My Year in Film Studies (part two)

For those who missed it, part one is here.

Before continuing on with how I decided what to watch next, I want to quickly review what worked and didn't work about my use of Jerry Maguire for the courses opening act, and look at what I would do differently next time around

Was Jerry Maguire a success?

The film was certainly a solid choice if my sole purpose was to examine the conventional 3 act narrative structure in mainstream film storytelling, as we could observe how Crowe's film observed the requirements of each act in not one but two plotlines that were quite capably interwoven. Beyond that, the film also has plenty to recommend, it is at times funny, romantic mildly subversite and unflaggingly energetic. If they were perhaps a bit less than rapt, Jerry Maguire had little trouble capturing and holding both classes' attention, and was awarded a 3.5/5 rating by the class in a film-ending survey. However, it is interesting to note that by year's end the class had no trouble identifying the film's elemental filmsiness when comparing it to the many far more superior and significant films we enjoyed over the rest of the school year. In the year end survey, Jerry Maguire's rating slipped down to 3/5, and it was ranked at 19th best out of the 20 films we watched in their entirety. And lest you think I prejudiced the class with my feelings about the film, as you will see when we reach this point in the course, no amount of enthusiasm on my part was able to convince students of the remarkable achievement that I and most critics maintain.

What would I do differently?

Simply put, use a different film. Next year I will give Hitchcock's North by Northwest a try for a three reasons. One, it accomplishes the assigned task of portraying the standard narrative structure in mainstream film. Two, it is a better made film that JM, and Hitchcock is clearly a more accomplished technician and storyteller than Cameron Crowe. Three, I can replace many of the Hitchcock films I showed in the Auteur Theory portion of my course with those of another filmmaker (yet to be determined) instead.

Overall grade for Jerry Maguire and the Study of 3 Act Narrative Conventions: B

Next up: A look at how some filmmakers like to push convention's envelop in their storytelilng choices, while still acknowledging the demands of their chosen genre so we could also use this as a jumping off point to study the subject of film genres. The films in question? Christopher Nolan's Memento and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.














Memento (USA, 2000, Christopher Nolan)

My rationale for choosing Christopher Nolan's remarkable sophomore effort Memento as my means into examining risk-taking storytelling must be self-evident to fans of the film. I wanted to choose a film that (a) plays with and challenges the narrative conventions we have just been studying (b) demands audience attentiveness (c) works firmly within at least one movie genre. Memento does this and so much more. Among it's many teacher-worthy aspects, Memento also boasts an appealing but extremely unlikeable narrator, a wicked (in the both senses of the word) plot twist and a deliciously indeterminate ending. The film begins with a bang, as our hero Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) dispatches his nemesis with a gun shot to the head. It becomes clear immediately that the situation is FUBAR, as blood starts running up the walls, and Leonard's Polaroid picture begins to un-develop before our eyes. As we adjust to the recognition that we are watching events play out in reverse (is that kid in the projection booth toking up again??) the film jumps into what appears to be some semblance of normalcy. But the feeling is fleeting, as the appearance of the murder victim from the previous scene alerts us to the fact that the story has looped back on itself, and is being told in reverse. Not in a frame-by-frame reverse of the opening scene, but rather in a scene by scene reverse trajectory. What a clever monkey this Nolan is, we think. But what of it? Is this just a clever gimmick to get us to pay more attention?










But wait, before we can answer these questions, what's happening now? The film has switched from colour to black and white. And it appears that these scenes are being in a chronologically "normal" fashion, in contrast to the rest of the film. These scenes seem to serve as back story, filling in the blanks of Lenny's story as he converses with an invisible stranger on the phone who most likely is the man he ends up murdering in the opening scene, police officer (?) Teddy Gammel, the always watchable Joey Pantoliano, aka Joey Pants. Also, before I forget, let me praise Pearce's fine work here. It easy to play a mental disability in a gimmicky way to gain audience sympathy, but Pearce does not of that sort of actorial mugging. His portrayal is nicely nuanced, as Leonard is a driven, distraught, confused and angry man seeking revenge for his wife's murder, and Pearce hits the notes cleanly, without resorting to any sort of heart-tugging tactics. But as we are going to learn later, perhaps we cannot believe everything we are learning here. That Nolan, such a cheeky monkey. Is he just trying to keep us on our toes, or does he have some deeper purpose?

And it seems just about everybody we are forced to reassess our initial impressions of everyone we meet. Leonard, a one-time insurance agent, suffers from short-term memory loss due to a head injury he suffered on the night of his wife's murder, and as a result, cannot retain information for more than 15 minutes. As a result, every time he meets someone it is for the first time, regardless of whether he has never seen them or has met them a dozen times before. So people get repeated chances to make a first impression, and consequently, we discover that those we thought helpful or kind could very well turn out to be devious, conniving, self-serving. And vice versa. Is the film trying to make us wary of our perceptions, and teach us to distrust the story as it plays out before us? If so, what could be the point?











And it is here that the film's cleverness proves to be so much more than that. Nolan uses these techniques not just out of playfulness or to draw attention to his cinematic wittiness, but for several and sundry reasons besides. Most obviously, Nolan forces us to see this world from Leonard's damaged perspective. As he struggles to gather and piece together the facts in pursuit of his wife's murderer from a distinctly disadvantaged perspective, so do we. His disability is ours. His frustrations are ours. It is a very crafty way to gain our empathy for Leonard. But more importantly, these techniques challenge our understanding of truth and reality, while not exactly in a Rashomon-like way, in its own unusual and provocative fashion. In Rashomon (as we will see in subsequent My Year in Film Studies entries) is a groundbreaking study of the subjectivity of our perceptions of reality. It posits that truth may be imperceptible to lowly humans due to the taint of personal biases and rationalizations. Self-interest and self-delusion go hand in hand in Kurosawa's great film, but we are often completely oblivious to this. So, is Nolan merely covering familiar ground, paying homage to the master in a modern American urban setting?

I don't thing so. Here I must offer up a SPOILER ALERT for those of you who come to this review not having yet seen the film. In Memento, Nolan is tilling similar soil as Kurosawa, but reaping a slightly different crop. Leonard's difficulty in discovering the truth appears to be based on his inability to hold onto memories, a struggle that he meets by keeping copious notes, tattooing key information on his body and taking Polaroids pictures. As he cannot be certain of what has just happened, it seems that he cannot be accused of misrepresenting facts or twising the truth to suit his purpose, unlike the leads in Rashomon's drama. But like much in this film, things are not as they appear, and Nolan's point becomes clear only at the moment of the film's aforementioned wicked plot twist, where it becomes clear that Leonard's brain injury, while preventing him from holding new memories, does not prevent him from manipulating reality to suit his purposes. In fact, he is willing to pretty much obliterate truth in order to give himself a reason to carry on. While the film boast aspects of many film genres, include thriller, murder mystery and police procedure, in this moment Memento honours its film noir heritage. In a twist that causes us to not only reevaluate everything that has gone before, but also our own willful manipulation of truth in our daily lives, Memento has a desperately cynical conclusion that matches the mood and attitude of great noirs through the ages, from Double Indemnity through to Touch of Evil. The world is a rotten place, these films say, so you do whatever you need to do to keep a leg up on the decay. And since the real world isn't about to give you what you need, you take it. By any means necessary.

So, onto the evaluation. What worked?

Everything! As a study of narrative envelop-pushing, you don't get much more interesting than Memento, and as a study of working within the rigours of specific film genres, the film holds its own with aplomb.

What didn't work?

Nothing! The film was well-received--though I was careful to guide students through some of the film's more serpentine plot developments--and students were engrossed throughout. The film ended up as the 3rd ranked film out of 20 at the end of the year, and was given a rating of 4.5/5

What would I do differently? Nothing significant.

Overall Grade: A


Next up: Alfred's devious and deviant Psycho.

Even Dwarves Get a Second Look: An Update

As part of Edward Copeland's week long look at the works of the works of Werner Herzog, he has posted a negative review of Even Dwarves Started Small, which provoked both Ben and I to leap to the film's defense. It has also led Ben to add a few thoughts onto our original review, and you can find these additions at the end of the original review, which is right here.

My Year in Film Studies

Part One

When my department head approached me with the idea that I consider teaching a Film Studies class, it was--not to put too fine a point on it--a revelatory moment. One the one hand, as a lifelong movie lover and a decades-long movie reviewer/blogger, the idea of spending several hours a week immersed in the world of sounds and images was quite enticing. On the other hand, with the old adage "be careful what you wish for, lest it come true" ratting around my head, I feared that the experience of sharing my favourite films with a group of less experienced and "refined" movie goers would prove if not frustrating, at the very least less than satisfying. I fretted about the motivations of the students I would encounter. Were they taking the class in hopes of viewing a stream of Hollywood blockbusters? Were they hoping for a chance to veg out and/or catch up on their sleep? Would I, with my agenda of art, foreign and genre films, be casting the proverbial pearl before a roomful of inevitably ingrateful swine? Would this experience suck the joy out of one of my life's great pleasures? Was I risking tainting my love of some intensely personal films by subjecting them to a public roasting by these rubes and neophytes?
Yes, arrogance is sometimes a problem.

Underestimating others as well, it seems. Now that the year has passed, I am happy to report that my fears and concerns proved largely of my own making, as, once the veggers were weeded out, the students turned out to be quite keen participants in the endeavour of helping me create this particular course of cinematic study. The experienced was, if not uniformly joyful, certainly and at the very least consistently rewarding. The students--those who stuck with it--showed themselves to be a keen audience and eager scholars. They may not have embraced every offering, but they remained tolerant of the unfamiliar and sometimes challenging material, and I could not realistically have asked for more.

So how did what to put on the curriculum? Of the tens of thousand films at my disposal, how do I decide which to use and why? And how to organize the units so that learning flows from one and into the other smoothly and effectively? A lifetime of movie-going, a solid decade of movie reviewing and self-directed scholarship and I had to narrow it down to 100 hours of course work, of which perhaps 50 hours would be dedicated to film viewing. How was I supposed to narrow the entire history of world cinema, touch on the art, techniques and technlogical developments, give students a taste of the evolution of narrative film and global cinema as well as a hint of the plethora of genres and genre busters, down to fifty hours of film? What to choose and how to choose it? The mind positively boggled at the prospect. It was an impossible task. But that was my job. And here's how I did it.

In order to start on familiar ground, I decided to start off by looking at the conventional structures and techniques of narrative film. I wanted to start with a film that would be accessible and entertaining, while also clearly exhibiting the familiar elements of the three act story arc. After considering a number of options, including Hitchcock's North by Northwest, I finally settled on a more recent film, Cameron Crowe's Jerry Maguire. My rationale was pretty simple. I wanted a film that would appeal equally to both genders, and I figured the dual plot line of Jerry Maguire would work to my advantage, as the rom-com aspects of the film would keep the female students onside, while the sports/buddy film elements would keep the guys on board. Turns out I was kinda sorta right, but not entirely so. But before dissecting the film's usefulness in the class, lemme turn first to a review of the film

Jerry Maguire (USA, 1998, Cameron Crowe)

While a fan of the film, Roger Ebert complained that Jerry Maguire feels overstuffed, and he may be onto something; however, for my purposes, the film's stuffiness (heh) played right into my hands. First, let me leap to the film's defense. Jerry Maguire carries its own weight narratively-speaking, as the twin plot lines, the first showing how Jerry (Tom Cruise) struggles to learn how to achieve intimacy in the most important relationships in his life, the second examining Jerry's professional growth and his burgeoning friendship with his (only) client Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) do not simply run parallel, but play off of and amplify each others themes quite effectively.
Just as Jerry's personal life disintegrates, and his professional life is rebuilt from the ashes of the very public humiliation of his firing, so too does Rod's personal life thrive in a rich and rewarding set of relationships with family and friends while he finds his career as a professional football player endangered not because of a lack of talent, but due to a lack of passionate commitment. So Rod and Jerry, and Cruise and Gooding do deserve some credit here for making this criss-crossed relationship seem plausible, have much to learn from each other, as one's strengths are the other's inadequacies. The story elements that involve these two characters and their struggles are easily the film's most appealing and successful, while charting each character's growth was an indispensible way into an analysis of the concept of character arc and the three act narrative structure.

Considerably less successful are the romantic comedy aspects of the film, as the story is less distinctive, the feel more generic, the writing more clever and forced, feeling less lived and more "written." Crowe's limitations as a writer, his Rolling Stone meets Judy Blume cuteness and quirk, draws attention to itself here, as the love story between Dorothy (Rene Zellweger) and Maguire has considerably less traction than the contentious friendship between Jerry and Rod. To be fair here, however, Crowe shows some of the same propensity throughout the sports plot, with its catch phrases ("Show Me the Money" and "Help ME to help YOU"), but these moments do not define this plot so much as punctuate it. Part of that is intentional, as Jerry is clearly not in love with Dorothy, but merely clinging to the wreckage of his life in order to stay afloat. He is described as being incapable of being alone, and Dorothy allows him to skirt the problem. For awhile at least. However, as we are supposed to believe that a love grows between them, it would be helpful if (a) the characters enjoyed some chemistry (b) the relationship actually grew before our eyes, rather than just in our and their imaginations. And while Zellweger had not yet become the lemony pucker-faced leading lady I have grown so very ewary of, her self-conscious and affected coyness does little to lift me out of the sense that I'm watching actors in a less compelling romantic drama attempting to keep me from falling asleep. And while it again dovetails nicely with the notion that Jerry initially enters this relationship out of fear and not love, it is quite telling that the most interesting relationship in this part of the film is between Dorothy's son Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki).

Overall, Jerry Maguire is a competently made and mostly well-written film that deploys the parallel plot structure quite effectively in the service of its twin themes. And while the buddy elements of the picture are more engaging than the rom-com aspects, Jerry Maguire's use of standard narrative conventions in the service of its dual plot proved fertile ground for study.

Part Two, wherein I complete the discussion of JM and take a gander at Christopher Nolan's Memento, can be found here.

Andrea Featured in Monday Magazine

A very nice feature on my favourite person in the whole world appeared in Monday Magazine this week. Take a look:



Andrea is a massage therapist here in Victoria B.C., and I'm here to tell you she's good. Very, very good (you can click on the image to enlarge it!)

And Now for Something Completely Different

I wrote this for the Baseball Prospectus Idol contest, knowing it stood little chance of being selected. I lack the number crunching skills to make it with that crowd of smarty pants. But still and so, here's my homage to baseball.

When I was young, baseball was played by giants on mythic Elysian fields. Raised in rural British Columbia, I escaped my weekday prison of a single-channel universe by running to my grandmother's house every Saturday morning where I witnessed the game's magical appearance in gauze-shrouded silvery tones on her console television set. I would perch myself precariously on her knee, as the warm, folksy drawl of Curt Gowdy and the crisp and pointed barbs of Tony Kubek welcomed me into the temple of baseball.

These were the days before air conditioning, when the sun-scorched Okanagan heat would drive most people under shady trees or into cooling waters. Instead, every Saturday I remained indoors, riveted by the shimmering black and white images of Bunyan-esque men, wielding the mighty tools of their trade, while my grandmother, fuelled by nicotine, caffeine and refined sugars, looked on with a curious air of detachment. A first generation immigrant and orphanage survivor with a grade school education, my grandmother was a single mother at a time when the term didn't exist. She also held down two jobs and couldn't afford to allow to be part of her vocabulary petty concerns like passionate commitment or religious intensity. Which was fine, because I worshipped at this altar with enough enthusiasm for both of us.

Like many of my friends, I also played organized baseball, but there was no apparent connection between the static, clumsy and largely boring game we tried to play in mundane living color, and the majestic other-worldly endeavor I saw unfolding before me on the monochromatic screen. The fields were immense, the bats too heavy, the bases too far apart. The players were mostly inept, the coaches only mildly interested, and the games interminable. This was the irreconcilable difference between fiction and reality, legend and fact. The heroes I saw playing on TV dominated the screen, whether it was Carl Yastrzemski striding purposefully into the batter's box, Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax toeing the rubber or Roberto Clemente roaming the fields with the swagger of a Giant-era James Dean.

Then I started to grow up, as we all must, and I and the young players around me got a little better. Consequently, I fell into the trap of youthful hubris that allowed me to arrogantly believe in the possibility that we were bridging that massive gap between Us and Them. In a sign of the scepticism of the Watergate era, I began to wonder if it was not such a magical thing to play this game. Somewhat contradictorily, I no longer hungered for the comforting awe of myth, choosing instead to challenge my childish assumptions by scrutinizing them under the cold eye of reason and realism. Watching the game no longer served me in this pursuit, as we had color TV by this time, and an aspect of the fantastical was lost in the transition from the mythic other-worldliness of those black and white images of my childhood to the gaudy rayon reality of my young adult years. Perhaps these men we saw on TV were not gods playing a great sport on an entirely different plane from the rest of us, but mere mortals, well-remunerated people, enjoying themselves at a past-time that provided distraction for the rest of us. Players like Reggie Jackson still had the swagger, but the world had changed. A bitterly divisive war fed our growing appetite for cynicism, while free agency highlighted the economic fact that baseball was not just a sport, but a business venture. Add to this the emergence of some tell-all books, and a near-mortal blow was dealt to the aura of invincibility that had once cocooned major leaguers. Still, it was not so much the world that had changed as I. Thankfully, time would serve to heal me of the largely self-inflicted wounds that had turned me away from the game I loved as a child.

As I was at the start of a lifetime inclination towards Truth over Fact, and as I began to realize that mine was the ability of a mortal and not a talent of mythic proportions, by the time I exited my youth, it was clear that my love for baseball would have to endure as a fan, not a player.
And as I aged, the line between legend and fact grew increasingly blurry. Fifteen years ago, I joined a strat-o-matic league, which helped to reinvigorate my interest in the game I had largely abandoned in my youth. I became voracious in my search for analytical sources that could give me the edge over my competitors. Luckily for me, I came first upon Bill James, whose determination to apply some logical statistical criteria to the evaluation of players' performances was matched by his ability to write intelligently and passionately about his love of the game. Later, I found Rob Neyer, who led me to the founding fathers of Baseball Prospectus, and in every instance I was introduced to a community of devotees, both writers and readers alike, who were not only knowledgeable and curious, but also eloquent and open-minded. I began to see that the legends could endure as a celebratory storyline onto which one could feature a more clear-minded examination of the reality behind the lore, and perhaps even help create a new narrative informed by a more honest appraisal of the accomplishments of those who played and continue to play the game.

And just as I recognize that fuzzy-headed nostalgic yearning for the good old days is yet another form of life-denying attachment to stasis, on terms both familiar and unfamiliar I return to the game of my childhood, chastened by youthful failures, but impressed once again by the glory of the game played at the highest level by the greatest talents. True, the game is no longer played by gods in black and white in our grandmother's living rooms, or broadcast on transistor radios stashed in student's desks. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. And yes, it turns out that those who play the game so well at the very highest level are mere mortals, with flaws and scars just like the rest of us. But how much more impressive are their deeds taken in this context? These are people who rose from the same earth as the rest of us, but can play this game we love with such skill that we can often only stand on in slack-jawed wonder. And drawing now on a global pool of talent, we are surely witnessing the highest level of talent and skill to ever play this great game. We should be ever thankful. Every generation will have their heroes, and so my Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax are today's Johan Santana and CC Sabatthia, while my Roberto Clemente is today's Ichiro. I wait with great anticipation to see who tomorrow's icons will be.

As I wander anxiously through my middle age, muscles withering and spine arching, and I see the creeping specter of senescence lurking in the not so distant greenery, the game, which has endured more controversies and indignities than any politician this side of Governor Blagojevich, remains. As I shrink back to the world from whence I came, I see that baseball has always been a game, such a unique and inspiring blend of low and high culture, played by great athletes, capable of remarkable feats of strength, agility and poetry, and that the people who ply this trade today at the major league level are at the pinnacle of this sport for a reason. They are the best players of the greatest sport, practitioners of this unique combination of low and high brow culture, tobacco-spitting Nureyevs of yore having morphed into protein shake-drinking Baryshnikovs, and I cannot wait to prop my grandchildren on my knee and introduce them to these giants of my and their childhood.

Okay, I don't have time to get into this right now, but suffice to say I'm pissed. I'm pissed cuz I invested eighteen hours of my life in the Oscar broadcast only to be told that the Academy is a bunch of pussies. I'm pissed cuz the Academy picked Sean Penn in retard mode over Mickey Rourke in laying it all bare for the world to see mode. But mostly I'm pissed cuz I even care.

Mickey Rourke gave the best performance of the year in a film that was MUCH better than any of the other five nominated pictures (yeah, Aronofsky got jobbed too.) What a buncha pussies.

Kittens Inspired By Kittens












I have no words.