Scanners

The curious coolness of Benjamin Button

Jim Emerson

Todd McCarthy of Variety, who’s old enough to know better, writes at the end of his review of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”:

Still, for what is designed as a rich tapestry, the picture maintains a slightly remote feel. No matter the power of the image of an old but young-looking Benjamin, slumped over a piano and depressed about his fading memory and life; it is possible that the picture might have been warmer and more emotionally accessible had it been shot on film. It has been argued that digital is a cold medium and celluloid a hot one and a case, however speculative, could be made that a story such as “Benjamin Button,” with its desired cumulative emotional impact, should be shot and screened on film to be fully realized. These are intangibles, but nor are they imaginary factors; what technology gives, it can also take away.

[Don’t worry — no spoilers.]

This makes about as much sense to me as blaming the weather on Doppler radar pictures. It may be the second-most misguided thing I’ve read about movies all year (after Patrick Goldstein’s assertion that a “dumb summer comedy” is more worthy of contempt that a dishonest or inept film that expects its ambition to be taken more seriously).

OK, let’s say the movie feels “cold” to you, and you attribute this feeling to something in the film. You could acknowledge the movie’s predominantly wintry settings and sepia color pallete (exemplified by the fully digital image, set in the dead of night in an empty hotel lobby in the middle of the Russian winter, above). Or contemplate the loneliness of the emotionally detached title character/observer/narrator, who is born an old man in a decrepit body and is cursed to grow physically younger while watching everyone around him age and die.

And you might very well consider the Kubrickian sensibility of the director, David Fincher (“Se7en,” “Fight Club,” “Zodiac”), the most deliberate and precise of filmmakers. Not known as Mr. Warm ‘n’ Cozy — even when working from a Gumpian screenplay by the writer of “Forrest Gump.” If the film is dark and cool in tone, it’s not because Fincher chose digital technology. It’s because Fincher chose to make it dark and cool. You may dislike the countless ways in which the movie emphasizes these qualities (in every composition, every cut, every performance), but don’t pretend it’s the video that’s doing it.

CE3K 30 3.0

Jim Emerson

The light is the movie.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary three-disc DVD release of three — count ’em, three — versions of Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” I offer yet another quotation from Richard T. Jameson’s “Style vs. ‘Style'” (Film Comment, March/April, 1980):

“Energy” has become the new cliché of film criticism, which is a damn shame since the cinema is a medium of energy… “Energy” as a cop-out for mindless noise and jitter is reprehensible. But energy, sans quotes, can be lucid, multivalenced, aesthetically informed, and beautiful in ways unique to cinema.

Steven Spielberg misapplies it in “1941,” but illuminates the world and his medium with it in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “Close Encounters” is, like any other good movie, about mise en scène, the transliteration of energy. “The sun sang to me last night,” an old derelict beams. The dissonant but regular chant on a mountain in India is echoed on the toy flute of an Indiana boy, while his mother finds herself painting an odd rock formation into all her pictures and a newly-ex power-company employee (he’s chasing a new power) looks for it in rumpled pillows and bowls of mashed potatoes. Form finally compels its own content. Music becomes light, gesture, mathematical formula, the patterns described in space by a celestial craft in motion. The metamorphosis of reality, the rediscovery of possibility, the translation of an idea into visual action: what movies do: why movies exist. The foremost pleader of the UFO cause is played by one François Truffaut, movie director.

This is energy as style, style as energy. It’s radiant because it’s been defined by a cinematic sensibility: What Spielberg’s seeing and the way he sees it are one.

I get chills reading that, because it puts me back in touch with the sense of awe I get from a movie that sings… like the sun.

Thumbs up for Roger

Jim Emerson

Thumbs up for a quick recovery.

Roger Ebert is in serious but stable condition after suffering a burst blood vessel near the site of an operation two weeks ago to remove cancerous growths from his salivary gland. These kinds of things are always scary, and I can’t concentrate on much of anything but wishing for Roger’s quick recovery. Thanks, too, to all of you who have sent e-mails with your best wishes. I’m saving them up to send to Roger and Chaz once he’s out of the hospital.

Just to keep the positive recuperative vibes flowing, I’m posting this picture — one of my favorites — that I took at an Overlooked Film Festival reception at the Playboy Mansion in 2000. Here he is with Mark Borchardt of “American Movie” (who’s holding a beer and a screwdriver — which was pretty much the case for the entire evening). The great thing about this shot is that Roger did his thumb gesture just as I was about to take the picture, and Mark immediately put both his drinks in one hand so he could reciprocate. Just one of many great times I’ve had with Roger, and here’s to many more!

UPDATE 07/04/06: Chaz Ebert has an update on Roger’s condition.

Reply to ‘The Da Vinci Code’:

Jim Emerson

Link to YouTube.com

One shot: They wrote that

Jim Emerson

View image To some, it’s just another genre picture. Composition, color, movement, texture, shapes, faces, expressions, bodies — that’s where you begin to experience what this montage sequence is “about.”

If film is first and foremost a way of seeing (and I believe that to be the case, even if not everyone sees seeing the way I do), then what we see in a shot, or a series of shots, is as important as… as anything. The movie is what the film does, as the mind is what the brain does. One of my oft-used analogies is Picasso’s “Guernica.” Now, you can know or not know what the painting is “about” — the story it depicts, the historical-political events upon which it is based. You may even sense the emotions the artist is expressing and the techniques he’s using to express them. But all those things don’t even come close to adding up to “Guernica.” “Guernica” is a large composition designed to evoke responses in the viewer. That’s where you begin to discover the thing itself.

All of which serves as an introduction to one image from “No Country for Old Men” that I would like to point out (separate from the longer piece[s] I’m working on now). It’s a second or two of film that occurs just after Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who is being chased through the desert by a truck at night, jumps over a river bank and glances back and up to see how close his pursuers are. It involves seeing dust produced by the braking truck, illuminated by the headlights as it breaks over the edge of the bank, darkly silhouetted against the light from above. It’s Moss’s POV, and it’s a detail we notice because he notices it. The hounds of hell are loose on his trail (or will be in moments), but here’s this moment of sinister beauty develops from it, and sticks around just long enough to register before more urgent matters assert themselves.

It’s a directorial (and photographical) coup in many ways, but I was delighted to discover that it’s one of those images the Coens visualized in advance and actually chose to record in an early version of their screenplay (which deviates from the finished film in several significant aspects):

Moss is almost to the steep riverbank. Another whump of the shotgun.

Shot catches Moss on the right shoulder. It tears the back of his shirt away and sends him over the crest of the river bank. Moss airborne, ass over elbows, hits near the bottom of the sandy slope with a loud fhump.

He rolls to a stop and looks up.

We hear a skidding squeal and see dirt and dust float over the lip of the ridge, thrown by the truck’s hard stop.

That moment, in the middle of a deadly chase, is a “privileged moment” of a kind that, perhaps, Francois Truffaut did not have in mind when he coined that phrase, but it sure is one. For all we know, it could be the last play of the light that this man will ever see — and we share the site with him. It’s natural, it’s what perhaps anyone in this situation could see, but the Coens make sure that we do see it. The next several images I don’t want to describe right now, but they are among the most electrifying and surreal in all of cinema — at least since the relentless approach of the nightmare dog in Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados” (1950). But at this moment, we’re awash in sensations: the squeal of the tires, the clang that tells us something or someone is getting out of the unseen truck atop the bank, the cold river into which the wounded and disoriented Moss is about to plunge…

View image Luis Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados” (1950).

But I just wanted to point this out, and that they wanted to be certain it was not just in the film, but even in the screenplay (which in other respects is somewhat different than the film itself). Writers often do that kind of thing, and the credit (or blame) for a shot or sequence will usually be attributed to the director, even if it was right there in the script. But it is the director who bears responsibility for realizing those images, and sequencing them, and presenting them so that they do what they need to do. The Coens, being their own writers, directors, producers and editors, pretty much understand what they’re looking for. And they recognize what they’ve got when a miracle drops in their lap: the birds, and shadows of birds, over the highway in “Blood Simple”; the pelican plopping into the ocean at the end of “Barton Fink”).

“Content, as I see it, is a series of connecting shocks arranged in a certain sequence and directed at the audience.” Sergei Eisenstein, you are so right! (I wish I liked your movies more.) Shocks as content — the junior-high equation [ART = FORM + CONTENT] trembles, previously secure elements threaten to swap sides. What Eisenstein theorized about cinema goes for writing, too: words as shocks; shocks arranged in a certain sequence. Words call up images and the images recur, mutate, cross-refer as the words extend in linear space and the reading-experience extends in time.”

— Richard T. Jameson, “Style vs. ‘Style'” (Film Comment, March/April, 1980)If Michael Bay turns everything up to 11 and assaults you until you feel bludgeoned and numb, the Coens do the very opposite. Bay, from the Alan Parker school of airless imagery, tries to shut you down, to restrict your imagination to fit his literal forms. (If you feel like cattle being funneled through the slaughterhouse, so be it.) The Coens open up the doors of perception, so that you become hyperaware of the many vibrant sensations — light, color, sound, motion — that are in the world around us every day, the kinds of living details to which most (flat, inert, mechanical) films just aren’t attuned.

So, one brief shot of the dust in the headlights — it’s a small thing, but it makes all the difference. It’s just one of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and one reason I emerge from a movie like “No Country for Old Men” feeling like my senses, my emotions, my mind, have been stimulated, invigorated rather than dulled.

Take the ‘WTC’ litmus test

Jim Emerson

Stephen Dorff plays a rescuer in Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”

Reading today’s critical responses to Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” I find it fascinating that the positive reviews and the negative reviews are saying essentially the same things. People have interpreted the movie in different ways, as a disaster picture and as a political picture, but if you look at the specific observations about the film, it’s not as easy as you’d think to distinguish the favorable notices from the unfavorable ones.

I saw “WTC” with three other people: two of us thought it was an honorable memorial, two of us thought it was phony and formulaic, but we all thought it was more or less emotionally inert. (I thought Stephanie Zacharek at Salon hit the nail on the head: “Even when Stone is clumsy, he at least seems to recognize that he can’t possibly re-create the experience of these policemen: The best he can do is put it onstage, reminding us that this happened to someone else and not to us.” That perfectly describes the sense of distance I felt in, and from, the film.)

One of my friends (also a film critic) who was favorably impressed said she thought the portrayal of the heroic Marine at the end was sad, because he was deluded into thinking the war in Iraq was about avenging 9/11. I don’t know if that’s what Stone intended. I didn’t see it that way. But it’s a legitimate interpretation of what’s up there on the screen. And make no mistake, this is a political movie. It makes choices about what to show and what not to show (including worldwide reactions on television), and in 2006 those choices in a film about 9/11 can’t help but be political as well as dramatic or cinematic.

Now, here’s a test (the movie itself is a test). What follows are excerpts of “WTC” reviews. See if you can guess which ones are considered “fresh” (by Rottentomatoes.com) and which are “rotten.” Answers, and the identities of the reviewers, after the jump. Ready? Begin…

1) [‘WTC’] wields a simple, blunt emotional instrument. It is a film about an American tragedy done up in the trappings of honorable, well-meaning melodrama…. ‘World Trade Center’ is the second major studio picture to weigh in on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. It is a more limited achievement: a comfortably unsettling drama.”

2) “In this screen version of the Sept. 11 story, however, we see only two people die, the same number that the movie shows being rescued. By creating a kind of equivalency between the living and the dead, the picture always feels as if it’s laboring to arrive at a Hollywood ending. ‘World Trade Center’ delivers to its audience a calculated dose of uplift and gooses us along to feel suspense here, compassion there and hope at the end.”

3) “The filmmaker and his colleagues have brought the sensibility of an old-fashioned Hollywood disaster movie…”

4) “Stone’s film bears some thematic resemblance to ‘Alive,’ Frank Marshall’s 1993 chronicle of a plane crash in the Andes. Both offer a tribute to human endurance under unimaginable conditions, but watching young guys huddle together trying not to freeze to death or two cops pinned under tons of debris isn’t exactly a cinematic thrill ride.”

5) “Attempting to convey a macro vision of Sept. 11 through a micro lens, Oliver Stone is to be credited for presenting this challenging, fact-based story with admirable restraint, a quality that has not always characterized his past directorial efforts….”

6) “‘WTC’ is not a definitive statement about 9/11, or one that is likely to make you see that day any differently than you do now. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

7) “The surprising thing about this commission job, directed from Andrea Berloff’s script, is not its factuality but its restraint…. As befits a new-style disaster film, spectacle is subsumed in subjective experience—in this case, being buried alive.”

8) “Stone has dutifully repeated his studio-given mantra that ‘World Trade Center’ is “not a political movie.” (As if that were possible: Even the musical cues suggest the mawkish piano doodling that’s been a campaign ad staple since Reagan ran for re-election.)”

9) “In some ways, it’s a typically unsubtle Stone movie. Stone can’t show New Yorkers (civilians as well as firefighters, policemen and Marines) helping one another through the disaster without later adding a voiceover about how everyone helped each other that day…. Over and over in “World Trade Center,” Stone acknowledges the importance of showing, as opposed to telling, and then goes ahead and tells anyway.”

10) “It’s impossible to watch Oliver Stone’s ‘World Trade Center’ without being moved…. Although ‘World Trade Center’ doesn’t fuel anyone’s political agenda, it lends itself to the kind of romanticized view of ordinary men that found its way into ‘Platoon.’ Stone can’t conceal his admiration for these salt-of-the-earth cops.”

11) “For the reality of what took place on the streets of Lower Manhattan is such an overwhelmingly sad and troubling story that simply re-creating those horrific events, as this film does, guarantees that your work will have moments of power and emotion. A person’s heart would have to be made of stone if he or she weren’t at least a little affected by the against-all-odds rescue of two Port Authority policemen, played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña, from beneath crushing piles of rubble, as their despairing wives, played by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, cry literal tears of joy.”

12) “The unthinkable has happened. Oliver Stone has made a film that is unrecognizable as an Oliver Stone film…. Most of all, it exhibits no political slant whatsoever, injecting only heartfelt empathy for the day’s many victims and heroes.”

13) “The films of Oliver Stone are the ongoing cry of a distressed romantic. Romantic, because the best of them are animated, and the worst marred, by the same simple dialectic of good versus evil…. Here, evil is a ‘yeah, sure’ given, unnecessary to cast and too obvious to show as anything more than a plane’s fleeting shadow, hovering above a valley of death where goodness and mercy abound. Such is the heroic myth that now permeates the hours of that fateful day.”

14) “As a tribute to those who died, and survived, on Sept. 11, World Trade Center is a scrupulous and honorable film. Yet it never comes close to being a revelatory one; it sentimentalizes more than it haunts.”

Answers next…

“In a world where…”

Jim Emerson

… Don LaFontaine is no longer the voice of that world, it is a lesser world. LaFontaine, the Voice of the Movie Trailer whose goosepimply vocal performances number in the thousands of hundreds of dozens, has died in Los Angeles at age 68.

And be sure to revisit the thrilling voiceover masterpiece, “5 Guys in a Limo,” featured here a few years ago, after the jump. Don’t you dare miss it!

Just a few LOST leftovers

Jim Emerson

They completely lost me with the time travel stuff, which became so arbitrary I just stopped caring. But the series finale did make me weep a few times (especially when Vincent showed up at the very end). Glad that it all concluded with the image it needed to end with (an eye closing, not opening — “Avatar” stole the latter for its ending). None of the Island Mythology made any sense to me (what’s with the big stone cork stopper at the bottom of the glowing cave waterfall — surely the Cheesiest TV Special Effect Since The Original Star Trek?). It seems to me that LOST went “sideways” long ago, with that wasted half-season that took place in the old zoo on the Other Island (references to which were significantly downplayed in the finale). Everything after that had little or nothing to do with the concerns of the first few seasons — The Others, the Dharma Initiative, etc. The Jacob/Brother With No Name thing was lame beyond lame. But, still, the finale kind of redeemed a lot of the interminable padding of the last several years — mainly by ignoring them and by re-framing The Island as a peak experience that bonded a group of people, even if the Thing Itself had no intrinsic meaning. You know, like being together in the army, or a college dorm, or a TV series for a few years… Still, some people have a few questions…

Oh, and in case you forgot: It was Nikki and Paulo’s story all along.

The tail of the banana-eating jungle monkey

Jim Emerson

The whole Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest fiasco instantly reminded me of the best line in Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” (2006), spoken by Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to a fellow police trainee: “Look at it this way, you’re a black guy in Boston. You don’t need any help from me to be completely f**ked.” But it proved to be more complicated than that.

The 911 caller who saw two men trying to get into Gates’ house wasn’t making the racial assumptions many assumed had been. The transcript of the call reveals that she couldn’t identify their races even when prodded for information by the operator (she thought one of them “looked kind of Hispanic, but I’m not really sure”), and was only calling on behalf of an elderly woman who was walking by and thought she saw something suspicious.

Diminished by the movies

Jim Emerson

Hugh Laurie as Dr. House. His mind is his temple, his body is his house.

“Two TV icons are demoted to the big screen.” That’s the headline over Christopher Orr’s piece in The New Republic about the careers of Jennifer Aniston and Sarah Jessica Parker, who seem diminished in the multiplex. Not that their TV shows — “Friends” and “Sex in the City,” respectively — were anything special. They made for mediocre television at best, and on the occasions I attempted to pay attention to them I likened the experience to visiting a distant planet populated by synthetic creatures who could not have been less interestingly humanoid if they tried. I did not enjoy my time spent in the company of these banal, studio-fashioned aliens, and I question their resemblance to any carbon-based life-forms on Earth.

But at least on their long-running series Aniston and Parker were big, pretty fish in their teeny-tiny sitcom puddles. In the movies (“Rumor Has It,” “The Family Stone”), the comedy hasn’t gotten any bigger or better, but they’ve seemed outscaled, like little floundering fish out of water. I’m not convinced either has the presence for the big screen, although Aniston was terrific in “The Good Girl” (a small movie) and Parker, who strikes me as more of a character actress than a leading lady, was suitably kooky and vivacious in Steve Martin’s “L.A. Story” and hilarious as Johnny Depp’s exasperated wife in Tim Burton’s low-scale “Ed Wood.” On the other hand, in the company of incandescent actresses such as Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack in “Friends With Money,” Aniston — ostensibly the biggest name in the cast — faded out, becoming blurry and indistinct almost like that actor played by Robin Williams in Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry.”

District 9: Alive in Joburg

Jim Emerson

This six-minute 2005 short, “Alive in Joburg,” by South African director Neill Blomkamp, forms the basis for his “District 9.” Unlike the feature, it is set in 1990 under the apartheid government, during which time (in actual history) thousands of black South Africans were relocated from an area of Cape Town known as District 6 to make it an “all whites area.” (The same was done in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, setting of the feature film.)

The dogs are loose! (Part 2)

Jim Emerson

My MSN Movies gallery feature article about Great Movie Underdogs (i.e., dogs whose proper names are not in the titles), is live. And, after the jump, the answers to last week’s movie dog quiz — and a couple of delicious bonus treats.

Regarding great movie doggerel doggies:

My dog Edith does not much like dog movies. At least I don’t think she does. Whenever a canine appears on our 55-inch HDTV screen, or any of the surround speakers, she lunges, barking, growling, whining and emitting other noises that sound like a wounded vacuum or a gargling siren.

If Edith were a bit less excitable and territorial, if she were better able to maintain a critical distance, she would appreciate how many fine screen performances have been given by members of her species, if not of her particular mixed-breed-of-color. […]

The new-er-est “Blade Runner”

Jim Emerson

View image This shot has always been there.

Steven Boone over at The House Next Door has seen the latest — er, “Final” — cut of what may now, 25 years after its debut, be “Ridley Scott’s” “Blade Runner,” in the new version premiering at the New York Film Festival. Above all, Boone was wowed by the digital presentation:

“The Final Cut” is remastered from original 35mm elements and transferred to High Definition digital video at 4K (4096 horizontal pixel) resolution. Projected in HD at 24 frames a second for this year’s New York Film Festival, this “Blade Runner” has no visible grain, dirt or scratches, stuttering frames, reel-change “cigarette burns” or soft-focus moments when the film gets loose in the projector gate. Funny how I thought I’d miss all those things, their “organic” qualities, but this restoration gives us a pristine image without sacrificing warmth. The picture even fooled our editor, who at first thought he was looking at a 35mm projection. This “Blade Runner” removes every barrier to getting lost in Scott’s fire-and-rain Los Angeles short of presenting it as interactive theater.I saw the original version first-run in 70 mm at Seattle’s Cinerama Theater in 1982, and grain was evident, probably for a couple reasons: 1) many of the visual effects involved multiple, non-digital exposures; and 2) the film wasn’t actually shot in 70 mm, but was blown up from 35 mm.

According to an extensive, multi-sourced Wikipedia article on the film, the 1990 version advertised as a “Director’s Cut” and shown at the Nuart in LA and the Castro in San Francisco was actually a 70 mm workprint. (In the days before digital, effects were often done in 70 mm, even for 35 mm releases, for better optical quality.) Scott approved the 1992 Director’s Cut, but wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. Wikipedia offers comparisons of the various versions, citing the primary changes as:

* The removal of Deckard’s explanatory voice-over

* The re-insertion of a dream sequence of a unicorn running through a forest

* The removal of the studio-imposed “happy ending,” including some associated visuals which had originally run under the film’s end-credits.It was apparent from the beginning that the voiceover was a big problem — and Harrison Ford (who didn’t get on with Scott, much less the studio execs who were calling him in to read narration) has said he did it badly and begrudgingly, hoping they wouldn’t even be able to use it. (It’s that cringe-worthy at times.) Scott, however, says he wasn’t taken off the picture, and that he completed the original release version after it tested badly with audiences.

But the movie was a theatrical flop anyway, producing rentals of only $14.8 million at roughly the same time “E.T.” was on its way to zooming past $300 million. According to a definitive piece by Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (September 13, 1992), the film may have died then and there. But the new home video market extended its commercial termination date:

“Blade Runner’s” availability on video kept it alive in the eyes of the always loyal science-fiction crowd, and gradually, over time, the film’s visual qualities and the uncanniness with which it had seemed to see the future began to outweigh its narrative flaws. Scott says he saw the interest rise, “And I thought, ‘My God, we must have misfired somewhere; a lot of people like this movie.’ ” And not just in this country. In Japan, where the film had always been successful, “I was treated like a king,” art director [Snyder reports. “The fans would be too in awe to even look at you.” The film’s look began to show up in art direction and design: Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” and the stage design for the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour were influenced by “Blade Runner.” And when laser discs appeared on the market, “Blade Runner” was one of the films that everyone just had to get. It became Voyager’s top-selling disc immediately upon its release in 1989, never losing the No. 1 spot.

(Are spoiler alerts now becoming unfashionable because we should just assume everybody’s seen the movie or knows the ending? I don’t care. This is one.)

In Sunday’s New York Times (“A Cult Classic Restored, Again”), Scott says of Ford’s character, Deckard: “Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”

NYFF? Fuggedaboutit!

Jim Emerson

What is the NYFF crowd going to make of “The Host”?

NYFF! Huh! (Good gawd, y’all.) What is it good for?

I laughed when I read Caryn James’ tired and trivial “All the King’s Men” piece in the New York Times the other day — especially this little nugget of unsupported parochial spin:

Oscar-ready films that have opened in September, like “Mystic River��? and “Good Night, and Good Luck,��? have come out of the prestigious New York Film Festival. “All the King’s Men��? went to the nonexclusive Toronto film festival, and the word there was that the movie was mediocre at best.What are those two statements intended to mean? That films stand a better chance at winning Oscars if they are launched in the “prestigious” New York Film Festival (which shows about 30 features, including revivals — the vast majority of which have already played Cannes in May, and Telluride and/or Toronto in September) rather than the “nonexclusive” Toronto International Film Festival (which shows ten times as many films)?

As David Poland points out (“Why We Don’t Link To Caryn James Much”), that notion is “as wrong as wrong can be.” He cites the obvious counter examples of Oscar faves shown at Toronto but not NY: “Crash,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Capote,” “Sideways,” “Ray,” “Finding Neverland”… and mentions that Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” also isn’t being shown at NYFF. (For that matter, neither is Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” although both films open in October.)

But who even cares whether a film festival screens a movie that’s later nominated for an Oscar? That’s not what film festivals are about. So, is James suggesting that the more “exclusive” a festival is, the better it is? In that case, surely the Floating Film Festival (which shows twenty-something films and is programmed mostly by film critics, including Roger Ebert, Richard and Mary Corliss and me), and which is held aboard a cruise ship for only 200 or so festivalgoers, is the more “exclusive” fest. (Bruce Kirkland of the Toronto Sun has called it “the world’s most exclusive.”) Still, Roger Ebert says the two best film festivals in the world — in terms of influence and quality — are Cannes and Toronto.

Or maybe James is suggesting that “mediocre at best” pictures are helped by exposure at “prestigious” film festivals, but not at “nonexclusive” ones? (Didn’t seem to help “The Da Vinci Code” or “Southland Tales” get better reviews out of Cannes…) Does she think people would think the movie was better if it was in NYFF rather than TIFF? Does she also have a bridge for sale?

But the question I really want to ask is: To whom does the New York Film Festival matter and in what ways? The general public can’t get tickets, which are almost exclusively reserved for donors to the Film Society of Lincoln Center. NYFF is social payback — time to give the old rich folks a little cinematic baksheesh for their generous financial support.

A letter about essential things from Albert Einstein

Jim Emerson

I like this Einstein fellow’s intellectual attitude (see the final paragraph, below). While firmly disagreeing with someone’s philosophical stance, he nevertheless insists that they may have much to say to each other “if we talked about concrete things.” (Hey, what do I always say? Any valid exchange of ideas must be rooted in specific, mutually recognizable observations and solid reasoning, no matter what your opinions. Einstein said so, and he was no dummy!)

This letter, dated January 3, 1954, was written to Erik Gutkind, author of the book “Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt,” which had been recommended to Einstein by a mutual friend, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer. (Full document at Letters of Note.)

Still, without Brouwer’s suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this….

Jonathan Rosenbaum on the life of a critic

Jim Emerson

This week film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, 65, retires from a 20-year stint at the Chicago Reader. In this interview, posted at The Reader’s site, Rosenbaum looks back at his career (writing, editing, blogging) and ruminates on what he’d like to do next, which includes the freedom to not have to see movies he has no interest in seeing. People who are not film critics have no idea how precious that freedom can be. (Rosenbaum also has a few choice words for out-of-control commenters on The Reader’s blog that make me grateful for the readers and commenters we have here.) You can see Part II here, in which he expounds on film as politics and vice-versa, Barak Obama, “Charlie Bartlett” and “There Will Be Blood,” which he sees as “simpleminded” and less-than-“challenging.”

JR’s authoritative, confrontational (sometimes even doctrinaire) style has sometimes provoked me to take issue with him, but I’m always interested in what he has to say — and will continue to be. May his “retirement” (not from writing, from The Reader) be an eminently productive one!