Closed circuit: You Are Here

A lecturer (R.D. Reid) stands before a projected image of rolling waves. He should like to instruct us in serenity and solitude. He warns us against the perils of allowing our eyes to follow the red dot darting across the screen, emanating from his laser pointer. The threat of the red dot isn’t specified, but the lecturer’s warning, stated at the very start of You Are Here, Toronto video artist Daniel Cockburn’s feature debut, serves as a reminder that there may still be something dangerous about taking instruction, submitting to direction, or simply watching a movie.

Such deliberately vague portent clings to every new realm of activity introduced in You Are Here: the discovery made by a bunch of people named Alan (not a typo) of a door where there should not be a door; the control centre where dispatchers give directions to individuals walking the city streets, emissaries whose trajectories are without apparent purpose save the avoidance of convergence; the prisoner (Anand Rajaram) who has pages of Chinese script shoved under the door and must then consult a voluminous text entitled What To Do If They Shove Chinese Writing Under The Door; the abandoned things appropriated by a self-appointed archivist (Tracy Wright), each containing recorded information, in varying formats, that may or may not add up to anything yet compel her to provide them with a home.

Each realm of activity, or thought experiment, constitutes a plastic component of You Are Here’s ornate circuitry—which is itself the film’s protagonist. At times this circuitry hints at a critique of technology’s promise to track and organize every last item in the world for posterity; at others it alludes to forms of interconnectivity that can only be understood once the individual (ie: one of those emissaries told not to interact with the other emissaries) rebels agains the dominant hegemony. Which is to say that You Are Here is playful, enigmatic and very cerebral. If the larger meaning strikes you as elusive, then you’ve just about got the point.

Press materials and clippings about the film keep invoking Jorge Luis Borges (though, given the film’s interest in found things and urban geography, I think Paul Auster is a more apt literary allusion) and Charlie Kaufman (though, given the film’s preoccupation with interlocking structures, I think Christopher Nolan is a more apt cinematic allusion), but such comparisons should come with one major caveat: each of these artists are storytellers (yes, Borges included), as engaged with narrative and character, with form and meaning, as they are with metaphor. You Are Here is fun, smart, inventive, and enjoyably puzzling—to be sure, I recommend it—it’s also pretty cold, and satisfies itself above all through the realization and careful arrangement of its concepts.

You Are Here is now playing at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox. It opens at Edmonton's Metro Cinema next Monday.

Nice work if you can get it: Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin had brought a burgeoning sensitivity to the myriad social problems proliferating out from the Depression to Modern Times (1936). Industrial alienation, police brutality, citizens reduced to crime by hunger, hostility toward labour unions and petty micromanagement were all worked deep into the film’s fabric through a chain of brilliant comic sequences that endure all the more for their indifference to ideology. One of the most memorable ones features Chaplin’s Tramp, leading a parade of protesting workers demanding unionization, touting a red flag no less, and doing so completely unknowingly—he was just trying to flag down a truck.

Modern Times is not the story of a worker who discovers politics but a worker who discovers that he’s, like so many others, unemployed and hungry. So often he just wants to eat, something anyone can understand without the slightest bit of social context—that’s why this is a terrific film for kids. Of course this particular worker is also afflicted with a condition that compels him to wreak a little havoc everywhere he goes, especially in the places least appropriate, the ones where explosively tempered authority figures loom. This affliction takes its toll on the Tramp. Chaplin had heard about farm boys who’d been sent to work on Ford assembly lines and quickly succumbed to nervous breakdowns. Following the opening sequences that find the Tramp getting literally consumed by a colossal machine and having his body so consumed with repeating the same nut-tightening gesture in rapid succession that he can’t stop running around with his wrench trying to screw everything in sight (insert Chaplin-as-pussy-hound joke here), the Tramp himself collapses into nervous breakdown and is dismissed.

But what I found so arresting in my latest viewing of Modern Times—now available on gorgeously rendered and heavily supplemented DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion—was the entrance of the film’s other central character sometime after the Tramp’s hospitalization. The young woman referred to only as the Gamine is first seen cutting and tossing bananas from a cargo ship to some raggedy children on the docks, doing so with a zest that’s positively deranged, not to mention undeniably sexy (and perhaps looks forward to the work of Christina Ricci). It’s a stunning entrance, and the camera favours her as it does no one else in the film. This Gamine, who seems game for anything, will come to play a dynamic role in the Tramp’s recovery, though their attempts at upward mobility are always endearingly absurd. She’s played by Paulette Goddard, and it comes as no surprise to learn that Chaplin’s discovery of her as a budding actress, a respected collaborator, and a lover, was the other key element in the conception and execution of Modern Times.

Unsurprising too, that Chaplin couldn’t bear to use his original ending in which the Gamine entered a convent, leaving the Tramp to walk that final dusty stretch of road alone. The image of Chaplin walking away, with Goddard at his side, would be the last we’d ever see of the Tramp, closing the last (largely) silent film from this master filmmaker, which, despite the film’s title, was made nearly ten years after the introduction of sound, yet remains as timeless today as anything the movies have offered us.

Absence makes the art go yonder: The Missing Person on DVD

John Rosow (Michael Shannon) used to be NYPD, now he’s a Chicago PI and a strong candidate for a DUI. He’s woken from some state close to comatose by the proverbial ringing phone, requesting his services to tail someone all the way down to LA. Initially the gig seems conspicuously easy, with the subject hiding in plain sight, taking the train, not bothering to disguise the fact that he’s a middle-aged white guy traveling with a handsome Mexican boy. Things gradually become more arduous. The technologically impaired Rosow has to buy a phone that takes pictures from a gentleman named Boo Boo (Mark Ventimiglia), pay a Serpico-obsessed cabbie named Hero (John Ventimiglia) $500 to let him hitch a ride in his trunk, and ward off the amorous attentions of an altogether fetching cougar named Lana (Margaret Colin) who sleep-talks to her mother about blueberry pancakes. But nobody told Rosow switching professions in your mid-30s would be easy.

Writer/director Noah Buschel’s The Missing Person is loaded with pronounced eccentricities, but its also loaded with amiable, detailed performances, thanks to an impressive cast of film, television and theatre veterans who unanimously seem to jive with Buschel’s kooky, decidedly unhurried neo-noir. Genre tropes are dusted off and tickled back to life, with Rosow regularly knocked unconscious, dreaming of some lost lover, or trading banter with good-cop/bad-cop feds who mysteriously turn up in the motel parking lot. At times it’s a little cute, a little cartoonish, all the coffee and jazz and smokes and booze and abundant anachronisms. Personally, I like coffee and jazz and booze, but besides it’s all leading somewhere, all in the service of a thoughtful narrative arc that exchanges noir’s foundations in postwar despair for a post-9/11 dispersion. This is a story about going missing, staying missing, and liking it, about being missing as a state of grace, and helping others to disappear for their own good.

None of which screams box office gold, I suppose, and thus, in this country anyway, The Missing Person makes its debut at your local video store rather than your local cinema. It plays well on TV, even if Ryan Samul’s HD imagery is a little annoyingly heavy on ostentatious filters. It also plays to the strengths of Shannon, an actor whose very particular peculiarities won him an Oscar nod for Revolutionary Road, not to mention plum nut-job and/or jerk-off parts in films by William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, and Werner Herzog. He’s really quite ideal for the strange, haunted, lumbering hero of The Missing Person, so withdrawn he could initially be mistaken for the title character. Shannon shuffles and groans through most of the film. I had to laugh at certain shots that play out with the sole item on the soundtrack being Shannon’s amplified wheeze. But it’s a wheeze with a soul, from a face like yesterday’s unrefrigerated lunch. Despite intermittent voice-over, we learn only fragments of Rosow’s past, but we finally know everything we need to know just by spending time with Shannon’s sardonic grin, bleary confusion, and seemingly outsized figure. They speak of a primal wound, one we can trace back to Philip Marlowe, to Jeff Bailey, or to Al Roberts. It’s a feeling that transcends time and genre, even when the setting is as winky as this.

In the neighbourhood: John Sayles and Maggie Renzi on Honeydripper, sense of place, and not moving to Canada

John Sayles has made 19 features over the last three decades and he’s made them the hard way, which in most cases is hopefully also the fun way, the way of unexpected inspiration, and of richer rewards. Sayles’ method of filmmaking strips the cloudiness and the confusion away from the term ‘independent.” His films are genuinely built from the ground up. Sometimes they’re sublime, sometimes they don’t entirely work, but they’re always the real thing.

Sayles and his producer Maggie Renzi have already spent months on the road, going from one community to another, promoting Honeydripper, a drama set in Harmony, Alabama in 1950, where, amidst news from Korea and perpetual tensions between the white and black side of the tracks, rhythm and blues is about to plug in and rock and roll about to spill forth, sputtering its first earthly breaths. I spoke with Sayles and Renzi—an inspiring, imminently down-to-earth couple who’ve stuck it out as partners and collaborators for more than 30 years—during their stop in Toronto. Renzi emphasized just how much they were depending on Honeydripper’s success to keep their spirits up and keep them making movies in an increasingly difficult climate.

“It was in 2004, right after Silver City was released and died a miserable death,” Renzi explains. “George Bush was back in for another four years. It was really a terrible low point for both of us and many of our countrymen. And instead of just saying, that’s it, we’re not making any more movies, let’s move to Canada, John said, ‘I have this idea about a guy who runs a club in the South in the 50s, and he does anything he needs to do to save his club, and that means he’s got to move along.’ And I thought, he hasn’t given up. It’s a great thing to make a movie about a middle-aged man moving along when you could be just brought to your knees, which is pretty well where we were.”

The character in question is Tyrone Purvis, whose place of business—the Honeydripper music club of the title—is on its last legs. He’s in debt. He can’t get liquor. The club across the way is draining Tyrone’s clientele with a louder, much cheaper source of entertainment called the jukebox. He’s about to be forcibly taken over by some moneymen and the local, lazy, racist white sheriff isn’t about to help him out. His daughter is sick and his wife is fed up… Sounds like a blues song, doesn’t it?

Tyrone still has a few good musicians at his disposal, including himself on piano, but their sound is rapidly becoming antique. Desperation pushes him to pour whatever funds he can raise into bringing in Guitar Sam, some dude in a flashy suit who plays some kinda amplified guitar. Tyrone’s hubris is his integrity, yet he’s not above trickery and theft to keep going. And there’s some story about his past that no one talks about, one that puts him in a very sinister light. It is among the film’s greatest strengths that Tyrone is played by Danny Glover, who wrangles all of these contradictions into a single living portrait of a no-longer-young man at the crossroads.

“The genesis of the story really comes out of the music,” Sayles explains, “from me growing up in the 50s, listening to top 40 rock and roll radio, which was pretty good, but then slowly finding my way to blues and gospel, which made me work backwards. I realized that rock and roll came from some place. The driving question in this is when did these disparate threads turn into rock and roll and why, which got me to researching the history of the first electric guitar. I started to think what that must have done to the music. Life was getting noisier and faster, so the music was going to change.”

Honeydripper’s other central protagonist is Sonny Blake, a radio repairman in the war who read an article about Les Paul in Popular Electronics and decided to make his own electric guitar. Sonny is riding to rails to nowhere in particular when he finds himself in Harmony and meets Tyrone—and his lovely daughter—just before getting sentenced to picking cotton for the county for doing nothing in the wrong place. As very charming as it often is, Honeydripper is decidedly not a story of great suspense, so I’m not ruining much by telling you that fate will slowly conspire so that young Sonny and his newfangled contraption will eventually ally themselves with Tyrone and his club.

Sayles attempts to wed myth and archetype—ie: the spooky mystical blind guitar-playing oracle played by Keb Mo, or Mary Steenburgen’s pickled belle—to naturalism is at times awkward, and his immersion in the Southern black vernacular makes for some strained, stagey-sounding dialogue (though Glover’s monologue about the first African-American to dare to tinkle on his master’s piano is absolutely riveting). But, besides the performances, and, of course, the music, what keeps Honeydripper compelling is how thoroughly it’s rooted in culture, place and people. As with many of Sayles films, it is the loving attention to detail, the heartfelt investment in ordinary lives being lived against the broader backdrop of history, that distinguishes the work and imbues it with sufficient vivacity.

“In other films,” explains Renzi, “so often there’s no real setting, no real time, no real sense of geography. The history of the place doesn’t figure into the story. Whereas what John does is take you right into that neighbourhood, lets you walk around, and the story grows out of that. Otherwise Honeydripper’s a pretty girl and a guy who plays a guitar—an Elvis movie, basically.” Both Sayles and Renzi have a good chuckle at this. Needless to say, Honeydripper’s all-black—and unanimously gifted—cast also gives it a little something extra you don’t find in Elvis movies.

“It’s been fun touring with this movie,” Renzi says, “seeing how warmly audiences, especially Southern and African-American audiences, have responded to it, and seeing their affection for John’s work in general. The people we’ve shown it to, they all want to tell you about this one movie that was so important to them. Often it’s Matewan, sometimes City of Hope or Eight Men Out. But it does seem like in nearly every case what people respond to are the particulars.”

Weightless words: devices, choices, and the future of reading

Introducing Kindle™

The following, abridged text was authored by The Amazon Kindle Team: “Three years ago, we set out to design and build an entirely new class of device—a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle…

“Thanks to electronic paper, a revolutionary new display technology, reading Kindle’s screen is as sharp and natural as reading ink on paper—and nothing like the strain and glare of a computer screen …you can be anywhere, think of a book, and get it in one minute… Newspaper subscriptions are delivered wirelessly each morning. Most magazines arrive before they hit newsstands. Haven’t read the book for tomorrow night’s book club? …Kindle delivers your spontaneous reading choices on demand.

“Kindle’s paperback size and expandable memory let you travel light with your library. With the freedom to download what you want, when you want, we hope you’ll never again find yourself stuck without a great read.”

The Illusion of Choice

I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a technophobe. Technological advancements fill me with as much wonder and excitement as they do trepidation. As a freelance writer, these days, without the internet I’d need a new profession, which is problematic since I seem to possess no other skills. And, need I add, you're reading this on a blog.

To be sure, I am by some standards a dinosaur. I covet vinyl –its weight, texture, bottom-rich sound, visual beauty, the decisive pleasure of dropping the needle– and when at home listen to it almost to exclusion of other formats. I go to the movies to sit in the dark with strangers as often as possible. I own the rather morbidly named Magic Bullet (are we meant to ponder the mysteries of the JFK assassination while we whip up our smoothies?), but I grind my pepper with mortar and pestle for no other reason than I have a really cool mortar and pestle and these smooth, well-crafted objects feel good when gripped in my hands. I’ve never downloaded a song or a movie from the internet, above all because it seems the most boring way possible to discover something new, removing all the pleasure of finding.

Yet I was the first person I knew to buy an iPod. I run in the mornings and thrive on music to keep me going. I have an obsessive need to travel light, so I was totally jazzed about not having to fit a bulky wallet of 48 CDs into my backpack anymore. I took my iPod everywhere, all the time, and always on shuffle. I became a walking advertisement for the device, enthusiastically showing it to everyone I met.

Then, without ever thinking about it, something changed. I grew tired of the sterile exercise of shifting music from CDs to my computer. When preparing for a walk, I found myself actually wanting to consider what to listen to, to walk up to my collection, take a disc from the shelf, examine the cover, remind myself of the track listing, what the packaging had to tell me. On my iPod were hundreds of songs, available through a mere finger tap, a seemingly mind-boggling selection –but I wanted to make a choice. Lately, unless I’m going for a run, if I want to move through the city with music I use my discman. A teenager in a restaurant recently asked me what it was.

The principle behind the marketing of Kindle is choice, but the choice it offers is not unlike that of a big box bookstore: contained within are a lot of books, but nothing in particular. How do you choose something from the virtual “everything” on offer? For most of us, managing the babel of infinite choice is a journey dictated by advertising, by whoever has the most money to spend. Does it make me a Luddite that I want to leave my house, enter a public space inhabited by other people, browse, maybe read a random page, linger in the aisles, maybe talk to someone who might share or understand my interests, might direct me toward some unexpected title or even engage me in conversation about a book?

The Unbearable Lightness of the Virtualization of Everything

In Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness, a problematic film, but one whose essential despair I find touching, the protagonist, a middle-aged family man and government employee, lives in a world where seemingly every pleasure has been compromised by a draconian conspiracy between labyrinthine bureaucracy and regulation, mindless consumerism, superficial status obsession, and technological distance. The protagonist’s only refuge lays in banal fantasy, yet in this sense he’s no different from his daughters, who when their not locked into some video game have their iPods constantly stuffed in their ears. Everyone around him is continually plugged into some electronic device that allows them to hover in a sort of fantasy realm, cut off from their immediate reality. It’s a comedy, incidentally.

Like other Arcand films, the philosophy guiding Days of Darkness reminded me of Milan Kundera, a writer with a peculiar gift for chronicling the uglification of the world. But the film’s final image made me think of John Berger’s writing, with its emphasis on attending to the sensual world. We see the protagonist sit down at a table, before him a large bowl of apples. Nearby a woman is canning preserves. The protagonist picks up an apple and begins to peel it, and the act yields a sort of quiet, modest revelation. We can smell the inner flesh of the fruit as its peel falls away, feel the spray of juice as the knife traverses its surface.

For the lover of reading (as opposed to a book-lover), Kindle promises an unprecedented freedom: wherever you are, a virtually fathomless selection awaits. Contrasting the dusty, bulky weight of libraries you’re offered perfect lightness, an entire literature cradled invisibly in the ether. It sounds like something out of science fiction –like a dream deal. As I write this I’m still amazed by the prospect and all it implies.

But what about that shed weight? What about the weight of a page, of a real book, with its margin notes and worn corners? What about the weight of an apple? The weight of a real baseball bat? The weight of a real body next to yours? I’m under no illusions that technological progress can be reversed, nor would I wish it so. Our relationship with technology is absolute, at least as old as the wheel, its path is carved deep into our destiny. But I also think, perhaps now more than ever, its worth considering every how and when to use that technology, to question whether we want to simply adopt every new development without considering what’s lost.