Four More Directors to Watch Out For

This is a sequel to a 2013 post I wrote about five of my favorite directors. This time I talk about Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow, Harmony Korine, and Noah Baumbach.

Michael Mann
I glancingly mentioned Mann at the end of that earlier post as one of my favorite action directors. It's true. I have reported before that I love film noir and moody urban (or rural) crime films, and in the contemporary era, Mann is one of the undisputed masters of the genre.

I have written elsewhere about my deep love for Manhunter (1986), so let me focus here on a couple other of Mann's best films as a means of explaining his appeal. (Remember, however, that as Nathan Ditum has written, Mann's career is quite varied and rife with "medium-hopping" variety.)

Neil (Robert de Niro) and Eady (Amy Brenneman) in Heat, Michael Mann's dramatic crime thriller masterpiece.

Heat (1995). My God, Heat. Heat is so goddamned good that I hardly know where to begin. This accurate appreciation does a good job of summing up the film's (and Mann's) many strengths, stating that Mann

traffics in established loner-pro genre archetypes, walking a fine line between character psychology and pulp myth. Mann’s underworld thrillers — Thief, Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and the recent, unfairly maligned Blackhat — blend fantasies and realities of crime. His screenplays are notoriously wordy, but play as minimalist on screen, with paragraph blocks of novelistic detail used to inform single gestures. He collects psychologies and reams of off-beat technical information and transmutes them into archetypal stories. 

[In] the two decades since its release, Heat — a film that was very well received, critically and commercially — has only grown in stature, and come to be regarded as a modern classic and a point of reference for genre filmmaking. Newness depreciates in value over time, but craft and expression remain. Most of Mann’s movies — quite a few of them flops — have become more highly regarded over time. Mann’s perennial problem, it seems, is that his plots are too old and that his movies look too new.

I couldn't say this any better. If you like smartly scripted, visually eye-popping urban crime films, then you simply must check out the films of Michael Mann, especially Heat. All 170 minutes of Heat's pleasurably grandiose running time are absorbing and tension-packed; the movie never drags. Its two leads, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, give career-high performances, backed by a supporting cast par excellence: Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Ashley Judd, Diane Venora, and Ted Levine. Filled with exciting, well-choreographed action set pieces interspersed with deliciously atmospheric L.A. film noir moments, I simply cannot recommend Heat strongly enough.

The post-heist shootout in the streets of L.A., one of the most exciting and expertly constructed scenes in Heat and in Mann's filmography writ large.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992) sits outside Mann's "usual" mode of the tough, urban crime film and yet in many ways it fits right in: it is about tough, manly, resourceful men caught in extremely precarious circumstances. I re-watched this movie a few months back and was blown away by how well-made, exciting, and compelling it is. All this plus Daniel Day-Lewis in the starring role equals, as Ditum calls it, "a period winner."

I also emphatically recommend Mann's Thief (1981), Collateral (2004), The Insider (1999), and the aforementioned serial-killer classic Manhunter. Furthermore, despite its decidedly mixed reviews (some positive, some middling, some negative) I plan to see the recent cyber-thriller Blackhat on the strength of Mann's good name alone.

UPDATE 11/27/2016: See also Darren Franich's detailed appreciation of Mann's Collateral.

Action thriller director Kathryn Bigelow in 2009. 

Kathryn Bigelow
As this sharp writeup of Hurt Locker-era Kathryn Bigelow argues,

She is, simply, a great filmmaker. Because while it is marginally interesting that she calls “action” and “cut” while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.

Yeah! I agree. Bigelow's films are consistently good -- I have been thrilled and entertained by every single Bigelow film I've seen, and a few, like Blue Steel (1989), Point Break (1991), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), are truly great. Probably the best way to approach her work, like that of Nicholas Winding Refn, is to see her films as a series of revisions of and experiments with different genres. MoMA's Jenny He accurately writes that Bigelow

boasts an accomplished oeuvre of engrossing and exhilarating films that are unified in their defiance of genre expectations, their sensual and visceral imagery, and their examination of societal mores and individual psyches.

Indeed. Let me further explain Bigelow's greatness via some specific comments about a few of her key movies:

The Loveless (1982). As the writeup from this 2011 retrospective explains, The Loveless "is a study in Americana that evokes influences as varied as Walker Evans, Kenneth Anger, Edward Hopper, and Douglas Sirk." Willem Dafoe is simply great as the lead, Vance, in this film (when is Dafoe not great?). Yet Vance's oscillating attitude -- between bemused detachment and mildly angry ennui -- is indicative of the overall tone of The Loveless. It is a fascinating genre study and entertaining in a downbeat, existential way, but it is also just a warm-up to the bolder and more innovative genre experiments to come.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan in Blue Steel. 

Blue Steel (1989) is one of my all-time favorite Bigelow films -- it's the one I've seen the most times. It is both an exciting and suitably hyperbolic 1980s crime thriller in its own right and a subtle deconstruction of the gendered assumptions that usually accompany that genre.

Film scholar Christina Lane notes that the "first five sequences of [Blue Steel] represent a series of reversals in which Bigelow toys with gender expectations that are embedded in the genre." My favorite of these reversals is the second one Lane analyzes, about the close-up tracking shot over the gun in the opening credits sequence:

Rather than impart the point of view of the bullets going into the chamber from the outside in, she presents the insertion "from within," perhaps suggesting a point of view that is gendered female. Exaggerating the fetishism of this phallic symbol, a fetishism common to the cop genre, the film defamiliarizes conventional connotations of the gun, asking us to examine the relation between the whole and the parts (i.e., the theory of phallic power and the practice). Also, during this caress of the gun, Bigelow frames the spinning of the chamber as though it were a movie reel, linking the phallic discourses of weapons to those of the cinema.*

In other words, Bigelow points out the masculine, phallic nature of the image of the gun while simultaneously reversing that gendering -- feminizing the gun -- visually. Clever! Lane continues:

In Blue Steel, Bigelow may stay within the terms of the cop/psychothriller genre, in which the gun is fetishized and women present a sexual threat; however, she reverses its terms, exploring what happens when the governing symbolic imagery changes due to a female presence which oscillates between femininity, masculinity, and androgyny (that is, to say that Megan takes up various positions throughout the film). Bigelow refuses to suggest that a mere substitution of a woman in a man's role - and one who is masculinized at that - ultimately reverses male power structures. Rather, she privileges the slippage between gender codes and modes of power, entertaining the possibility of disrupting those structures.**

Very well argued, I completely agree. Blue Steel doesn't just plop a female heroine into a masculine film-world and plot structure, as do Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Kill Bill (2003 and 2004), but rather it disrupts and renders ambiguous the gender codes of the typically male-centered action genre.***

Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) and Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) in the downbeat final scene of Point Break, Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 action masterpiece. 

I re-watched Point Break (1991) quite recently. Prior to that, I hadn't seen Bigelow's high-octane cops-and-robbers actioner since the late 1990s. In my hazy memories, I remembered it as being too over-the-top for my tastes -- a strange perception, damn hard to account for given that I was still heavily into mid-career Schwartzenegger movies like The Running Man (1987) and Total Recall (1990) at the time Point Break came out.

Point Break constitutes a remarkable achievement in action cinema. Its bank-robbery, sky-diving, and chase sequences are tautly directed, with effective, visceral touches like the use of steadicam in the amazing mid-film foot chase between Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) and a Reagan-masked Bohdi (Patrick Swayze). And while the breathtaking, ever-escalating action set pieces are the main reason to take this ride, Point Break's surfing sequences and character development scenes are shot really beautifully, often in depth, with copious slow motion used for dramatic effect. Bigelow is great at directing action yet is unafraid to include some long takes and just soak in the mise-en-scene of things from time to time. The film's attention to detail makes the southern California setting, and the whole milieu in which the story takes place, feel lived-in and real. Much as I dislike the term for its recent overuse in film criticism, "gritty" is the perfect word to use here. Despite its fairly breakneck overall pace, Point Break is far more thematically resonant and visually gritty than I remember it being.

Point Break's Bodhi, in Reagan mask, torches a getaway car. I love this image. 

Seeing it again now, I am inclined to place Point Break in the upper echelon of great '80s and 90s L.A. crime films, a group that includes William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and Mann's masterpiece Heat (1995). Is some of the dialogue and its delivery (especially by Reeves) a bit cringe-worthy? Yes. Yet does it work as a piece of brilliantly crafted action fare? Yes, absolutely. Highly recommended!

Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero in Kathryn Bigelow's terrific neo-noir Strange Days.

Strange Days (1995) is a well-made neo-noir with slight science fictional trappings, that is, a noir set in a dystopic near future much like Bladerunner. Ralph Fiennes gives a terrific central performance as harried low-level street operator Lenny Nero, and the supporting cast, including Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott, and Richard Edson, is remarkable. As usual, Bigelow takes a familiar genre -- in this case the film noir or crime thriller -- and then slightly turns it on its head, especially along gender lines. I do not wish to give away spoilers, but suffice to say that Nero, our ostensible "detective," gets proven wrong on one key matter that gives the lie to his need to protect his ex-girlfriend Faith (Lewis). Plus the "real" badass of the film is not the somewhat effeminate Nero but rather Bassett's Mace, a limo driver with finely honed fighting skills and an unswerving loyalty to Lenny. In sum, Strange Days is a terrific psychosexual thriller that presents near-future L.A. in a very different yet nearly as haunting a way as does its most obvious influence -- Ridley Scott's Bladerunner. Well worth seeing.

K-19 The Widowmaker (2002): First, a caveat: Das Boot is to submarine movies what Jaws is to shark movies. It's the absolute peak of the genre, with no other film even remotely in its league. In the case of shark attack films, even other solidly enjoyable ones like the Jaws sequels, Deep Blue Sea (1999), the Sharknado films, and The Reef and Open Water form a distant second tier behind Jaws, that one superior specimen of the genre. Likewise, all other submarine warfare films fall distantly behind Wolfgang Petersen's incredible masterpiece Das Boot. 

So in order to place Bigelow's clunkily titled K-19: The Widowmaker in its proper context, we must compare it to other second-tier military submarine adventure movies, alongside stuff like Destination Tokyo, The Hunt for Red October, and U-571. And compared to films like these, K-19 is pretty good. The movie takes a lot of rightful heat for Harrison Ford's abysmal "Russian" accent, though if you can look (listen?) past that flaw, his performance on the whole is pretty damn good given how late in his career we are talking about. Also, the supporting cast, including the always-great Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard, is uniformly excellent, though mostly consisting of lesser-known performers.

K-19's greatest strength, however, comes from its relative seriousness of tone and its grounding in a historically true series of events. I know this is a Hollywood film and I am not saying I believe the film is historically accurate, of course not. But the whole tone of the film, especially its tragic, tear-inducing final scene, gains power from the story's link to reality, however tenuous that link my be (I have never extensively researched the real history of Soviet nuclear submarine K-19). Set in 1961, K-19 is an historical period piece and therefore not as contemporary feeling or as "ripped from the headlines" as The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Nevertheless in many ways K-19 is a warm up to Bigelow's subsequent Iraq war dramas. As a meditation on the personal cost of serving the state and maintaining state secrets, K-19 specifically foreshadows the themes of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

Jessica Chastain gives a harrowing performance as beleaguered CIA operative Maya in Kathryn Bigelow's espionage masterpiece Zero Dark Thirty.

While I like The Hurt Locker and am very happy in general that Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director at the 2009 Oscars for it, I nevertheless maintain that Zero Dark Thirty is a superior film and may even mark the highest point in Bigelow's directorial career so far. I won't spend time elucidating its many strengths -- taut action and suspense, full-tilt performances from all players but especially Jessica Chastain, pitch-perfect cinematography -- but simply urge you to see it and take in all its espionage-movie excitement, investigative breadth, and grim beauty.

The main issue that comes up for most people around Zero Dark Thirty is its relationship to its real-life subject matter. We know all biopics and historical pics and films "based on a true story" are filled with inaccuracies and fabrications, but some films seem to draw more heat for exemplifying this ubiquitous truth than others do. Zero Dark has taken a lot of criticism from viewers who think its depiction of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e., torture) by U.S. military intelligence personnel is inaccurate and inappropriate. For myself, I fully agree with Roger Cohen:

Watching torture is profoundly unsettling. But Bigelow and Boal have done an important service in setting before a wide U.S. and global audience images of a traumatized America’s dark side. This happened: the waterboarding, the sleep deprivation, the sexual humiliation, the cruelty. Not exactly as depicted, but yes it did.

By graphically depicting actual U.S. torture methods, Zero Dark exposes a truth many Americans would not like to face: that the U.S. does not occupy moral high ground in the global conflicts in which it is embroiled. The reality that the U.S. tortures captives in violation of the Geneva Convention is, in the context of this film, more important than the specifics of real-life torture's efficacy or inefficacy. That torture is ineffective in reality does not erase the truth that it happens.

Thus Zero Dark Thirty is justified in integrating graphic torture scenes into its narrative, in part because it is a work of fiction and a work of art. As Cohen further explains, "while reality is the raw material journalism attempts to render with accuracy and fairness, it is the raw material that art must transform." This resonates with film director Werner Herzog's notion of cinema's "ecstatic truth":

Cinema, like poetry, is inherently able to present a number of dimensions much deeper than the level of so-called truth that we find in cinema verite and even reality itself, and it is these dimensions that are the most fertile areas for filmmakers. I know that by making a clear distinction between 'fact' and 'truth' in my films, I am able to penetrate into a deeper stratum of truth most films do not even notice. The deep inner truth inherent in cinema can be discovered only by not being bureaucratically, politically and mathematically correct.†

Starting with its opening audio of the real 9/11 attacks over a black screen, Zero Dark Thirty means serious business in terms of conveying the full emotional impact and consequences of the events it depicts. It artistically deploys the facts in the service of reaching a deeper, ecstatic truth. Cohen rightly concludes that "the charge of inaccuracy is a poor thing measured against the potency of truth. Zero Dark Thirty is a truthful artistic creation, one reason it has provoked debate." Very well said.††

The sublime last shot of Zero Dark Thirty, which conveys the personal cost of serving the state and implicitly questions whether or not the hunt for bin Laden was worth it.

Harmony Korine
Harmony Korine, like his German idol Werner Herzog and his Danish counterpart Lars von Trier, is an enfant terrible, a talented provocateur who crafts his films and public appearances in such a way as to tease, provoke, and mystify his audiences. Take, for instance, this bizarre 1997 Letterman interview segment:

Is Korine really this crazy? Or is this whole appearance some kind of performance-art type of stunt? We'll never know, and part of the fun with Korine is that the line between who he might be as a person and what he wants to accomplish with his art is pretty heavily blurred.

As Korine himself says in this interview, responding to a question about the capacity for some of the images found in his films to shock viewers:

It's nice to know that people haven't become so completely desensitised to things that there's still a way to get some type of extreme reaction. But that's why you make films; to provoke some kind of discourse.

I think that quotation is key to understanding Korine's over-arching project, and it says a lot about him that when asked directly in the same interview about that controversial appearance on David Letterman, he replies:

Well, you know, it's interesting, because this has become such a thing now, when it's something that happened 15 years ago! I know what happened. But… I don't want to really say, because I like the way it exists in the way it does now.

That is, Korine would rather preserve the mystery, leaving things open to interpretation, than to spoil it by explaining himself. In this way he reminds me very much of David Lynch, who also steadfastly refuses to explain or interpret his films or creative motivations to interviewers. Frustrating though this may be for some of us, this refusal tells me that Korine, like Lynch, trusts and respects his audience. He wants us to decide for ourselves.

None of this impishly maddening public behavior would matter if Korine's films weren't some of the best crafted and most ideologically insightful works being made in the early 21st century.

To start with, Gummo (1997). Gummo is my personal favorite Harmony Korine film -- I assume it will always loom large on my list of all-time favorite movies. Gummo tells a loose "day in the life" type story, albeit in a multi-strand, non-linear way. The film features a true ensemble cast, with no single protagonist unless it is Tummler (Nick Sutton), the younger of two boys who kill neighborhood cats, selling the meat to a Chinese restaurant to earn money. The movie episodically follows several neighborhood characters, gradually creating a penetrating if carnivalesque portrait of mid-1990s white American poverty.

Is Gummo thinly fictionalized "poverty porn?" It's a legitimate question. Korine surely immerses himself in the low-income worlds he depicts in Kids (1995), Gummo, and julien donkey-boy (1999). And his films do both critique and exploit the genres in which he works.

Like Herzog, Korine likes to look unflinchingly at bizarre, unusual, even grotesque things, somehow making the viewer see their abject beauty. Alternately painterly and grunge-documentarian, Gummo's visual style is something very unique and special, consisting of beautiful images of unbeautiful subjects.

Gummo is an absolute must-see if you are interested in American independent cinema, or even if you just want to see one Korine film only -- make it this or Spring Breakers (2012).

Then there's julien donkey-boy (1999), Korine's Dogme '95 film. This is for serious Korine enthusiasts and may not be an ideal first Korine film if you are new to his work. More narratively coherent than Gummo -- it has a clear protagonist, Julien (Ewen Bremner), and features fewer central characters, focusing only on Julien's immediate family -- julien donkey-boy is nevertheless more thematically extreme than its predecessor. Both Julien and his father (played by Werner Herzog) seem to be mentally ill, and the film's plot centers on the anticipated birth of Julien's sister Pearl's (Chloe Sevigny's) baby, whose father's identity I cannot spoilerishly reveal. There's some intense shit in this movie. It's very good and I recommend it highly if you like Korine's stuff but you've been warned.

I already discussed Spring Breakers at length when I named it my favorite film of 2013, and I have not yet seen Trash Humpers (2009). Beyond that, Korine's feature filmography consists of Mister Lonely (2007) and the film he wrote but did not direct, Kids (1995). Mister Lonely is a gentler, more upbeat film than any other in Korine's filmography (even though one major character does commit suicide by the end). Depicting the exploits of several celebrity impersonators, including Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) and Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton), this slice-of life piece aesthetically foreshadows Spring Breakers, being much glossier and a bit less arty and abstract than his earlier works. I enjoy Mister Lonely but it is the Korine film I have returned to least. I recommend neophyte Korine viewers skip it in favor of seeing the more visually accomplished and thematically incisive Spring Breakers.

Harmony Korine's cameo appearance alongside star Chloe Sevigny in Kids.

Kids is must-see viewing, for multiple reasons. First, it is an early harbinger of Korine's style and themes, focusing on the lives of several (mostly delinquent) youths over the course of a single day and night. It is shot low-budget style with street photographer Larry Clark directing.

Second, Kids is a key work of the 1990s American independent cinema boom. As this retrospective interview and this oral history make clear, Kids is the kind of film that could be made during the mid-1990s indie film heyday, but simply could not be made today, now that the indie sphere has been more or less completely taken over by the multinationals that run the major film studios.

Lastly, Kids, sensationalized though it may be, deals frankly and truthfully with underage sexuality and drug use, shining a light on the interconnected dangers of AIDS and urban poverty. In this sense I see it as another precursor to Spring Breakers, which also investigates white youth culture's obsessions with drug use, crime, and imagined blackness.

UPDATE 11/14/2015: A friend recommends that those interested in hearing a Harmony Korine interview with less "performance art" weirdness should check out this podcast with Marc Maron.

Noah Baumbach 
I have been a fan of Noah Baumbach's work ever since I saw The Squid and the Whale (2005) on home video circa 2008. That is a remarkable film, still my favorite of the director's. It is an intense coming of age drama centering on the travails of Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) as he deals with the divorce of his parents.

The Squid and the Whale is one of Baumbach's most psychologically incisive films, though Margot at the Wedding (2007) is also pretty intense and I've heard Greenberg (2010) is totally warts-and-all too. In any case, Whale displays all the key hallmarks of Baumbach's style. It is well-shot, well-paced, and its focus is on the nuances of its hard-to-love characters and their interactions. Whale and Margot are the two most emotionally harrowing Baumbach films I've seen, bleak tales of interpersonal fragmentation and raw family relationships. The lightness and comedy that infuse Baumbach's later works is present only sparingly in these two superbly crafted dramas.

Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) in the final moments of The Squid and the Whale.

Baumbach is an excellent director of actors and he always brings forth real, lived-in performances from his cast members. Take, for example, Jack Black in Margot at the Wedding or Ben Stiller in While We're Young. These two guys both have clearly identifiable schticks -- JB's is rooted in his theatrically hyperreal Tenacious D persona, Stiller's is that of a tightly wound, geeky underachiever -- yet Baumbach brings roundness of character out of these two, mellowing, deepening, and therefore defamiliarizing their usual personas.†††

Ben Stiller as frustrated Generation-X filmmaker Josh in While We're Young.

One of the most accurate general assessments of Baumbach's work is this one, provided by AV Club's Mike D'Angelo:

Baumbach isn’t a great stylist, but he does think visually, especially considering how talky his films tend to be.

Very well said. Baumbach is no show-off, not even in his fairly clever dialogue. No, he places the characters (and by extension the actors) first. I think this is a fine principle by which to direct films. It seems to drive Nicole Holofcener's work, too. And surely Robert Altman's. This is good company to keep.

Amanda Seyfried, Noah Baumbach, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival premiere of While We're Young. 

Baumbach's strength as a director of actors is on display in Frances Ha, his upbeat female buddy comedy I discuss briefly here. While Frances Ha isn't my personal favorite Baumbach film -- I prefer his darker, edgier stuff -- I highly recommend that delightful gem if you haven't seen it already.

To conclude, I urge my readers to check out this delightful interview with Baumbach conducted by Jonathan Lethem around the time of Squid and the Whale. In it, Lethem says something of that movie that applies to Baumbach's film work as a whole:

it had that homely humanity to it. There was breath and impulse and life.

Yes indeed.

Nicole Kidman as the emotionally turbulent title character in Margot at the Wedding.

--
* Christina Lane, "From The Loveless to Point Break: Kathryn Bigelow's Trajectory in Action." Cinema Journal 37.4 (Summer 1998) pp. 70-1.
** Lane p. 73.
*** According to Kevin L. Ferguson, Blue Steel also reworks the "yuppie villain" trope in its bizarre depiction of obsessed serial killer Eugene (Ron Silver). Ferguson argues that the film "simultaneously sustains and critiques the new trope of the yuppie devil" in his fascinating analysis in Jump Cut.
† Paul Cronin (ed.), Herzog on Herzog (Faber and Faber, 2002) pp. 239-40.
†† Those interested in both sides of the debate over Zero Dark Thirty should check out Cieply and Barnes for the pro and Steve Coll and Peter Maass for the con. You may also want to read this Time Magazine interview with Bigelow, in which she addresses the Zero Dark controversy.
††† I think Black's part in Margo at the Wedding constitutes his second-best "offbeat" career performance after his starring role in Bernie, which is his career-best performance bar none. I like him in Orange County but I consider that to be one of his "core persona" performances. All that said, I basically like Jack Black's core persona, especially in School of Rock and the HBO Tenacious D shows.

Great Directors: David Fincher

David Fincher.

I am somewhat hesitant to use the term "great directors" at all because it suggests a kind of auteurism that favors the works of a few so-called "great" filmmakers over films made by lesser-known or less consistent talents. Despite my love of certain directors (Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Kurosawa, Korine, Soderbergh, Holofcener, etc.) and my tendency to seek out films by directors whose work I know I have enjoyed in the past, I am not ONLY interested in the work of directors I know by name nor do I believe that a "great" director is required to produce great work. However, I could not include this appreciation of David Fincher in my "Overlooked Directors" series because he is certainly not overlooked, not since 1999's Fight Club anyway.

I further acknowledge that greatness is always culturally determined and historically contingent. I recently wrote a piece about the lack of greatness I see in Quentin Tarantino's post-1997 output. In that piece I compare QT's late-career works both to his own earlier, better films AND to several other independent, studio, and non-U.S. directors and films with which I am familiar. To me, as a filmgoer with a fairly deep exposure to many of the same films from which Tarantino borrows his style, his post-1997 work seems derivative, two-dimensional, and not that interesting. By contrast,  I assume his films must feel like an edgy, inventive breath of fresh air to someone who mainly only watches big studio blockbusters and other mainstream stuff.

In addition to a viewer's assumptions and background knowledge, time also changes how we view films and bodies of work. In 1997, Quentin Tarantino's work seemed lively, clever, amazing. In 2015, the novelty has worn thin.

Therefore I judge Fincher in his present moment and context: he is a commercial, studio director with an extraordinary degree of technical and artistic mastery who really really loves to make dark, noirish crime thrillers, often about serial killers.

It might be best if we start off by watching this excellent video:

David Fincher - And the Other Way is Wrong from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

Tony Zhou, the whip-smart narrator of that video, remarks of watching David Fincher's films that "it's great to watch someone who's actually great at their job." Zhou concludes that "even if you don't like Fincher, this is some of the best craft in directing right now and it is absolutely worth studying."* I couldn't agree more. I will state openly that I think Fincher is one of America's most talented and skilled directors, and he may sit very close to the top of the heap now that Steven Soderbergh has supposedly "retired" from filmmaking.

Let's look at a few of Fincher's best efforts -- chosen quite subjectively by me -- in an attempt to sum up what makes his work so consistently superb.**

"Its production history has usurped its impact." --Scout Tafoya on Alien 3

Alien 3 (1992)
Alien 3 is one of those films that it is fashionable to hate, probably due to the rock-solid construction, immense popularity, and lasting influence of its two precursors, Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). Yet I have always liked Alien 3 and have never quite understood the outcry against it. When I first saw the extensive behind-the-scenes footage of how difficult this threequel was to make, I was surprised, for to me the finished film does not reveal the tumultuous struggle that brought it into being. Like this reviewer, I consider Alien 3 to be on par with the first two Alien films, and in fact I personally prefer it over James Cameron's Aliens.

Of course, much of my preference is surely attributable to genre: I categorically prefer horror films to action films. But like Mr. Constantine says in the review linked above, Alien 3 is a perfect capstone to the Alien trilogy (like him I deny the existence of the abysmal and, ironically, lifeless Alien Resurrection) and a superb stand-alone gothic horror film, especially in its extended version included in the Alien Quadrilogy boxed set:

While it’s admirable of James Cameron to do something different as opposed to a traditional sequel, I do feel that [in Aliens] the aliens became a bit less threatening by having so many of them. [. . .] With Aliens, although there are some surprises, you’re pretty confident that Ripley, Hicks and Newt will all survive. But in Alien 3, like in Alien, it’s made very clear that no one is safe. We’re now in a situation that is just as desperate as the first film.

Indeed. To continue in this vein, let's check out this great video essay about the greatness of Alien 3:

As Scout Tafoya writes in the essay accompanying the video, 

Because the third film revolves almost entirely around Ripley's desire to protect the integrity of her body—specifically her womb—"Alien 3" feels more purely feminist than the previous two movies, for all their innovative images of a badass heroine fighting bugs whose bodies fused male and female genitalia into a Freudian nightmare. In the first movie, she's fighting to save her crew. In the second, she's fighting to save a little girl, and in so doing, embracing her own latent potential for motherhood; the climactic action scene even brings her face-to-face with another mother, the alien queen, in an egg chamber. These are all engaging, relatable motivations, but they're culturally conservative, because they play on the traditional image of woman as potential victim or maternal protector. 

In "Alien 3," Ripley is fighting for Ripley, period.

I agree with this assessment. I have always felt that, while Ripley is undeniably badass in Aliens, the feminist implications of her role in that film have tended to be overstated. I think she is a more progressive figure in the first Alien film, where her gender is barely even at play -- she just does her job as first officer of the Nostromo and her femininity and/or maternal instincts have nothing to do with it. In fact, I think that Alien makes clear that she is a better leader and officer than Dallas, since he makes the devastatingly bad call to insist she admit he and the alien-infested Kane back onboard ship, while she has the good judgment to refuse him. The only way the first film might be seen to "sell out" Ripley on the basis of her gender is when it depicts her in her underwear near the end, subjecting her to the objectifying, erotic masculine gaze germane to all Hollywood cinema.***

The one sexually objectifying series of shots that mars Ridley Scott's 

otherwise perfect horror masterpiece Alien (1979). 

All that said, and to broaden the scope here a little, we should ask: is David Fincher's work sexist? I admit that a couple of his recent works, The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, have given me serious pause: the former is about an adolescent-minded guy who treats women misogynistically at every point along his rise to the top, and the latter depicts rape in ways that I find unnerving (especially compared to its Swedish antecedent).† Beyond that, I am inclined to read Gone Girl, Fincher's latest psychosexual thriller, as another of the director's works that leans too heavily in the misogynist direction.††

In this context, Fincher's work reminds me a great deal of Alfred Hitchcock's, both in terms of its technical perfection and in its tendency to be both woman-positive AND misogynist at the same time. Like Hitch, Fincher seems drawn toward stories featuring well-rounded and interesting women characters (e.g., Alien 3, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and the Netflix TV series House of Cards) most of whom are dark, edgy, gender-bending, and sexually dangerous in ways reminiscent of the femme fatale of film noir. As such, Fincher's women characters, despite their complexity, often end up getting tortured, raped, and/or murdered at some point in their respective films or programs. I discuss Gone Girl at length elsewhere, but must note here that, despite its technical perfection and edge-of-your-seat thrills, it has drawn a substantial feminist backlash (e.g., here, here, and here) that I find difficult to downplay or refute.

But in any case Alien 3 is great and I strongly suggest that you lay your hands on a copy of the extended 1991 "Assembly Cut" and check it out.

Jodie Foster and a young Kristen Stewart star in David Fincher's 
somewhat under-appreciated thriller Panic Room.

The Game (1997) and Panic Room (2002)
I am quite fond of these two underrated gems, especially the latter. They are genre films, tightly made thrillers with few, if any, deep thoughts on their minds, yet they are so damn well directed and visually rich that they stand out purely for their level of craft.

One of the most remarkable shots in Panic Room is a digital "long take" in the film's first act, just before the 16-minute mark. The shot lasts about three minutes, tracking backward out of Meg's (Jodie Foster) bedroom, between two banister rails, down two stories, past the front window (seeing intruders outside) and into the front door keyhole, back past the front window (still seeing intruders), through the kitchen to the back door, up a story to see an intruder climbing up the fire escape outside, then up a few more to the skylight, then back down into the "panic room" on the house's top floor. What I like about this shot is that it is clearly an impossible shot to get via traditional means -- no camera could fit between those banister rails or inside that keyhole -- yet what Fincher and his team do here is create a mostly digital (computer-generated) shot that attempts to look like a traditional, analog camera move that achieves the physically impossible. I wish more directors and films took advantage of CGI to accomplish stuff like this rather than to overwhelm us with robots.

Aside from his general virtuosity and inventive use of cutting-edge digital effects techniques, I also like that Fincher clearly understands the roots of the genre in which he works, paying homage to other thrillers and noirs such as Kubrick's The Killing:

One of the last shots from David Fincher's Panic Room . . . 

. . . pays homage to this famous, climactic shot from Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956).

Fincher's early thrillers and neo-noirs such as Se7en, The Game, and Panic Room ultimately pave the way for his greatest achievement in this area . . .

A beautifully lit and composed shot from the opening sequence of Zodiac, 

David Fincher's 2007 neo-noir masterpiece.

Zodiac (2007)
Zodiac is Fincher's hands-down best film in my view. I really don't know what to say about it except: see it. It may be that I am ill-equipped to speak critically about Zodiac because I am too close to it -- it is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is essentially a film noir (more precisely a neo-noir, that is, a noir-like film made after 1958), which is one of my very favorite film genres / styles. Briefly glossed, film noir is a style that emerged as part a cycle of crime films starting in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Structurally, the noir is an offshoot or adaptation of the crime thriller, especially the police procedural. What makes the film noir distinct from its antecedents is its high-contrast lighting style, its rain-soaked nighttime city streets, its morally ambiguous characters, and its focus on the process of an investigation as opposed to its outcome (a great many noirs end ambiguously or with the real culprit uncaught). According to French film theorists Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton,

the moral ambivalence, the criminality, the complex contradictions in motives and events, all conspire to make the viewer co-experience that anguish and insecurity which are the true emotions of contemporary film noir. All films of this cycle create a similar emotional effect: that state of tension instilled in the spectator when the psychological reference points are removed. †††

This applies oh so well to Zodiac, in which everyday guy Robert Graysmith becomes obsessed with the case of the Zodiac Killer and utterly loses touch with his family life in the process. He finds the killer, but does he catch him? Watch the movie to find out.

Note Zodiac's noir-like high contrast lighting that plunges 

Robert's (Jake Gyllenhaal) face into shadow. 

For those of you who have read my American Hustle review, you will recall that I critiqued that film for over-doing its "70s-ness," going too far over the top, creating something that felt off-putting, hyper-real, and historically wrong. Zodiac is my positive counter-example for how to get a 1970s period piece exactly right.

Zodiac represents neo-noir at its very best. Its aesthetics are a masterful mixture of neo-noir style and a perfectly rendered 1970s period piece -- kind of like the serial killer plot of Dirty Harry shot, lit, and paced as if it were Night Moves or Chinatown.

Mark Ruffalo walking in front of a bluescreen in San Francisco shooting Zodiac. 

Equally interesting as what we see onscreen in Zodiac are the cutting-edge processes used to bring them about. I could attempt to explain in detail how Fincher and his associates created 1970s San Francisco via complex bluescreen technology etc., but why not once again defer to an informative video?

Deliciously twisted and sprawling, intelligently scripted, and (as always) boldly shot, lit, and edited, Fincher's Zodiac is a masterpiece for both Fincher and the neo-noir tradition writ large. Please see it.

Kate Mara and Kevin Spacey in season one episode two of House of Cards.

House of Cards (2 episodes, 2013)
Folks who know me will attest that it is difficult to win me over as a regular watcher of dramatic television shows (comedy is a different story). I am well aware of the "quality TV" revolution and have watched a few pivotal series, like Oz and The Shield, to completion, but I swear I've made several earnest efforts to get into The Sopranos and have never made it past season two. I made it three and a half seasons into Mad Men and got bored. Dramatic shows, no matter how well-produced, just don't typically seem to hold my attention for long.

Fincher's Netflix Original Series House of Cards is an exception. I don't even normally like Kevin Spacey -- I usually find him too "actor-y" and over-determined in his onscreen performances -- and yet I like him here. (I also basically like him in Se7en as well -- his hamminess meshes well with that somewhat fantastical / fanatical character.) I watched all of seasons one and two of Cards and enjoyed them both quite a bit.

That said, my interest in House of Cards has flagged a bit as it heads into its third season. Part of my issue is that I think Claire Underwood's (Robin Wright) story got compromised in season two. As Karen Valby's critique of Claire's season two story arc makes clear, she is such an awesome, compelling, uncompromising character to begin with that it is a major letdown to discover that a past sexual assault may be a motivating factor explaining her present-day edge. As Valby asks: "can’t we enjoy standing aghast in the face of Claire’s ruthlessness without saddling her with such an excruciating foundation?" I sincerely wish we could. I join with Valby in asking "quality" television shows to quit falling back on rape as a stock story device imposed upon otherwise extremely compelling and interesting female characters.

Robin Wright as Claire Underwood on House of Cards. 

I guess that brings us back to the misogyny point, and it is an issue that continues to haunt Fincher's latest works. I must acknowledge Fincher as one of the greatest living American filmmakers. His mastery of his craft is exceptionally high, his films consistently superb, and even when he makes sexist missteps, his films are never anything less than emotionally and visually provocative. Even when I am troubled by some of their gendered implications, I nevertheless enjoy and marvel at (most of) Fincher's films. Yet that sexist vibe is palpably in there, perhaps nowhere more so than in Gone Girl. That troubles me and may, for me, somewhat diminish Fincher's cinematic achievements over time if it continues.

--
* Zhou has a Patreon site where he solicits financial support for his superb and essential "Every Frame a Painting" video essay series.
** Note that I am not discussing Fight Club (1999), because frankly, I don't like that film much. I find it thematically pretentious (with its false "anti-capitalist" message), and ideologically dangerous (striving to be a satire I think but presenting Edward Norton's character too sympathetically to work as a critique of his white, hypermasculine bullshittery). I am not discussing Se7en (1995) because, while I like it a lot, I think Zhou's video essay says enough about what makes this generally well-received film great.
*** Here I refer to the well-known feminist analysis of Hollywood cinema by Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," which correctly points out that Hollywood objectifies women onscreen via sexist camera and costuming techniques Mulvey calls the "male gaze."
† For more on the sexism of the geeky protagonist of The Social Network, see my co-authored article, "Postmodern Geekdom as Simulated Ethnicity."
†† I capsule-reviewed Gone Girl in my 2014 end of year roundup, concluding that it is "an amazingly well-wrought thriller with an unfortunate, mile-wide misogynist streak."
††† Borde and Chaumeton, "Towards a Definition of Film Noir" in The Film Noir Reader (Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, Limelight Editions, 1996) p. 25.

Overlooked Directors: Jake Kasdan

The talented Mr. Jake Kasdan.

Jake Kasdan, the son of famed 1980s Hollywood screenwriter (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi) and director (Body Heat, The Big Chill, Silverado, Grand Canyon) Lawrence Kasdan, has established a stellar track record directing quality television comedies and wonderfully sharp mid-budget films since the late 1990s. Let's run down a short list of the younger Kasdan's must-see directorial triumphs:

Ben Stiller and Bill Pullman in Zero Effect, Jake Kasdan's directorial debut.

Zero Effect (1998) is a wonderful detective story / comedy, which I have been told is a loose adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story "A Scandal in Bohemia" -- a fact I did not recognize since I am unfamiliar with that specific Holmes tale. But whether or not you are familiar with the source material, this is a delightful, well scripted and well acted buddy film that pairs eccentric genius detective Darryl Zero (Bill Pullman) with his uptight, long-suffering assistant Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller). These two have great comic chemistry together, and as usual, Kasdan finds time for some truly poignant character moments in between all the twisted plotting and zany antics. After The TV Set this is my second-favorite Jake Kasdan film.

The stellar cast of Freaks and Geeks.

Freaks and Geeks (five episodes, 1999-2000) -- Kasdan was a consulting producer on the series as well as director of several episodes including the pilot and the terrific "Beers and Weirs" episode. Freaks and Geeks is, quite simply, one of the finest "dramedies" ever aired on television, painting a squirmingly hilarious portrait of many of the serious trials and tribulations high schoolers endure. It also captures the historical moment in which it is set -- the year 1980, before "the 1980s" as we know them now truly set in -- perfectly (yes, I remember 1980). And while much of the credit for the series' brilliance goes to creator Paul Feig, executive producer Judd Apatow, the entire writing team, and the stellar cast, Kasdan was surely a key player in the success of many key episodes -- including the penultimate (and possibly his best) one "The Little Things" -- and the series as a whole.

Jack Black stars opposite Colin Hanks in Orange County.

Orange County (2002) is perhaps a lesser work by the younger Kasdan, as it lapses into some overt sentimentality atypical of the director's work. It also provides a fairly thankless role for Schuyler Fisk as Ashley, our protagonist Shaun's (Colin Hanks) girlfriend. She is too perfectly and consistently supportive of Shaun to be completely believable, and therefore comes off as a bit two-dimensional (where's the conflict?). But despite these relatively minor niggles, there is much to enjoy here, including Jack Black's turn as Shaun's slacker brother Lance, and a happy ending that does -- sentimentality aside -- feel earned.

Sigourney Weaver in Jake Kasdan's satirical masterpiece The TV Set.

The TV Set (2006) is Kasdan's masterpiece, a razor-sharp satire of the television industry with standout performances by the entire cast, including David Duchovny, Sigourney Weaver, Ioan Gruffudd, and Judy Greer, among others. Based loosely (I presume) upon the real-life trials of Judd Apatow during his years on Freaks and Geeks and other programs, this hilarious film depicts show creator Mike Klein's (Duchovny) attempt to get his TV pilot The Wexler Chronicles produced and picked up for broadcast by a network helmed by mercenary executive Lenny (Weaver). The latter's performance alone is worth watching the movie for, as she takes the kind of cutthroat character she played in 1988's Working Girl and ramps it several more notches, into truly "unhinged" territory. Also noteworthy is Fran Kranz as talentless actor Zach Harper, the other major foil to Klein's plans and visions for his precious pilot. An overlooked gem, The TV Set is literally one of my all-time favorite movies and I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.

David Duchovny stars as The TV Set's Mike Klein, 

an onscreen proxy for real-life writer / producer Judd Apatow.

In short, if you only check out one Jake Kasdan film, make The TV Set the one.

"The Beatles" as they appear in Walk Hard.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), while not my favorite Kasdan film, is surprisingly funny and enjoyable given its premise, and sits head and shoulders above other similar "fake biopic" style comedies like Talledega Nights and Anchorman. If you have given this film a pass due to its promotional materials, you may be denying yourself some delightful comedy fun here. But I wouldn't prioritize seeing this above seeing The TV Set or Zero Effect.

Coming soon: Jake Kasdan's next directorial feature is Sex Tape starring Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz, due out in 2014.

Darryl Zero sez: "Check out these movies . . . they're devilishly funny!"