HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1937: In which budgets are exploded in the name of spectacle; and we learn an important lesson about film preservation

There's nothing easier than losing favor with Hollywood: no matter how successful a director's high peaks might be, all it takes is one project that ends up costing far too much and makes far too little back at the box office to tarnish even the brightest shining star. This truism takes us to one Frank Capra, who was the closest thing Hollywood in the '30s had to a brand-name filmmaker, and whose highly profitable run of movies with Columbia Pictures - one of the mini-majors, along with Universal and United Artists, but still responsible fora fair number of big hits - came to a bitter close over the matter of 1937's Lost Horizon, an epic that was green-lit with (by some accounts) the highest budget ever allocated to a Hollywood production, and still managed to shoot over it by a third. The film was cut from an assembly edit of six hours down to three and a half, down to two and a quarter, and finally down to 107, the length that was generally released in America to thoroughly unimpressive box office numbers. Capra and Columbia boss Harry Cohn fought nastily over the final cut, over pay, over contracts. And then the next year, Capra directed the Best Picture Oscar winner You Can't Take It with You, Columbia's biggest film of 1938, and it was like nothing ever happened. Because it's almost as easy to gain Hollywood's favor as it is to lose it. It's always, and only, about money.

Adapted by Capra's regular screenwriter Robert Riskin - they too had a falling-out, and didn't patch things up, either - from James Hilton's 1933 novel, the film tells of what happens when a planeful of Brits flees Shanghai following political upheavals in 1935. Cool-headed diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) is the head of the rescue mission, but it's really an Asian pilot (Val Duran) who dictates what's going to happen: the plane is crashed, deliberately, in the Himalayas, where the survivor (not including the hijacker) are found in the bitter snow by a team from a valley hidden deep in the mountains. This unbelievably idyllic place goes by the name of Shangri-La; a rural community guided, but not precisely "led" by the High Lama (Sam Jaffe) who dwells in the lamasery on a cliff overlooking the valley. He doesn't have much to do with everyday life, though; his primary actor is a certain Chang (H.B. Warner), and it is this Chang who explains the ins and outs of life to the survivors, including Robert and his brother George (John Howard), con-man Henry Barnard (Thomas Mitchell), paleontologist Alexander Lovett (Edward Everett Horton), and Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell), sixth months past her due date for dying of some dread disease. At first, only Robert is terribly excited by the calm sensibility that permeates Shangri-La; he is encouraged in this upon meeting the lovely Sondra (Jane Wyatt), an oddly European-looking resident of the valley. But as the rest find, one by one, that the slow pace and simple needs of life in the valley can be more rewarding than the chaos of the West - and that the valley has some unexplained power that can restore health and prolong life to extraordinary lengths - only George ends up staying angrily insistent that, goddammit, they need to get out of this weird Oriental hell.

So let's knock the unpleasant bit out of the way first. Lost Horizon has a racial politic that almost can't help but make a modern viewer feel a bit queasy - just the yellowface is enough for that, really, but the story grips with particular enthusiasm an idea of hyper-spiritual, Zen-like Asian spirituality that is, at any rate, a lot easier to handle than the notion of ignorant savage hordes of slant-eyed monsters in the Fu Manchu mode. Still, it is by all of the standards of our time - less so by the standards of its own (in fact, the film was later re-edited to downplay its over sympathy for the Chinese, when this became a political liability) - a deprecatory representation that's long on exoticising foreign culture. And this is not true only of the script: there are many shots that find Capra and cinematographer Joseph Walker framing characters and the Stephen Goosson-designed Shangri-La itself with a kind of precious fussiness, one that, on hand, stresses the ethereal nature of the place (which I think to be appropriate and good), and on the other, is deeply invested in making some kind of Orientalist art object of the frame that denies any kind of life or flexibility to the content.

All that being said, this is a fable, not an social documentary, and a certain sense of rich mystery and formalised ritual in the story and the visuals suits the material just fine. After all, the explicit, top-level narrative of Lost Horizon involves a man - a very British man (Colman could play no other kind), that is to say a man who embodies all the things that the phrase "white European colonialist" calls to mind - being thrown into a completely foreign environment and finding that he is entirely the better for it, and that it is a deeply spiritual place to be. The specific trappings do, of course, put Lost Horizon squarely in a tradition of Exotic Other stories, but I am now thinking less of the degree to which, nearly 80 years after its creation, the film matches contemporary tastes, but of how well it functions as a drama driven by its visuals; and I am inclined to say, it does this very well indeed.

One of the things I perpetually re-learn, as I get older and less worked over what films have political and social agendas I agree with, is that Capra - a filmmaker whose politics are very infrequently cotangent with my own - was a talented motherfucker. For all that he's tarred and feathered with the seemingly immortal slur of "Capra-corn", and accused of ticky-tacky sentiment, that criticism only works if you haven't actually seen many Capra films, especially since his most famous work - It's a Wonderful Life, though I wonder how much longer till Mr. Smith Goes to Washington eclipses it - actively repudiates that line of thinking, though many people do not realise this. Not that Lost Horizon is some kind of dour, cynical downer, but it does pretty bluntly suggest that all of "civilisation" - a word that the film unmistakably puts in those exact ironic quotes - is savagery, violence, and base behavior, and what we should hope for is not that some genius will come to save us from ourselves, but that there's a wonderful land far off in the untouchable mountains where a cluster of decent humanity can be saved and groomed until the world is ready for it. The movie says that we all long for a Shangri-La of our own; in so doing, it implies that damn few of us ever get one.

But that has nothing to do with Capra's quality as a filmmaker, of course. What I was starting to say just then was that he's actually quite a gifted craftsman of stirring, interesting visuals, and an extraordinary director of actors - the list of performers who gave their best or near-best performances under his guidance is not a short one, and this film certainly adds Ronald Colman to that list. I have little use for him on the whole: there's a packaged dignity to most of his acting that I find largely indigestible. But his slowly percolating enthusiasm is communicated here with subtlety and restraint, as Capra builds Robert Conway's character through simply watching Colman's feelings move quietly up through his face. And the last act, in which Conway is full of regret, dismay, and fear at the thought of losing his Shangri-La, is simply the best stuff in Colman's career, bleak without being punishing and hopeless.

The other thing that's really extraordinary about the way the film is put together is its use of sound: Dimitri Tiomkin's music especially, but sound effects too. There is a simple, almost primitive scheme used here: when things are chaotic, driven by conflict, or full of negative emotion, the film is loud. When things are serene, thoughtful, reflective, and at peace, the film is quiet. The opening is a violent rebellion, and then the sound drops out to almost nothing but dialogue on the plane. The plane crash is busy and metallic, and then the early scenes in Shangri-La lack even the hint of ambient noise or music. It's elementally powerful, working on an almost wholly subconscious front - and yet, if it's so obvious and simple, why does it feel so unusual? That the film includes virtually nothing on the soundtrack at its most peaceful moments, besides human voices - no birds, no chimes, no wind in the grass - is genuinely startling, but by God, does it work.

Clever filmmaking, and impressively grand filmmaking too: for a hell of an expensive film, Lost Horizon looks it, with massive sets and setpieces, presented by the filmmakers with an eye towards emphasising their scale - the film looks like it takes place in a huge valley surrounded by massive mountains. The use of stock footage from documentaries about the Himalayas certainly aids in this illusion, but it's not the only reason: the mountain sets often seem just as vast, and it should be noted, not without regret, that the studio-shoot footage and the stock footage don't cut together so cleanly, so consistently, that there's much of an illusion to be had, anyway. But setting that aside, it's a sprawling, epic-sized film, and however much Columbia hurt for it, this was money well spent.

And now, a complete change of subject for our final word. As noted, Lost Horizon was generally released at 107 minutes, with 132 minutes being the longest cut that was ever screened for a paying audience. In the '70s and '80s, a massive restoration was attempted, using every scrap of footage that could be scrounged up anywhere in the world. Though a complete soundtrack for the 132-minute cut was found, several minutes of visual information could not, and so the film ends up with several scenes playing out over stills. Meanwhile, the quality of the restored footage is immensely variable, with some of it so blurred and scratched that only context clues make it entirely clear what's going on. To a degree, then, watching the "full" version of Lost Horizon is an act of interpretation: you can gather what's going on and suppose what it might have looked like, but it requires work to get there. And this is not entirely unknown - the reconstructed A Star Is Born from 1954 is exactly the same kind of hybrid.

What is kind of delightful, or at least instructive is seeing the footage that was snipped out, the footage that Cohn deemed inessential. This includes, mind you, the scene where Lama explains his vision of peace and harmony, and clarifies the entire backstory of Shangri-La. So much for an idea-driven movie (it also includes a scene - one of the still photo reconstructions - where the film-long homoeroticism between Henry Barnard and Alexander Lovett sounds to have exploded into full-blown homosexual domesticity. Since this could hardly have been possible in a film made in America in 1937, even one with Edward Everett Horton, the missing visuals must have downplayed things fiercely). Undoubtedly, this moved faster, but that's really the only thing that can be said on its behalf. The longer version of the film is actually a film, with a throughline and clear character moments; yet it is also a compromised Frankenstein monster of passable and unacceptable elements. And so it is with film preservation and restoration: always a situation of coming as close as possible, never actually getting all the way there. Some things, like Shangri-La itself, are hidden away where no one will ever be able to see them again.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1937
-The first cel-animated feature film in history, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premieres at the end of the year, going on to explode box office records
-Leo McCarey's devastating autumn-years romantic drama Make Way for Tomorrow opens, breaks everybody's heart who sees it
-Daffy Duck makes his first appearance in the Warner Bros. Looney Tune short Porky's Duck Hunt

Elsewhere in World cinema in 1937
-Jean Renoir's magnificent anti-war film Grand Illusion opens in France
-Little-known in the West Yamanaka Sadao's Humanity and Paper Balloons makes a profound impact on the future development of Japanese period dramas, or jidaigeki
-The Polish production The Dybbuk is one of the earliest important works of Yiddish-language filmmaking

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TIM AT TFE: DOROTHY'S REVENGE

I don't post about these anymore, because I take it for granted that you're all heading over there to read my stuff, RIGHT? But I was especially proud of my essay at The Film Experience this week, taking down Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return and the bizarre conspiracy theory that has poked up about it.

Go, read, enjoy! And I will have more reviews up here in the very near future - today was a traveling day, and I didn't have time to get anything completed.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 1 POLL: CAMPING KILLERS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: CHEERLEADER CAMP
Thanks to everyone who voted!

There's no more seminal setting for a slasher film than camp, and no better place to start out a new edition of the Summer of Blood. The three candidates I've selected for this week are:

Cheerleader Camp (1988)
From IMDb: "An unknown killer is killing off the members of a small cheerleader group at a remote cheerleader training camp."

The Final Terror (1983)
From IMDb: "A group of forest rangers go camping in the woods, and trespass into an area where a backwoods mama likes to kill people who come onto her turf."

Just Before Dawn (1981)
From IMDb: "Five campers arrive in the mountains to examine some property they have bought, but are warned by the forest ranger Roy McLean that a huge machete-wielding maniac has been terrorising the area."

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VAMPIRE LOVERS

I have on three different occasions now described Only Lovers Left Alive as Vampires Who Write for Pitchfork: The Movie, and I still don't have the damnedest idea if I mean that in a disparaging or highly complimentary way. It's that kind of movie, where the singular weirdness of it more than trumps judgments that try to pin it down into good or bad, worth-it or not-worth-it. It is absolutely and unequivocally a Jim Jarmusch picture, at any rate, infinitely friendlier than his last film, The Limits of Control, but not in the least ways suggesting that he's seen a reason to alter or modulate the beyond-deadpan sense of humor and enthusiasm for squatting quietly to the side and allowing scenes to build up slowly through character behavior rather than plot concerns, the two traits which more than anything have dominated his entire career as a filmmaker.

Superficially, Only Lovers Left Alive - a most exquisitely suggestive and nuanced title - is the most populist film Jarmusch has ever made; it is about vampires. But that's a blind if ever I saw one; the director's character-driven gangster picture Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, itself only barely interested in playing by formula rules, is far more of a traditional genre picture than this one ever wants to be. Just about the most traditional gesture in the entirety of this film is its central metaphor by which blood-hunger in vampires is a metaphor for heroin addition in rock stars and other drug dependencies in artistic types, and even that's only "tradition" insofar as vampires have a long history of being used as symbols for other things. Mostly, Only Lovers Left Alive treats the state of vampirism less as the condition of being an undead ghoul possessed by evil (of which there is no hint), nor as the more modern, Anne Rice-ey condition of being a tormented soul unable to find release (of which there is more than a hint, but mostly so it can be drily mocked); vampirism, in Jarmusch's eyes, is the state of having been long enough to have gained a perspective on life and art that a single human lifetime can't possibly accomodate. These vampires are, above all else, deeply confirmed nostalgists, very aware of what has gone by in the past and sad that it has gone, though they are also fully capable and willing to be alive in the present with all its technology and communication (herein, vampires use FaceTime, terribly casually in a way that even most normal humans in motion pictures don't).

The vampires, and the lovers in question, are Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), there being at least a minor indication that they're in on the joke about their names. They've been mated for centuries, but present live on opposite sides of the globe: he's making underground club music in Detroit, she's off enjoying a quiet live in Tangier (no real explanation for why these dedicated soulmates would be separated by an ocean is given; one assumes it's the vampire equivalent of human couples spending at least one day per week away from each other to keep outside interests). Adam, far more moody and disturbed by the course of recent human history - "zombies" is their preferred epithet for alive humans - has recently begun having suicidal thoughts, and picking up on his depression, Eve heads over to the States to be with him for a time. All is calm and well in their lives until Eve's "sister" Ava (Mia Wasikowska), an unpredictable, self-indulgent loose canon, shows up and muscles her way into their lives, taking far too keen an interest in Adam's unwitting human gofer, Ian (Anton Yelchin) along the way.

I would not state some tired, trite thoughts along the lines of "Swinton and Hiddleston are the best thing about the movie", but the way Jarmusch builds scenes, it's awfully hard to disentangle the performances from the story, from the battered, warmly used sets and props, from the unusually small and domestic lighting (the production designer is Marco Bittner Rosser, the cinematographer Yorick Le Saux). At its very best moments, which far outweigh its most tiresome moments, the film does a superb job of dramatising the pleasure of being in a comfortable, low-key long-term relationship, the kind that thrives on talking about art and politics in between sex and cuddling, and would rather stay in than drive around having misadventures. Swinton and Hiddleston, both of them wrapped up in fascinatingly otherworldly make-up and a melange of out-of-time costume elements (Bina Daigeler's costumes are almost as important to building character as the actors are), exude a weirdness that's neveretheless comfortable and homey, and make domesticity look tremendously sexy in a way that films virtually never care about depicting.

All that being said, I found it impossible not to get a little itchy for lengthy stretches of the film: this is very much a film by the occasional Jarmusch who has really smart musical tastes and is fucking well going to make sure you notice them sort of like a much more erudite but also, somehow, much more obnoxious version of Garden State. There are so many conversations about this or that really gorgeous and even more obscure piece of midcentury blues or modern day underground rock that it sometimes seems if the vampires ever think about anything else but having cooler tastes than all of the rest of us. It's far beyond my place to tell a filmmaker who has given me so much pleasure, including in this very film, how much right he has to indulge his taste in lengthy musical scenes; but I do suppose that Only Lovers Left Alive is probably only entirely appealing to the viewer whose taste in music is exactly like Jarmusch's. Reader, I confess: I am not that viewer.

I am, however, the viewer whose taste in Elizabethan drama and Romantic English literature to get - I think - all of the jokes scattered throughout about various tortured artists through the years. I do not know if this means I am necessarily glad those jokes exist: it gives the film a modestly self-congratulatory feel, like it's proud to make its audience jump through all kinds of intellectual hoops to be worthy of its cleverness. This is very different from the much more overtly complicated matter of The Limits of Control, a film that doesn't care in the slightest if we're able to keep up with it, and doesn't give us a cookie if we can; I think I like that approach better.

Still, a vague but unmistakable line of pretension doesn't keep Only Lovers Left Alive from being one of the few altogether captivating vampire pictures of recent vintage, although as far removed from anything resembling the horror genre as vampire stories can go (there's only one scene that could really be called "horror" by any strict definition, and it bothers the characters as much as it bothers us). Tinged with a melancholy awareness of time passing that's never remotely maudlin or self-congratulatory in the "we're so much cleverer than the damn kids" register that something this obsessed with analogue musical equipment could easily have been, it's a very pleasurable, unexpected portrait of people observing time passing and thinking about how it affects them and everyone around them; and its virtually non-stop picturesque, almost fairy-tale nighttime photography leave it as beautiful, in its odd way, as most movies can ever hope to be. It's acerbically playful, judgmental about the Way The World Is without being a harangue about it, and knows better than any movie I've seen in ages how stillness can give us a chance to soak up characters and their world, and for all its archness, it's as singular an experience as I've had in a long time.

And now for the disgusting business of a number grade. I'll be unhappy with anything I put down here, but I've decided for the time being to low-ball it, on the grounds that I'd rather decide later that I liked it more than decide later that I liked it less.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1936: In which we bring a little color into the world

The second major technological revolution in cinema history, the arrival of color, was neither as abrupt nor as immediately ubiquitous as the rise of talkies: there was a certain mistrust of the artistic validity of the technology that lingered for years after Technicolor introduced Process No. IV, its legendary three-strip color system that permitted for the most vividly saturated, luminous colors that have ever been known; The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind came out four years after the first three-strip Technicolor feature, RKO's Becky Sharp from 1935. And as late as the early 1960s, there was still a certain division between black and white as the medium for serious dramatic filmmaking, with color used mostly for broad entertainment, historical epics and musicals and the like (for example, it wasn't until 1967 that there was an all-color slate of Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards).

Still and all, the technology continued to develop and grow and prove itself long before color film ever became as standard as sound. And we are arrived now at one of the most important single steps in that development, with 1936's The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, the first three-strip Technicolor film shot outside of the reliable, easily-controlled environment of a studio; it was filmed entirely on location in the vicinity of Big Bear Lake in the San Bernadino Mountains, far east of Hollywood and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It was the film that demonstrated the flexibility and utility of the Technicolor process, while also proving that the natural world could benefit from the realer-than-real depth of color that process provided to the vibrantly rich sets and colors of a studio production.

That was, anyway, the intention: I cannot begin to say if the fault lies more with cinematographers Howard Greene (the pioneering Technicolor expert making only his second film) and Robert C. Bruce, or more with a deficient DVD transfer released by Universal (the film was among the glut of Paramount titles acquired by Universal for TV and, ultimately, video distribution in the 1950s), who clearly have no real incentive to sink much money for a major restoration into a backwoods melodrama with a minuscule contemporary audience of historically-inclined cinematography buffs. But however it happened, the version of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine we have to watch now is a perversely muted affair, for something whose position in Technicolor history is so profoundly important: it is heavily brown across the board, with brown forests housing brown cabins in which brown clothes are worn by people with pasty, wan faces that haven't been lit anywhere near right (the absence of brown skin is, unfortunately, not remotely surprising).

So whether the fault lies in the filmmakers or their later archivists, the fact remains that The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is not so pretty to look at, circa 2014. And as the obvious point of entry for the film is its visual style, the fact that it's conspicuously lacking on that front makes it awfully hard to feel good about anything else in the movie, which is not, if we are going to be mercilessly honest, such a unique and special butterfly that it's worth fighting for above and beyond its unquestionable historic importance. The source novel, by John Fox, Jr, was adapted four times in the silent era - thrice between 1913 and 1916! - so something about it must have struck an intense chord with audiences back then, but the evidence as to why that should have been the case isn't easy to see onscreen.

Basically, this is a drab romantic melodrama that keeps acting like it's an action epic about a pair of warring families, with its secret heart set on being an historical docudrama about coal mining in the Virginia mountains in the early 20th Century. The families, whose feud is one of those "started so long ago that nobody knows the reason" jobs, are the Tollivers and the Falins; we are to be primarily concerned with the Tollivers, including patriarch Judd (Fred Stone), a fiercely reactionary man, and his sensible, long-suffering wife Melissa (Beulah Bondi); their near-adult daughter June (Sylvia Sydney) and little boy Buddie (George McFarland, "Spanky" from Hal Roach's Our Gang series); and cousin Dave (Henry Fonda), widely expected to be June's future husband. But what hunky outsider comes? Why, 'tis Jack Hale (Fred MacMurray), who hopes to buy the mining rights from the Tollivers and the Falins and whoever else owns coal-producing lands in those hills. June falls for him instantly, though it takes a little while for anyone else to notice it. It takes longest of all for Jack to notice himself, largely because he is a massive tit.

If The Trail of the Lonesome Pine had absolutely nothing else that was dramaturgically crippling, that would be enough: Jack Hale is a shit, so breezily assured of his objective superiority to all of the undereducated rural folk he meets that there's not, anywhere in the film's opening hour, even the merest sense of tenderness or charm to his bearing. It doesn't help that MacMurray was extraordinarily good at playing a peremptory, bossy asshole, and commits so hard to that version of the character that it's whiplash-inducing in the second half when he starts to be nice, or basically human. At any rate, it certainly makes the film's romance plot hard to swallow, since the only way to buy that June would be so infatuated with this man is if we take her for a complete and utter doormat, and while the Asshole/Doormat dynamic is hardly unknown in life or the movies, it's not the sort thing that you should really be expected to root for.

The other massive, crippling flaw: the stupefying dialogue all throughout Grover Jones's screenplay, which puts into the mouths of the Tollivers alarmingly colorful phrases that, one hopes, no human beings throughout history have ever actually said, at least in such volume. Particularly in the opening act, it feels less like a family drama than a peek backstage at a Yosemite Sam impersonators' convention.

What this all means, of course, is that the film's conspicuous flaws are front-loaded, and the back half (if you can make it that far) is a considerably more nuanced and thoughtful affair in which the corrosive effect of violence is explored with a bitterness and clarity that's suggested by none of the redneck cartoon shenanigans that open the film. Even at its worst, though, there's a kind of thoughtful gloominess to much of the film that primes us for this eventual drift from tepid romantic movie to morality play. It is a film aware of the harsh effects of violent living even when the plot and the characters are not (outside of Dave, and that owes mostly to how brutish Fonda could be when he wasn't constrained by the star system to play a Sensible Average Joe - his is the best performance in the film by at least a couple of laps). This was an early film in the career of director Henry Hathway, who'd end up making several key Westerns in the '50s and '60s ("key" not meaning "great"; he's responsible for the most turgid portions of the wearisome Cinerama epic How the West Was Won), and his later films, in that genre and others, all suggest a keen sense for how exterior locations can place certain emphases on the drama. That skill is in a nascent form in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, but there is certainly a clear relationship between the hushed, shadowy forests of the mountains and the closed-in, paranoiac lives that are lived there. It's not quite compelling enough to make up for how bland it is as a groundbreaking work of color (in fact, it almost certainly suggests that the film would be better in black and white), but at least there's a consistent visual scheme to the film. Dramatically, the film is at least half a washout, but as an atmosphere piece and visual expression of mental states, it has some skill to it that makes all the hootin' and hollerin' and widespread mugging in the cast (how much mugging? Spanky is comparatively sedate), if not forgiven, then at least relatively tolerable while we wait for the good stuff.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1936
-William Wyler's criminally underseen Dodsworth is released by United Artists
-Universal's 13-part serial Flash Gordon is one of the biggest hits in the history of the form
-The proto-noir The Petrified Forest from Warner Bros. makes a star of Humphrey Bogart

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1936
-Japanese master Mizoguchi Kenji has a banner year in Japan, directing the early triumphs Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, his oldest films that remain broadly available
-The Marathi-language Sant Tukaram is the first Indian film to find international success
-Hollywood production designer William Cameron Menzies goes to Great Britain to direct the science-fiction milestone Things to Come

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BEST SHOT: X-MEN

With X-Men: Days of Future Past breathing down our necks as the third superhero movie in a two-month span, Hit Me with Your Best Shot does a bit of time traveling all its own. Nathaniel R's selection for tonight is the first X-Men, the movie that kicked off the present superhero fad 14 years ago, and the subject of the very first episode of HMWYBS, so long ago that The Film Experience wasn't even at its current home.

I wasn't playing along yet at that point, so I get to take advantage of this rerun to share my pick for the best shot of a movie which, across such a huge gulf of time (14 years is about what, three generations in pop culture?), has a sort of elegance and classicism that makes it seem downright artsy compared the later films in the genre it birthed. Director Bryan Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel use their pointedly limited color palette (blues, blacks, browns) and anamorphic widescreen frame with deliberation and care uncommon in 21st Century popcorn movies (though, strictly speaking, X-Men is a 20th Century popcorn movie). It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a gratifying level of restraint and human-sized filmmaking, perhaps a reflection of the time the film was made - CGI wasn't as ready and cheap and 2000 as it was even just a couple of years later. The resultis a film that has aged unexpectedly well (when I last saw it in 2006, I didn't care for it nearly as much as I did now) as superhero movies have gotten bigger, noisier, busier, full of higher stakes, and altogether more generic. And this isn't even the good Bryan Singer X-Men picture.

Anyway, the film is positively laden with dramatic blockbuster-style images, the kind that are very impressed with their own dramatic weight and mood, but still work for communicating ideas in a blunt, burly way. It's filmmaking that's longer on iconography than sophistication and grace, but that's exactly the right fit for a superhero movie, wouldn't you say? Shots that go "WUMPH!", and not shots that sneak in and tap on the shoulder.

And with that, here is the WUMPH that I picked:

If the film has a protagonist, it's Hugh Jackman's Wolverine; and while this is not the first shot in which Wolverine appears (Singer has a fetish in this movie for introducing characters in the background of shots), it is the first shot that is "about" Wolverine. Here we find him pounding back something alcoholic in between bouts as a steel cage fighter, which is, we gather, how he gets all his money.

X-Men, thematically, is about feeling isolated because of who you are, and finding comfort and acceptance with those who understand what that isolation feels like. And as such, it has all sorts of metaphorical expressions of that isolation, whether narrative (secondary protagonist Rogue, played by Anna Paquin, and her inability to touch other people without killing them), or visual, such as the final shot in which former friends Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen) and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) are divided by the fact that Erik present lives in a plastic cube hovering in the middle of a giant empty room. Or, of course, in this shot, where we meet Wolverine as a caged animal. Theoretically, this use of his powers in the service of earning a living and supporting himself could be read as a fine act of self-sufficiency and behaving within the limits one was born with, but the impact of this "here's Wolverine" shot says otherwise: the life he is living has trapped him. X-Men depicts the process by which he learns how not to live in that cage; beyond this one character, the film - the whole trilogy, for that matter - is about the desire to live with freedom outside of the prison that has been both self-inflicted and elected by outside society. Three whole films exist as an attempt to repudiate this image; to allow characters like Wolverine to exist without cages and without the psychological torments that lead to that glass of booze. It's never explicitly referenced again, but it's a shot that lingers symbolically for a long time after, and that's what made it my easy pick for, if not necessarily the "best" thing in the film, then maybe the most resonant.

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STANLEY KUBRICK: BEYOND THE INFINITE

2001: A Space Odyssey is the sort of movie that frequently gets called "difficult". Which is, ultimately, never true of a film that costs that much money laid out by a major studio (MGM, in this case), though I'll concede that if by "difficult" one means "the ending is a deliberately obscurantist explosion of borderline nonsense", then I can see why you'd think that.

Here's my notion: 2001, it is generally known, came about because Stanley Kubrick, fresh off the triumph of Dr. Strangelove, wanted to do hugely ambitious things. And it was in that capacity that he reached out to Arthur C. Clarke, the great science-fiction author who was the most concept-driven and technology-oriented of the big names in genre fiction of the mid-'60s, and suggested that they make "the proverbial 'really good' science-fiction film". Through a great deal of wrangling that needn't bother us here, Clarke and Kubrick ended up collaborating on a pair of virtually identical narratives, both released to the public in 1968: one of these was the screenplay to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the filmed version of which premiered in April, and the other was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was published months later, so as to avoid stepping on the movie's toes.

There are many tiny details, and a couple of substantive ones, where the book and the film split, but the biggest one is more a matter of tone and focus: Clarke's novel is, generally speaking, explicit about what's going on, and Kubrick's film is, generally speaking, cryptic. I think this is no accident, and not a flaw with either version of the story; it strikes me and has always done so, that the book and the film are complementary to each other. Both of them address roughly the same themes using the tools which their respective media are best at: the book is about the communication of ideas in a clear way, while the movie is about the relating of moments and sensations in a series of fluid images. The one is concrete, the other is intuitive. The one is descriptive, the other is experiential.

Shorter: if you don't understand what the plot of 2001 contains, and it really matters to you, read the book. That's what it's there for.

Anyway, this is begging the question, a little bit. To be frank about it, I think that getting too tangled up in the "why" and "what" in 2001 is missing the point of the whole thing, which is that the film specifically intends not to clarify things - it is a story about events beyond human conception, very literally. The final 30 minutes of the film depict a process that we, are homo sapiens are insufficiently evolved to comprehend; the greater sin would be if the film did make any sense in this passage. In seeing what happens, and not knowing what it means, we're occupying the exact same place as the human protagonist, until such time as he ceases to be the "human" protagonist.

That's the ending, anyway. At almost two and a half hours long, 2001 is about much more than its visually transporting, narratively obtuse conclusion. It's part mystery, part "what if?" ethnography of a speculative future (that was, in virtually every regard, wildly optimistic about what life in the year 2001 would look like; though in retrospect, the most shocking thing is that the film would predict video chatting and self-aware computers, but not touch-screen control of either of those things), capped with a depiction of spiritual development that would seem altogether New Agey if the film weren't so rigidly materialistic in every single detail. Most of all, it's a good old-fashioned space adventure as warped into new forms by an author noted for his fixation on scientific plausibility and a director whose approach to genre had consistently been to subvert norms; the most significant element of 2001 is, in fact, that it's an early example - among the earliest in the English language - of an anti-genre film, in this case an anti-thriller. Take the details of the plot (hidden objects on the moon, insane killer computers, aliens), and give it to just about anybody, and you get a snazzy little blunderbuss of intense moments, probably clocking in at about 70 or 80 minutes. But in Kubrick and Clarke's hands, these materials are grist for one of the most purposefully boring movies ever made on American studio dollars.

Which sounds like a criticism, but I mean it to be the highest praise. Thematically, 2001 has one overriding interest that it examines from multiple, wildly different angles: the human's interest in interacting with the world around it by means of technology. We are the tool-using animals; we are the animals that manipulate reality using labor-saving devices. And with that as its primary focus, the film spends an utterly, wonderfully absurd amount of time watching people utilising future technology. There might not be any other hard sci-fi film in history where the lingering over future tech feels so focused and keenly tied into the theme as this: the languid, almost endless shots of people manipulating buttons to make spaceships go, or watching people walking in zero gravity environments, or studying the rules of weightless toilets, or eating food in space; all of these individual moments build up to one statement, which is "this is how technology will enable us to live". No film to boast such groundbreaking, still magnificent visual effects work - and 2001 is probably the single greatest triumph of visual effects in the 44-year window between King Kong and Star Wars - has ever done it with so little interest in providing spectacular entertainment. Quite the contrary: the immensely convincing effects work (which, according to the credits, was all designed by Kubrick himself, though it is known that he somewhat bullied his way into that credit, which rightfully should have been more fully shared with several other men, among them future VFX icon Douglas Trumbull), eye-popping in itself and still fully convincing on even the sharpest 70mm print or in the bright crispness of Blu-ray (and I have seen the movie on both formats), the superbly involving and immersive effects work, is all presented in the most confoundingly banal way.

A film about humankind and technology; but not a terribly optimistic one, you see. There is the way that the first tool ever used by a proto-human is seen in the film as having been a weapon; there is the legendary cut from a falling bone to a drifting orbital nuke, bluntly suggesting that after millions of years we're still using all our cunning in the most savage, animal ways; there is the fact that such drama as the film actually possesses hinges on an artificial intelligence created so perfectly that it can have nervous breakdowns and go on murderous rampages, at which point the only thing left is to kill it - killing it being, in 2001, the one thing we're really good at. At any rate, the film's major thesis about the marvels of interstellar travel is that it's depersonalising and tedious, and the way that people live in its fantastical vision of the year 2001 is full of the same bullshit and nonsense as life in 1968, or every other year in the history of civilization. It's such a well-worn argument that I'm embarrassed to even bring it up, that the only character in the movie that has real feelings and whose fate is genuinely affecting is the mad computer HAL-9000 (voiced in the incomparably bland and soothing tones of Douglas Rain), while the actual people - including the ones that HAL kills - are dull ciphers. The astronauts Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) - the latter is our nominal hero and the focus of all future human evolution, which is undoubtedly why Kubrick and Clark gave him a surname referencing weaponry - are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable, and completely untouchable by emotions; Frank's birthday message from his awkward parents elicits barely any kind of response from him at all. The first human lead we meet, Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), says virtually nothing that's not mindless small talk, even when he's presumably briefing a team with information that can hardly be all that revelatory to them, mostly coming off as bureaucratese. It is the first film where Kubrick played a game that he'd return to frequently in his career: cast lifeless actors and use their very lack of affect or personality to comment on the character they're playing. Sylvester appeared in the 1964 horror film Devil Doll, which put in an appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000; there, one of the snarking robots observed during a particularly leaden moment of vacant staring, "This is the scene where Kubrick said, 'That's my Heywood Floyd!'", and even as a joke, that has a tang of truth to it.

Now, all that being said, the film is still magnificently watchable. Depicting tedium does not have to be itself tedious, and the actual effect of the movie is both mesmerising and invigorating, I have found; Kubrick, his cinematographers Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott (the latter receving only an "additional photography" credit, in his first of four collaborations with Kubrick - the only cinematographer to come back for more of the director's micromanaging after the first time), and his editor Ray Lovejoy collaborated to make one of the small handful of movies that fully and legitimately deserves to be called visionary; and that's without mentioning the music, which is a foolish thing not to do. 2001 was the first film of the director's career where the music choices were consistently thoughtful and extraordinarily important, especially his use of three pieces by György Ligeti (without Ligeti's permission), with the composer's jarring micropolyphony creating a sense of unearthly aural sensation, chaotic without actually being formless, that ideally suits the film's depiction of human beings getting in out of their element (of course, the iconic use of the fanfare from Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" - itself based on a Nietszche work where he discusses, among other topics, the idea of the Superman, which makes it thematically cunning and aurally pleasing - is also brilliant, though a bit damaged by almost a half-century of parodies). I can only complain about the pairing of the first space travel sequences with Johann Strauss's waltz "By the Beautiful Blue Danube", which though it creates an exquisite marriage of image and music, also serves to make the sequences that are, presumably, meant to especially showcase the tooth-grinding dullness of space travel, instead come across as especially poetic and lovely.

But anyway, the images, the editing; 2001 is an impeccably well-crafted piece of cinema. Visually, it is anchored by a handful of repeated shots and images that echo each other (the alignment of celestial bodies and the film's famed black monoliths; the repetition of set-ups within the spaceship Discovery that especially stresses the limited scope of the ship and life within it), giving it a consistent visual shape - it is a movie deeply in love with circles, for reasons that are obviously linked to its theme (cycles, repetition, species replacing species only to be replaced by other species). The stillness of its images and the length of its shots gives it a hypnotic, insinuating sense that is occasionally pierced by quick or dramatic cuts at certain moments - the interpolation of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" with the image of an ape-man wielding a bone and non-diegetic shots of a tapir dying is not the film's most famous sequence, but one that I particularly admire for its quick transposition of triumph, awe, and cruelty. Later, HAL's murders are committed through piercing beeps on the soundtrack and the brutal cuts between the sterile white sets of the spaceship interior (the three production designers do excellent work throughout of making a future that looks both plausible and lifeless) and blaring right lights. Editing is not only used to indicate violence in the film, though it does an outstanding job of doing so.

All together, this is extraordinary filmmaking, creating intellectual arguments mostly through image and music, with its story shoring up its form, rather than the other way around, as is typical of mainstream filmmaking. The only thing that the film can be knocked for is that the sheer scale of its themes makes it an easy target for accusations of being kitschy, or pretentious, or overly pop-sciencey; all of which are criticisms I've heard leveled against it, and they all strike me as coming from the same place. Most art doesn't deal with the actual big questions - What, if anything, is the nature of God? What is moral behavior? What is it to be "civilized"? Where does humanity fit into the rest of the universe? - and there are plenty of people who get very irritated when it tries to, for reasons that I'll not pretend to understand, or care about. At any rate, that 2001 asks questions in these areas is, I think, an absolutely noble trait; that it asks them in such a well-formed, bold mix of experimental and mainstream filmmaking technique, with such one-of-a-kind images and structural conceits, is why it's a brilliant achievement of cinematic art. To me, it's enough to make it Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, and one of the greatest films ever made.

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