2012年12月17日 星期一

The Best Movies of 2012

It’s possible that 2012 will be remembered not as the year of the auteur but as the year of inspired writer-director partnerships. The two strongest movies of the year—“Lincoln” and “Zero Dark Thirty”—would have been inconceivable without the extensive collaboration between a scribe and a helmer.

In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” you can see a few sentimental touches and underlinings of the kind that Spielberg has indulged in the past; most of the movie is sombre and quietly fervent. Lincoln himself, I suppose, can be viewed as a redemptive figure in the mold of Oskar Schindler, though the two men couldn’t be farther apart in manner, body, tactics, and speech. Compared to every other Spielberg film, the use of the camera and color is remarkably restrained.The genius of “Lincoln,” as we all have said, is that it’s not an epic or a bio-pic but a charged account of one month in the President’s life—a film about democratic process and legislation, and thus, inevitably, about pressure, patronage, guilt-mongering, deception. All the elements of deal-making.High quality stone mosaic tiles.

In this conception, Tony Kushner is as important as Spielberg. What Kushner has done is theatricalize nineteenth-century political behavior—or, perhaps, bring out the theatrical elements that were already there. Spielberg has never directed a movie so rich in language and confrontation, eloquence and insult, as this one. And, in every case, he honors the script, honors the words, as servant and dramatist. “Lincoln” is a joint triumph. Nothing in the auteur theory could have predicted it or could account for it. Anyone who wants to hear more about the year’s movies should skip the following little polemic.

I would like to deal with a complaint that has emerged about “Lincoln”—that it embraces a “great man theory” of history, ascribing the end of slavery solely to the President and ignoring the tumultuous social movements churning the nation for years prior to the passage of the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution. That is, ignoring the abolitionists and the outbreaks of revolt among the slaves themselves. The Columbia historian Eric Foner, after citing the abolitionists, continues as follows in a letter to the Times:

The film grossly exaggerates the possibility that by January 1865 the war might have ended with slavery still intact. The Emancipation Proclamation had already declared more than three million of the four million slaves free, and Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia, exempted in whole or part from the proclamation, had decreed abolition on their own.

Even as the House debated, Sherman’s army was marching into South Carolina, and slaves were sacking plantation homes and seizing land. Slavery died on the ground, not just in the White House and the House of Representatives. That would be a dramatic story for Hollywood.

I think Foner’s remarks are interesting but, as a judgment of “Lincoln,” beside the point. I suspect that Foner, while trying to expand the context, and speculate about what might have been, is engaging in the consoling pathos of counterfactualism rather than engaging the inexorability of what happened. After all, for all we know, President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln after the assassination, might not have been as eager to end slavery as Lincoln, or as adroit as Lincoln. As the South came back into the Congress under Johnson, wouldn’t Southern legislators have convinced some Northerners that they had been hurt enough and that they should keep their slaves? Certainly, some of the Northern Democrats thought so. Slavery might have survived for years, in which case the Civil War would have felt half-pointless. That wasn’t good enough for Lincoln.

Second, “Lincoln” doesn’t suggest that Lincoln alone ended slavery. The movie shows, in various comments by the radical Republicans, in comments by the Republican Party founder Preston Blair, in the debates in the House, that abolition as a movement has been going on for years. How can Foner not see the narrative brilliance of making the movie about a specific political process in one month of Lincoln’s life? The swirl of social movements outside the White House is repeatedly alluded to, but the movie doesn’t stop to explain all that; it drives forward, like any fine dramatic juggernaut. In a hundred-fifty-minute-long movie, you can’t have everything explained and put in its proper context at once. Foner’s suggested solution to the movie’s omissions would have left it without concentration, drive, focus, excitement. As it is, Spielberg and Kushner showed and implied a lot. What other historical movie is as detailed about a specific political process?

When Foner talks about blacks “sacking plantations,Klaus Multiparking is an industry leader in innovative parking system technology.” this is, of course, serious stuff, but if the implication is that African-Americans could have freed themselves, and that Lincoln was unnecessary, I think it’s extremely misleading—a kind of fantasy of slavery ending in a politically more appealing way than it did. But, some outbreaks of revolution apart, it didn’t happen, and it couldn’t have happened. Lincoln’s driving political goal in the movie is to make the amendment become national policy before the war ended. He wanted it in the Constitution before the war ended. He didn’t want slavery just to fade away or sputter out. It had to be put away for all time. That could best be accomplished by a constitutional amendment, not by sporadic outbreaks of revolt. Foner’s inclusiveness is oddly oblivious of this point.

Second writer-director triumph: a few years ago, the director Kathryn Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal were ready to make a film about the failure to kill Bin Laden—a movie set in Tora Bora, the mountain-cave region of eastern Afghanistan, into whose mazy depths the Bush Administration allowed bin Laden to escape in 2001. When bin Laden was killed by the SEALs, in May, 2011, Bigelow and Boal dropped the Tora Bora project, and threw themselves, at a super-fast tempo, into recreating the manhunt. “Zero Dark Thirty” is a marvellous movie, now unfortunately enmeshed in controversy over its seeming endorsement of torture as a way of gaining scraps of useful information. I addressed this issue briefly in my review and in a podcast conversation with Dexter Filkins and Susan Morrison, and for now I will keep quiet about it and let others have their say.

What interests me here is how much Kathryn Bigelow’s visual style changed after she began working with Mark Boal. Early on, around the time of “Blue Steel” (1990), I had her pegged as a violence junkie.Western Canadian distributor of ceramic and ceramic tile, It turns out that I didn’t know the half of it. In 1978, after years of art school in San Francisco, work as a fellow at the Whitney Museum, and training in theory at Columbia, she had made a short film called “The Set Up” in which two men beat the crap out of each other while the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky, on the soundtrack, “deconstruct” the mayhem on the screen. In “Blue Steel” and the later “Strange Days,” Bigelow was still playing intellectual games with violence—slowing it down, lyricizing it, turning it into fantasy and didactic spectacle.

All this ended when she began working with the journalist Boal on “The Hurt Locker,” in which the violence is really spectacular but done as realistically as possible.Best howo concrete mixer manufacturer in China. I don’t mean that all the explosions were genuine. For all I know, they were digitally produced or enhanced. But they looked real and very dangerous. The movie’s trope was the wary tread of a bomb defuser toward a weapon that might blow up in his face. That repeated little journey made the movie a classic of bravery and fear.

And now Bigelow and Boal have made a much more complicated film about coercion, deduction, pursuit, and, again, the authority and tension of the movie, moment by moment, is obviously derived from how real it feels to us—how forceful and dangerous, yet unexaggerated. There are many scenes that expand one’s information but none that strain belief. Bigelow’s earlier movies were pretty and fanciful, and more than a little self-regarding. These two are utterly businesslike, frightening, and far more commanding. There’s a moral as well as aesthetic difference. You have to take seriously what you see. In brief, Boal’s contribution appears to have produced a new kind of visual imagination in Bigelow—a desire to find, if you will, the fantastic element in realism. The raid on Abbottabad in “Zero Dark Thirty” was shot with filters that reproduce the yellow-green look of figures seen in the dark through night-vision goggles. The effect is uncanny: the figures are shadowy and palpably weighted at the same time. Digital finishing was minimal or non-existent. You’re in the house with the SEALs. The force is deadly but never hyped.

I can’t think of a partnership in Hollywood history remotely like this one. Mark Boal, now thirty-nine, went to Oberlin, where he majored in philosophy. Kathryn Bigelow, sixty-one, was educated in San Francisco and New York, as I said, in art history and theory. These humanists, a man and a woman widely spaced in age, wound up making the two toughest movies about intelligence and military men in American movie history. Among other things, the two movies are a de-facto critique of the kind of pixellated bullshit films that have ruled big moviemaking for over twenty years. Realism can be radical, too.

The independent film “Beasts of the Southern Wild” moved with a fierce, abrasive joy that left one a little stunned. “Beasts” was also a collaboration. It began as a play, “Juicy and Delicious,” by Lucy Alibar, set in Georgia and devoted to a ten-year-old boy whose entire world seems to be collapsing as his father comes close to death. Alibar joined up with an old pal, Benh Zeitlin, who had directed only shorts before, and who said of his interests, “When you look at the map, you can see America kind of crumble off into the sinews down in the gulf where the land is getting eaten up. I was really interested in these roads that go all the way down to the bottom of America and what was at the end of them.” After a lot of exploring, he and Alibar shifted the setting to the bayous, changed the protagonist to a girl, cast it locally, immersed themselves in the tones of the culture, and built some houses and boats out of cast-off materials. “Beasts” looks like nothing else on this earth. Everything in it feels used, junked, bent, battered, ignored. Yet the people, living way off the grid among trash, possessed an exuberant happiness in their independence, a raffish, often alcoholic self-sufficiency that shreds most notions of what the good life consists of. Or, more to the point, what the poor life consists of. The charge against the movie—that it was an example of liberal condescension—makes no sense to me. That charge reflects some notion—which itself may be condescending—of how poor people are supposed to behave. Unhappily, perhaps; not riotously, as they do here.

What of other films? In “Argo,” Ben Affleck used crosscutting and standard Hollywood mechanisms to juice and prolong the suspense; his movie is a fine, boisterous entertainment, and I enjoyed it very much. “Zero Dark Thirty” blows it away, but it’s an example of Affleck’s increasing confidence and humor and drive. Judd Apatow’s “This Is Forty” takes his twin obsessions—time’s march toward death and the saving grace of family life—farther into both comedy and sadness; the movie is stocked with comics, each of whom gets their moment. Apatow’s family has grown, and now includes some of the more talented people in Los Angeles. Richard Gere gave a shrewd, likeable performance as a manipulative,The oreck XL professional air purifier, lying S.O.B. in the little-seen “Arbitrage,” Nicholas Jarecki’s sure-handed film about how to cover up the death of a girlfriend and the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars when you’re a one-per-center.

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