The guys at the The Q Filmcast do a podcast every week where they pick a film on Netflix to discuss. It is a surprisingly good show. There are five of them and they never seem to agree. Thus far, I have agreed the most with their producer Adam Rodgers, who the rest of the gang seem to think is a cinematic philistine. I don’t consider myself a philistine, but I do constantly rebel against what I think of as the professionalization of mediocrity. If you have the money to hire professionals, it is trivial to tell a standard story in a standard way. In general, I’m more into psychotronics and more generally personal art that is thrilling but often inconsistent or worse.

So when I heard that the Q boys were going to watch Glengarry Glen Ross, I was excited. I’ve been meaning to watch it for years, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. So I curved up with it Friday night and watched. It is everything that you expect from a David Mamet film. And if you like him, I don’t see how you can go wrong. Unfortunately, I don’t like Mamet. That’s not to say that I always hate his work. For one thing, when I read American Buffalo when I was a kid, I thought it was fantastic. But that was my introduction to him. Since then, I think everything that Mamet has to offer is on display in that play.

I remember reading that in his original script for The Verdict, Mamet ended without the jury coming back. I admire this. The story is about the personal redemption of Frank Galvin. It doesn’t matter that he wins the case in practice; we’ve seen that he has won in the eyes of Galvin. But it does have a resolution because Mamet is constrained by Barry Reed’s novel. When Mamet is not constrained by someone else’s story, he doesn’t bother to even come up with a story. Generally, he writes stories that are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

This is entirely true of Glengarry Glen Ross. It tells the story of four salesmen and an office manager. The owners of the company have decided to have a sales contest where the top two win prizes and the bottom two are fired. We only get two days into the month before the entire office is destroyed. As is typical of Mamet, he seems not at all interested in the absurdity of the situation. Nor does he seem to be aware that ultimately the owners are to blame—you make people too desperate and they will turn on each other. Of course, they already have, just in smaller ways. We learn, for example, that the office manager has been giving out good leads to agents he likes and bad leads to agents he doesn’t. In fact, my reading of the script is that the agents’ sales are totally determined by the leads given to them, just as they allege throughout the film.

All of this conflict is in the service only of the conflict itself. The thematic core of the film comes when a once great salesman (Jack Lemmon) asks the office manager (Kevin Spacey) why he is trying to destroy him. The office manager says, “Because I don’t like you.” That’s the tautological message of the film: people are cruel because people are cruel. I don’t doubt that Mamet sees the world like that. But that isn’t the way the world seems to me. People are cruel to each other mostly because they get an advantage from it. Mamet’s take on the world is the simplistic mentality of pubescent boys who haven’t learned how to manage their hormones.

Along with the unrealism of the plot, we have the highly stylized Mamet dialog. In small doses, it’s fine. But I’ve been inundated with it for decades. It hasn’t grown. It’s the same thing we always get from him. And sadly, it is the same thing we get from a lot of writers who have followed after him. If it weren’t for how foul it all is, I’m sure critical opinion on it would have changed and more people would admit to how annoying it is. But okay, it is what it is. What is is not is realistic.

I know that Glengarry Glen Ross would work much better as a play. That was especially true of the scenes between Moss (Ed Harris) and Aaronow (Alan Arkin). These are very funny, fast paced dialogs. But the director James Foley decided not to do them in a two shot or similar. So we cut back and forth between the characters very fast. It not only makes one’s head spin, it distracts from the dialog. There is no continuity. I have no idea why it was done that way. I am rarely even tempted to say something I don’t like is wrong, but here it is hard to escape that conclusion.

The film does not expand itself very much from the play. At times, I think that works rather well. The opening in payphones worked really well, for example. It reminded me of the art direction in the 1996 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the vast majority of the film takes place in the office. And other than it looking totally like something built on a sound stage, it had nothing of the otherworldly feel of the other locations.

There are things to admire in the film, however: mostly the acting. It is great. Kevin Spacey as the small minded and hateful office manager was wonderful. Al Pacino gave a slightly muted performance, which was perfect for the flamboyant “closer” of the office. (Am I saying that Pacino usually over-acts? Yes!) Lemmon, Harris, and Arkin were all excellent. Alec Baldwin tried very hard but was not properly supported by the direction. The standout performance was Jonathan Pryce in a small role with almost no dialog. Throughout the film, I felt he was the human ombudsman, looking on in horror, “What kind of creatures are you anyway?”

I know that a lot of people will like Glengarry Glen Ross. And there is no doubt that Mamet is probably more in tune with American attitudes toward drama than he ever has been. But I think a close viewing of the film shows its problems. It is ultimately empty socially and spiritually. It has nothing to say and it says it in the most offensive way it can. And as much as that is modern America, I don’t want to be reminded. So in the end, my feelings about the film are the same as Adam’s: I just don’t like it; it makes me feel bad without any enrichment. Regardless of how we dress up our feelings about a film post facto, that’s what it all comes down to. It would seem that Adam is just being more honest than the rest of us.

I was shocked to see that Maximilian Schell died at the age of 83 back on 1 February. He seemed healthy, but apparently he got a bad case of pneumonia and quickly died. The next thing you know Max von Sydow will be dead and I won’t know what to do. These people I don’t personally know are so much part of me, it is hard to carry on. It is one thing to have the movies, even when they don’t make anymore themselves. (Although that isn’t true of either of those men.) But seeing them from long ago on screen and knowing that they are alive is something special. The odd things is, I’m a lot more okay with my own death than I am theirs.

Now I’m going through my films to see if I have any of Schell’s films to watch. In terms of his acting, I’m afraid I’m left with relative dreck: The Freshman and The Brothers Bloom. Although I have to admit, he’s great in both of those, especially the first. But I wish I had Judgment at Nuremberg or The Man in the Glass Booth. I will probably watch Marlene, his documentary about Marlene Dietrich. At least she gave us another seven years! I will miss the old man.

Here is a great scene from Judgment at Nuremberg, although I have to say that Montgomery Clift steals it:

I watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru after many years. It is the story of a man who learns that he is dying of stomach cancer and so decides to use his life to do something meaningful. You can well imagine what kind of sentimental claptrap this would be in the hands of Hollywood. Ikiru—which means “to live”—is not at all sentimental. In fact, the main character dies halfway through the film. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t inspiring. It shows how one man decided to change his life for the better without any of the cheap movie tricks that I so despise. (Think: Beaches.)

The film is a product of the post-war period in Japan and focuses on a bureaucrat, Kanji Watanabe, who follows the tradition of doing as little as possible. This is highlighted at the beginning of the film when Watanebe uses as scrap paper, pages from a document titled, “A Proposal for Increasing Departmental Efficiency.” This is followed by the narrator telling us, “The best way to protect your place in the world is to do nothing at all.” This goes along with a quote provided in Stephen Prince’s excellent commentary from Masao Miyamoto, “The three great principles of Japanese bureaucracy are: don’t be late; don’t take time off; and do no work.” Watanabe wasn’t always like this, but he certainly is at this mature point in his career.

At the same time, we are introduced to a group of local women who want the government to fix a problem. Near where they live is an open sewer that is making their children sick. They want it to be remediated and turned into a park. So they go to the government and end up being sent from one agency to another. They stand as the opportunity that Watanabe needs to find redemption and his pathway “to live”—even if it is for a short time.

(As a political matter, I have a problem with too much focus on governmental bureaucracy. Bureaucratic obstruction in the government was a big problem and still is in many places. But at least in this country, it has gotten much better. Now, the “run around” is much more common in dealing with corporations. A couple of years ago, Paul Krugman noted, “I’ve recently had fairly extensive dealings with both our healthcare system and with the New Jersey DMV. In one case, I encountered vast amounts of paperwork, mind-numbing bureaucracy, and extremely frustrating delays. In the other, my needs were met quickly and politely. So far, then, it’s DMV 1, private health system (and I have very good insurance) 0.” That’s my experience.)

The structure of the film is very interesting. As I said, Watanabe dies halfway through the film. As a result, his actual redemption is shown through the recollections of other bureaucrats as they get drunk at his wake. While sober, they all want to disregard what he has accomplished as just doing his job. But we’ve already seen that all the bureaucrats think their jobs are to do nothing. As they drink they begin to celebrate what he has done and commit to doing it themselves. Of course, the next day at work, they are all back to business as usual. All of them, that is, except for one mostly impotent low-level bureaucrat, Kimura, who acts as the conscience of the second half of the film.

The whole film is episodic. In the first half, we see Watanabe trying different things to make sense of life. An extended section involves a pulp novelist taking him on a tour of the night life. The whole thing is shot from the outside with a distinct subtext of disapproval at the hollowness of it. Then Watanabe starts following a young woman around who quit the bureaucracy because the people who worked for it never did anything. This isn’t sexual. He sees in her a more valid outlook on life. But ultimately, he returns to work, but with the idea of actually doing something. The second half is also episodic, but for a different reason. As in Rashomon, we get different views of the work that Watanabe did. But unlike in that film, it is done to create a single narrative: Watanabe working for the mothers to overcome bureaucratic obstruction.

Despite all of this, the narrative works well. I suspect that had it been normally structured, it would not have worked that well. Or it would have been a much shorter film. Once Watanabe has his insight about what kind of life is worth living, there is little to do except to show the results. So dramatically, the cut to Watanabe’s wake is jarring. But it allows the film to delve more deeply into the social dysfunction of the bureaucracy.

Clearly, there is a cynical take on the film: nothing changes. Unlike in Hollywood films, Watanabe doesn’t start a trend or lead a revolution. If he had, the movie wouldn’t be realistic. It would be just another story of the romantic hero who saves the world. But ultimately, Watanabe does save his world. And in doing so, he helps all the people in that neighborhood who got an environmental hazard replaced with a park. What’s more, he did act as an inspiration for Kimura, who we see at the very end of the film as he walks out of frame having just been watching kids playing in the new park.

Technically, the film is excellent as well. Most of the set design is very crowded until Watanabe has his epiphany. This is represented in the piles of paper that surround all the bureaucrats in his office as well as the night life. I think it is a stretch to suggest that Kurosawa was making a point about how our things distance us from one another, but that seems a perfectly correct interpretation of what got onto the screen. It is made even more concrete as the bureaucrats get drunk, they are seen crawling over each other.

The camera work is typical of the Kurosawa troupe. We see cross cut tracking shots just like we see in Seven Samurai and Ran. It is quite exciting to watch, especially for a film about a man’s existential crisis. There is surprisingly little music used in the film, which helps with keeping it from turning sentimental. I find I’m often offended when films overuse music to tell me what to feel. There is none of that here. But there is some great use of sound, as when Watanabe walks from the doctor in a daze. There is no sound until he almost walks in front of a truck, when all the sound comes blasting back.

Other than the script, however, the core of the film is Takashi Shimura’s performance. If you know him, it is most likely as the lead ronin in Seven Samurai. But I especially associate him with the woodcutter in Rashomon. (He’s also great in the Japanese version of Godzilla; if you haven’t seen both versions you owe it to yourself.) As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of Toshiro Mifune. But he is a star more than an actor. Shimura is a great actor. In fact, it is hard to believe that the little dying Bureaucrat in 1952 is played by the same man who plays the battle weary ronin in 1954. Of course, this isn’t to say he isn’t a star too. Regardless of the part, he radiates charisma on the screen.

It is commonly said that one should read Don Quixote three times: once when you are young, then in middle age, and finally when you are old. The idea is that you will perceive it differently at those times in your life. I’m sure that’s true of any great work of art. It is certainly true that I see Ikiru differently now than I did in decades previous. As a young man, I was much more egotistical—looking at the world only as a means to my fulfillment. Now I see things much more as Watanabe: I would like to be useful to the world. But being useful is not as easy as it sounds. We are all used to doing so little. We sleepwalk through life like we are zombies. It takes effort “to live.”

Andrea alerted me to the documentary That Guy… Who Was in That Thing. It consists of interviews with 16 relatively familiar screen actors about the acting business and their lives. It’s interesting because we don’t get much information about actors at that level. I didn’t learn much, however. I’m very aware of just how extreme the winner-take-all economics of the film business is.

Consider, for example, Marcus Chong (who isn’t in the film). He played Tank in The Matrix. Other than the three principal actors, he was the only member of the Nebuchadnezzar who survived. So when the producers made the two sequels, they needed Chong to reprise the role. They offered him $250,000 to do both films—$125,000 each. Chong wanted $250,000 for each. Eventually, the producers replaced Chong with Harold Perrineau in a very clunky script rewrite. This was a huge mistake. As it is, the biggest problem with the sequels is that they introduce so many new and uninteresting characters. Having Tank would have helped a great deal.

Now I understand: $250,000 is a lot of money for roughly 6 months of work. But for actors who spend most of their time not acting, it isn’t that much. And it especially isn’t much for an actor who was one of the best parts of the hugely successful earlier film. And Chong was hardly alone. While the principals made a lot of money from the film, for everyone else, it was just a job. For most people, it is nothing other than a union job. And that’s good, but not great.

This comes across loud and clear in That Guy… Who Was in That Thing. Even extremely well-established actors like Paul Guilfoyle seem to get relatively little pay. Even more than that, the whole Hollywood system is designed to give them little respect. They are just cogs in the machine, to be plugged into roles. What I didn’t know before is that salaries of the actors have gone down over the last decade. Given that they are not seen as draws (although people like Guilfoyle and Xander Berkeley are for me), producers just offer a low salaries and get someone else if they aren’t accepted.

I’m not going to shed any tears for these guys. It is relatively hard to get into the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Even so, the average yearly salary of SAG actors is below $5,000. So most actors are making little money. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the median salary is zero. So these guys are doing okay. And they are doing what most people go into acting for: to act and get paid for it.

But it does bring up the issue of income inequality. I don’t mean the fact that acting is a winner-take-all market. Everyone knows that and so people who go into the business know what they are getting into. The big conservative argument of why we have to pay the “winners” so much is to motivate everyone else. But I don’t see that at all. If there were something vaguely linear about success and financial gain, I don’t think anything would change. Certainly these middle-level actors continue to do good work despite the fact that they know they will never be stars making millions of dollars per film.

Regardless, the documentary provides a far better description of Hollywood than is usual. And generally, what is happening there is the same thing that is happening in the rest of the economy. It isn’t a question of the stars versus the rest. The real money in Hollywood goes to the producers; stars make most of their money by being executive producers. So again, it’s all about the workers versus the owners. In general, working actors and technicians do okay. But very few are getting rich. Luckily for them, they still have strong unions. Without them, it would be far worse—just like in the rest of the economy.

Another day, another time travel movie. Last week, I watched Looper and last night, I watched a bit of it to remind me what it was all about. It is the third film by Rian Johnson. The first was Brick, an interesting but ultimately disappointing film. The second was The Brothers Bloom, an interesting but ultimately disappointing film. Looper is also an interesting but ultimately disappointing film.

The basic plot is that a crime syndicate 30 years in the future sends people back in time to be killed and disposed of. The Loopers do the killing. When they are done with their careers, they from 30 years later are sent back to be killed. After that, they get to hang out for 30 years until the syndicate finds them and sends them back in time to be killed. Time travel narratives are always difficult. I’m fine with paradox, but it really creates a drag on drama. And personally, it takes me out of the film.

A good example happens at the beginning of the film where a minor character allows his 30 year old self to escape. In order to get the older character to come in so he can be killed, they start cutting parts off the younger character’s body. These immediately disappear from the older character. By the time he comes in, he has so little left of his body that he has to crawl. This creates nothing so much as a thousand questions in my mind. It is later explained in the film that as different things happen, it changes the probability distribution of the future character’s life. I think a fairly interesting science fiction story could grapple with some of these issues. But the film does not and it creates a muddled foundation on which to hang the plot.

Apart from this, there are other problems. Johnson is a distinctly intellectual writer. When it comes to emotion, he is largely lost. Other than having less stylized dialog, the main character in Looper (Joe) is no different than the main character in Brick. They are both hard men who don’t seem to care about anyone. Yet both plots depend upon the character actually caring. There is no arc for the character. This is particularly problematic in Looper, where the plot depends upon Joe changing from selfish to altruistic. In the end, I didn’t buy it.

The film is also overly dependent on exposition voice over. It’s almost too much at the beginning when Joe provides what seems like a treatise on loopers. And it comes in multiple chapters, I assume because even Johnson realized he was telling the audience way too much to do it all at once. But that isn’t the greatest sin—we are used to films talking too much to get the plot rolling. The problem is at the end when Joe does something that is completely out of character. The denouement is totally dependent upon it. But it would have made no sense if Joe hadn’t been there to explain it.

Having now seen all three of Rian Johnson’s feature films, I do think I have a handle on him. I think he is a good director. And as a writer, he has a lot of good ideas. But he is badly in need of a writer to fix the many problems that he doesn’t seem capable of fixing. First, he needs someone who can write interesting characters. Even his best characters are two-dimensional. Second, he needs someone who can provide an emotional core to his scripts. He’s clearly aware of this problem because he does play around with it, even if he is ineffectual. And finally, he needs someone who can land the ending. Brick was okay because it was pure genre. But both The Brothers Bloom and Looper have endings that don’t mesh with what came before.

I am 50 today. I wouldn’t be so keen to tell you that, but it is public information for reasons I am still kind of fuzzy on how it came to be. But somehow it got on Wikipedia and so it is there forever. Whatever. I don’t particularly care that I’m 50 today, because I still feel about 17. What bugs me is who else is 50 today: Glenn Beck.

Now I should be clear, although I think Beck is a nutcase, there is something I like about him. He is a searcher. He really is interested in finding out the truth. I value that because I am very much the same. The problem is that Beck is a sub-genius: someone who is smart but not very smart. And that means he is smart enough to get lost in conspiracy theories. I think a lot of people miss this about Beck. They focus on his conservative politics, but he is really just Alex Jones, except a little smarter. I think that somewhere along the line, Beck read Cleon Skousen’s The 5,000 Year Leap and he thought he had found the Truth™. And everything pretty much flows from that.

In a purely commercial sense, Beck has been extremely successful. He has a large group of people who hang on (Off?!) his every word. Politically, of course, he is irrelevant. The people who follow him are already far to the right politically. Beck’s main power is to drain them of money, although if he wants, he can whip them up to vote or encourage them not to vote. I figure they already vote consistently, though.

But Glenn Beck is well worth having around to pollute our intellectual discourse because it resulted in some of the best satire ever by Jon Stewart. Here is the first part of it. In the second part, he nails exactly why Beck was fired from Fox News, “Well maybe Fox News thought it would be useful to hire some random talk radio host rehashing the same tired old John Birch Society conspiracy theories to seed an ultra-conservative viewpoints into the news cycle while making the rest of the network seem centrist by comparison. But he then began to believe his own messianic delusions and became a giant pain in the ass.” That’s about right. Click the link before for the whole thing. Or just watch the beginning:

The singer Roberta Flack is 77 today. I mention her only as an excuse for listening to Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”:

Other birthdays: naval commander William Cornwallis (1744); writer Charles Lamb (1775); great French Romantic painter Ary Scheffer (1795); saccharin co-creator Ira Remsen (1846); Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890); actor Judith Anderson (1897); the Father of Modern Vaccines, John Franklin Enders (1897); actor Stella Adler (1901); actor Lon Chaney Jr (1906); great cinematographer Douglas Slocombe (101!); film composer Jerry Goldsmith (1929); actor Robert Wagner (84); swimmer Mark Spitz (64); and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan (47).

The day, however, belongs to the great playwright Bertolt Brecht who was born on this day in 1898. I know him mostly as the guy with all the books in the section where I’m looking for Beckett plays. Despite the fact that he didn’t live that long, he wrote a tremendous number of plays—all of which have been translated into English. He is best know, of course, for writing the book and lyrics of The Threepenny Opera. But among theater people he is ridiculously important—not only because of his plays but because of his extensive writing on theatrical theory and practice. Here is “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” from the 1931 film based on the play:

Happy birthday Bertolt Brecht!

Regular readers doubtless know about my trips to the movies with my comic book loving brother. These normally end in what I refer to as my “Marxist movie reviews.” These are reviews of films as they function as government propaganda. See, for example, Marvel’s The Despots. But yesterday, I had a different experience. I took my father to see Captain Phillips, at our cheap Third Street Cinema. I was actually more interested in seeing the other Tom Hanks film, Saving Mr Banks. But dad wasn’t that keen to go to the movies, so I figured Captain Phillips was a better choice.

The film is directed by Paul Greengrass or, as I have come to think of him, the handheld Tony Scott. And it is entirely what I’m come to expect from Greengrass: a big budget film for intelligent people that will appeal to idiots as well. In fact, I think Captain Phillips is the Iliad of the American empire. It provides an excellent illustration of how men on both sides of a conflict are supposed to act. Phillips, of course, is stoic while trying to safeguard his crew and eventually even the leader of the pirates, Abduwali Muse, and its youngest member. For his part, Muse does his best in a situation he does not like—never forgetting his duty to his employer and by extension the safety of his community.

There is much to like about the film. In particular, I appreciated that the US Navy was mostly not humanized. It presented it as the huge killing machine that it is. Once it is on the case, all hope is lost for the pirates. Another important aspect of the film is that Phillips is not really cast as a hero. A good comparison is John McClane in the first half of Die Hard, where all he is trying to do is get the police to notice the hostage situation. Phillips is trying to make the best of a bad situation. The role has a bit too much of the star hero, but it is surprisingly limited. And at the end, after he is safe, Phillips breaks down. So I liked all of that.

Of course, by necessity, the film is propagandistic. In the end, the Navy comes to the rescue, just like the cavalry did in bad westerns of old. And ultimately, most people will see the film as the bad pirates against the good merchant marines. The film does do a good job of showing that the pirates are also victims in this. In the end, three of them die, and nothing happens to the warlord behind it. In addition, nothing happens to those in the commercial fishing industry who destroyed the pirates’ village’s fish population. In fact, there is a great moment in the film where Phillips tells Muse that there has to be an alternative besides fishing and kidnapping. Muse responds, “Maybe in America.” But it’s still a bit subtle. For example, the actual pirates were all between the ages of 16 and 19. The film makes note of the fact that the youngest is 16, but this is made out to be different from the others. Muse was only 18, but Barkhad Abdi, who brilliantly plays him in the movie, is 28.

That’s all minor and beside the point. It isn’t the filmmakers’ fault that most people who go to see the film will have an extremely biased perspective and miss the subtleties. The fact remains that the film is largely respectful to its characters. In the end, I think the film raises important issues about equality and fairness. And it drops these issues in your lap and runs away. No one involved in this movie wants to deal with these implications. So they wrap it in an exciting thriller and figure their job is done. And they are right. But the rest of us ought to think about why we live in such an unfair world where it is just dumb luck whether you are killed at 18 because of a botched kidnapping or make millions off the hedge fund daddy gave you the money to start.

Something must be said about Paul Greengrass’ overuse of the handheld camera. I know that he is going for a cinema verite feel. And it often works, and worked the best I’ve ever seen in this film. But during non-dramatic scenes such as the car ride to the airport, it doesn’t make it feel real. The camera just calls attention to itself. That’s also the case when a beautiful helicopter shot interrupts the jitter-fest. And the camera man is clearly moving the camera more than he has to. Most camera operators can shoot scenes handheld without most observers even realizing it. So I think that Greengrass is being awfully pretentious a lot of the time. And then there is the over-cutting. It’s like he thinks that the film would die if there wasn’t a cut every three second.

That’s all meta criticism that doesn’t matter all that much. What is a bigger issue is that the film does kind of die once the pirates take Phillips hostage on the lifeboat. Much of the dynamism of the plot dies here. What’s more, most of the characters lose their interest. There are still many interesting movements like the “Maybe in America” line. But large chunks of time are taken up with all the Navy maneuvers. Given that it is based fairly closely on a real life story, this is understandable. But it was not necessary to spend so much time on kidnapping part of the story. I think the film could easily be cut down by a half hour.

Given all of this, it is still unlikely that you will see a better big budget thriller in the next several years. It is extremely engaging, the characters are well rendered, and its theme is important. If Hollywood made more films like this, we might become a better nation.