Drift

Someone is walking somewhere from someplace else—so begins an Eric Rohmer movie. Two secretaries in an office chat about nothing in particular; mail is sorted; a boat is at sea. The pointless opening is crucial for establishing the rhythm of these movies, and what happens as they unfold is not that events get more exciting but that the pointless events grow richer in meaning.

These movies capture the formless sequentiality of life, which moves us along until we find ourselves somewhere other than where we thought we were, or thought we might end up. Jean-Louis's conversation during My Night at Maud's feels like those real late-night sessions, mostly in college, which you can never plan in advance or later quite recall; in The Aviator's Wife, after hours of brooding and planning and anticipating the effects of what he has to say to his girlfriend, François never dreams that one thing he says will make her defensive, another will make her jealous, and a third will make her cry, so their talk shifts back and forth and it bewilders the boy, and perhaps the older woman too. Rohmer's understated theory of the relations between the sexes is nothing more than this: men and women drift farthest, and fastest, and most mysteriously, in their dealings with each other. Read More

James Cameron's 3-D movie Avatar gave me a four-hour headache. Probably the headache was caused by a combination of the 3-D effect, a seat near the front and at the far edge of the theater, the way the 3-D glasses skewed my plain old glasses beneath, and the dark in which I biked home afterward, my bike light having been stolen while I was in the theater. But I can't help but also attribute the headache to the movie's moral corruptness.

It's a finished corruptness. The easiest way I can think of to describe it is by comparison with The Matrix, a movie which is merely disingenuous, and to some extent struggling with its disingenuousness. The moral lesson that The Matrix purports to offer is that the glossy magic of life inside a simulation distracts from painful truth. But the moral problem faced by the Matrix is that this lesson is betrayed by the fun that the movie has in playing inside the simulation. A viewer enjoys the scenes of jumping over buildings, and of freezing explosions and fistfights in midair and then rotoscoping through them. In fact, the viewer enjoys them much more than the scenes of what, within the conceit of the movie, is considered reality. There may be a brief yucky thrill to learning that in reality people are grown in pods so their energy can be harvested by robots, but as a matter of aesthetics, reality in The Matrix turns out to be drab and constricted by gravity and other laws of physics. The closing sequence, where Neo (Keanu Reeves) plugs back in to the matrix and runs a sort of special-effects victory lap, makes no sense, in terms of the moral victory he is supposed to have won. If he has really joined the blue-pill team, he ought to be sitting down to another bowl of bacterial gruel with his ragged, unshowered friends, and recommitting himself to the struggle. Instead he's leaping around in a Prada suit. So the viewer departs from the movie with a slightly queasy feeling, a suspicion that visual pleasures aren't to be trusted. That queasiness is the trace of the movie's attenuated honesty.

Stephanie Meyer has said that the idea for the Twilight series came to her in a dream, but it may as well have come to her in a graduate seminar. There are, after all, few other contexts where so much cultural baggage comes together under the sign of so many backpacks. 

New Moon, the latest film installment of the colossally popular franchise, opened this past weekend, breaking box office records and putting reviewers everywhere to work. What, everyone is asking, is Twilight "really" about?

Gabriel mondlane had failed a test, so when a group of government officials entered his chemistry class at the technical institute and ordered everyone to stand up and give their names, he was sure their purpose was to send him to war. Some of his classmates, after dutifully standing up, promptly fled the room.

I dislike alien/zombie movies and vowed I would never see another after 28 Weeks Later (the worst sequel in the world and a clumsy parable for the war in Iraq). But District 9 is nimble. It does not abandon its allegory in favor of interminable chase scenes, paramilitaries with poor aim, and spumy alien entrails; it incorporates these things judiciously.

The cleverness of the film's setting has been widely noted. In lieu of the low stakes and bland corruptibility of post-industrial America, writer-director Neill Blomkamp presents the toxic vim of failing-state South Africa, a more apposite backdrop for an alien visitation that reveals less what's out there than what's always here: bigotry, venality, infrequent flashes of compassion. The film alludes to the expropriation and razing of Cape Town's District Six under the Group Areas Act of 1966, whereby 60,000 mostly Coloured residents were escorted from their homes in the heart of the city—a neighborhood full of jazz and forbidden mingling that the government pronounced a den of iniquity and overcrowding—to the windswept shantytown of the Cape Flats. Blomkamp invokes, unobtrusively, more recent troubles as well: last year's xenophobic pogroms targeting Zimbabwean, Mozambican, and Malawian migrants; illegal arms deals with pariah states; AIDS-inflected myths about muti cures. Read More

Funny People

The pathos of comedians used to be that they were funny because they wanted everyone to love them. They were motivated by their psychic wounds, their difficult personalities, their inability to tolerate the world as they found it. Gags and jokes were a way to triumph over brute physical reality and the intractability of the human race.

In this movie, comedians beg for something new and different: "Love me because I'm not that funny," they plead. "Love me because I'm only funny enough to be on a sit-com. Love me because the movies I'm in aren't any good." "And by the way," Apatow adds, "aren't my daughters cute? These are my real daughters!" Read More

When I was five years old, my eyes were clouded to my childhood duties by the peak fan experience of my life. It was 1982, and everything was Annie. I developed a new-to-me, curious sensation of both wanting to be like her and believing myself to be already more like her than anyone else could possibly be—a certainty about kinship of soul that is the mark of devotion. For nearly a year I moved through the streets of my neighborhood with this feeling inside me. Read More

Avital Ronell

Astra Taylor's documentary Examined Life premieres in New York this week and opens in other cities soon. It follows eight philosophers, public intellectuals, writers, or whatever you want to call them, on trips through public spaces like airports and garbage dumps.

Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, and Judith Butler discuss their ideas with the filmmaker on strolls, or while rowing a boat (in the case of Hardt) or from the backseat of a moving car (West).

Taylor's film focuses on conversation and movement. It avoids the usual talking-head, quick-montage, stock-footage, re-enactment style of today's feature-length documentaries. Examined Life ignores and therefore refutes television techniques. It is serene yet exciting, allowing us to understand and experience the mind-states evoked by the thinkers in the movie: "anxiety is the mood par excellence of ethicity" (Ronell); philosophy emerges from "personal catastrophe lyrically expressed" (West); "we should develop a much more terrifying abstract materialism" (Zizek).

Rooted to seats in a café on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village, Taylor and I spoke about her film, which will also be published in book form by the New Press.     Read More

Encounters at the End of the World

Encounters at the End of the World gratifies on three levels: it is apocalyptic, it has cute penguins, and it stars a man with a German accent berating us because we are inadequate. It is an animal show, end-of-the-world adventure travel, and a trip to a German dentist. Herzog's impatience with people has become palpable. He can't wait to tell whoever he meets that "nature will regulate us," that "the empire has started to fade into the abyss of history." Saying these things in Antarctica gives them a weight they'd lack if you said them on Vanderbilt Avenue. Read More