Listmaking Blogathon

After reading my recent Vertigo essay - which resulted in a comment board casually ranking the best Hitchcock films - Loren Rosson III, a blogger friend and ex-co-worker of mine, was inspired to initiate a meme over at his blog The Busybody. The idea is that he will publish ordered lists of his favorite films by his 10 favorite directors once a month. Having already kicked it off with Hitchcock for July, his site has also plotted out the plan for the next 10 months, and he is encouraging other bloggers to join in on the fun by posting their own lists and commenting on others. It's a simple exercise that could yield vibrant discussion of some great filmmakers. I'll be following his lead and posting a list every month as well, and I urge you to do the same. As he says, these will be very personal lists not following any established canons, and I'm sure they'll change radically for me down the line, but it's nonetheless an interesting way to take stock in my cinematic taste at this point in life. Here's my plan for the next six months (the four after that have not yet been determined), intersecting with Loren's when possible:

August: David Lynch. The Full 11, plus shorts and oddities. (Déjà vu?)

September: Ingmar Bergman. The Top 14, for now.

October: Stanley Kubrick. The Top 10.

November: Andrei Tarkovsky. The Full 7.

December: Bela Tarr. The Full 10.

January: TBD

February: TBD

March: TBD

April: TBD

May: TBD

Magic Mike (2012) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

These days, Steven Soderbergh's career seems to have reached the end point of a slow, insistent turn towards a path rarely traveled in Hollywood. He's making wide-release films with studio money that exemplify 21st century D.I.Y filmmaking ethos - that is, movies guaranteed commercial treatment that feel as if they were made by one dude with a (ridiculously high-end) camera and some friends. And more often than not, that's practically the case. His latest film Magic Mike is like an informal companion piece to 2009's The Girlfriend Experience, a sharply observed portrait of the business of sexuality - this time set in a Tampa Bay where the males are the performers and the females the customers - in which the modus operandi is roughly the same: co-opt a subject (nightlife, sex), a hot-topic star (Channing Tatum here, Sasha Grey in TGF), and a genre (dramedy/dance film here, drama/prostitution exposé in TGF) from the universal interests of the masses in order to gain financing, and proceed to make probing, non-judgmental, humble cinema. Soderbergh strikes me as a filmmaker set upon providing gentle forms of rebellion to the reductive, predictable, conformist fare taking place elsewhere in Hollywood, not through grand gestures and cynical statements, but rather through down-to-earth socioeconomic detail and an impassioned curiosity for the various subjects he films.

Here, that subject is male stripping, and Soderbergh's characteristic lack of bias is especially impressive given the stigma surrounding such a profession. Magic Mike portrays the business of male stripping for what it is - a business, just as worthy of exploration as any other pastime humans choose to embark on, not as a target of ridicule or as easy fodder for girls-night-out exploitation. The film sees stripping both as an exaggerated extension of the primitive urge for sex and sociality and as a lucrative option for aimless but well-meaning twentysomethings forced into odd jobs by the reality of the American economy. Such is the case for Mike (Tatum), a charismatic, self-described "entrepreneur" with scattered ambition, as well as Adam (Alex Pettyfer), a bored 19-year-old who ruined his college football career after a misguided fight with his coach. Mike's already an established hunk at the local male revue (they call him "Magic Mike") and he enjoys plenty of sleepless nights and late afternoons waking up next to nameless females. He doesn't see the fault of his ways, but rather exudes the kind of self-confidence and jovial solipsism that is so pervasive in the modern post-collegiate world, where relative success in a small pond translates to a feeling of being on top of the world. It's precisely that feeling that encourages him to make Alex his project.

It's not that Mike is good-for-nothing, or that Soderbergh is framing him as a villain. In fact, it's quite the opposite. From his ostentatious SUV that he prides himself on by keeping perpetually "new," to his casual but invested relationship with his booty call Joanna (Olivia Munn), to his ridiculous future goal of launching a business of custom furniture assembled from junk parts, everything about Mike is both convincingly flawed and convincingly real. When he senses Alex needs to come out of his shell, his decision to befriend him stems, yes, from a genuine kindness, but mostly from a subconscious desire to increase his sex appeal through an act of charity. The film is remarkably true to the ways that social gamesmanship occurs through bravado; significantly, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), the megalomaniacal owner of the strip club, is the most obnoxious of all the film's central characters, but in his own way, he displays a tight control of every social situation he's in. (It's the perfect role for McConaughey, who hasn't been this expertly sleazy since Dazed and Confused.) Soderbergh, ever-alert to the process of how things can rapidly change for better or worse (see: Contagion), conveys the transformation of Alex from a go-nowhere stud with a good Schwarzenegger impression and a motherly sister (Cody Horn) to a drugged-up, testosterone-fueled dancer who wouldn't admit he cares about anything but partying and women, and yet there remains a sympathetic core to his character.

The majority of the film's astute, unfussy observations of modern life emerge during its narrative setup. Among them: Alex reveals that he got the same construction job as Mike through Craigslist, and shortly after, we see in the corner of the frame as the boss denies an employee a second soda for lunch, one of his regulations for a non-union, under-the-table gig; later, when Alex successfully pleas for a +1 at one of Mike's regular nightclub digs, he asks naïvely upon receiving his first drink, "Is this free?" Both are minor nuances in Soderbergh's mise en scène, but they add volume to the film's sense of verisimilitude. As Magic Mike enters its third act, it starts to shoehorn its characters into somewhat expected molds (Adam's spiral out of control, Mike's escape from the stripper business as a form of heroism, Adam's sister as a romantic saving grace) and integrates standard genre tropes into its plot (a trippy, color-coded party, a drug deal gone bad, a chance at upward mobility with the prospect of the business moving to Miami). But at the same time, this mash-up of the ordinary and the iconic, the spontaneous and the schematic, the monotonous and the escapist, is exemplified constantly in the lives of these strippers, who are used to shifting between normalcy and performance. It's built into the core of the film. The sadness is that Mike has lost the ability to distinguish between the two modes, despite his desperate efforts to shake off his play persona. Among its many strengths, Magic Mike conveys the whirlwind effect that occurs when standards of obligation collide with transient pleasures.

Again, Soderbergh acts as his own DP here (another sign of his mild independence), and it's integral to the unique texture of his latest films; nothing else would have made a globetrotting epic like Contagion feel like a small-scale experiment, or The Girlfriend Experience a Godardian essay, or Magic Mike a feel-good Aaron Katz movie. Soderbergh's always seeking an angle that will problematize the action onscreen, that will infuse a sense of chaos into the bloodstream of a scene. In night clubs, he shoots faces from beneath, letting flares from the dancing overhead lights obstruct the image. In the strip club, in addition to presenting the dance moves legibly in extended wide shots, he'll mix in a strange beneath-the-glass-floor perspective that recalls a similar shot in Bela Tarr's Almanac of Fall. After one dramatic punchline, he cuts not to a clear shot that will capitalize on the joke, but rather to a collage of unfocused neon lights that only gradually reveal a setting. It's all a way of making a prosaic portrait feel anything but controlled and boxed-in, as well as a way of reflecting the spontaneity of the lives onscreen. Even when it's obvious where the film is headed, this visual experimentation brings a notion of imbalance, making Magic Mike an exciting thing to behold.

Love in the Afternoon (L'amour l'après-midi) A Film by Eric Rohmer (1972)

Of all the male protagonists in Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, Frédéric (Bernard Verley) of Love in the Afternoon is the most tied down by obligation. As a result, the guiding conceit of the series - a man devoted to one women but tempted by a second - gains a charge of practical emotional intensity, a sense of dramatic stakes not as explicitly felt by the drifting, often vacationing souls of the previous five films. Frédéric is married. He has a child and is expecting another. He also works as an office manager in Paris. There's a tangible divide between private and public spaces, between duty and leisure, that Rohmer builds into the film only to gradually disrupt as his character, mentally adrift due to his unchallenging occupation, allows himself to be drawn into the various beauties he sees on a daily basis walking the city streets. "Their beauty is an extension of my wife's beauty," he claims in articulate voice-over, but the comment is so clearly a left-field justification, the kind of thought process Rohmer continuously and delicately explores throughout the series.

Love in the Afternoon's first thirty-odd minutes constitute a prologue, but it's so long that one quickly forgets there's any structural device at play at all. When that prologue segues into a "Part Two" with a sudden, unexpected cut, it has the force of a psychological rupture. It's fitting, because Part Two begins with the birth of Frédéric's child, which brings with it an additional jolt of familial responsibility and a greater weight on Frédéric's psyche. Halfway through the prologue, the film introduces Chloé (Zouzou), an old friend of Frédéric who begins to pose a threat to his marital fidelity towards the end of the section. She represents the antithesis of Frédéric's self-contained bourgeois reality: proto-grunge in her faded blue jeans and moppish hair, so slouchy with her posture that it registers as an affront to the casual professionalism of the office environment that she habitually visits, and unassumingly direct in her language and lifestyle beliefs, she's a clear product of the sexual revolution. This type of self-assured personality often characterizes the secondary love interest in the Moral Tales, but even among this batch Chloé is especially forward and original, more of an earthy presence than many of the ethereal women of previous works. As if to acknowledge this difference, Rohmer has each temptress from the previous films materialize as potential romantic objects in an atypical dream sequence of Frédéric imagining flirtatious success at lunch break, the suggestion being that such presences are too angelically removed to actually crack Frédéric's repressive shell in reality.

The precise history behind Chloé and Frédéric's relationship is kept oblique by Rohmer - we know that Chloé once dated one of Frédéric's best friends, and there are only fleeting hints of a brief romance between the two. This only serves to make the impact of their casual courtship even stronger. Frédéric's flirtation arises from convenience but is treated as fresh territory to explore. The film portrays a sense of how quickly and easily his narrow idea of fidelity can be tested when presented with an attractive and charismatic option. Chloé shows up at Frédéric's office on a nearly day-to-day basis without warning, and her presence in the work space serves to slowly leak the professionalism from the setting until Frédéric seems no longer capable of carrying on his office responsibilities. Private thoughts bleed into professional life, and soon there is no division of Frédéric's consciousness; everything is Chloé. Verley's performance exudes this idea completely. Every interior impulse sneaks out in his body language, from his blank stares when not in her presence to his seeming inability to refrain from affectionate gestures around her (hand holding, hugging, exuberant kisses on the cheek, arm around shoulder, etc.).

There are several outbursts of overt eroticism in the film, but even without them Love in the Afternoon possesses a sneaking sensuality evident in every line and gesture. When Frédéric tells Chloé how much he loves his wife Hélène (Bernard's actual wife Françoise Verley, supplying added resonance to the themes), he's usually avoiding directly communicating how passionately he longs for Chloé. When he makes a comment to Chloé about how great their friendship is, more often than not the unspoken addendum seems to be "so we should express those feelings." Rohmer's image patterns - his reliance upon medium close-ups, his occasional change of rhythm to a two-shot or a tighter close-up - are carefully choreographed so that every cut underlines a minor gradation in the emotions occurring beneath the surface of language, and every shot held longer than usual offers an opportunity to glean the internal monologue happening behind the speech. Punctuation also arrives in the form of the occasional slow dolly in, and in one instance Rohmer uses a zoom to gradually fill the frame with Frédéric's face. By the French director's unassuming standards, Love in the Afternoon sometimes feels downright expressive, especially when a strange theremin score plays behind the dream sequence and the opening credits, but it's balanced by some of the most ascetic interior sequences in the entire series (no picturesque backdrops here, just blank walls and the infrequent splash of color).

All the partial come-ons, incomplete caresses, and erotic not-quite-jokes culminate in Chloé's wordless sex proposal late in the film, which reveals all the previous moves to have been not just casual goofs of good friends but advances of barely contained sexual energy. Frédéric's consuming desire nearly gets the best of him, until an innocuous glance in the mirror reminds him of a previous scene of playfulness with his newborn son (the full realization of the film's shift to a Part Two). The moment is loaded with subtext, as the gravity of Frédéric's emotional infidelity finally subsumes his physical urges. It's sublime. Up until this point Frédéric has harbored a contradictory notion of fidelity that allowed for emotional dishonesty but drew the line at physical contact; his refusal of Chloé's offer both adheres to that moral code and revises it. Realizing that his emotional interest was merely an extension of physical interest, he returns home to Hélène (who at this point has all but disappeared from the film) in a newly sincere mode. Love in the Afternoon quietly asks if this insistence upon monogamy was inherent in Frédéric from the beginning of the film or if real psychological discipline was required to make it anything more than a vague theoretical stance.

Vertigo (1958) A Film by Alfred Hitchcock

I wonder if those responsible for the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo realized, consciously or not, the meta nature of the project, seeing as the idea of restoring an old film mirrors so many of the ideas Hitchcock was getting at with his signature classic: trying to reclaim something from the past, to make it over into its ideal form, to resurrect a lost artifact in a new light. That Vertigo does exist now in varying forms seems the logical extension of its own motifs of doubling, projection, and representation, staging its Cinemascope print (the latest and ultimate iteration) as not necessarily the film finally actualized but as the film in one form - its most idealized - of many. This Vertigo is the Kim Novak of James Stewart's most sacred dreams, Madeleine at her most stunning and ethereal. Which, perhaps, gives it the kind of blunt experiential force necessary to match Scottie's (Stewart) obsessive desire, the eye-popping colors and unreal sense of space to bolster the audience's sympathetic alignment with Hitchcock's memorable protagonist.

After enough probing, the twisty, complex Vertigo reveals itself to be a fairly universal love story. Taking the kind of structurally convoluted, paradigm-shifting approach that can't help but dredge up a minefield of uncomfortable human behavior (the same path David Lynch would take to tell a fundamental love story with his own riff on Vertigo, Mulholland Drive), the film burrows into the complementary psyches of John "Scottie" Ferguson and Judy Barton (Novak). Though commonly understood chiefly as a vehicle for the psychological deconstruction of Scottie, Vertigo is in fact one of the most comprehensive studies of two people in the history of cinema. Both main characters - specifically, Scottie of the first half and Judy of the second - are without a fixed identity, prepared to be malleable entities to achieve what they desire yet simultaneously hiding some aspect of their inner life. Scottie routinely calls himself a "wanderer," and by the end of the film Judy proves to be one too; it's the slogan of a person desperately searching for love, aiming to frame themselves as perpetually "available".

Wandering, as a physical, metaphysical, and psychological notion, actually provides a succinct framework for understanding both the events of Vertigo and Hitchcock's underlying commentary. It is part of the reason why Scottie, fresh off retirement from detective work after succumbing to vertigo and letting a colleague fall to his death from the roof of a building in the opening scene, is hired by fair-weather friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to follow his wife Madeleine Elster (Novak again). He insists she has been periodically possessed by the ghost of Carlotta Valdes, a woman in a painting at San Francisco's famous art museum, Palace of the Legions of Honor. It is why Scottie subsequently becomes so magnetically attached to the pursuit of Madeleine, seeing as she herself, under the spell of Carlotta, resorts to wandering. For Americans, wandering relates to a lack of discipline and productiveness, and it's precisely this middle-class pragmatism and sense of duty that Scottie wants to avoid. He's more interested in a decadent European frame of mind wherein wandering without guilt and without fear of class slippage is honorable, and he glimpses that same mindset in the suave, sleek Madeleine, who seems to travel only to decidedly un-American locales (the art museum, an old, opulent hotel, the San Juan Baptista mission) around San Francisco.

Scottie's avoidance of duty and conformity - he's single, jobless, and, with the exception of the motherly Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), practically friendless - is essentially a rejection of reality. As a result, Vertigo integrates the dichotomy of reality vs. illusion that is so central to art in its structural, aesthetic, and narrative elements. Novak's famous entrance into the film singlehandedly erects this idea. The first elaborate camera movement that spots her amidst the velvety beauty of Ernie's Restaurant feels like the out-of-body perspective of Scottie, who's seated in awe across the room at the bar. Then, there's something almost taunting and self-aware about her subsequent trip out of the restaurant directly past Scottie, pausing to be viewed in enigmatic profile. For a suspended moment, the light seems to dim in the room while brightening around the glowing Novak, as if Hitchcock is making an announcement of theatrical artifice: after this point, all will be an illusion. Once Madeleine has entered the film, Hitchcock creates strong visual distinctions between Scottie's world in her presence and his world without her. The camera glides with forward-moving elegance towards her, the images shrouded in a fog filter that transforms unglamorous San Francisco reality into a heavenly dream; back in the company of Midge, on the other hand, the film defaults to sharper images and stiffer, more conventional blocking and cutting, while Midge's apartment is haunted by a painfully and irrevocably real panorama of the city.

The events of the film's first two thirds, leading up to the "death" of Madeleine at the San Juan Baptista, are riddled with endless curiosities and coded with little hints that suggest there's nothing normal about Scottie's investigation. This is not just a man following an unsuspecting woman and gaining information about her - there's something tricky, perhaps conspiratorial, going on. All these hints gain retrospective power once Madeleine is revealed to be alive in the form of Judy in the final third of the film. Hitchcock compounds this sense of suspicion in several ways. First, there is Madeleine's repeated encroachment towards the camera/Scottie's perspective, getting at such an uncomfortably close distance that it seems impossible for her not to be aware of his presence. Then, there is Novak's unsettling sense of performativity for Scottie, particularly in her attempted suicide at San Francisco Bay, where she poses for quite some time with postcard perfection in front of the Golden Gate Bridge as if to tempt Scottie with her idyllic beauty. Finally, lines of dialogue slip out as the film inches closer to its ostensibly tragic moment that, in their vagueness and incompleteness, suggest another soul emerging from within the previously stoic Madeleine: "And if you lose me, then you'll know I, I loved you. And I wanted to go on loving you." One gets the feeling, a euphoric feeling, that Judy is coming out of the shell of Madeleine.

This sudden fusion of identities, this bleeding of the realms of fantasy and reality, is the most moving aspect of Vertigo. Lynch has become known for this same maneuver, a whiplash effect caused by the film seeming - at first glance - to be falling apart around itself, but here Hitchcock mastered it. In this moment before "suicide," before following through on Elster's scheme, she is torn between obligation and desire, which is manifested as a split between two distinct personalities. These two personalities are irresolvable, an idea given weight by Hitchcock's application of completely different character traits to Madeleine (radiant, softly speaking, cool, stunningly dressed) and Judy (brash, forward, pragmatic, gaudy). Indeed, they seem like two different people altogether. All of this underscores the similar irresolvability of reality and illusion. The clichéd visions of romantic love between Scottie and Madeleine - based on nothing more than simplistic platitudes of courtship, not real connection - have no place in reality. Scottie's spiral into obsession has a notable casualty: the friendship of Midge, who is last seen in the film fading into darkness in the vast expanse of a mental house hallway.

Enter in Scottie's vertigo to this framework and the film gains an extra dimension of meaning and significance. Consider Hitchcock's famous "vertigo shot," an invention that involves both backward camera movement and forward zooming; there's something elegant about that combination of forward and backward movement in the context of the film's themes. Judy's character arc, in particular, is defined by its back-and-forth movements, from Madeleine to Carlotta Valdes and back, as well as from Madeleine to Judy and back. Her psyche is constantly pulling itself apart by competing impulses, those of her heart and those of her job. Scottie, too, is conflicted. His eager sprawl towards his idealized romantic object is interrupted by jabs of reality, from Midge's vulgar painting of herself as Carlotta Valdes (intended as a lighthearted joke but taken by Scottie as an aggressive attempt to break the spell) to the concrete danger facing the suicide-prone Madeleine. Also, the film visualizes this conflict in its interplay of forward and backward tracking shots that tend to signal the entrance or exit from an illusionistic realm.

When a nun suddenly enters the bell-tower of San Juan Baptista as a creeping shadow and sends Judy leaping out the window in the final moments of the film, to me she registers as Death arriving to put the inevitable end to Scottie's cycle of obsession and self-deception, not necessarily as a tangible catalyst to Judy's hysteria. In this way, Vertigo is brutally fatalistic about the punishing end result of obsessive objectification. It reveals Scottie's harrowing make-over of Judy back into Madeleine - a striving for a perfect vision of the past that was itself a facsimile - to be inherently flawed and destined for self-destruction. Like so many great works of art, the film is about the danger of substituting art for reality, the actual chaos and imprisonment (rather than bliss and perpetual satisfaction) that can result from too fervently seeking an ideal, an idea that the ever-meticulous Hitchcock implicates himself in. His Vertigo is a towering achievement, a harmony of form and content so complex that it cannot be unraveled in a mere viewing or two.

Prometheus (2012) A Film by Ridley Scott

(DISCLAIMER: If you're sensitive to spoilers, I suggest not reading beyond this point.)

The onslaught of questions asked by Ridley Scott's Prometheus represent the worst kind of cinematic ambiguity; raised by manipulative loose ends in the plot line, they send overzealous audience members circling internet forums to decode the implications of single images, lines of dialogue, and story developments, hoping to uncover some grand meaning that the filmmakers excessively hint at but never once intend to explore. Essentially, they're not the type of questions whose answers yield productive insights into life, only into the superficial world created by the film, and what good is that? If this sounds reminiscent of the clusterfuck presented by ABC's Lost, it's probably because the same writer behind that six-year spiral of narrative dead ends is responsible for penning Prometheus, an Alien prequel of lumbering complication and pseudo-mystical underpinnings. Scott's always been a director whose films owe a great deal to their screenwriters, and in this case the bloated absurdity of his new film seem to derive largely from the keyboards of Damon Lindelof and co-writer Jon Spaihts.

Prometheus' most notable addition to the mythology of the franchise - as well as the Other around which the film revolves - are the Engineers, a breed of buff, silver, computer-generated humanoids who maybe gave rise to the xenomorphs which dominate the other four films in the series and maybe even spawned human life on Earth. Scott visualizes this evolutionary event in the opening sequence, a series of sweeping Icelandic vistas culminating in a scene of an Engineer sucking down an intergalactic oyster, convulsing, and being carried down a waterfall, where its swirling DNA is suggested to be the root of the planet's life. For this sequence, Scott makes gaudy use of CGI, presenting an animated tour of the reaction occurring in the Engineer's veins and subsequently of the DNA tossing around in the icy water, shots that recall early David Fincher in their desire to reach for the macro within the micro. It's one of the few sequences in the film that is not tainted by simpleminded blocking and lousy dialogue, and one of the only ones that seems, despite its Fincherian gloss, to be pure Scott visual design.

Lindelof then leaps ahead millions of years to catch the tail-end of two hipster scientists' tour of caves around the world in search of etchings that will support their tenuous theory that something extraterrestrial created human life. (In this film's world, despite their utter scientific ineptitude, it turns out they're right.) Next, the scientist couple - Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) - is seen aboard the massive titular space shuttle having apparently convinced rich corporate fogey Peter Weyland (an embarrassingly prosthetically aged Guy Pearce) to fund their far-flung hypothesis, and they're working alongside a crew of blue-collar morons who agreed to take the trip having not been briefed on the purpose of the mission. When that belated briefing comes, the only justification for its apparent absurdity is that it's what Shaw "chooses to believe," the first obnoxiously pushy hint that she's of Christian faith, and therefore, according to Lindelof, good as dead. As ship captain Meredith Vickers, a self-parodic Charlize Theron wears her hair in a tight knot to telegraph the fact that she means business (contrary to Rapace's shaggy look), bosses the crew around, and shoots the kind of menacing glances that are designed to suggest turbulent backstory at the holographic Weyland recording who somehow knows the positions of the crew members in the room.

Then there's David (Michael Fassbender), an uncomfortably human-like robot introduced tending to his routines on the dormant ship in another of the film's proudly Scott-influenced sequences. David, while one of the most intriguing, if fraudulent, characters in the film, is also the source of some of the biggest failures, as Lindelof and Spaihts have no idea what to do with him. Clearly hearkening back to other sci-fi inventions such as A.I.'s identically-named David, 2001's HAL 9000, Bicentennial Man's Andrew Martin, and of course Alien's own Ash, David shares those figures' mix of chilly benevolence and potential menace, an aura of ambivalence quite functionally handled by Fassbender. But David sits lamely on the fence of all the narrative action in Prometheus, a constant but mostly unproductive presence. Lindelof continually flirts with suggestions of possible conspiratorial impulses churning within David but regularly defaults to presenting the character as a passive drone. The current of emotional uncertainty that David erects in every situation he's in is contagious, but the script fails to find a way to make something significant of the character.

Once the Prometheus ship lands at its destination (a cosmic valley traced with unnatural line segments and divided by a gargantuan hollow dome), the film seems committed to stuffing its story with as many subplots as possible within the two-hour limit asked of the summer blockbuster. Hoping desperately to "find answers" (the extent to which Lindelof's main characters constantly refer to their search as such reminds one of the cries of Lost's target audience), the crew barges right into the massive breeding ground of the Engineers, who are gradually stirred from rest by their presence. Inscrutable clues - holographic helmeted figures running the dark halls of the facility, black goo oozing from tall pods, shape-shifting murals on the walls, a supernatural sandstorm (the whole affair starts to recall those abominations known as The Mummy franchise, and it turns out Spaihts is signed on to write a reboot) - warn the scientists of danger but they plow forward regardless, greeting death and frustration at every turn. The demise of punk geologist Fifield (Sean Harris) and Starbucks-regular-cum-biologist Millburn (Rafe Spall) is perhaps the most idiotic death scene in the entire franchise, a moment of true stubbornness aiming for a shock scare that treats the audience as if they've never seen a horror film.

In contrast to the slick simplicity and frightening restraint of Alien, Prometheus progresses like a schizophrenic mess, attempting to disguise its absence of real tension or momentum with a fast, loud pace and an insistent symphonic score. Out of this clunky design comes the occasional scene or moment that produces genuine terror; Shaw's self-abortion, for instance, is a thrillingly deranged set piece that overcomes the narrative contrivance surrounding it (for some reason, David and the crew members trying to contain her and place her in cryostasis just seem to disappear) through the utter viciousness of its execution. But then there are also plenty of major moments that suffer, such as the spatially confused rescue of Shaw by David in the torrential sandstorm, the rushed, sentimental death of Holloway, David's discovery of the holographic symbology in the Engineers' cave (unlocked by a ridiculous magical ocarina line), and most problematically the reveal of the totally unimportant twist that Vickers is actually Weyland's daughter.

Stirring up a queasy brew of Christianity, Darwinism, Hollywood/science-fiction lore, and franchise mythology, Prometheus is a trigger-happy film. It seems game to gesture towards any conceptual template exuding a vague air of philosophical profundity (hence its relentless symbolic use of Shaw's cross necklace), and is willing to shift its supposed concerns at a moment's notice if it allows the narrative to keep churning rapidly, to keep sustaining a sense of escalating mystery. In fact, the film not only dances around heady ideas but also entertains any possible diversion from the central narrative thrust, seemingly ready to take a shot at anything that might stir up intrigue. Thus, the film includes: the momentary regeneration of Fifield, who, after being thought dead by the crew, arrives at the ship in monstrous form to throw some punches and then get trampled by a bulldozer and set aflame; the occasional hint of malicious intent in David, as if the mere suggestion of robot motivation equals a serious investigation into What It Means To Be Human; the oh-so-monumental awakening of Weyland, also thought dead by most of the crew, from cryostasis, who seeks immortality and bites the dust shortly after his arrival because of it; the thin-as-ice "is-she-human-or-not?" subtext revolving around Vickers, capped off by pilot Janek's (Idris Elba) brilliantly straightforward delivery of the line "are you a robot?". The list goes on.

What's lacking in all these red herrings is a sense of conviction, the kind of earnestness that makes storytelling devices anything more than devices strewn up awkwardly to imply narrative momentum. The film is overflowing with inconsistencies and lapses in narrative logic, some hilariously damning and others inconsequential. At their most glaring, they underscore a general laziness of construction that infects all of the film's stabs at seriousness, its overarching desire to be a major science-fiction event. Scott, as a visual storyteller, is rarely able to emerge comfortably and confidently from the narrative noise built up by Lindelof and Spaihts, and when he does, he has only unimaginatively sterile sets and an overworked digital effects team to play off of, allowing for little of the atmospheric beauty of the original. Prometheus is enjoyable enough as a loud, outrageous thriller, but it yanks so hard on the audience's chain for so long while being unsure of what to prioritize that I can't understand how it could satisfy even the most die-hard fanboys.

Whores' Glory (2011) A Film by Michael Glawogger

"Griffith saw that the cinema could show things that everybody knows, that everybody wants to recognise, and at the same time, not show certain things which are very violent, which must be hidden. Griffith was the first to understand and experiment with the idea that cinema is an art which can make its strongest effect with the idea of absence, with the idea of cinema as an art of absence...

...I think what Mizoguchi wanted to say in the final shot (of Street of Shame (1956)) was: ‘Starting from here, it's going to be so unbearable that there's not even a film.’ After this closed door, a film is no longer possible. It's terrible, so don't come in."

-Pedro Costa, "A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing"

When watching Michael Glawogger's Whores' Glory, the concluding film in the globetrotting Austrian filmmaker's trilogy of transcontinental labor, I was intermittently reminded of a transcript of an inspiring lecture given by Pedro Costa to a school of Japanese film students. In it, Costa spoke of the philosophical and ethical divide between commercial cinema and cinema of truth, analogizing the whole argument to the idea of a door left open or selectively shut. Costa's language is curiously vague for the most part (or at least the translation is), perhaps intentionally so, but what I sense him dancing around is the notion of an ethical line - in no matter what kind of film is being made - that simply cannot be crossed. A film should only show so many details, and in fact it becomes more truthful, and more significant, when it eschews certain aspects of the lives of those onscreen that would in some ways be too intensely private to show, that would inevitably steal a part of the soul of the subject. Enter a film like Whores' Glory, which seems to thrive on tiptoeing across this line, for the most part keeping the door shut but occasionally dipping its feet in the other room. And, given my profound agreement with many portions of Costa's sublime speech, I find myself troubled by the speculation as to what extent Glawogger's few crossings of the line so dutifully established by the structure of his own work actually damn the film as a whole.

For clarification, Whores' Glory is an insanely comprehensive, thematically focused, brilliantly framed, tonally consistent, and refreshingly non-judgmental three-part look at prostitution in separate milieus: Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico. Glawogger somehow managed to gain extremely intimate access to a casual urban brothel in Bangkok, a grungy and claustrophobic red-light district in Faridpur, and finally a ghostly drive-in motel expanse just beyond the border of Texas known mysteriously as The Zone, and he codes each section with its own subtle variation on the same aesthetic of vibrant, compulsively composed cinéma vérité. The film's lack of an explanatory voice-over or a clear editorial point-of-view, as well as its ambivalence regarding the definitions of documentary and fiction (unafraid to pit reenactments and stagings alongside more "authentic" fly-on-the-wall footage), all situate it firmly within the same kind of postmodern Direct Cinema practiced by Costa as well as Glawogger's Austrian contemporary Ulrich Seidl, yet there's also an uncommon expressive streak running through Whores' Glory, a desire to use the editorial tools at the disposal to the filmmaker (a soundtrack consisting of mostly P.J. Harvey and CocoRosie tunes, dynamic color and compositional arrangement) to heighten atmosphere.

In most cases, that's precisely what Glawogger's stylistic tics do: heighten atmosphere. They don't reduce the lives of the destitute, dispossessed, or less fortunate to graphic displays. Glawogger's particular kind of keen compositional sense - basically an ability to stumble upon striking framings without appearing to set out with that intention when a take begins (his camera is almost always moving, whether handheld or on track, quickly or slowly) - is more about discovering something pre-existing that is beautiful than it is about arranging a subject and its surroundings in a flattering manner. Whether or not Glawogger actually does rearrange elements in the frame, and to what extent, is beside the point, because one gets the feeling that the prostitutes in Whores' Glory are not trivialized or overtly glamorized by the cinematography that contains them. Nor are they by the music that often accompanies the images and gives the film such elegant momentum, but the music does translate a melancholy perspective to the audience and sometimes threatens to derail the otherwise undemonstrative approach. For instance, it's hard to hear P.J. Harvey sing the words "all around me people bleed" or "the city's ripped right to the core" (both from "The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore" off of her 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea) and not attribute them to Glawogger's own stance on the matter, which, sympathetic as it may be, suggests an exotic imposition of perspective, a kind of generalized reading of a community.

That reading becomes increasingly problematized by the nature of the film's emotional structure, which begins with the brothel that is easiest to swallow in terms of the level of shocking images on display, and moves gradually into thornier terrain from there. Bangkok's "The Fish Tank" is a business that operates in a very male-centric fashion, dividing its architecture quite firmly by separating the male and females by a pane of glass behind which women are advertised. In Faridpur, the women have more agency, and the entire environment is much more open, encouraging males and females to co-exist in a free market. Mexico differs from both the previous scenarios; its women work entirely on their own, divided into different motel rooms, and they do their "marketing" free of any "pimps" or "mothers." Glanced at quickly, it seems that the relative levels of dehumanization and squalor intersect with one another across the timeline of the film, which starts in a comfortable environment where women are literally numbered and transitions to a grungy, bleak place where individualism reigns. Really, each location - as well as any similarity and difference between them - is just too complex and multi-faceted to be summarized by a pop song, even one by an artist as complex and multi-faceted as PJ Harvey, CocoRosie, or Antony Hegarty.

Costa might call this use of music an instance of a film trying to "open the door," to allow the spectator to see himself/herself in the work rather than the truth of what's onscreen. I might agree. There are scenes in Whores' Glory that are wrenching and painful (a Faridpur mother's blunt, honest prediction of the rest of her very young daughter's life, a working girl in the same district asking the camera candidly why this is the path required of women) as well as scenes that are joyous and charismatic (a retired Mexican hooker's over-explicit and hilarious recollection of old jobs (which she recites entirely with her breasts indifferently exposed)), and Glawogger does not need to rely on music to convey the enormity of the human behavior in such instances. The film works well as a loving portrait of these women as people capable of their own personalities, desires, and problems irrespective of their profession, especially when it devotes the same kind of fascination to the actual labor in their lives. Indeed, one feature of Glawogger's film that is so unheard of in films coming even remotely close to the topic of prostitution is an earnest consideration of the job as a job, which is every bit as taxing and devotional as any other career.

Returning to Costa's idea of absence, then, it seems adequate that given Glawogger's unlikely interest in the politics and lifestyle of prostitution that he might benefit from skipping over the actual act itself, both as a sign of respect to the women and as a matter of augmenting the impact of his own film. That's exactly the case for three-quarters of Whores' Glory, but, in a build-up that is almost pornographic in nature, the film finally reveals sex in one of the final scenes in Mexico. The scene is not exploitative in its camerawork by any means, but the very presence of it seems to cheapen the integrity of the work, at the very least dulling its power. This is not some moralist statement arguing for chastity in cinema. Not at all. Quite simply, it's an aesthetic belief. Whores' Glory loses something by revealing that which is so protectively omitted throughout the film. One women in Faridpur seems to comprehend this idea even more so than Glawogger. Followed by the filmmaker to her room earlier in the film, she suddenly turns and remarks: "I'm going to close the door now."

Alien (1979) A Film by Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott, at least in the period during which he made Alien (because God knows he has been unpredictable since), is a living embodiment of the director as designer, concerning himself first and foremost with the aesthetic means used to build a mood and only secondarily with the practices traditionally attached to a Hollywood director: working with actors, pacing a story from beginning to end, constructing a "logical" mise-en-scene. One can easily imagine Scott taking the script provided to him by Dan O'Bannon and dividing it into manageable chunks, attempting to visualize each section in the most dramatic fashion, squeezing the emotion out of every beat, every shot, every sequence through lighting, camera movement, and blocking. Or getting caught up in individual set pieces and forgetting he's making a feature-length film, only to find himself shunted back on course by a more big-picture thinker like a producer or a screenwriter. Not surprisingly, Alien feels as if it's made up of separate movements cross-faded into one another, much like its antecedent 2001: A Space Odyssey, though Alien's segments vary radically in length and tone and don't always glide elegantly along as in Kubrick's musical opus.

None of this is to suggest that Alien succeeds in parts and fails as a whole; in fact, the film is a stunning example of a mean B-movie conceit elevated to larger-than-life stature through the conviction and consistency of its execution. Alien sustains an unrelenting power largely because of one key feature: its tendency to cut the explosive final moments of each aforementioned movement prematurely, letting the tension bleed into each subsequent chapter. Once the crew of the Nostromo spaceship unintentionally invites an alien visitor into its habitat, the film becomes a remarkably taut string of scenes involving people walking through chillingly quiet and empty spaces searching for the strange creature that has gone astray in their spacecraft. The punch line of each encounter - usually the sudden vision of a titular Alien (aka xenomorph) and the implied violent death of the person - is truncated; this is not a film committed to expensive showdowns, but rather to atmospheric build-ups that accumulate into a nasty, looming cloud of dread. No scene, therefore, is free of residue from the last, all the loose threads and offscreen mayhem making its presence felt abstractly.

Scott's imagination is opened up considerably by the kind of schlocky material he worked with in Alien and, subsequently, Blade Runner. As a stylist he's very much reliant upon colored lights and smoke effects, and in few genres other than science-fiction and horror do these tactics make sense. Hard sources glowing from uncanny locations, slashes of foggy light, blinking and shuttering effects, and labyrinthine sets are all vital to Scott's evocation of intense, claustrophobic atmospheres, and here those elements get a robust workout. With Scott, the look and feeling of a set can shift on a moment's notice based on the emotional temperature in that space, regardless of the so-called diegetic logic. As such, the chaos of strobe lights and leaking smoke in the denouement of Alien functions less as a plausible result of Ripley's imposed detonation of the Nostromo than it does as a manifestation of her wild anxiety. Even more absurdly, when she shoots into space in her escape vessel shortly thereafter, she hits a button that turns on a flashing blue light seemingly only to give the impending sight of a surviving Alien perched in the corner of her spacecraft an expressive, kaleidoscopic dimension.

What I'm saying is this: Alien gets its blue-collar socioeconomic detail, its abundance of sexually charged motifs (labored over so pointlessly by critics for decades, as they're ultimately little more than shortcuts - albeit brilliant shortcuts - to squeamish scares), and its simple but effective overarching structure from O'Bannon, its androgynous and frighteningly inhuman monster from hyper-goth Swiss artist H.R. Giger, and the fluidity of its production design (from the slick, symmetrical, cold spaces of the ship's main floor to the dark, muggy, lived-in corridors in the basement) from Michael Seymour and Roger Christian, among many others. Only then does Scott take the reins and turn Alien into the sweat-soaked nightmare that it is. Cinema is always a collaborative effort, of course, but I get the sense that Alien is almost overtly so, that its various achievements come from separate moving parts and were synthesized and fully realized by Scott once placed in front of his camera. Why? Because with the exception of Blade Runner and the very recent Prometheus, Scott has not made another science-fiction/horror film (never mind one with supposed feminist slants), suggesting that he is not inherently drawn to this type of material despite the obvious aptitude he possesses working with it. Scott seems to have designed and constructed Alien more than he directed it, a small distinction but a significant one.

But, what a beautifully designed film it is! For starters, the first twenty or so dialogue-free minutes of the film are riveting in their quiet, gradual building of ambience. Taking cues from Solaris, Scott uses the time his ensemble cast spends in a deep sleep to glide through the tubes, valves, and belly of the Nostromo, capturing the eerie stillness of life in space, the detachment and alienation of these living quarters. Papers and dangling clothing swing softly to the cosmic breeze drifting through the ship, and Jerry Goldsmith's intoxicating synth-pad score floats uneasily over the images, always an aural omen of things to come. When the crew is woken up by their "Mother" - Alien's HAL, because every post-2001 sci-fi needs a HAL - Scott watches as their glass covers are mechanically lifted, and then utilizes what are notably the film's only slow dissolves as Kane (John Hurt), the first to die, rises to wakefulness. It's as if Scott's editing cue is suggesting that Kane's soul is detaching from his body, the first indicator that these people are bound for death.

The best scene of the film is that of Brett's (Harry Dean Stanton) demise, the second of six total crew member deaths in the film (though one may be defined more as a shutting down, but that's another discussion). Up until this point, Brett has been characterized as a bit of a village idiot, one of the lowly workers on the Nostromo brave and ignorant enough to argue for financial benefits when the ship runs off course due to its interception of strange signals from a nearby planet. Thus, it's no shock when he is ushered into the Queen Alien's chosen breeding ground on the ship by a mischievous cat. That much is pretty lazily scripted, but it's what Scott does with the scenario through image and sound that elevates it into something tense, sinuous, and strangely mystical. Scott's camera moves through the hazy boiler room slowly and with uncomfortable grace, much like the way it traverses the empty spaces of the main floor in the opening movement of the film. Meanwhile, the cat's cries, as well as dripping condensation and chains dangling from the ceiling, are heard reverberating through the cavernous architecture, beckoning Brett through the room. Just when the tension is at its peak, Scott deflects it temporarily by making Brett walk over to the liquid falling from above to point his face heavenward. Perhaps it's an attempt to cool himself in the pummeling heat of the room, but it works best as a kind of mysterious out-of-body moment, a calm before death. The image may pull from Tarkovsky's canon, most specifically Stalker, but it nonetheless holds a peculiar weight of its own in this suspended instance.

Of course, there are other things to admire about Alien. Weaver's performance is increasingly mesmerizing as the film progresses (though in some ways Alien inaugurated the slasher tradition of cardboard thin characterizations, she brings a vitality and perseverance to Ripley that cements her humanity). Also, with the exception of a few screenwriterly clichés that look transparently manipulative in retrospect and a distracting subtext about corporate corruption (or whatever), O'Bannon's script is elegantly propulsive, mostly dedicated to exposing the utter fragility of humans in the face of something unknowable and otherworldly. But I'm most fascinated with the way Scott absolutely controls the screen, how he displays an innate understanding of the behavior of images and how those images can be transformed by sound and by combination. Alien would be little more than a lavishly decorated hunk of metal suspended in front of a back-projection and a Nigerian man in a bulky monster suit without this pristine aesthetic command.