"Boyhood" and Robin Williams Essays at RogerEbert.Com

Hello, dear readers, wherever you are. Just a little update. I've been fortunate enough in the past to have some pieces linked by RogerEbert.com, Slant, the House Next Door, and the Dissolve, and in the past month even more fortunate by having the fine folks at Ebert publish my work on their website, a thrilling honor. 

Richard Linklater's Divine Comedy: "Boyhood"

 The first is an essay about Richard Linklater's Boyhood, probably the best film of this summer, about which I draw some parallels with Dante's Comedy. It's admittedly a little book report-ish, or Lit major-y/Religion minor-y, but fans of The Tree of Life stuff from the past might find worthwhile stuff in it. Please click here to read and share with friends throughout your social media outlets.

The second was sparked by the tragic death of Robin Williams last week. I look at my favorite Williams movie, Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (1991), written by Richard LaGravenese, and its relationship to trauma, mental illness, and the healing power of storytelling. Click here to read and, again, share. 

Retrieving the Grail: Robin Williams and "The Fisher King"

I will continue to post material at L'etoile Magazine out of Minneapolis. I recently got a bad haircut, which should be keeping me indoors. 

In other news, my friend Tommy Mischke has a new podcast up and running, and I hope you give it a try. The Mischke Roadshow is now several episodes in and has Tommy back in action and form. 

Thanks for visiting,

N

Order your copy of Off the Map: Freedom, Control, and the Future in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, published by Cascade Books, here. 

Remembrances of Matinees Past

We’ve been reminded this week of how Tim Burton’s Batman, the Jack Nicholson/Michael Keaton box office smash that altered how a generation of moviegoers responded to hype and marketing, just turned 25. Discussing the Burton Batman has been quelled in recent years, thanks in part to Christopher Nolan’s trilogy with Christian Bale as the caped crusader, to say nothing of the campy and dreadful Joel Schumacher sequels (the first of which credited Burton as a producer) from the decade before that. Suddenly, this Batman is news again, and very much appreciated. In 1989 it inaugurated a renewed interest in comic books, the silly old Adam West TV series from the ’60s was suddenly back in syndication, and Hollywood studios had a fresh orchard of published ideas and characters from which to pluck and plant new franchises (the Superman series with Christopher Reeve had by this time died; and we don’t have time to discuss Howard the Duck).

Of course when we compare Batman‘s impact to how novelty characters have worked in the last 10 years, it’s a fairly limp resurgence. The first comic book movie, as I recall, to follow up was a straight-to-video Captain America. There was also a tedious television series of The Flash which could never get its pace in order and was soon canceled. Burton’s hotly anticipated all-star sequel, Batman Returns, had the indelible mark of its director, but the Wagnerian noir of the first film was replaced by fetishistic Gothic indulgences (personified by Burton’s grotesque–and doubtlessly personal–rendering of Danny DeVito’s Penguin) that could not excite the movie fanboys as much–in fact, it repelled some of them. Then you had The Shadow, The Phantom, Batman Forever, and finally Batman and Robin, which kind of crapped on everything, with a cherry on top. Batman did change hype and blockbusting (even in a summer when it was one of the few big releases that wasn’t a sequel–Ghostbusters II, Lethal Weapon 2, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were all released around this time), and Burton’s touch broke out of the MTV music video style that became trendy with Rocky III and Flashdance. But its impact is not as powerful as Jurassic Park would be four years later, Steven Spielberg once again (as he had with Jaws in 1975 and E.T. in 1982) setting summer movies on a whole new trajectory. Whereas Batman‘s environs are somewhat retro, an artful futurism groomed with the fabric of German Expressionism, with two loudly dressed men at its center, Jurassic Park heralds the future with new creations that quite literally gobble up the human caretakers, the filmmakers, to quote Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond, “sparing no expense” in the spectacle, or as 1993′s other Spielbergian hero, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), says, it’s less about the work than “the presentation.” The tumult within Gotham City is rather intimate when set against the non-stop propulsion of Speed, tornado touchdowns in Twister, Independence Day‘s alien invasion, and Armageddon‘s catastrophic asteroid. The popular notion of the journeying hero–like Rocky, Luke Skywalker, Tom Cruise in Top Gun or Days of Thunder, Indiana Jones, or Batman–was, for a time (Harry Potter and Frodo arrived in 2001), replaced by extreme sound and fury (which is still here, yes, though at a kind of Ludicrous Speed kind of sound and fury).

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT L'ETOILE MAGAZINE

Caught in a Loop: Tom Cruise

The lumbering thesis here could be, “Whatever, you guys, Tom Cruise is great and has always been great.” Every so often we hear about how lame Cruise is from our friends and in the press, followed by two weeks of forgiveness as whatever film being released turns out to be, at the very least, not bad, often with Cruise impressing with his indomitable movie star charm. And then, like in Groundhog Day–or Cruise’s latest, the comic sci-fi actioneer Edge of Tomorrow–the same sequence begins with everyone, save for the valiant if out-of-breath Cruise defenders, back to their original dismissals.

Cruise was able to carry a large movie on his name for about 20 years, slipping between genres–action (Mission: Impossible), romance (Jerry Maguire), thriller (The Firm), and character-driven drama (Magnolia)–while, like a classic movie star, always maintaining his Cruise-ness, his Cruise-osity, his Cruisoise: the indelible grin and charm underwritten with a kind of basic Cruise character arc detailing a cocksure guy whose world is crumbling. This week the overheard banter at a neighborhood coffee shop, as relates to Edge of Tomorrow, featured some guy complaining about Cruise (in the manner of Clint Eastwood to the Chair), “You have no talent and you play the same boring guy over and over again.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT L'ETOILE MAGAZINE

Kelly Reichardt's 'Night Moves' of the Soul

Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves delivers as a relentlessly intense suspense story while, despite the familiar, “movie heist” tropes of its plot, being in perfect accord with the director’s notoriously sparse, quiet, observant, but tacitly explosive previous films—Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek’s Cutoff. A shuddering before/after narrative about a Portland-based eco-terrorist trio’s (Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard) plot to blow up a dam, Night Moves faultlessly strums the tune of crime-film contingency with the same relentless tension of Kubrick’s The Killing, while crucially building on Reichardt’s theme of modern day economic disparity and the problem of progressive ideals at odds with progressive action.

The opening image, of the dam in question as plotter Josh (Eisenberg) grimly looks on, shows the subduing of the natural world by human invention which has become a background banality. This young man could be weighing the ramifications of an illegal transgression he’s preparing or, saturated with exhausted melancholy, fixating on the end of the world. There’s mention of Science’s prognosis of the End a few times, but maybe it strikes the budding activists in this film with the same faith coupled with doubly-bound intangibility as the “World Vision” eschatological Christians referred to by Dena (Fanning) at an environmentalist film screening. Following the insolubility of Meek’s Cutoff, where frontier travelers trying to outrun the expanding Republic westward encounter a perplexing “Tree of Life” at the conclusion, Night Moves examines the ramifications of both ideas and actions, enveloping much of the eerie wilderness and haggard urban outposts in darkness. It’s a film with a deep social conscience that proceeds to excavate intimate Dostoyevskian layers of individual psychology, where decisive action begins. Social activism/politics and individual psychology prove to be similarly murky.

Read the full essay at L'ETOILE MAGAZINE

Dziga Vertov's Doors of Perception

Recently RogerEbert.com editor and New York Magazine TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote an impassioned call-to-arms for film critics to consider the formal elements of what they were evaluating. “I see a lot of writing that describes what a piece of art is about, not so much how it is about.” Consequently film criticism skates on surfaces, using adjectives regarding the artifice without digging in and asking why the artisans behind these ingenious visual and aural behemoths have made their decisions. The negation has increasingly fed into a film culture consumed by celebrity and easy to take political stands, while the idiosyncrasies of creativity, subject to myriad tools of machinery, are largely ignored.

Considering the author’s formal design: “The Grand Budapest Hotel”

Seitz is a film lover fascinated by the sensual touch of authors, and he understands the pressing need to anatomically dissect a film’s connective tissue and sinews. Look at his visual essays on Michael Mann and Terrence Malick—two of the most accomplished formalists in feature narrative filmmaking—or his book The Wes Anderson Collection. Anderson’s newest project—and arguably 2014’s best film—The Grand Budapest Hotel, is as interested in its own storytelling medium as Cervantes was with Don Quixote, with fictions constructed within fictions through an artificial pre-war Europe of false capitals, liveries, and armies, Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman’s camera aspect ratio alternating through different historical periods, beginning and ending with a contemplation on the beguiling sepulcher of the “Author” and the mystery of what the creator wants to communicate to us.

READ THE ENTIRE POST HERE AT L'ETOILE MAGAZINE

"Dressed for the Occasion": On Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan's "No Holds Barred"

Welcome. It's the Niles Files fourth annual April Fool's blog. Undermining my reputation like nothing else, which is hard. Hi! Again, hi! If you're really bored and life is still pointless, like it was last year, check out 2013's entry on UHF, 2012's piece on Young Einstein,or the selection from the year before that, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Have a good day! Wheeeee!

Thomas J. Hart’s No Holds Barred begins its bellicose exchanges on a black screen, the verbal wranglers out of sight but indelible by the sound of their voices. “I dress for the occasion!” color commentator Jesse “the Body” Ventura proclaims to his straight-man counterpart, “Mean” Gene Okerlund, who’s just pointed out the audacious outfit of the Body. “I’m dressed of course stupendously!” Ventura adds. “Stupendously I…think would have to be the word,” Okerlund says before returning attention to the eagerly anticipated clash about to transpire in the ring.

Promotional image from the 1989 motion picture of warring bodies, “No Holds Barred”

No Holds Barred was the marvelous first attempt of WWE (then, WWF) promoter Vince McMahon to successfully migrate his sports entertainment empire to Hollywood, tellingly at the end of a decade he had helped define. The prologue between Ventura and Okerlund is not throwaway stage banter, but, as we finally see Ventura’s wacky hairpiece looking on, we understand that it cuts into the motion picture’s stance on wrestling and McMahon himself, a suit unable to “dress for the occasion,” controlling the dialogue but, like Okerlund dwarfed by Ventura, not really understanding the words. In film, McMahon’s collaborator and star, Hulk Hogan, was the scene stealing Thunder Lips in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky III, leading to a fruitful relationship with A-Team actor Mr. T, who would co-headline the first Wrestlemania. McMahon’s pay-per view ventures in the decade effortlessly married west coast screen icons to professional wrestling, and finally, in 1989, No Holds Barred would attempt to be celluloid deliverer for McMahon and Hogan’s silver screen legacy, the two straddling disparate worlds of coliseum action and swanky restaurants, the same way Hogan does in the film.

READ THE REST OF THIS SPECTACULAR APRIL FOOL'S COLUMN AT L'ETOILE MAGAZINE AND RUN WILD, BROTHER! 

"The Wolf of Wall Street": Martin Scorsese's "You Can't Do That On Television"

The late period of filmmaker Martin Scorsese is entrenched in the manifold meanings of illusion, a theme of grave importance as our collective collision with images has accelerated along with available technology and the encapsulating web of cyberspace when, while a world so widely canvassed would seem to be becoming more objective, our senses are saturated in manufactured images—or illusions, and so susceptible to gross manipulation. Scorsese has successfully migrated from the idiosyncratic crystal explosions and chemistry of analog moviemaking to digital’s binary code, yet what’s interesting about the trajectory of his career, along with the technology of his profession, is how he’s linked the art and business of image production to the psychological and spiritual problems he, as an artist, is bent on exploring.

His controversial new film The Wolf of Wall Street, about corrupt and decadent Long Island broker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), is much more than another rise-and-fall (or “fall”) arc of a criminal overwhelmed by his luxurious excesses (it seems like a WASPy white collar version of Goodfellas or Casino); in its dizzying whiz-bang episodic carnivale of unreliable anecdotes, Scorsese has made an indictment of our present day submissiveness to the profit-motivated allure of moving pictures, the dulling narcotic of visual sensory intake that aids the evasion from existential realities. Scorsese has made the antipode to his preceding feature, the earnest and moving ode to illusions, Hugo, in which fantasy opened the real world up to transcendent irradiation. The Wolf of Wall Street is also a fantasy, but the sanctuary of images, where the viewer is transformed, is replaced by the passive lull of television. The screen isn’t in dialogue with reality. It's the Leviathan Hellgate mouth that swallows reality and replaces it.

READ THE FULL ESSAY AT L'ETOILE MAGAZINE