Sidney Lumet; 1924-2011

            Pacino: “Is there any special country you want to go to?”

            Cazale: “…Wyoming.”

            -Dog Day Afternoon, 1975

            “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

            -Network, 1976

            Policemen, bank robbers, pundits, judges, jury, wizards, Manhattanites:

            Sidney Lumet evidently made such films about such characters not because they would change the world, or because they had any cultural significance, but because “…I like it and it’s a wonderful way to spend your life.”

           

No more. Please.

(Josh Radnor and Michael Aligieri in Happy Thank You More Please/Anchor Bay films)

          

            Motion Studies are not supposed to be holistic; they only concern themselves with a piece of something larger. But with a film like the recent Happy Thank You More Please, an exception must be made.

            Writer-Director-Star Josh Radnor’s film contains one image of protagonist Sam (Radnor) sitting on the stoop of his apartment building, drinking a Brooklyn Lager from the bottle. Beside him sits a mysterious black child named Rasheen (Michael Algieri) he has taken in (technically kidnapped) for a week, sipping from a coke can. It is a sunny day. Everything in the frame is somehow bright; the homey brown of the apartment steps and the beer bottle, the redness of the coke can, the fashionable blue and white neo-bohemian attire Sam never sheds, the darkness of Rasheen’s skin. Even the blackness of Sam’s trimmed beard, a vision of endearing scruffiness is “bright.” Variations of this image are repeated several times in the film, always involving a conversation, always playing on the theme of hapless friendship. But the brightness within this shot is really a grasp towards some idea of sophistication. So it must be here where it all turns dark.

            The brightness—both intellectual and visual—of every frame in Happy Thank You More Please destroys its own ambition. It means to illuminate, by way of a series of serio-comic gestures, the lives of young, smart people who don’t have their lives figured out yet, but who are on their way towards some sort of inner enlightenment. Its brightness also illuminates an already enlightened people who are ready to become more enlightened; who show a forthright cluelessness about the world as it exists outside of thrift stores and trust funds; who expect sympathy and even gratitude. Such brightness, when it shines on characters meant to be taken at face value, rather than ironically, shows that there is nothing really at stake amongst these comfortable lives. Yet not only is this not the stuff of drama or comedy; it is not the stuff of movement.

            Which brings up the one significant piece of motion within the shot of Sam and Rasheen drinking their beverages. Sam’s beer bottle swings up to his mouth, then casually back down to his legs, while he talks to Rasheen about his goals in life and art and not much else. The eye moves to nothing more than a bottle of beer, clearly labeled as Brooklyn Lager. Whether or not this counts as product placement is secondary; it is motion that doesn’t even try, that relies on cheap meaning and flashing amusement to passively exist. Radnor’s motion exists in a vacuum of indie music and brownstones. It whimpers rather than command his camera.

(Brooklyn Lager)

Motion Studies: some other Svankmajer objects

(Darkness/Light/Darkness (Tma/Svetlo/Tma)/1989)

        
       Take four seconds of film. Make that four seconds of two clay arms in a small room, one with eyeballs embedded in two fingertips, examining each other in fright under a low-hanging lamp. Jan Svankmajer explores the territory where actual people are visually discarded for the paranoid lives of objects. But in Darkness/Light/Darkness, possibly his finest short film, four seconds of two frenetic, and utterly alive arms will bring out our most human impulses. We’re forced to laugh, because we don’t know where this absurdity is headed and besides, those bulging eyeballs look goofy. But we’re also kept on our toes, because the film is so evidently many chopped up pieces crashing together. Svankmajer won’t let us forget it.

            Stop-Motion animation allows the filmmaker to break film down to its tiny grains. Its grains are frames that jerk past our vision and are gone; but jerking the film along is only the most inherent purpose of stop-motion. It allows the filmmaker to work freely with his physical subjects. In this sense there has never been a freer, or broader filmmaker than Svankmajer. Midway through these four seconds, the eyeless arm lunges at the other arm, which backs against the wall. The appeal of this content is that we will never fathom, in our waking existence, dislocated arms locked in confrontation. But the aesthetic appeal is that we have never seen such outrageous, obvious technical fakery. That stop motion never convinces us of being real motion makes it cinema incarnate. Cinema never really moved. If we see it breaking down in its tracks—object by object, jerk by jerk—then we can see it for the glorious, disturbing lie that it is. This gives stop motion the freedom to write off any real-life logic necessary for a real life feature. This form might be called surrealist, because it is. But it also makes stop motion the most legitimately cinematic animation technique available.

Yet Svankmajer does more than expose the lies of moving images. He goes beyond writing off logic. For within the surrealism of two arms inspecting one another and scurrying around on the floor comes the most logical storyline leading to the most logical possible conclusion. Svankmajer is the only logical surrealist; watch closely in the center of the shot. Behind a tiny, darkened window, a pair of ears flaps outside…

Monogamy

(Monogamy/Oscilloscope Pictures)

         

         I am in a theater. It is a small theater, with perhaps seventy seats, and a small screen. The lights go down.

 The film that comes on the screen, as is clear from the get-go, is about still imagery. Next, it is about voyeurism. An old man walks down a sunny sidewalk in some squished New York park. Then it becomes about analysis; The man sits, in real life, with Theo (Chris Messina), the photographer he hired to snap shots of him going about his day. Theo lives with his girlfriend, Nat (Rashida Jones) in a loft in Brooklyn. He has created the unusual profession of a “Gumshoot;” a photographer hired by people to photograph them unawares, in their daily lives. As he sees it, it “pays the bills.” So then, the film could be about profession.

It soon becomes clear that it is not about profession in anything more than a peripheral sense. Which is a shame; the craftiest pieces of the film come to life when Theo is doing his job. He photographs a mysterious woman with the online moniker of “subgirl” (played by Meital Donhan), sitting on a park bench, fondling herself. He looks at the pictures on his computer and zooms closer to her legs, then closer to a tattoo on her heel. He photographs a wedding by a lake, sick with tension, and watches the bride and groom veer from forced contentment to argument within the frame of his camera, before he finally snaps the photo. 

(Monogamy/ Oscilloscope Pictures)

How images embarrass us. What really goes on within a frame. This is strong visual ground for the director, Dana Adam Shapiro. Unfortunately, he slides that ground out from under himself. The only reason the photographs of Theo’s elusive exhibitionist are important is to show that Theo has a perverse side. But if he has a perverse side, then why can’t actor Chris Messina show any evidence for it? Then the thematic ground slides away; the only reason the wedding scene is so extended is to show us a mirror of Theo and Nat’s relationship troubles. Shapiro doesn’t want to understand that we don’t need a mirror for such a grand theme; we’ve taken fraught relationships as a given.

Then the screen goes blank. The projector bulb is out. The sound continues over a blank screen. It looks appropriate, for a second—still images give way to moving images, which then give way to blankness—but of course, it’s an error. I know the projectionist—Christ, I work in this theater—so I don’t want to say anything. Some other viewer leaves to complain. Soon the lights go up and I can see the projectionist back there, re-threading the film. I may have an engagement later tonight. But I wait.

Sound. Picture. The wedding scene, the tail end of it. Theo finishes the job and gets back home to Nat, who wants him to come to her gig over the weekend. But while talking and chopping garlic, she cuts her thumb with the kitchen knife. It is at this point that the film branches off in to a surprising parallel narrative; first, Theo goes on an obsessive hunt for subgirl, whom he tracks to a nighttime rendezvous with an aggressive stranger (does the stranger see him?). Meanwhile, Nat’s cut develops in to an infection, and she is rushed to the hospital. That Nat is staying in the hospital while her boyfriend pays her vague, half-assed visits pumps some juice back in to the story, by default. Theo’s nighttime lurkings, disguised as business, keep the juice going. Theo might be getting in over his head. But why is it such a mundane deep end? Girl is an exhibitionist; likes it rough; stalks around at night; dresses in mysterious symbols. The film thinks it’s too good to be a genre piece, but that’s the territory it is lurking in.

(At this point, I consider yelling at the three girls sitting in front of me, not even watching the film, chatting and lighting up their cell phones.)

Blankness again. Again, it somehow looks right. The sound stops and the few audience members groan. Oh, what is wrong with these films? How hard has film projection become for the modern projectionist? I take a phone call for a few minutes. When I come back in, I still have a few minutes of sitting before the lights dim.

Sound. Picture. Theo rides his bike, in a wide shot. He goes on to click on his pixelated close-ups of subgirl’s provocative acts. He shows the pictures to a friend, resulting in the poorest scene in the entire film. This friend, who we have barely been introduced to, has a chat with Theo out on his roof, thereby veering away from a flesh-and-blood chum and in to an embodiment of the film’s moral voice. Go talk to your Girlfriend, Theo. She needs You. You are wasting your Life with this perverted Fascination. Take a hold of Yourself.

Only after another episode of blankness, and another re-threading of the film, probably a few calls for refunds, perhaps a few more text messages for the girls sitting in front of me, does the third act start, and, thank god, it works.

The most obvious comparison to Monogamy is Antonioni’s 60’s groove fest, Blow Up. In that film, there was another photographer, and he also took pictures of people in their every day lives. He also became too transfixed with one of his more sinister images. He also followed it to a distorted and maddening conclusion. But sadly, this type of story did not work when Antonioni did it, either. Like Monogamy,  Blow Up was too interested in  the hipness of its ideas to even move along at a decent pace. Which is why it is a relief when, in its final act, Monogamy becomes a quick, bluesy mystery. Nat gets out of the hospital, but not without Theo first unearthing one of her own secrets. Then he goes out on his nightly stalk to find subgirl and her married lover. The film becomes a sleuth film, not a pile of vague, deep questions. It offers a few twists and turns, rather than versimilitude.

Some twenty minutes later, it’s over. As I leave the theater, I feel as if those breaks in the picture followed by silences were not errors, but the way the film should be seen. It was like the god of movies had intervened, trying to force the film to be what it could be. But even he could only do so much work. In the end, perhaps those three chatty girls were giving the most appropriate response the film deserved.  I felt frustrated, because I knew my engagement was off, that my friend would not call me back that night. But mostly, I felt deeply frustrated by the last twenty minutes of Monogamy. If only Shapiro could have looked at his footage and realized that this was his story, that this was what he could expand on…I would have sat through a million projection errors.

(Monogamy/)