Out, damned appendix!

Those who know me well know that I'm scornful of the appendix. I can't pass up telling the latest appendix jokes, and just last week I dubbed something "more useless than an extra appendix," which had the gents at the club tittering.

Well, my appendix got wind of this and said, "Oh yeah?" with a sneer. A sneer and a narrowing of its tiny, tiny eyes. On Monday it puffed itself up mightily, from the size of your little finger to the size of a ripe gherkin. Random shooting pains in my abdomen resulted. I ignored its threats, of course: what is the appendix but a notorious bluffer?

By Tuesday morning, though, it had switched from threats to violence: I could barely walk, and I had to do something about that appendix. Our car had broken down over the weekend, likely in cahoots with my appendix, so my friendly neighborhood rock star drove me to the emergency room. After a very brief stay among the fifty or so other people in the waiting room (abdominal pain is apparently a "get out of jail free" card), I went to wait among fewer people in a series of little curtained-off rooms. I believe I witnessed domestic violence, but things were starting to get a little fuzzy, so I'm not sure what exactly I saw.

Except sudden flashes of white light obscuring my vision! Was it a visit from the lord? No, it was phase three of my appendix's attack on my person. The worst betrayal is the one that comes from inside, dear readers. I got incredibly nauseous, I started to sweat like a Viking in a sauna, and apparently I started to moan loudly and rock back and forth. I know this because later, while I was being prepped for surgery, someone said "he started to moan loudly and rock back and forth." It was at that point that I discovered that sweating buckets, moaning loudly, and rocking back and forth is like a "get out of jail free" card in the room that's just past the waiting room.

Much of the rest of Tuesday is blurry. A thousand people approached me, asking me the same questions, and I wondered (aloud?) why the first person didn't just write my answers down someplace where the other people could consult it. Perhaps they were trying to catch me in a lie? Perhaps I looked like the kind of guy who would fake his way into an appendectomy? Does Crash touch on the subject at all? (Not that Crash.)

So at some point a handsome guy who might have been on E.R. at some point (the surgeons really do look like that, apparently) introduced himself

(More later. I need to go back to bed. I just got home from the hospital a few hours ago, and the Vicodin has me a little off-kilter.)

as the surgeon. His name was Dr. Angelus, which I took to be either a good sign or a bad sign. Are we talking Angelus, as in Season Two of Buffy's Angelus? Yikes. Or are we talking angelic, but in a "we're here to help you, my son" kind of way, instead of in a "we're your escort to the next plane of existence" kind of way? Before I could figure this out, I woke up in a standard-issue hospital room.

Things that are alleged to have happened in the interim: I told the anesthesiologist that she was pretty, I had surgery to remove my appendix, I called for my favorite art historian from the recovery room, she came and we had a chat during which I told her about the pretty anesthesiologist and the sweating/moaning episode in the inner emergency room, and they moved me to the regular hospital bed that was to be my home for the next couple of days. I'm reasonably certain that these things happened, but because I wasn't there to witness them, I can admit them only as hearsay.

The room was nice, as far as hospital rooms go. The bed was too short for me, so my feet were always jammed against the end. Because vicious thugs stabbed me in the gut, it hurt to sit up or lie down or exist, but kindly nurses kept adding things to my IV that made things not so bad. The worst part was the nights: they wake you up every two hours to take your blood pressure, which I found extremely annoying. Aren't you in the hospital to recover? And isn't sufficient rest necessary for recovery? When I complained to the nurse who insisted on calling me "baby" about the constant wakeups, she told me the story of a woman who insisted on being left alone from 9 pm to 9 am, who then died of a heart attack that might not have been fatal had she not insisted on being left alone.

This part of the story is boring, because being stuck in a hospital bed with one book and sixteen channels and a Vicodin haze is boring. On Wednesday I progressed rapidly from no food or liquid to clear liquids to solid food clear liquids to solid food, and I managed to stagger up and down the hall a few times while leaning on my IV cart. MFAH visited a couple times, and this morning I befriended my second roommate, who had had his prostate removed.

Then it was time to go home. I'll be stuck here, more or less in bed, for the next few days, so if you want to call and keep me company, please do. If I don't answer, I'm probably not out for a jog.

2007 Goaties: Stay Tuned for Updates

I couldn't think of anything to say on this blog that others haven't said more eloquently elsewhere, but Heath Ledger's death left me shaken. We've watched him grow from a pretty kid with promise into one of the best actors working, and I'm sad that on Oscar nomination mornings to come, we won't wake up to hear his name listed.

Instead of attempting to write in-depth appreciations of all of my award winners (we saw how well that worked out last year, when I never got around to finishing them), I'm going to post shorter blurbs about them, with the intention of writing less about more films. I'll post them here as I get them done, so check back over the next few days or weeks as I complete them. Recent additions (1/26): Cinematography, Visual Effects

I haven't seen nearly as many films as certain other critics, but I'm faced with the prospect of having to wait until March or later for the chance to see the rest of the award-worthy films. Exactly how good is Lust, Caution? Does Benicio Del Toro give a better lead performance in Things We Lost in the Fire than my pick for Best Actor? I guess I'll find out in March. But for now...

Musical Moment: As a midnight thunderstorm rages outside and Christina Ricci cowers (no longer chained to the radiator) at his feet, Samuel L. Jackson thrashes out the title song of Black Snake Moan on an electric guitar whose overfuzzed tones intermittently turn tinny and metallic when the power flashes on and off. It's the climactic scene in Craig Brewer's deliciously overheated slice of southern-fried ham, and it's about the power of the blues to drive out your demons. Can I get an amen?

Original Song: OK, whereas I think that several of the songs from Once were among the year's best, including the soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated "Falling Slowly" but also the better song "When Your Mind's Made Up," I think that the brilliant "PoP! Goes My Heart" from the deservedly underseen Music and Lyrics deserves mention here. It manages to perfectly parodize 1980s synth-pop while actually being a great example of the music it's picking on. Unfortunately, it's also catchy as hell, and I expect the chorus to be stuck in my head for a few days now.

Supporting Actor: Hal Holbrook is getting all the critical raves, but I think he was outshined in Into the Wild by a non-actor named Brian Dierker, a guide and white water rafter who Sean Penn convinced to appear in the film as a middle-aged hippie who trades relationship advice and quiet companionship with Emile Hirsch. Dierker, speaking unscripted lines and guided by one of the best actors alive, brings an easy, unaffected realism to the role; his scenes with Hirsch, who I didn't particularly like, and Keener, who I did, are the best things about the film.

Foreign Language Film: Christian Mungiu's harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a nightmarish odyssey into totalitarianism. Anamaria Marinca gives one of the best performances of the year as a young woman who attempts to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate; guided by Oleg Mutu's unforgiving and unsteady handheld camera, we follow her into a hell that tests the limits of her friendship and our ability to keep from screaming and running out of the theater.

Original Score: Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood's modernist score for There Will Be Blood was recently disqualified for Oscar, and I'm sure a Goatie is a small consolation prize. His score's shrieking strings and droning chords, like Daniel Day-Lewis's iconic performance and Paul Thomas Anderson's whiz-bang shot compositions, demands to be noticed; it calls attention to itself both as something inseperable from the film it inhabits and as something apart from the film.

Costumes: From Jennifer Garner's J. Jill pastels to Jason Bateman's layered, ratty Soundgarden t-shirts to Michael Cera's bright yellow too-shorts and headbands to Allison Janney's softer side of Sears to J.K. Simmons's worn Carharts, Monique Prudhomme's costumes for Juno work as canny character statements, culminating in Ellen Page's riotous rag-picked ensembles.

Documentary: Zoo addresses its topic—men who have sex with horses—elliptically, by refusing to explain it, by almost refusing the very idea that it can be explained to someone who doesn't share that particular desire. There's an enigmatic scene in which one of the actors in the reenactments explains how he connected to his role by thinking of a particularly bad accident he witnessed; I was struck by what a tenuous and false connection he was creating, and I realized that the film was telling us the same thing: you think you can get your head around this, but you're wrong.

Actor: I sure hope there's still room on Daniel Day-Lewis's mantel after awards season is done. As much as I hate to jump on anyone's bandwagon, I can't deny that his performance as avarice personified in There Will Be Blood is such a staggering achievement that calling it one of the greatest male performances of all time doesn't seem so crazy, although I'd rather wait and see how it holds up after a few years.

Visual Effects: As much as I disliked the movie, I can't deny how great 300's visual effects were; it's one of the first films in which the vaguely incorrect feel I usually get from large-scale CGI (e.g., Gladiator, The Golden Compass) was an aid instead of a hindrance: from the giant beasties to the giant Rodrigo Santoro to all those gouts of blood, the general unreality of the effects (which, in fact, looked more "realistic," if that's a useful word here, than anything in The Transformers) added to the comic-book feel of the film. Because there were more visual effects artists listed in the cast than there were Spartans in the battle (or Persians, for that matter), I can't single out any one person's achievement.

Cinematography: Many people (including me, for a long time) think great cinematography is about pretty pictures, but it's really about finding the right images to tell the story. No film did that better this year than 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. Oleg Mutu's wavering handheld camera, so often held in long, shaky, unbroken closeups on Anamaria Marinca's face as she builds the web of half-truths and evasions that will allow her to complete her mission and travels deeper into this film's hell, both gives us special access to Marcina's thoughts and cuts us off from others', adding to the increasing isolation that she feels (and we feel). Highlights (if the definition of "highlight" contains the phrase "made me want to run out of the theater") include the almost-surreal dinner party at Marinca's boyfriend's house and the final dash through Bucharest's labyrinthine, poorly-lit streets.

Earlier: Best Supporting Actress Jennifer Garner
Sooner: I'll get back to you on that
Later: The other 7 categories

The Leading Critics

According to this Reuters story, Leonard Maltin, Peter Travers (Rolling Stone), and, um, Richard Roeper are not only "leading critics," they're the leading critics. God help us.

And they're "almost unanimous" in choosing Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie as their best actor and actress, respectively, of the year. "Almost," in this case, means "not really," as Maltin has Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard, Travers has Johnny Depp and Christie, and Roeper goes out on a limb and picks an assortment of eligible male leading performers (Day-Lewis, Depp, and George Clooney) and then Laura Linney.

I'm going out on a limb and saying that I agree with the leading critics totally, "totally" meaning "here and there." It's good to be on the winning team. I await the arrival of my "leading critic" badge.

2007 in Review: Best Rentals/Revivals

I watch twice as many older films as new releases, and 2007 was a banner year on my couch and at the revival house. I saw four of my top ten as homework for Edward Copeland's survey of the top 100 foreign films of all time, and others resulted from my Oscar obsession (#7), a gift of a membership at Chicago's Siskel Center (#4), and my too-infrequent trips to the revival house in my own neighborhood (#8).

It physically hurt to have to leave off such films as Andrei Tarkovsky's poetic Andrei Rublev (USSR, 1969), Réne Clément's deeply disturbing Forbidden Games (France, 1952), the sublimely religious The Song of Bernadette (1943), and Charles Burnett's devilish To Sleep with Anger (1990). But it's a top ten list, and I couldn't quite figure out how to shove fourteen films into it.

10. The Narrow Margin (1952). Studio hack Richard Fleischer's minimalist noir is like a hypodermic full of pure suspense jabbed right into the heart, or something equally thrilling (but maybe less painful). A good cop has to shepherd a mob moll cross-country to testify, but which of the beggar's banquet of tough guys on the train is the assassin sent to kill her? Maybe they all are. It's surely the best suspense film set on a train, despite what you may have heard about a certain portly British director.

9. The Conformist (Italy, 1970). This fragmented masterpiece suggests that Tarantino wasn't just watching kung fu movies. The story of a regular guy who's so driven by the need to fit in that he ends up a Fascist hit man is driven to dizzying heights of directorial and photographic audacity by the 29-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci and his brilliant cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. This must be the coolest film ever made.

8. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). A three-hour lullabye to the film industry, this documentary looks at how Hollywood has chosen to depict its hometown. Its hundreds of movie clips are only the start of the fun; director Thom Anderson also provides a smart analysis of the interplay between architecture and cinema and the ways that films have rewritten the city's history. Most intriguing to me, however, is the complete absence of movies about the movie industry, but I guess that would be fodder for another three-hour documentary.

7. Shanghai Express (1932). Most of Josef von Sternberg's talkies leave me cold: they're so frosty and beautiful, with stylized mannequins who stand around talking about love and devotion but not demonstrating any of it. This one bowled me over because it combined von Sternberg's brilliantly realized visual flourishes with some real, human feeling. Dietrich was never again so divine as she was here.

6. Strangers on a Train (1951). OK, but this one takes place only partly on a train. Less than The Narrow Margin, at any rate. Hitchcock's masterpiece (which may be my favorite of his films) is filled with signature touches, my favorite being the tennis match. The audacity of how long that sequence takes is just one example of the Master of Suspense's mastery of timing. Who else would dare drag it out that long, and to such delicious effect?

5. Pickpocket (France, 1959). My first Bresson film, and why did it take me so long to get around to him? His stripped-bare version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment retains all the angst and grand ideas about supermen as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition; it could be that Michel is just blowing smoke to cover his addiction. The characters stand at obtuse angles from each other; they're only truly alive during the balletic pickpocketing sequences.

4. War and Peace (USSR, 1968). It's the biggest and most expensive film ever made, and will probably retain those titles forever (it helps when you can use most of the Red Army for a single battle scene), but the scale and spectacle are only part of this sweeping epic's charms. Sergei Bondarchuk is able to balance all that delirious excess with the sensitive performances of his sprawling cast, especially Lyudmila Savelyeva as Natasha and Bondarchuk himself as Pierre.

3. Come and See (USSR, 1985). Where War and Peace showed us war in all of its possible permutations, this nightmarish down-the-rabbit-hole film is about only one: the "hell" part of "war is hell." It's the story of one patriotic kid who joins the Soviet resistance against the Nazi invaders during World War II, and pays for his patriotism with his sanity.

2. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Germany, 1974). My first Fassbinder film, and why did it take me so long to get around to him? His reinterpretation of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows is one of the most beautifully depressing films I've ever seen, the story of how love triumphs over everything except our own pettiness and prejudice. Excuse me while I get some tissues.

1. Persona (Sweden, 1966). I'm not positive that I could explain more than a scene or two of Ingmar Bergman's modernist masterpiece; all I know is that it's emotionally shattering, an almost religious cinematic experience—religious in the sense that it's like developing an intimate relationship with something that's unknowable. It defies interpretation, or at least my fumbling attempts at it. I think it's one of the five or six greatest films ever made.

Progress Report

My own data, along with independent confirmations from researchers in the field, indicate that I am aging at the targeted rate. If all goes according to plan, I'm right on schedule to turn 100 exactly 67 years from today. Please consult the chart for details.

2007 Goaties: Best Supporting Actress

StinkyLulu has prompted me to get a head start on my 2007 awards with the second annual Supporting Actress Blogathon. Check over there for more Supporting Actress goodness.

Ellen Page's much-lauded lead performance left me cold—anything she did, Thora Birch did better in Ghost World—but what saved Juno for me was the veritable cornucopia of supporting work from such people as Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, and, especially, and especially unlikely, Jennifer Garner. I'd previously dismissed Garner as a low-talent pretty face that, in fact, isn't all that pretty. (I believe that I wrote a blog post about how unattractive she is. I believe I quoted, with approval, someone calling her a "Picasso guppy.")

But my god, I take it all back: Garner is brilliant, or at least she's brilliant here, with the right part. She gives the best supporting performance of 2007, slyly toying with our impressions of a character who starts out as an easy mark: the baby- and decor-obsessed frigid suburban yuppie housewife. Cue the guffaws, especially as the film presents her as little more than a Baby Gap monster, a comic foil for the thwarted ambitions of her wanna-be rock-star husband (Bateman). But the screenplay's finest quality is its ability to take these easy marks and flesh them out, making us gradually discard our first, or even second or third, impressions. Subtly, and slowly, Garner opens Vanessa up, turning the joke inside out.

The film first introduces her through shots of her hands, smoothing coverlets and arranging flowers; if the shot had opened up to reveal that the hands belonged to an employee in a particularly high-end home furnishings store, it wouldn't have been surprising. Garner's obsessed with creating the perfect household: anything untidy (like everything Bateman brought from his former life) must be hidden. When things don't fit her domestic fantasy ("You found us in the penny saver?"), it throws her, and we see the anxiety that knits her life together. Most of that anxiety comes from her desire to have a child; Garner helps us, over the course of the film, to understand her obsession with outward perfection—her wholesale purchase of the American suburban dream—as a manifestation of her thwarted desire to have a kid. I can't have this one thing that would make me whole, she reasons, so I'll take all of these other things that give the illusion of wholeness.

It's when that anxiety becomes apparent that Garner really shines. I felt little a twinge at her reaction to Juno's careless "Lucky it's not you" comment; that twinge grew sharper during the scene at the mall when, at first, the baby won't kick for her (she interprets this, in an instant, as confirmation of the cosmic curse against her), and then the uncertain "do I deserve this?" joy when she finally feels something. And that twinge turned into a punch in the heart at the end, when, still anxious and uncertain, she asks Janney "How do I look?", her new baby in her arms.

So Jennifer Garner has demonstrated incredible range here—an ability to play the part for laughs, and then to gradually flesh out the screenplay's skeleton. She succeeds, better than the woman in the spotlight, in selling the film's underlying heart.

Runners-Up: From Todd Haynes's messy I'm Not There, there's the obvious choice of Cate Blanchett, so gawky and adolescent and androgynous that she was the best Dylan imitator of the bunch, but there's also Charlotte Gainsbourg, so adept and moving as the thankless and unthanked deserted wife in the "this is the part of the biopic when there's domestic strife" part of the film. And let's not forget Tilda Swinton, elevating her role in Michael Clayton above the casual misogyny of the part and letting us watch her going through the process of building a character as the film progresses.

Not Dead, Just Nearly So

I had plans for blogging about all the year-end awards, my recent trip to San Francisco, and my giddifying attempts to watch all the 2007 movies I've missed along the way (I'm particularly fond of Black Snake Zoo and Before the Devil Knows You're on Horseback and Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Red Road), but I dot a told. Both my favorite art historian and I have been out of commission; we spent a nice New Year's Eve fitfully attempting to catch a few winks between coughing fits, and we're heading for Maine tomorrow, despite being still under the weather.

But when we get back, I'll plunge into these things I used to write, what are they called... movie reviews! And blog posts! My flight lands at 6:00 on Sunday, and by midnight I'll have a post ready for StinkyLulu's second annual Supporting Actress Blogathon on an unexpectedly moving performance from someone I've spent time dissing on this very blog.