queen, but an individual, and even searches for kindness.

Together, Linklater and Mottola have made the two most sober, reserved, and delicate pictures on American youth. Pages more could be written about their nuance, their brilliant uses of rock-pop music, and their wonderful dialogue structures. Their humanity is their central strength, and their subtlety leaves an impression far more powerful than any other film of their type. They have respect for their characters, and they both remember what it felt like to be those ages, the lack of which is the greatest weakness of most American youth films.

Michael Mann and Claire Denis; Miami Vice and L'intrus

2010-09-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

Perhaps more than those of any other fimmakers, the current films of Michael Mann and Claire Denis, particularly their respective masterpieces Miami Vice and L'intrus, speak more clearly and succinctly to the post-9 11 frame of mind, the nightmare shadowland of shifitng perspectives that is the 21st century. Revolutionary in their cinematic methods, Mann and Denis are rapidly evolving beyond the abilities of their contemporaries, creating a cinema that is both primal and wholly new. Miami Vice and L'intrus focus on the transient, the abstract, the unnameable. Their shimmering surfaces offer us glances into a fractured state of being, a world struggling to find a sense of identity.

Both Miami Vice and L'intrus can be placed among the sensualist films of contemporaries such as Terrence Malick and Wong Kar-Wai. But Denis and Mann push the boundaries more aggressively than their fellow sensualists. The melancholy brought on by Miami Vice and L'intrus is far too pervasive and penetrating to allow them simply to be deemed sensualist films.

Both films understand and process the post-9 11 mindset far more accurately and hauntingly than any ham-fisted Oliver Stone or Michael Moore piece. Both pictures are fragmentary, gliding across uncertain surfaces, struggling to identify themselves. No films capture the flux and isolation of a fractal, paranoid world shaken and divided, constantly in a shift of identity, better than Miami Vice or L'intrus.

The crime plot of Vice is rendered both nearly unintelligable and obsolete by Mann's abstraction. It is a maelstrom of chaos, and extremely adept and cunning stand in for the 21st century globe. The characters are drowning in a sea of technology and constant information, all blending into a dehumanizing storm of stimuli, rendering our midnight warriors lost amidst a landscape of blurred lights and florescent skies. The characters strive for emotional contact and consolation, a primal peace hidden amongst the digital world, most clearly represented by Colin Farrell's mournful and longing gaze into the deep blue of the ocean, an escape impossible for him on his quest. It is the smallest of moments, the soundtrack of voices fading away as Farrell's eyes gaze through the window into the horizon of the sea. But it's already over, he's pulled back into the plot, and the inherently meaningless cop babble continues.

Farrell's relationship with Gong Li's character is an attempt, beautifully tender but ultimately futile, to gain a hold on real human emotion. They abscond to Cuba in his sleek speed boat, literally zooming into the escape he so desperately longs for, the chasm of the ocean's horizon line. This Cuba segment is the most crystalline portion of the film. Love blossoms under the tropical sun, and the film finds a moment of quiet peace, the world suddenly intelligable and perceivable. But a deep well of melancholy underscores the proceedings, built on a foundation of lies and hopelessness. Farrell's identity is hidden to Li, he is a cop to her criminal, but the moral distinctions between them have been erased. They are both lost souls wandering through the night, desperately seeking contact. But their love is doomed, because she is the woman of the film's central drug lord, and he is a partner and, unbeknownst to her, a cop. His sense of identity is compromised by his love for a criminal, his prey, and ultimately, rather than solidifying him as he would hope, his passion only furthers his separation from a concrete self. He is destined to roam Miami's luminous landscapes of light a lonely, weary soul. His partner, Jamie Foxx, is more stable in his identity and relationships, but his world is supported by fragile foundations. His sense of identity does not make him invulnerable to the chaos.

Michel Subor's central, enigmatic protagonist of Claire Denis' L'intrus is a step beyond Colin Farrell's character in Vice. An old man, he has been separated from his identity and emotional connections for a longer duration of time, living amongst nature in solitude, escaping the mysterious truths of his place in the world at large. His past is obscured, with no clear explanations for what actions defined him for others. Subor, threatened with death via heart ailment, must leave his solitude and reenter a world wary of him. Encountering his son for the first time in years, Subor is met with bitterness, revealing a resentment. In what is perceivably a dream, he is dragged through the snow by two people on horseback. He explains that he had already payed, but a mysterious blonde woman, present throughout several sequences, informs him that he shall never stop paying. There is a hidden and unrevealed guilt in this man's past responsible for the perceptions others hold of him.

Subor is utterly alone in the world, moving like the faintest wisp of a soul from locations as varied as France and South Korea. He possesses no definite center, no true self, and on his voyage he attempts to recapture an identity, a new heart, but his body rejects it and he is left as vacuous as before. He, like the souls of Vice, is desperate for contact, but is ultimately incapable of giving it. Hi lover towards the beginning of the film, after sex, is abandoned in bed as he wanders his home at night, stoically killing an intruder on his property. His attempts to touch the dog keeper played by Beatrice Dalle are spurned, again hinting at an unknown past of transgression, her calling him crazy. In a beautiful sequence, a sense of genuine emotion, more transient even than Farrell and Li's affair, occurs in a South Korean bar well into the night. Subor and a Korean bond over drinks and the Elvis song "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", a brief respite from loneliness, Subor even cracking a genuine smile and laughing with real warmth. It's just a glance, a moment, of true human contact. Subor remains an abstraction, but his humanity, however obscure, briefly surfaces as he bonds over alcohol and Elvis. But the moment is over, and he presses on into the unclear once more.

Farrell and Subor's quests for identities and contacts both end in failure, not for lack of trying, and both are left wanderers of some form or another. They are twenty-first century individuals in the truest sense, lost in the flux of the world, grasping at vivid glimpses of something more, but remaining isolated and unidentifiable. Both are tragic figures, unable to find themselves, and facing futures as abstract as their own sense of being. Their crises of identity and stability are potent representations of the modern world. Denis and Mann achieve this without setting out to achieve it, without politics or grand statements. These films are simultaneously insular and expansive, containing no on-the-nose symbolism to drive across ham-fisted and hollow points. Rather, they occupy the world of the individual, and say thing without saying them, represent things without representing them. They are obscure and clear, fleeting visions of the fractured conscience of a world lost.