A Note on Messterpieces

Maybe it's because after you've seen too many films, convention loses its edge. Or maybe it goes back to the old French film critic's claim that the worst film by an auteur will always be more interesting than the best film by a non-auteur. But whatever the reason, lately I've become more enamored of "messterpieces."

A quick internet search tells me that the term "messterpiece," as I use it, has been used before. (The most official source I've found is IFC's Matt Singer.) But since the top search results for "messterpiece" are a Bounty ad campaign and an address in Glenview, Illinois, it seems that the term isn't in wide enough use, so it's worth outlining what it means and why such films have appeal.

A "messterpiece" is, as the name suggests, a film that would be a masterpiece if it wasn't such a mess—and you could dismiss it as a mess if it wasn't also kind of masterful. A messterpiece is often jumbled, awkward, overloaded, undercooked, and can understandably come across as an indulgence. But inside that awkward, overloaded, undercooked jumble is something of value: energy, inventiveness, distinct personality, and ideas that would be a shame to ignore. They're not perfect, but then, the people I love aren't perfect either, and I see no reason to have a double standard for films.

Messterpieces, in fact, probably aren't even "great." There is such a thing as a great and messy film—a film whose mess is part of its greatness. (Something like late 60s Godard comes to mind). No, these are films that, for what they are, could and probably should have been improved upon. If you had to judge them on a limited two-directional axis and come up with an adjective, they'd probably only be "good." But their flaws, in a way, have a certain warts-and-all appeal for the adventurous: it's almost like looking under the hood. The inspiration isn't fine-tuned, but it's inspired nonetheless. They're the misunderstood monsters of cinema.

The best example of a recent messterpiece may be the film that introduced me to the term: Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (2007).



Kelly broke onto the scene with Donnie Darko (2001), which, despite a negligible initial run, built up steam on DVD and midnight screenings to become arguably the cult film of the decade. Southland Tales was his follow-up: a gigantic sci-fi sprawl, daftly ambitious in the way that sophomore features are always rumored to be.

Essentially, Kelly combined Philip K. Dick, David Lynch, Hollywood blockbusters, comic books, B-movies, reality TV, music videos, post-9/11 paranoia, the red state.blue state divide, The Communist Manifesto, and the Book of Revelation to create a wildly campy and distinctly American vision of the apocalypse. Little good can be done trying to briefly synopsize the plot, which has to do with an amnesiac movie star, a burgeoning police state, and—why not?—a rip in the space-time continuum. The film stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, and Sean William Scott. This alone is enough to cause eye-rolling in certain potential viewers, until you realize the film's ironic, self-conscious wavelength—not to mention the tacit understanding that, for better or worse, America is a country defined by its shiniest, flashiest pop culture.

By most bellwethers, the film was a failure. It cost about $17 million, and in its entire worldwide run, it made *checks internet* $375,000. So unless it pulled in extraordinary home video numbers—it didn't—somebody got hosed. Critics weren't much kinder to it. On rottentomatoes, it holds steady at about 39%, with pull-quotes like "immature," "incoherent," "politically sophomoric," and, from Richard Roeper, "one of the worst cinematic train wrecks I've ever seen." (More on that in a moment).

But among the few critics who stood by it was Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, and her defense perfectly captures the appeal of "the messterpiece." Her review came at a time when the great film of the day was the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men, and she took the opportunity to draw a parallel. Ms. Dargis writes:

American cinema is in the grip of a kind of moribund academicism, which helps explain why a fastidiously polished film like “No Country for Old Men” can receive such gushing praise from critics. “Southland Tales” isn’t as smooth and tightly tuned as “No Country,” a film I admire with few reservations. Even so, I would rather watch a young filmmaker like Mr. Kelly reach beyond the obvious, push past his and the audience’s comfort zones, than follow the example of the Coens and elegantly art-direct yet one more murder for your viewing pleasure and mine. Certainly “Southland Tales” has more ideas, visual and intellectual, in a single scene than most American independent films have in their entirety, though that perhaps goes without saying. Neither disaster nor masterpiece, “Southland Tales” again confirms that Mr. Kelly...is one of the bright lights of his filmmaking generation.

And that more or less sums up why a film so messy can be so fascinating and so worthy of attention.

Of course, messterpieces being what they are, it's not a film that I'd be comfortable giving undiluted praise. It's almost certainly more jumbled than it should be, even by Lynchian anti-logic standards. (And as the film goes on, I sense that Richard Kelly thinks repeated blowjob jokes are funnier than I do). The less said about The Box—Kelly's most recent film, which has much of the same problems and none of the virtues—the better. So on the whole, it's easy to see why Southland Tales has had a hard time finding acceptance, as in many ways, the different elements of its appeal cancel each other out.

But more importantly, it looks like nobody knew exactly what to do with it. On its theatrical release, it never made it to more than 100 theaters. The week it came out on DVD, a friend of mine recommended it, so we went from store to store searching for a copy. Circuit City had it listed in "Comedy," Best Buy had it listed in "Action," Barnes & Noble had it listed in "Sci-fi," and none of them carried it in stock. When the distributor printed up the DVD, they didn't used the blurb from the New York Times calling Kelly "one of the bright lights of his filmmaking generation." Instead, they went with a quote from Ain't It Cool News saying that "the Rock is awesome!"

Still, in all its off-kilter, junk-clogged messiness, Southland Tales fits as a minor benchmark for aughts. It captures the Bush era as a bizarre, fragmented, media-saturated nightmare that gets stranger and stranger until it collapses in on itself—and it can strike a chord for anyone who feels like current events in America are like a bizarre dream. Keep on the lookout for nice, sardonic touches, like how the opening exposition is sponsored by Gillette. Even the casting is a postmodern wink: Amy Poehler as a Marxist revolutionary, Jon Lovitz as a brutal cop, and Timberlake as the prophet of Revelation. Unpolished, frequently immature, and occasionally misfiring, yes—but often some kind of inspired.

In short, it's a film due for reevaluation. My friend Adam Cook, over at the Bronze, has already thrown his hat into the ring on this, and I would recommend checking out his article.

*****

The critical reception for Southland Tales is worth returning to, since getting poor (or at least highly mixed) reviews seems to be the fate of messterpieces. This is even more of a shame, since such bizarre, limited-release niche films rely on critical recommendation. The reception for Southland Tales can be seen, in miniature, in this review from At the Movies, where Richard Roeper thrashes the film for 60 seconds, and the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips dives in to defend it for the next 20 before they have to cut to commercial. You can see their exchange here:



When Philips and Roeper say that they wouldn't recommend it to a "general audience", it's an interesting point to consider, if only because of what it says about the role of the critic in popular culture. For starters, I'm not entirely sure what a "general audience" is or if it it really exists—though I assume it's a group of non-cinephiles looking for a movie on a Friday night. (And who can blame them?). But giving thumbs up or down to the Hollywood entertainment of the week is one of the least important roles of a critic; far more important is the analysis and consideration of the ideas that are at work. Let's not get ahead of ourselves—Southland Tales isn't L'Avventura. But then, L'Avventura is another film I wouldn't recommend to a group of non-cinephiles looking for a movie on a Friday night, so that may not be the best bellwether. Philips's "save your bile" comment is a fitting defense for messterpieces: to me, a film that is emotionally or intellectually vapid, regardless of slickness, is far more deserving of critical skepticism.

To me, messterpieces stand most strongly as an alternative to the idea of the awards season "prestige picture", by which I mean something along the lines of, say, The Reader. These end-of-year films more strongly hit their mark: more polished, more forceful, and probably more watchable. As such, they find more acceptance from audiences and from the powers that be at awards ceremonies, and it's easy to see why. But by the time the Oscars have all been handed out, they've faded in amongst the rest. To me, a film like Southland Tales is more memorable, more interesting to discuss, and more tempting to return to than at least half the Best Picture nominees of the last decade. It's gotten to a point where I'm more interested in a personal film that's gotten polarized reviews than I am in the critically-acclaimed Oscar bait of the year.

After all, falling flat on your face—publicly, at that—has to be admired. It takes courage.

A scene from Francois Truffaut's Shoot The Piano Player (1960), which I would label as a messterpiece from an earlier era. At the time, it was dismissed by critics and by Truffaut himself, who called it simply "my second film." The infamous New York Times critic Bosley Crowther commented, and not without reason: "It looks, from where we are sitting, as though M. Truffaut went haywire in this film...as though he had so many ideas for movies outpouring in his head, so many odd slants on comedy and drama and sheer clichés that he wanted to express, that he couldn't quite control his material." Today, the film has a reputation as a minor classic.

A running list of other films that I would describe as messterpiece, or otherwise "messterful":

Velvet Goldmine (1998, Todd Haynes)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999, Stanley Kubrick)
Schizopolis (1997, Steven Soderbergh)
Dodes'ka-den (1970, Akira Kurosawa)

Something About a Bright Light (L O S T)

I turn my back on the media for a moment, and so many stories worth noting have piled up. We get what detectives would call "hard evidence" that Mark Zuckerberg is an asshole; John Stossel said on TV that the free market would stop racial discrimination; and a small controversy has brewed over the fact that for a movie called Prince of Persia, Hollywood went with the white guy.

(Fun sidenote about that last bit of ethnic appropriation: I actually found a small detail in the Prince of Persia trailer kind of funny. It's been a longstanding Hollywood practice to cast any ancient civilization with actors who have British accents. Romans, Greeks—all British. So when they cast an American as a Persian, it appears that all they had him do was use a British accent, thus moving Hollywood a further degree of separation from racial/national accuracy).

But of course, the big media news has nothing to do with reality at all. ABC's Lost ended its 6-year run in a big, two-and-a-half-hour TV event that was more or less guaranteed to piss off a comfortable majority of its audience. From 2004–present, Lost was one of the most innovative and (to a cult following) one of the most loved shows on network television. Lost was an enigma, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a revolving door of romantic couplings. It was a pulp, sci-fi, character-based soap opera adventure philosophical allegory—nd lots of fun. But it was also kind of a Ponzi scheme of answers, delving deeper and deeper into cliffhangers and unexplained mysteries every time it tied up a single loose end.

The big question, plaguing Lost fans and separating them from everyone who gave up on the show, was whether or not the writers "know where they're going"—or if the Ponzi scheme would collapse. Getting near the end of the series, it was thrown increasingly into doubt: in short, there was no way in hell they could tie this all together. In the week before the final episode, I heard some comic speculation over what a good finale would be. My favorite was the shocking revelation that the entire show was a dream in the mind of Special Agent Dale Cooper.

But I, having no TV, had to wait until the next day so I could watch it on Hulu. I heard vague echoes of despair on facebook, and when I went out to breakfast the next morning, I saw a headline in the local paper that "Lost finale leaves questions unanswered" (I think it was actually under stories about how there's a budget deficit problem and conflict in the Middle East).

A lot seemed to be riding on this ending. It was as if, until this moment, the jury was out on the entire series: only after the ending could we step back and evaluate Lost as a whole. This, needless to say, put a lot of burden on the finale—the way it doesn't matter how many impressive backflips an Olympic gymnast does in midair if they don't nail the landing.

For me, Lost was one of the few shows I devotedly kept up on. Not only was it different, it was different in a way that took full advantage of the narrative possibilities of the current age. It seems fair to say that a show like Lost could not have existed (and lasted) before TiVo, Hulu, and TV on DVD. In other words, you could now do an exceedingly complicated, multi-threaded, serialized story that demanded to be seen from the beginning and watched without any holes. Lost was exhibit A for the TV potential of the past decade, and I always loved it for that.

So I sat down to watch the finale and see how they went out. 2 hours (and 12 modest commercial breaks later), I decided that I must be one of the few people who was not incredibly annoyed by it, even though they went the Full Wachowski.

Thoughts on the finale will follow, and it goes without saying that there will be incidental SPOILERS.

First off, a note on the unanswered questions. There are a lot of them. So many, in fact, that it's not even worth compiling a laundry list. Which is, I suppose, the natural consequence of spending 6 years ending every other episode with a cliffhanger. You can pick which one annoys you most (mine is that they never answered what, exactly, is up with Libby).

I definitely feel they're allowed unanswered questions. A lot of details—like, say, where the statue came from—are incidental, and the show can maintain some mystery. Leave it for fan fiction and authorized paperbacks. The bigger problem is that during the last half of this season, they did what you're not allowed to do for sci-fi: they set up a fantasy world with no clear rules, and a battle with no clear stakes.

So ultimately, with all that was left untouched, my satisfaction with the finale has less to do with the quality of the episode itself and more to do with a willingness to just go along with it. The surprise twist for the end of the finale, that [SPOILER] everyone has died, was understandably something that left people unsatisfied. And I have to admit, I cracked a smile when a character defensively said that, even though this part wasn't real, everything else had still happened. In other words, a message from the writers: "don't worry, we're not saying it's all a dream."

It's actually a very similar ending to The Chronicles of Narnia. (Viewers may recall that C.S. Lewis was referenced earlier in the series). It wouldn't surprise me if they were going for something like Lewis's The Last Battle, which also ends with the revelation that everyone died, and which also has its fantasy adventure give way to abstract spirituality about finding peace beyond the material world. If that's the way they wanted to go, it's certainly a fascinating choice. And if the "real world" on Lost has become too complicated for its own good, maybe spiritually announcing that it's all irrelevant isn't so bad of a call.

So ultimately, now that we can step back and see it as a whole, what is Lost? An overly ambitious experiment? A lesson about biting off more than you can chew? A cop-out to the Christian right? The world's longest and most complicated allegory for a man coming to grips with the death of his father?

I actually maintain that Lost is what it always was: a singular, innovative show that managed to be different and get away with it. If it no longer feels right to call it one of the best shows TV ever offered, I can at least say that I don't regret following it.

And seriously, if you want to see a frustratingly enigmatic finale, watch the old 60s show The Prisoner. The Prisoner's last episode is possibly the most ballsily abstract thing ever aired on TV, and it upset people so much that its producer and star, Patrick McGoohan, briefly went into hiding. Lost has nothing on that.

Today

From Yahoo! searches:


Nothing to add to this, really. I just thought I'd preserve it in posterity: May 14, 2010 AD.

Les Enfants Du Lucas et Spielberg are forced to care again (A post about Star Wars? On the internet?)

"That's it! I'm through with Star Wars! I don't care anymore."

These words were spoken by a friend of mine after he went to see the Clone Wars animated movie a few summers ago. In all fairness, we were kind of asking for it.

Both of us were born in the pop cultural landscape of the 1980s, and so were part of the tail end of the group that could be described as "the children of Lucas of Spielberg" ("les enfants du Lucas et Spielberg" sounds classier). Not ardent Star Wars Fans with a capital F, but...you know, the sort of young movie buffs who first grew to love Hollywood adventure through VHS tapes of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and E.T.

With that bedrock of fondness, we hit adolescence during the whole prequel deal. The problems with that particular trilogy have been critiqued often and vehemently (and with great hyperbole) over the last decade, and there's really no need to go into it. But Lucas, for his part, seems fairly unfazed by the wave of negative criticism, and it's worth noting that in a recent interview, he used the Hollywood Nuremberg defense: kids like it. In fact, Lucas claimed that a whole new set of kids prefers the prequels to the originals. I'm totally willing to buy that this is true. But it may also mean that the root problem with the latest mediocre Hollywood blockbusters (including some with Spielberg's name on it) is not entirely on Hollywood's end. It's not hackery or a lost touch, but a shift in cultural tastes towards having everything bigger, louder, faster, and shinier, irregardless of content. Maybe the real monster is us.

In that broader context, it's easy to see where my friend was coming from after he left the Clones Wars, which was basically a Saturday morning cartoon that they decided to release in theaters. His desire to not care anymore was like both a rebellion against the tentpole system (which relies on the marketing clout of established franchises) and the bitter nostalgia of post-adolescents who already sound like stodgy old men when they claim that the series peaked in 1980. Indifference towards any new entries in a once-reputable franchise didn't seem like a bad idea.

The strategy of calculated indifference, though, was challenged recently. When I swung by yahoo the other day, I was caught off-guard by a front page headline--next to a slightly less disturbing one about Nic Cage going blond--announcing that a Star Wars sitcom is in the works. At first, adding a sitcom to the Star Wars canon seemed wildly off. My first thoughts were that either a) they realized that when you set a laugh track to the romantic scenes of Episode II, it attains a level of ironic poetry; or b) George Lucas had decided to dig until he hit rock bottom.

But then I found out that it would be spun off of the Robot Chicken spoofs of Star Wars--essentially free-style comic riffing--and the announcement took on a subtext other than selling out. It was an official sign that the franchise was going to embrace self-parody. Maybe that's not a bad thing. If anything, the prequel trilogies took themselves--their mythology, their love story--too seriously. I'm sure this announcement has already sent rage ricocheting around the internet, though I haven't felt like checking. I honestly have no idea how this will turn out, or if I'd give in to marketing clout and tune in out of curiosity.

It can be best not to care.

Kevin Smith, Auteurism, and the Mass Culture Debate

The following post is informed by nostalgia and media theory.

A new episode in the mass culture debate happened last week, involving Kevin Smith.

Smith, aka "Silent Bob," is an independent film icon from the 1990s, and could be accurately described as something along the lines of a "raunch auteur." His breakthrough flick, Clerks, which he made for less than $30,000 by maxing out his credit cards, is a case of the cinematic American dream in action. And throughout the 90s, he sketched his own self-contained universe, a New Jersey suburb filled with aimless, hyper-articulate post-adolescents who have nothing better to do with their time and energy than debate Star Wars. At their best—and they're often inconsistent—his 90s films alternately show sensitive insight (Chasing Amy), on-target satire (Dogma), and strong character-based comedy (Clerks). (Mallrats, though a critical flop, is the perfect movie for a middle schooler to watch when his parents aren't around.) As many have noted, including Smith himself, he isn't particularly remarkable when it comes to directing. But that never really mattered, since he wrote some of the wittiest comic dialogue in 1990s America film.

This decade, though, has seen Smith become more of a Hollywood hitman. When I saw the trailer for Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which he wrote and directed, and which was a pretty solid raunch comedy, what surprised me was that the trailer didn't mention him or his past work at all. Compare that with Dogma, which positioned itself as "from the creators of Clerks and Chasing Amy." (As far as credits go, Smith, I believe, likes to emphasize group collaboration over the whole auteurist claim of individual authorship—which I actually find very admirable.)

The transformation seemed complete when I saw the trailer to his latest flick, Cop Out, a film in which, sigh, a comically irresponsible black dude and a comically stern white dude team up to fight crime. Not only did it look like a formula star vehicle, it wasn't even his script. It looked like a sign that his identity was being subsumed by Hollywood formula, and nothing I heard since did anything to change that impression.

But all of that was just a prelude. As Anne Thompson notes at indieWIRE, Kevin Smith caused something of a stir recently (an internet stir) by insulting the critics who panned Cop Out--which was, as Thompson points out, his highest gross to date.

Smith's post is a long one, touching on the righteous (the ridiculousness of rabid hating, the mellow enjoyment of simple pleasure) before going into his take on critics, complete with a long, incredibly detailed politically incorrect metaphor. Take a deep breath. His accumlated posts, which came in response to fan question about film theory, are as follows:

@coked_up_jesus “I gotta say that every day I hate film theory & film students & critics more & more. Where is the fun in movies?” Sir sometimes, it’s important to turn off the chatter. Film fandom’s become a nasty bloodsport where cartoonishly rooting for failure gets the hit count up on the ol’ brand-new blog. And if a schmuck like me pays you some attention, score! MORE EYES, MEANS MORE ADVERT $. But when you pull your eye away from the microscope, you can see that shit you’re studying so closely is, in reality, tiny as fuck. You wanna enjoy movies again? Stop reading about them & just go to the movies. It’s improved film/movie appreciation immensely for me.

Seriously: so many critics lined-up to pull a sad & embarrassing train on #CopOut like it was JenniferJasonLeigh in LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN. Watching them beat the shit out of it was sad. Like, it’s called #CopOut; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna shit in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called “Schindler’s Cop Out”? Writing a nasty eview for #CopOut is akin to bullying a retarded kid who was getting a couple chuckles from the normies by singing AFTERNOON DELIGHT.

Suddenly, bully-dudes are doing the bad impression of him, using the “retart” voice. The crowd shifts uncomfortably. And you may impress a couple of low IQ-ers who’re like “Yeah, man! Way to destroy that singing retart!” But, really? All you’ve done is make fun of something that wasn’t doing you any harm and wanted only to give some cats a some fun laughs. It was just ridiculous to watch. That was it for me. Realized whole system’s upside down: so we let a bunch of people see it for free & they shit all over it? Meanwhile, people who’d REALLY like to see the flick for free are made to pay? Bullshit: from now on, any flick I’m ever involved with, I conduct critics screenings thusly: you wanna see it early to review it? Fine: pay like you would if you saw it next week. Like, why am I giving an arbitrary 500 people power over what I do at all, let alone for free? Next flick, I’d rather pick 500 randoms from Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why’s their opinion more valid? It’s a backwards system. People are free to talk shit about ANY of my flicks, so long as they paid to see it. Fuck this AnimalFarm bullshit.

I find this to be a very interesting entry in the basic mass culture debate—which is also, for that matter, the root of a great many internet arguments: populism ("don't overthink, just enjoy") versus intellectualism ("this is mediocre").

And I think there are, to this issue, a great many nuances.

On the one hand, I think that movies should be fun--or rather, that there should always be a place for fun movies. But I'll never buy the argument, which I see over and over again, that critics don't like fun films.

A brief detour to Rotten Tomatoes shows that recent blockbuster hits like Iron Man and Star Trek got rave reviews—to pick a gender-flipped example, Julie & Julia got strong critical notices as well. (Or, to pick something older, Singin' in the Rain continually tops lists of the greatest films of all time, and I defy anyone to find a happier, more bubbly movie). I think critics do like "movies," they just like them to bring something to the table. Entertainment is a good thing--not the only thing, but a good thing--but most bad movies don't qualify as entertainment by the pure fact that they don't entertain. At best, they only qualify as distraction.

Of course, one man's entertainment is another man's distraction, and having times when you can turn your mind off can be a great privilege. But I don't think people should be discouraged from reading or thinking about the media they consume. And if extremely low ambition is the producer's defense, I'm not sure that's an argument worth winning.

I'm reminded of a quote by Ebert, who is hardly an intellectual elitist (no one can be and give Vin Diesel's xXx three-and-a-half stars at the same time). Ebert wrote--in a discussion of the most unapologetically intellectual director in film history, Jean-Luc Godard--that we live in a time when the mainstream audience expects to be "congratulated for its narrow tastes, and catered to." The use of "narrow" rather than "bad" is key. And I agree: currently, the idea of intellect in the public arena is too often seen as something to be sneered at.

Snobbery is its own problem, and it should be avoided. After all, it occurred to me that I watch movies by Jean-Luc Godard for the same essential reason that someone else watches, say, Cop Out: it's what we like to do during our spare time to keep ourselves busy and make us contented. But I can't get on board with Smith here. I think people should be encouraged to poke around, to read up on films, to look into what makes all these ostensibly-great movies so great instead of just uncritically accepting the latest execution of a formula. And in the meantime, I hope we see more movies from the creators of Clerks and Chasing Amy.