Re-seen: Koyaanisqatsi

There is stuff on besides the Olympics. Tiring of watching the curling round-robin, I tuned into MGM-HD and, like the case of Wizards, caught a film I haven't seen in several decades: Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982). I was so blown away by this film when it first came out I saw a matinee screening, then came back a few hours later and saw it again in an evening screening. And unlike Wizards, seeing it afresh after so long didn't expose it as a flawed film. It's every bit as impressive as when it came out: It is history itself that has been unkind.

Koyaanisqatsi a work of the "pure cinema" genre, which I have long been a fan of. Pure cinema dispenses with actors, scripts, dialog, and traditional narrative, building meaning though the arrangement of images and the dialectical language of montage. Dziga Vertov (Man With a Movie Camera, 1929), Leni Reifenstahl (Triumph of the Will, 1934) and Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man) are notable directors in this genre.

My favorite practitioner is Ron Fricke, who was Godfrey Reggio's cinematographer: He created Baraka (1992), shot all over the world in 65mm Todd-AO. This film has a deep, profoundly honest spiritual resonance that is hard to explain unless you see it, especially if you can see it projected in 70mm. You will not believe a film with no apparent narrative structure can leave you with a lump in your throat when the lights come up. (Baraka is available on Blu-Ray, and is the single best argument I can give you to get a Blu-Ray player.)

Koyaanisquatsi tells a story about humanity's relationship with technology and how it is unmooring us from the natural world, through arresting images (time-lapse footage of people on escalators or freeway traffic; urban blight), stock footage (bombs exploding, rockets launching), montage (cutting together sequences to explore and expand these ideas in a linear way) and Philip Glass' amazing soundtrack, a relentless, percussive work so singular Godfrey Reggio recut his film to match it.

Up to this point, I'm not saying anything that hasn't been written in the last 28 years. But from a contemporary vantage point Koyaanisqatsi has gained some new, unintended insights.

The film is a work of avowed social criticism. It is an 82-minute-long complaint about capitalism and technology, not that much different than the "message" in James Cameron's Avatar (2009). Judging by his age and biography, Godfrey Reggio was no doubt a Vietnam-war-era New Left activist, a hippie-age Boomer, and a bit of a commie.

He shot the film over five years, from 1977 to 1981: the last half of the film is mostly composed of sequences shot in cities, freeways and factories all over the United States. It was a time before computer automation had completely taken over, and people can be seen at work doing things: sorting mail, stuffing Twinkies, stacking ham. It shows factory floors full of Americans doing things they don't do anymore: assembling televisions and Chevy Camaros by hand, streaming out of Lockheed's Burbank facility by the thousands.

Most of this footage was shot undercranked, which speeds everything up to a frenetic pace. Reggio did this to make a point about how technology is making us inhuman. But from our 2010 vantage point, he captured the the pulse of a lively period of American history, with a thriving manufacturing sector and something like full employment. The sped-up stuff just makes the workers of the time seem more purposeful and energetic. In contrast, if he put his undercranked camera in one of Google's vast cubicle farms in Sunnyvale, I don't think it would make compelling viewing.

Reggio saves his best jabs for the end: in the final act, he shows the paper-littered floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He employs the film's only post-production effects here (the under- and over-cranking was done in camera). The footage is double-exposed, rendering the traders as shadowy, invisible capitalists, controlling everything. Okay, I'll admit that part works.

We then get to the famous last scene, an amazingly long piece of stock footage of an Atlas-Centaur rocket blowing up. As the soundtrack goes to organ music and creepy basso profundo chorus, the camera tracks a second-stage engine slowly falling back to earth. Reggio is making a point by showing us what the kids call a "fail" but all I could think about, watching this footage, is the fact that NASA is close to shutting down the Space Shuttle program, and is looking for ways to privatize future space launches. So Godfrey Reggio's metaphor has become yet another example of something America can't do anymore.

You can see Koyaanisqatsi in it's entirety at Hulu: The jarring, every-twelve-minutes commercial breaks add to it's non-narrativeness.

NBC: America is Swell

It's hard to figure out who is influencing who in the style of coverage The Winter Olympics is receiving: NBC chief Dick Ebersol or faux-conservative talk-show host Stephen Colbert. To Colbert's credit, he waves the American flag constantly, and it is such an integral part of his act that he has managed to cheese off the Canadian hosts of the sporting event.

With NBC, I suspect the incessant flag-waving is a bit more calculated.

Just as an example, I watched the Women's Downhill event last night. The breathless chatter for days about the event was all Lindsey Vonn, all the time-- Her serious injury weeks before, her chances of competing. It also doesn't hurt the NBC "inspiring narrative" approach that Ms. Vonn is absolutely adorable. All the medalists were Nordic beauties, in fact. I mean, check out the babe factor on the podium-- it looks like a still from a Hallmark Channel movie, huh?

So when the long-anticipated event happened, the NBC commentary was so Vonn-obsessive it was almost comical. I'm paraphrasing, but it went something like this:

[Near the beginning of the event, an Austrian skier has a pretty decent run.]
ANNOUNCER #1: There is the time Lindsey Vonn has to beat!

[Later, American skier and long-time Vonn rival Julia Mancuso sets the best time for the run]
ANNOUNCER #1: And Mancuso is in gold medal position by almost a full second!
ANNOUNCER #2: A flawless run! Lindsey Vonn will have to go all-out to beat that!

[A Swiss skier has a horrific crash near the end of the course]
ANNOUNCER #2: Lindsey Vonn had better be careful on that last jump!

[Thirty or so other skiers have their runs. For the most part, none are broadcast.]

[Finally, Lindsey Vonn begins her run.]
ANNOUNCER #1: Lindsey Vonn! Lindsey Vonn! Lindsey Vonn! Wow! Lindsey Vonn!
ANNOUNCER #2: Lindsey Vonn! Lindsey Vonn! Wow! Lindsey Vonn! Lindsey Vonn!

It might have made a pretty decent drinking game-- take a shot when you-know-who was mentioned-- but you'd pass out half-way though the event.

At the conclusion of the event, when Lindsey Vonn had secured the gold medal, she had a televised moment with her husband/trainer Thomas. He was miked. NBC shouldn't have bothered. She cried (which is understandable, but the fact her mascara ran when she did was not) and he ran off a monotone string of stunningly clichéd words of praise: "You were due. It was amazing. You deserved it. I'm proud of you." and so on. If he knew NBC was going to clip on a lavalier so 80 million people could hear him, I think he'd take ten seconds to think of something, I don't know, genuinely original to say.

I'm just singling out Women's Downhill because it was so overdone: NBC gave Shani Davis, Apolo Ohno, and Shaun White the same breathless narrative treatment. To be honest, snowboarder Shaun White truly deserves breathless praise: Unlike the other measured-by-milliseconds events, even a neophyte viewer can see he's flying ten feet higher than anyone else on his aerials.

Weekend Box Office

Numbers here.

Ah romance! Studios released three of their big-guns date movies this weekend; let's see how they did. At #3, Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Lightning. It ain't Harry Potter, unless you're squinting! Still, there are $31 million worth of nearsighted youngsters out there. At #2 The Wolfman. Man's best friend (or Universal's at any rate) also pulled down $31 million, proving that old dogs something something something oh God I can't write this joke again.

At #1, cleverly: Valentine's Day! Gary Marshall's American version of Love Actually made $56 million American dollars. Studios other than WB are scratching their heads and wondering why they didn't think of it themselves.

If you were interested in dumping someone you love you may have seen Shall We Kiss, a comedy that charted at #94 and made $273 dollars all weekend. It sounds pretty bad but made twice as much as the documentary at the bottom of the chart! Muuuuuuah!

Little Misdirection

As I may have mentioned, I'm acting this month in Murder On The Nile, an Agatha Christie murder mystery. I play William Smith, the eccentric communist who hates rich people. Kind of a weak motive but that just makes me a more likely suspect, n'est-pas?

Christie presents an interesting acting challenge. In most plays I consider it my job to convey information, to illuminate the plot in a dozen subtle ways so that the intention of the playwrite is made clear. Of course, you can't be too obvious about this but the point is you're finding ways to help the playwrite tell the story.

However, this is a murder mystery, where the point is to short-circuit the audience's ability to guess the ending. If you illuminate what's really going on, you're wrecking the play. So here my job is to be true to the character but convey whatever I can to NOT illuminate the playwrite's intention. Maybe this is why you don't see a lot of method actors doing Christie - they see their job as to be true to the character and don't care about messing with the audience. That's someone else's job.

INSPECTOR: So Mr. Kowalski, you say you loved Miss Cosgrove?

STANLEY KOWALSKI: (glowers angrily) Oh to hell with it. Take me in. Bitch had it coming! (spreads arms, cries to the sky as if to God himself) Stella!

INSPECTOR: (nonplussed) Well! Uh... alright, the rest of you can leave. (EARLY CURTAIN)

The play has been useful to me in the sense that it's sharpened my ability to underplay. The less you put out, the less you give away! I'm auditioning for Moss Hart's Light Up the Sky tonight, a play about the opening of a play. Possibly have to overplay this one. The last thing a backstage comedy needs is realism.

Seriously, Man

Just seen: A Serious Man (on On-Demand), the Coen Brothers movie that is among the huge mound of films vying for Best Picture. This raises my tally of watched nominees to 8 out of 10. It is a black comedy, and as such it is quite funny and unusually spooky. But...

Coen Brothers films remind me of points on a biorhythm curve*. Remember that 70s quackery? Emotional, physical and intellectual sinusoidal waves, all cresting and dipping to their own time. Triple highs are auspicious, but watch out for those "critical days," when all three bottom out.

When the Coens are hitting the triple high we get amazing stuff-- O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, even The Big Lebowski. Even when we get a dip or two, it's still compelling: No Country for Old Men, Fargo and Blood Simple.

But man, watch out for that triple low point. A Serious Man reminded me of Barton Fink and a LOT of The Man Who Wasn't There: grim stories with hapless, hopeless protagonists. It's the story of Larry Gopnik, a perfectly nice man who get his ass kicked by every single other character-- wife, kids, brother, his Rabbi, total strangers, everybody-- from fade-up to the devastating black-out. Even the Columbia Record Club has it in for him. As they did with O Brother, the Coens took the core of the story from an ancient source-- in this case the Book of Job, set in suburban Minneapolis in 1967.

Lining it up with the current Oscar nominees, it sounds comparable to Precious, which I haven't seen. Of course, from what I read, The life of Precious is several orders of magnitude more horrible than the life of Larry Gopnik. So I think I'll cut bait and stop at eight nominees.

*Just for laughs, I just checked my Biorhythm chart here. Yikes. I am not leaving the house today.

The Record Shows I Took the Blows... AAAAAAARRRGH!

In a way this kind of falls under the heading of "This is news?" but there is a documented spike in killings in the Phillipines related to people singing My Way in karaoke bars.

...the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. ...Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.

I gotta be honest with you, I almost always feel the urge to open a can of whupass on anybody who sings Yellow.

Weekend Box Office

Numbers, numbers.

Well lookie there! Something finally knocks Avatar from the top spot, and it's a romantic drama. Dear John, based on a Nicolas Sparks novel, brings in $30 mil. No doubt it benefitted from its status as the best alternative to Superbowl mania. (Side note: I was acting in a play on Sunday afternoon, and I correctly predicted that the audience would be almost entirely old women. Bingo! Women because they wanted to avoid all the testosterone-fueled screaming at home, and old because it's a Sunday matinee at the theatre.)

More romance in the form of From Paris With Love. It comes in at #3 with a distant $8 million, behind Avatar's $23 million.

At the other end of the scale, we have Departures (Okuribito), last year's best foreign film now relegated to a single theatre and making $114. Just goes to show... if you're Japanese and you want to make a picture about the dead, you damn well better include jealous ghosts.