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Who Killed the Electric Car?

Jim Emerson

Where did these cars go?

“To preserve our children’s future, we have to waste every resource we’ve got.”

No, that was not Dick Cheney. That was Stephen Colbert, endorsing General Motors’ $1.99 gasoline promotion: Buy one of their guzzlers and they’ll reimburse you for fuel costs at the end of one year so that you wind up paying no more than a buck ninety-nine a gallon. (If you remember to send in your receipts with that mail-in rebate form, that is!) Colbert heartily endorses the deal, using flawless logic: The only way we’re going to get more efficient fuel technology is to use up all the oil we can, as fast as we can.

Oddly, this is much the same logic behind the death of GM’s electric car, the EV1, in the mid-1990s. According to the new documentary (and technological murder-mystery) “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” there was simply too much easy money remaining to be made from old technology and the remaining trillion gallons of crude oil beneath the Earth’s crust. So, anti-free-market forces (oil companies, petro-politicians, automakers) killed off an existing, and quite successful, fuel cell vehicle that was already available in California and Arizona. Emissions: None. Speed: Up to 184 mph. Operating cost: The equivalent of buying gasoline at 60 cents a gallon.

Opening Shots: The Dark Knight

Jim Emerson

The corporate logos are deep blue and black: Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures, DC Comics. Then, out of a silent explosion of blue flames and black smoke, the familiar Batman shadow appears. Cut to bright afternoon daylight. The camera glides with surreal smoothness above a recognizably real American cityscape, over the rooftop of a large, squat building toward a cluster of shiny glass skyscrapers. This is not the forbidding, neo-Gothic Gotham City we expect to encounter at the beginning of a Batman movie, a densely stylized urban forest of inky comic-book noir. It’s almost like Phoenix at the start of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”: Anywhere, USA.

And that may well be the idea: The camera closes in on a colossal mirror, a wall of tinted windows in the side of a building. What are we looking for? How much closer can we get before something has to happen? (Where’s the helicopter? You’ll catch a glimpse of it at the far left, just at the moment your eye is distracted by an exploding window near center frame.) For a fraction of a second we may wonder about the fate of the people inside the room, and the pedestrians on the street below who are about to be showered with bits of glass. But before that can quite register we’re on the other side of the blown out window with a pair of clown-masked gunmen. This is part of some diabolical plan… which turns out to be a bank robbery in progress. (See other notes on this shot, and the rest of this sequence, here.)

Turns out, the building we’ve just passed over is the most important element in the shot; the glass wall is just a means to an end. Smoke and mirrors…

It’s Johnny’s Birthday (October 9, 1940)

Jim Emerson

TIFF 2007 Wrap: Personal best & indelible images

Jim Emerson

View image Roger & Chaz Ebert, with Roger’s second sidewalk star. (All photos by Jim Emerson. Thanks to Kim Robeson for the use of the camera on this one!)

View image Man Push Dog. Anyone will tell you that one of the joys of TIFF is the street food. I was inspired to take this after seeing “Chop Shop,” Ramin Bahrani’s second film after “Man Push Cart.” Want green olives on that dog? I do.

On average, I saw two to four movies a day at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival — and, incredibly, I didn’t see a bad movie. That’s nine days and 20-something pictures (less than one tenth of the total screened), but I don’t think I’ve ever had a run of good movies like that in my life. No, I didn’t write about everything I saw — but I also liked Ira Sachs’ “Married Life,” Chaude Chabrol’s “A Girl Cut in Two” (figuratively and literally), Gus van Sant’s “Paranoid Park,” and those other movies I saw, except for the one I walked out on (the third in a four-movie day) that was not so much bad as doleful and predictable. And there was the Woody Allen movie I accidentally half-saw, without knowing I was half-seeing it.

View image Toronto Film Festival Co-Founder Dusty Cohl with Roger Ebert. Ya got a coupla stars here.

View image Ingmar Bergman’s Death (center, rear) welcomes ticketbuyers, lined up at the TIFF box office in the Manulife Centre, which is being remodeled (nice duct-work, eh?) and currently looks like something out of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” The woman in orange (center, foreground) is one of the fest’s fantastically friendly and organized volunteers.

On the other hand, I also didn’t take all that many risks. Most of what I saw was by familiar directors I like, or came recommended by fellow critics or other film festivals. There were some movies I wanted to see just because they sounded interesting (not because I’d ever heard of the filmmakers), but I couldn’t squeeze them in, and in that sense I did not have the full experience a festival has to offer.

View image They do love their celebs up in Toronto. Last year, air-polluting, environment-destroying Sean Penn smoked at a press conference and it was a huge scandal. The paparazzi couldn’t wait to catch him with a cigarette this time. And when they did — front page news!

View image The “Juno” guys.More photos after the jump…

Anyway, although I fear some of the films I saw even ten days ago are no longer as vivid in my memory because of the ones I’ve seen since, here were my ten favorite Toronto movies, in very rough order of preference:

“No Country for Old Men” (Joel & Ethan Coen)”I’m Not There” (Todd Haynes)”Chop Shop” (Ramin Bahrani)”Secret Sunshine” (Lee Chang-dong)”Eastern Promises” (David Cronenberg)”Atonement” (Joe Wright)”The Orphanage” (Juan Antonio Bayona)”Persepolis” (Marjane Satrapi & Vencent Paronnaud)”Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon” (Eric Rohmer)”4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days” (Cristian Mungiu)

More photos after the jump…

Opening Shots: ‘The Rapture’

Jim Emerson

From Nathaniel Soltesz, Pittsburgh, PA:

One of my favorite opening shots is from Michael Tolkin’s “The Rapture.” First, a black screen, menacing ambient music, vague noises of typing, people speaking. The camera rises and we realize we’re looking at the side of a cubicle, and then we begin to move over a dark and shadowy cube farm, where average-looking phone operators perform and say the same maddeningly rote things over and over again. Eventually the camera focuses in on Sharon, our protagonist; but until then she could be anybody, another face in the crowd.

The “Best” Non-English-Language Films (Round 1)

Jim Emerson

View image Wim Wenders’ “Kings of the Road” (or literal English translation: “In the Course of Time”). You may recognize the poster image from outside the theater in which “Duck Soup” is playing in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.” This movie can also save your life.

An ad hoc bunch of 51 online movie enthusiasts (online movie critics, bloggers, et al.), organized by Edward Copeland, the eponymous proprietor of “Edward Copeland on Film,” recently composed our unordered lists of up to 25 most significant (or enduring or even favorite) “foreign-language” talkies.

Eduardo (as he might be known in, say, Mexico or Spain or Uruguay or Nicaragua or Puerto Rico) took on the gargantuan task of tabulating the ballots and coming up with the initial list of 122 nominees. As he explains:

I set a few guidelines for eligibility: 1) No film more recent than 2002 was eligible; 2) They had to be feature length; 3) They had to have been made either mostly or entirely in a language other than English; 4) Documentaries and silent films were ineligible, though I made do lists for those in the future if this goes well. In all, 434 films received votes, not counting those that had to be disqualified for not meeting the criteria.In order to make the final ballot, films had to receive at least three “votes.” I’m happy that most of my initial choices made the finals. And there were five I’ve never seen, so I have these to look forward to: Elem Klimov’s “Come and See,” Sergio Corbucci’s “The Great Silence” (a spaghetti western), Wong Kar-Wai’s “In the Mood For Love,” Bela Tarr’s 7.5-hour “Satantango,” and Hayao Miyazaki’s anime “Spirited Away.” (And I’ve never made it all the way through “Amelie” or “Chungking Express.”)

This exercise also reminded me of a bunch of movies I need to re-watch, because it’s been too long (at least 20 years) and I don’t remember them very well, including: Jacques Rivette’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating” (always hard to see, but available on Region 2 DVD, at least), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Days of Wrath,” Lucino Visconti’s “The Leopard,” Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Story of the Late Crysanthemums” (and, for that matter, “The Life of Oharu,” which deserved to be on the list and which I have on import DVD), and Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi” (which I’ve been meaning to revisit since his untimely death).

Best of all, the list serves as a reminder that the vast majority of these films, available on DVD, are easier to see now than they have ever been since they were made! Most are just as easy to borrow from NetFlix as “Wild Hogs.”

For my Own Personal List, and some observations about the preliminary results, click to continue…

Meanwhile, if any of the participants — or any readers — would like to publish their own lists, please feel free to do so in comments! I’ll show you mine if…

Catchiest movie theme music of 2009

Jim Emerson

The opening credits sequence of “An Education” doesn’t seem fully developed to me, but the music — Floyd Cramer’s 1961 Nashville slip-note piano classic, “On the Rebound” — had me coasting on an endorphin high for half the movie. Here’s Cramer performing it on live TV with Chet Atkins in 1965, followed by a couple other toe-tappin’ numbers…

Opening Shots: Pan’s Labyrinth

Jim Emerson

So many movies have opening shots that are like overtures, condensed miniatures of the whole film. In Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” you might even say it contains the entire movie in one shot. Not only does it begin with the ending, but the movement of the shot (together with the next one) takes us from underground (the land of the subconscious, the imagination) up into the light of day — or, looked at another way, from political and psychological repression into the liberation of the open air. This presages the momentum of the entire movie.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is so locked into the emotional and fantasy world of its protagonist, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), that the camera itself lies on its side next to her and is then plunges vertiginously into her pupil, entering her head, where the movie takes place. This initial dazzling sweep (actually a composite shot, but executed in once continuous motion) sucks us into the movie so quickly that we barely register what we’ve seen until the end, when we remember these prophetic first few seconds from the start of the movie.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is riddled with pupils and irises, holes and portals that lead to new worlds. In this first shot, we appear to rise out of the ground (although it’s a right-to-left movement, reversing time), into Ofelia’s eye into a fantasy realm of her own creation, and then moves back to the right (setting the story into forward motion), following a running figure (Ofelia herself) up a circular stairway and through another doorway, into another chamber, with another stairway. The next shot follows her up the stairs, leading through a reverse of the opening pupil-shot: an eye-hole flooded with white light. And, with that, the movie-proper begins…

Roger Ebert has published a Great Movies review of “Pan’s Labyrinth. My own review, originally in the Chicago Sun-Times, is at RogerEbert.com, too, in the Editor’s Notes section.

TIFF 2007: Stuck in time

Jim Emerson

Celia (Keira Knightley). I have a question about these kinds of dresses: Are they meant to be worn more than once? Don’t they get dirty and wear out pretty fast, dragging around on the ground like that?

My dog ate the book. Well, not really, but when I was about 200+ pages into Ian McEwan’s 350-page “Atonement,” my copy somehow disappeared. I found it weeks later, in a dark corner under the bed, and by then was already on to something else. I put it aside, intending to pick it up again soon, but the next thing I knew months had gone by and I was on my way to the Toronto Film Festival where a movie called “Atonement” was being screened.

While watching Joe Wright’s intensely cinematic interpretation of McEwan’s book (co-executive-produced by McEwan and written by Christopher Hampton, best known for adapting “Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Honorary Consul”/”Beyond the Limit,” “The Quiet American,” “The Good Father), I kept wondering how far into the story I had actually read. Every once in a while something would happen and my memories of the book would snap into place. But by the end (actually, by the point Robbie reaches the beach and goes for a drink), I had lost any literary moorings and was completely immersed in the movie.

Actually, I was immersed in the movie from the beginning: a shot that follows a parade of toys on a little girl’s bedroom floor to the desk where she sits before a typewriter, composing her first play, “The Trials of Arabella.” Using a typewriter as a musical instrument in the score may sound a bit precious, but it works cleverly and hauntingly in “Atonement,” the story of a 13-year-old girl — an aspiring writer — who enlists her extended family in her imaginative productions… with, as they say, disastrous results. Her “ruthless innocence” (in a phrase used, I believe, by Kathleen Murphy) spurs her to miscast the roles in a melodramatic fantasy-scenario that’s beyond her understanding. And yet, once she imagines it, she sticks to her story, and crushes lives with her godlike (author-like) will.

Robbie (James McAvoy): An idealized vision.

This is the story of the uncomprehending gaze of pretty blonde Briony Tallis, how fixes her subjects like insects pinned to a board — as in a repeated shot of her cold blue stare through a windowpane. She frames a scene in her imagination and fits it into a false outline of events. The moment is stunning in the true sense of the word — but among the many things Briony doesn’t realize at the time is that she is freezing her 13-year-old self in the same instant. She determines the consequences of what she has witnessed, and what she has imagined, and in those moments has locked herself into her own existential coffin. For the rest of her life, no matter what she does (or writes), she will never be anything but that 13-year-old girl, stuck in the past.

“Atonement” is an intelligently, evocatively directed movie in every aspect, from the adoring ways in which the romantic leads are photographed (who would have thought James McAvoy could be filmed as gorgeously and lovingly as Keira Knightly?), to a long take along the shore at Dunkirk that is one of the most complex and emotionally shattering single shots in movies.

I don’t want to say much more now, until we can have a more detailed discussion about the last ten minutes or so. But as I wrote in a comment earlier, I wasn’t sure the 2,000 or so people at the public screening in Toronto’s grand old Elgin Theater were reading the ending the way I did. When I got home, I delved into the epilogue of the book (it gives nothing away to say it’s set in “London, 1999”) and discovered that Hampton and Wright had conceived an impressively cinematic way to transform what is, almost by definition, a thoroughly literary conceit. I think the ending of the book is even more devastating than the film’s. But let me say this much: It’s based on a moral tale by Ian McEwan, the man who wrote “Enduring Love,” a book (and a fine movie) with a similarly ambiguous title. “Atonement” may describe its subject as acutely as “Do the Right Thing” describes what Spike Lee’s movie is about….

There Will Be Blood: Sculpting in time

Jim Emerson

View image Hands up.

I do believe the best single piece of film criticism that I’ve read in 2008 (and I’ve thought so ever since I read it two months ago) is David Bordwell’s “Hands (and faces) across the table” — which, parentheses aside, also happens to be the title of a delightful 1935 comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen (“Easy Living,” “Midnight,” “Remember the Night”) starring Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray and Ralph Bellamy. (Manohla Dargis’s review of Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” deserves mention, too. And Glenn Kenney became my hero this year when he posted “‘Pierrot le Fou: An Annotated Bibliography,” Parts 1 & 2.)

But Bordwell’s article centers on a scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (just released on DVD) and the director’s orchestration of screen space, which involves creating rhythm and texture by moving the actors, not just the camera. (This, too, is mise-en-scène.) Writes DB:

In books and blogs, I’ve expressed the wish that today’s American filmmakers would widen their range of creative choices. From the 1910s to the 1960s (and sometimes beyond), US filmmakers cultivated a range of expressive options—not only cutting and camera movement but other possibilities too. Studio directors were particularly adept at ensemble staging, shifting the actors around the set as the scene develops.

You can still find this technique in movies from Europe and Asia, as I try to show in “Figures Traced in Light” and elsewhere on this site. But it’s rare to find an American ready to keep the camera still and steady and to let the actors sculpt the action in continuous time, saving the cuts to underscore a pivot or heightening of the drama. Now nearly every American filmmaker is inclined to frame close, cut fast, and track that camera endlessly. I’ve called this stylistic paradigm intensified continuity….

The Seitz-geist

Jim Emerson

View image The House Next Door.

Now that Matt Zoller Seitz has announced that he’s moving on, back to Dallas from Brooklyn and into full-time filmmaking, I thought I’d take a quick glance over the shoulder at some of the writing he’s done at his home, The House Next Door, since he opened the place January 1, 2006. Of course, he’s done a lot of other writing — for The Dallas Observer, The Newark Star-Ledger (the Sopranos’ hometown paper), the New York Press and the New York Times among other outlets — but he became a habit with me through the House.

Matt has been a generous proprietor (sometimes perhaps too generous, but that’s hardly a grievous fault). Today the House Next Door masthead lists more than 40 contributors — novices and vets alike — including the invaluable editor-cum-landlord Keith Uhlich.

At the same time that I’m excited for Matt (who, by the way, I’ve never met face-to-face), I’m not going to pretend I’m not bummed. This is how I deal with the grief part: Let’s celebrate MSZ for all he’s done in (and for) the blogosphere. Consider this a very short clip reel. As the lights go down on one phase of Matt’s career, and the curtain opens on another, sit back and immerse yourself…

Oh, and sorry about that headline, guys. (That’s as in Zoller-, not polter-.)

Open House (first House Next Door post, January 1, 2006):

My grandfather, a self-educated German-American farmer from Olathe, Kansas, believed that no journey, however seemingly circuitous or self-destructive, was ever truly unnecessary, or even avoidable. Sometimes we just have to continue along a particular path for inexplicable, personal reasons, disregarding warnings of friends and family and perhaps our own internal voices, until we arrive at our destination, whatever it may be. This type of journey, my grandfather said, was the equivalent of “driving around the block backward to get to the house next door.”

What if they didn’t spend millions to advertise “Norbit”?

Jim Emerson

“Norbit”: Un filme de Brian Robbins.

Brian Robbins has been making himself and others quite rich recently as the director of the Eddie Murphy comedy “Norbit” and the co-producer of last weekend’s top-grossing movie, “Wild Hogs.” But guess what? He’s distraught that his motion pictures were not accorded a more positive critical reception. (He’s almost as upset that more music critics aren’t fans of “American Idol,” but can’t bring himself to talk about that just yet.) As he complained in The Hollywood Reporter:

“How does a movie score in the 90s with an audience and get a 9% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes?” Robbins said, referring to “Norbit’s” onslaught of negative reviews as summarized on the review compilation site, rottentomatoes.com. “How do you figure that? Is the audience that stupid? Is America’s taste that bad? I don’t think so.”

While the jury may still be out on America’s intelligence, Robbins has given up making movies for critics.

“If you read reviews on a consistent basis on all films, you realize that the majority of films just get murdered,” Robbins said. “The only films that get good reviews are the ones that nobody sees. I just don’t think you can make movies for critics.”

Oh, Brian, Brian, Brian. You are so right… and yet, so wrong.

Let me ask you: Did you make “Norbit” and “Wild Hogs” to please critics? Did you expect those movies to get good reviews? Do you think moviegoers read the negative reviews and then just decided to buy their tickets anyway? If that’s the case, then what are you complaining about? You want glory and money? How often does that happen in Hollywood?

So, consider this: Did you ever entertain the possibility that perhaps “Norbit” and “Wild Hogs” were neither designed for, nor marketed to, people who pay all that much attention to movie critics? Why in the world would you think that general audiences and movie critics should agree? (See ancient analogy about McDonald’s and food critics.)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe “Norbit” (the movie that some speculate may have cost Eddie Murphy his “Dreamgirls” Oscar because it was released during the Academy voting period) was screened for critics. I don’t remember about “Wild Hogs” because, well, that was so long ago. Seems like they may have screened it on a Thursday night for an opening the next day. But, really, why did you bother? Do you think most critics would go see your movies if they didn’t get paid to? Do you realize that critics probably make up 0.0001 percent of the moviegoing population — or less?

So, if you don’t pre-screen the movie, then what more are you gonna do? Keep critics from buying movie tickets like everyone else (because their editors want reviews, even of trash)? Make all moviegoers agree to keep non-positive opinions to themselves — you know, in case they have blogs or friends or something and might spread negative word of mouth? Ask more rhetorical questions?

I like this: “If you read reviews on a consistent basis on all films, you realize that the majority of films just get murdered.”

YES!!! It may be just a coincidence, but most movies are also crap! Even if they’re relatively enjoyable at the time, they’re forgettable and disposable, like yesterday’s lunch. Imagine if you had to spend more time writing about movies than you actually do seeing them. Because most reviews take longer than 90 minutes to write, which is probably why many critics prefer writing about films that give them something to write about. Something that may be worth thinking about after you pay for your parking.

And then there’s this: “The only films that get good reviews are the ones that nobody sees. I just don’t think you can make movies for critics.”

You are so right about that! Nobody sees “The Departed” (RT: 93%) or “Casino Royale” (94%) or “Little Miss Sunshine” (92%) or “Borat” (90%) or “The Devil Wears Prada” (76%) or “Cars” (76%) or “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” (89%), to name some of the top-grossing and/or most profitable movies of 2006. (“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” rated a 53%.) So, you should just stop right now trying to make movies like “Norbit” and “Wild Hogs” for critics. Don’t waste your time on us ungrateful scribes who fail to sufficiently appreciate the joy you are attempting to introduce into our humdrum workaday lives! Here’s the deal: You take the multi-million dollar ad campaigns and let the wretched critics scribble about those tiny little movies that can’t afford those kind of expenses — you know, “the ones that nobody sees” because aren’t advertised in every conceivable medium for weeks before they are released. Deal? Deal!

WALL-E scrunches Love Guru inVillage Voice/LA Weekly crix poll

Jim Emerson

Mike Myers’ “The Love Guru” was chosen worst picture of the year in the Second Annual Ninth Annual Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll, in which I was but one of 81 balloteers. I may have been fortunate in that I didn’t see it. Nor was I exposed to runner-up Alan Ball’s “Towelhead,” which was followed by a multiple tie for third-lousiest between “Burn After Reading,” “Changeling,” “Doubt,” “Gran Torino,” “Rachel Getting Married,” “Step Brothers,” and “Synecdoche, New York.” The reason I mention this first is that most of these films (OK, not “Love Guru”) were also chosen by some as among the best movies of the year, and they were directed by a few critical darlings: Joel and Ethan Coen, Clint Eastwood (twice), Jonathan Demme, Charlie Kaufman…

This year’s poll favorites:

10) “Synechdoche, New York” (Charlie Kaufman, USA)

9) “Let the Right One In” (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

8) “Wendy and Lucy” (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

7) “Milk” (Gus Van Sant, USA)

6) “Waltz With Bashir” (Ari Folman, Israel)