The Battle of Algiers (1966)

A one of a kind revolutionary fervor runs through this film, shockingly chronicling the events leading up to the Argelian independence. The movie's heightened, organic sense of reality may have had its roots in neorealism, but Gillo Pontecorvo's film is involved and passionate about everything; it refuses to merely observe what happens. It's reactionary and combustible. We see events mostly from the Argelian perspective, but the casualties on both sides of the war hit us with the same kind of emotional horror. But before you have time to dwell on the loss of humanity, the movie jumps to the following chapter; like the revolution itself, there's no time for lament. Maybe that is why the film is so powerful, because in its scattered, senseless 20th century view of war, what defines humanity is abolished (terrifyingly) by a greater need for independence and a need to define one's place and identity. That need is channeled almost intuitively (and given the circumstances, one might say necessarily) through violence, and the movie becomes the gutural, ravaged poetic expression of the opressed. The film's truly revolutionary spirit totally surpasses the like of Eisenstein's Potemkin, which seems, next to it, rather like an empty technical achievement. And it exists in a pre-City of God era where the violent element is just as senseless, but where the primal human motivation still exists.

From "Wall E" (2008) to "Up" (2009): Pixar's Earthly Gesture

Is there something more suggestive, more expressive of the times, than the initial scenes of Wall E, the camera zooming in on a wasted, rotten Earth? The view is both post-apocalyptic and sweetly nostalgic for the lost humanity, the city sounds. And at the same time, it has nostalgia for the forgotten expressiveness of the silent cinema, a cinema of feeling through images. Wall E has, for the first half of its running length, no human faces, but it is full of feeling and humanity to a degree that maybe no other movie this decade can make claim to (give or take a Miyazaki movie), and its preoccupation for the future is in no way overshadowed by its lament of the past (and present).

Surely, Wall E embodies this era of global warming and capitalism gone mad with the humor and warmth that is so characteristic of Pixar, but most of all and most terrifyingly, Wall E is about the mechanization of the human condition. What's so frightening and so enchanting about it is that the feelings are all post-human: the humans themselves no longer feel anything; it is Wall E, with a Chaplinesque sense of humanity, that is not robotized. Wall E represents us all, or at least the best about us; he's a decaying little thing, broken down and isolated, but with a fundamental, special curiosity about him that makes him alive. He's the remnants of humanity; the robot is the only thing that has survived mechanization. This sweet little commentary on man's irrational fear of machinery --while the real robotization is happening right now, to our own human experience-- runs through the whole movie masterly, delicately; it's a grand, beautiful gesture. And it's also about contact with the universe: though the post-human humans of Wall E live off grand technology and spaceships on autopilot, the beauty of space is hardly corrupted by their inanity. It becomes the playground for Wall E and EVE to make love, as it were, in a sequence of celebration of the universe. If we're on the verge of a grander, cosmic era, Wall E, too, carries a current uncertainty, a sense of joy and mischief mixed with a fear of ourselves when we get there.

The movie isn't as strong in the spaceship sequences; the "humans" are all too crudely written, and the rhythm sometimes changes abruptly, but maybe it's logical for the scenes of crazed consumerism to just not have the poetry of the others (it would be a lie if they did). Wall E and EVE are such great characters, and their romantic entanglement is so new and amazing, that it doesn't much matter anyway (Wall E brings back the comic invention of the silent era; EVE's what Katharine Hepburn would be like if she were an iPod). It's slapstick comedy reinvented. And who can forget the last scene, when Wall E has lost his memory, and all of a sudden he's no more than an inert, useless piece of metal; maybe the haunting underlying is that without the memory of what was lived, the humanity is killed, its feeling eradicated. In the end, EVE brings him back to life, of course, just as it should be.

It's a curious, but welcome choice for the animators behind Pixar to have switched their attention from the vast space and the wasted Earth of Wall E to the exuberant blues and greens of the South American jungle in their latest, Up. Up is shrouded, like the previous movie, with a sense of urgency, but moreso than Wall E, it has an awareness of mortality. It openly acknowledges death, not just in the figure of Carl Fredrickson's wife, whose memory pushes him to go on his adventure, but also in the story of Kevin, the strange, supposedly prehistoric bird on the verge of becoming extinct. Up doesn't have the magic or the almost avant-garde edge of Wall E, but it's more current that many people give it credit for. Its commentary on adventure, and the different kinds of adventure to be had, is quite lively and enchanting. Part of the beauty of this flawed film is how it grows to show adventure as both the most wonderful and joyful thing imaginable, fueled by imagination and curiosity; but also as a thing of potentially great evil, which happens when ambition goes wrong. In an ironic gesture worthy of Pixar, the misunderstood idolized hero of the protagonist ends up being the villain; the villain, too, shares the love for adventure, but he functions in much the way a conquistador works, his joy is in domination, while Carl's joy is in life. And once again, much like Wall E, our hero is a fragile old thing in danger of becoming mechanized; the only reason he doesn't become a cynic is because of the memory of life. (What Pixar shares with traditional animation is that curiosity creates life, but the morals are more complicated). Up explodes with the full colors and raging sunsets of the jungle; none of the smog and death of Wall E shows through, and the rhythm is faster, more traditionally adventurous. But its adventure's shaded with mortality; maybe it's not just Kevin the bird who's in danger of becoming extinct, but something rather entirely bigger. And it's beautiful to see Pixar register in Up the world with all its vitality just as in Wall E it paints its most critical side, a kind of restless worldly melancholy seeping through.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

It all began with Alfonso Cuarón injecting the series with much needed sexual awkwardness and Harry infamously "masturbating" under the sheets in the opening scene of The Prisoner of Azkaban (for anyone with an imagination, anyway). The following movies were all half-hearted frolicking and curious experimentation, but now all that is replaced by what feels like actual sexual tension and the sweetly poignant anxieties of unrequited love. As teenage comedy, it's splendorous and it has warmth, humor, and pathos, often mixed up. Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson have never been better, and they embody the promise and the awkwardness of adolescence, with the looming proximity of adulthood showing through. But the movie is not about them. We're reminded that Voldemort's power is ever growing and that nothing, not even high school (Hogwarts) is safe anymore, so you get a lot of Death Eaters running around and Helena Bonham Carter doing a demented impression of chaos that rivals Ledger's Joker for sheer comic excitement. There's nothing that connects these two ends; the only bit of erotic experimentation on Voldemort's front is eager Bellatrix, who kisses Draco as if to take his virginity just when he's about to face Dumbledore (and therefore become a man).

I hope I'm not mistaken for some purist when I say this, but if my memory serves me right the basic themes of the book have been virtually eradicated, and the film suffers from this lack of edge; the themes of ambition (Voldemort) and shame (Snape's half-blood heritage) are barely touched upon. Long story short, the movie seems to be about nothing in particular, but maybe it doesn't need to because it's the best and the richest Harry Potter movie anyway, give or take Azkaban (still unsurpassed in poetry and invention).

The movie has dozens of characters, and yet each of them gets a moment to shine; David Yates makes everyone feel specific, vital. The mood is laid back and more internal, freer of the mechanisms of plot and having to explain everything. That's magic enough for me, and virtually everyone has grown as a character. Tom Felton gives a wonderful performance as Draco: alone and vulnerable, and walking the empty corridors of Hogwards while everyone else is partying and getting stoned (of the magical kind), he's got a palpable solitude about him and is not the emo caricature one might expect. Michael Gambon gives the finest performance, of course, though there's this nonsense running around that his greatness here is something new. He's been terrific all along, ever since that first introductory speech in Azkaban, eyes glittering with mysterious joy and wit, and he's terrific now: there's less humor in the performance, an impeccable reminder of the shadow that looms near, but no less determination. Just as with Snape -played with great intelligence by Alan Rickman- we no longer talk about "good or bad" characters, and there lies a lot of the pleasure of the novels, even if a little less so of the films. So if the movie isn't really about anything, there's so much to enjoy, and it's so obviously an introduction to the final two, that complaining seems superfluous. And if you want it to be about something, the warmth and joy of the images suggests that it still is, primarily, and as it's always been, about the rich love between friends and how that can (at the least) help anybody get through a world of waning magic.

Aparajito (1956)

[Spoilers ahead]

A new rhythm emerges in the second part of the Apu trilogy. The lost in time spaces of Pather Panchali are replaced by cities, crowds, buildings, and the feel of machinery. But Satyajit Ray's vision, far from becoming mechanized, thrives in this new environment. It's edited faster, shot more vividly, accompanying the new sensations and ways of life experienced by the young Apu and his parents (the actors are all excellent). The core of the movie is the tension between family and the security of the old life, and youthful ambition and the uncertainty of the future. Because Ray is a masterful director, this tension is always present, and it imbues everything with extra meaning, but it's never made explicit; the scenes just breathe and keep adding up.

There are scenes of simple, exuberant joyfulness as Apu plays in the city and initiates contact with the world; they are juxtaposed with the fears and weariness of the mother, who wishes the best for his son, but expects him to become a priest like his father. In one sequence the father lies ill in bed as Apu sits by his side; there are fireworks outside and the father tells him to go and join the other kids. The simplicity of such exchange can leave you elated when, a few moments later, the father dies and Apu's childlike gesture, the desire to go see the fireworks in the sky, is tingled with the face of death. And so the movie keeps evolving before you, in very simple touches, and one starts to realize the true scope of the tale; a tale of a country in a period of change, torn between tradition and a modern world, a new world imposed, perhaps, a little too quickly. But the world has changed and the movie is also about the way the desire to get to know it and get to take part in it begin to form inside Apu.

The shockingly human characters in Aparajito are also compassionately incomplete. In the most haunting sequence, the mother rises from the old tree in the countryside, believing to have heard Apu's voice back in the house (at this point he's been absent for a long time). But nothing is there; she searches the house and the trees, but they're dark and silent, except for the fireflies that begin to fill the screen. It may be the only moment in the trilogy when reality becomes confused; there's something sublimely sad about it, inexplicable, about this empty nature, filled by fireflies where once there was her son. The mother dies without seeing Apu for a last time, and having never told him about her sickness; and Apu, in turn, is broken, but immediately goes back to Calcutta to his exams, and to the future. The mother's death suggests the lonely passing of the ancient grandmother in Pather Panchali, which was in turn like the passing of an era. And now the mother too, closes another chapter. Apu's roots have died out, except, perhaps, in himself. But Ray's artistry has only become magnified: the two movies, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, nurture each other wonderfully, and now the sense of magic is twofold: in the first movie, the train in the fields signaled another world coming, and in the context of the jungle and the life there it had the feeling of something new and strange. And now we get to know the new and strange, and the old world keeps coming back to us: in the traditions, the spirituality, in the tree of the ancient roots where his mother dies and where Apu laments her death before returning to his studies. The different feelings, the distinct worlds that seem to not quite fit, become increasingly confused and in turn, richer: they respond fully to one another.

Forgotten Silver (1996)

Peter Jackson's so-called "mockumentary" on the life of largely ignored (fictitious) New Zealander film pioneer Colin McKenzie is first and foremost a celebration of moviemaking. The movie is about this revolutioner/genius who in the first years of the 20th century -- as films are just taking their first steps -- constructs his own camera at the age of 12, soon after invents tracking shots, and then proceeds to add sound as well as color to his movies way before anybody else. He then embarks on the grandest, most exuberant of all epics, the biblical "Salome" -- which seems like Eisenstein, Griffith, De Mille and Ed Wood all lumped into one -- with the financial aid of Stalinists and bigshot (Catholic!) American businessmen alike, only to bury the finished footage under a monstrous set built over some godforsaken New Zealand jungle. The whole enterprise may have had a hallucinatory feel to it if it wasn't so utterly funny; what's funnier is that some of the obstacles faced by McKenzie seem to suggest The Lord of the Rings. The finished version of "Salome", restored in the 90s and released to a select audience in New Zealand, is abysmally, grotesquely bad, but perhaps a little endearing; it's instantly hailed as a masterpiece.


Peter Jackson directed the movie right after Heavenly Creatures, that masterpiece of feverish romanticism and ambitious emotional grandeur, and Forgotten Silver is an ode to the romantic spirit he associates with the medium. Jackson has always turned this passion for filmmaking into an epic theme on its own terms, and nowhere is this more evident than here. But it's also a full and masterly view on the most typical of the documentary forms, where archival footage and interviews are used to give any kind of nonsense a ring of truth. Jackson piles up nonsense after nonsense for us, but all of it comes from his very rich imagination (everything that happens to McKenzie is so exultingly epic). He portrays McKenzie as this force of nature, the artist-inventor as tormented torrent of creativity; the artist as impassioned romantic whose life is a succession of mad, delirant obstacles. And Jackson, like McKenzie, is in love with the technological possibilities of the movies and their great storytelling power. No one in modern cinema is more of a romantic than him, but he also has enormous intelligence as a filmmaker: he understands intuitively how to get intimate, and visceral responses out of us (and he does it all at once). Not only that, but he has a superb technical control of the medium; even this low-budget mockumentary is put together rather breathlessly.

Lastly, but not least important, Forgotten Silver, like Heavenly Creatures, is terrific comedy. Jackson has passion to spare but he can distance himself from it and underline the hilarity in it. Indeed, as the movie progresses and Jackson (playing himself) delves into the mystical forests of New Zealand in search of the lost sets and footage of "Salome", one can't help but associate his quest with the archaeological significance of someone looking for the forbidden treasures of an ancient Pharaoh or something equally cosmic. That same exhilarating love and affection for the movies fills every frame. It becomes intoxicating.

The Golden Coach (1953)

Jean Renoir's splendidly colorful take on the world and the traditions of the theatre. The story is about a group of Italian actors who arrive at a 18th century South American colony. The actress, Camilla, played by Anna Magnani, makes everyone fall in love with her on and off the stage. But the film itself is the stage; it's about the power of illusion, in a way. Magnani makes everyone in the audience and all three of her beloved feel unique in her presence. She brings out the magic and the passion in their lives, and in turn she finds in each of them something the other doesn't have. The three men fight amongst each other to possess her but it's a lost cause, she loves all three precisely for being so different. The film's an ode to the performing arts and the way they have of making us find ourselves only to leave us lost all over again, and the wonders in all that. Magnani gives all of herself to it. She seems such a part of this world, so involved in the sadness, the humor and the passion in it, that she's dreamlike.

A few scattered thoughts on Cherry Jones in "24"

Spoilers ahead.

I don't know if the hook of the series is in the real time factor, which imbues the show with a rhythm and an urgency than most shows lack. Maybe the hook is that it gives us the kind of "antihero" the times deserve, or maybe it's the seamless way that it combines drama and action (sometimes). Whatever it is, there's something remarkably compelling in its timeliness, in both theme and structure, in its mad conception of reality. Everything's going on at once; the drama is accelerated. The surprising thing about Season 7 of the show and the finale in particular is how it finds a theme and takes some time to explore it. The season ends on a genuinely ambiguous, broken note. Overall, the series doesn't reach the moral complexity that it strives for because its haunted lead, Jack Bauer, is almost constantly glorified. We are led to believe that his "no nonsense" approach, the brutality of his methods, have made him a broken man, and it's all been in the name of "the greater good". The truth is the show revels in this violence, sometimes thrillingly, sometimes leaving a very bad taste, and Bauer's given a halo of martyrdom; he's a hero disguised as antihero, and when the brutality becomes the show's gusto and prowess you lose the chance for real debate.

There is one character in Season 7, though, that has the joys of any fully grounded characterization. It's Cherry Jones' President Taylor, said to be America's current premier stage actress, who I'd only catched in bits and pieces of movies here and there. The woman has charisma and presence to spare; she seems the ideal of the American woman, intelligent, compassionate, just. Her "flaw" may be her idealism, but Jones turn it into her strength. The screenplay of 24 has more twists and turns and more fatalism than a soap opera, and at one point or the other even the most compelling of actors is going to lose himself processing all that. Not Jones, though, who gives every circumstance a certain mood, an expression that shapes it. She's the real humanity in the show, and in the finale, she surpasses herself. If Bauer breaks the law in order to get to the "truth", Taylor's truth exists in the law, more specifically, the ideals she bases her convictions on. In the final hour she is forced between choosing to send her daughter Olivia to jail (who ordered a hit on terrorist Jonas Hodges resulting in his death), or covering it all up. 24 is full of impossible decisions like this which lend themselves to melodrama -- in fact, if one were to be cruel one could say it's a soap opera for the new millennium, though that would be to reduce it to much less than it is. But Cherry Jones turns it into great drama. You can see the division in her face, a kind of defeat mixed with uncanny moral strength that is never remotely didactic. Dramatically, her work is immensely interesting: there is the torment of the two characters she is playing, Mother and President, and watching her trying to reconcile both, while inevitably losing something in the process, is the great thematic and emotional triumph of the season. It has the shadings of tragedy coupled with a humanity that elevates it. Her characterization brings real richness to a show that often has to all too obviously manipulate you to articulate its message. Jones' dramatic prowess and intellect are inspiring, and maybe they are the series' way of acknowledging a different (necessary?) way of being "truthful" than Jack Bauer's during what the finale itself calls "complex times".