Village Voice — July 18, 2012
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Christopher Nolan’s ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator’s manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don’t miss a thing. This is as true of Inception, with its reams of expositional walk through, as of Nolan’s superhero saga, now swollen into a trilogy in which the dramatis personae are always stepping up to identify themselves in statements of principle. All of the on-the-nose speechifying (scripted by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan) keeps the run times long, while the drum-tight rule of schematic relevance shuts out anything resembling wit, spontaneity, and recognizable human conduct.
Billed as director Nolan’s final contribution to the franchise he revived with 2005’s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises opens eight years after the events of 2008’s The Dark Knight, eight years after the death of Harvey Dent, a/k/a Two- Face, still honored as a hero through the print-the-legend contrivance of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman, returning), and eight years after the villainized, fugitive Caped Crusader was last sighted in Gotham City, which has settled into a fragile peace. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has hung up his Batman suit and become a Howard Hughes–like recluse, only lured into the world again by a couple of women: a socialite investor in Wayne Enterprises’ clean-energy programs, Miranda (Marion Cotillard), and a cat burglar who penetrates his sanctuary, Selina (Anne Hathaway, repeatedly proving the “No-Fun” Nolans’ ability to make comicrelief one-liners fall flat amid their sepulchral, master-builder cinema.)
The overarching theme of the Batman films is the moral problem of vigilantism, as played out by name-tagged figures of virtue and vice. “The idea was to be a symbol,” Wayne says of his anonymous alter ego in The Dark Knight Rises—and so this most solemn of superhero franchises duly marches ahead with the process of ominous signification, having established itself among those who accept its self-regard at face value as not just another blockbuster but the multiplex State of the Nation for the 21st century. If The Dark Knight openly invited interpretation as the War on Terror Batman, then The Dark Knight Rises, whose creators obviously scented the class discontent in the air, is the Occupy Wall Street installment. “You think all this can last?” down-and-out survivor Selina says upon meeting Wayne at a fancy-dress masquerade ball. “There’s a storm coming.”
That storm breaks in the form of the living incarnation of Have-Not rancor, Bane, played by the hulking Tom Hardy, face indistinguishable behind the ventilator apparatus clamped over his mouth.
The visage will remind many of the unmasked Vader, though his fruity, magniloquent purr is closer to Vincent Price talking through a window fan.
Bane was “born and raised in hell on earth”—a pit prison on the other side of the world. In order to punch in Bane’s weight class, the softened, fresh out- of-retirement Wayne will first have to join the 99 Percent, eventually enrolling in the same third-world school of hard knocks that spawned his opponent. Training in dismal, prehistoric conditions trims away the fat of techie decadence and reinvigorates Wayne’s sense of the ethical obligation of privilege. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Wayne did a similar piece of slumming in Batman Begins. It is also the theme of Rocky IV.
As in The Dark Knight’s conflict between Wayne and the Joker, Order versus Anarchy, the face-off between Wayne and Bane is a dialectical battle between personified concepts. Wayne is Gotham City’s philanthropic chaperone; his company develops technologies with great potential for help and harm, which Wayne then keeps away from a polis that he protects without trusting. Bane is, in posture at least, a radical revolutionist, setting himself up as the champion of the disenfranchised, though it is difficult to imagine who would be seduced by his tactics or his plan “to return control of the city to the people,” followed by the neutralization of law and order and the foundation of a Gotham Commune.
For the Nolans, it is characters who voice seemingly utopian goals such as “restoring balance to the world” of whom the most is to be feared. And while The Dark Knight’s climax hinged on finding faith in the common man’s decency, upon witnessing the goings-on in Occupied Gotham, it is impossible to imagine this revolution accomplishing anything decent— the citizen’s tribunal kangaroo court, a fantastic production design flourish by Nathan Crowley, is Reign of Terror by way of Kafka, while a parody of the Bastille is played out before Blackgate Penitentiary. The Dark Knight Rises is not a reactionary movie outright—it would be more respectable if it were—but only on a villainous technicality. The perpetrators of the city-upending mutiny have no interest in a new order, only in seeing Gotham purged in blood with a rote ticking time bomb, an apocalypse that precludes the possibility of revolution either failing or succeeding on its own terms.
The Dark Knight Rises is a shallow repository of ideas, but as a work of sheer sensation, it has something to recommend. At two hours and 45 minutes, it’s no fleeter of foot than its plodding predecessors, but Nolan has continued his experimentation with the IMAX format, and the sheer mass of what he has constructed inspires a dull awe—it is impossible not to be cowed by a film that’s five stories tall while Hans Zimmer’s stampeding orchestra tramples you. As throughout the Batman films, Nolan is at his best symphonizing second-unit footage, illustrating how the shock waves of an assault resound across the infrastructure of an entire city, a coordinated attack on Gotham’s pressure points being a particular highlight here. (The city is composed of bits of Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, with New York City for establishing shots, including a half-complete new WTC tower available for suggestive effect.) The history of Batman’s burden is, however, increasingly cumbersome, and it’s Mr. Bane who finally makes the pertinent point: “Gotham is beyond saving and must be allowed to die.”
The Nouveau Crash
In The Queen of Versailles, time-share royalty’s time might be up
KARINA LONGWORTH
‘I don’t want to give you lessons in self-denial and social responsibility,” an art dealer tells her billionaire boy client in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, by way of refusing to entertain his demand to buy the Rothko Chapel. “Because I don’t believe for a second you’re as crude as you sound.” This scene occurs in David Cronenberg’s soon-to-be-released movie, but the question of whether “self-denial” is a “social responsibility”—particularly when it comes to rich so nouveau it doesn’t realize its appetites strike others as crude—is more vividly brought to life in Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary, The Queen of Versailles.
The titular royal is Jackie Siegel, a fortyish IBM engineer turned model turned trophy wife to seventyish time-share mogul David Siegel. Jackie is a shopping addict who admits that she wouldn’t be raising eight kids (seven natural, one “inherited”) if she couldn’t afford a staff of nannies. As the film begins, the Siegel clan’s 26,000-square-foot Florida mansion teems with bodies (kids, maids, dogs) and accumulated detritus. Rather than cut back or clean house, the Siegels are halfway through construction on a new “house,” a complex the size of Fantasyland in the form of a replica of Versailles—modified, natch, to include elements of Vegas’s Paris hotel.
And then comes the crash. The Siegel fortune comes from Westgate Resorts, whose salesmen are indoctrinated in the nobility of talking working-class Americans into buying vacation time-shares they probably can’t afford. But after the 2008 market collapse, the customer base no longer has access to quick and easy credit. Westgate is soon unable to pay outstanding costs on its new flagship property in Las Vegas, the Siegels have to halt construction on Versailles, and Jackie and her kids must begrudgingly adopt a more conservative lifestyle. The matriarch is quick to play the victim. “The banks made us do it,” Jackie claims after Westgate lays off 6,000 workers. “I thought that rescue money was supposed to be passed on to the common people,” she says of the bailout. “Or you know, us.”
I’ve seen The Queen of Versailles twice, and both times the audience laughed frequently at the Siegel family’s sheer tackiness: their life-size oil paintings of themselves, the piles of expensive garbage stacked throughout the family manse, the pet poop drying on what seems like every carpet, the limo Jackie takes to McDonald’s. Schadenfreude is fair play, I guess, but bad taste and questionable hygiene are not crimes—or really even all that LOL-worthy. Putting aside David’s admission that he “got George W. elected president, personally” through means that “may not necessarily have been legal,” the Siegels’ real offense is their complete obliviousness to the way they’re perceived or to the fact that many find how they’ve made or spent their fortune offensive to begin with. It simply never occurred to them that just because they could build the biggest private home in the United States doesn’t mean they should.
Eventually, it emerges that David can either turn over the Vegas Westgate to the bank and lose the $400 million he has already invested while keeping the rest of his empire and all of his personal assets, or he can delay, potentially allowing the property to fall into bankruptcy, and risk losing everything. He picks the latter, and the implication is that there might be something righteous to his stubborn refusal to kowtow. Fueling Versailles is a nagging, unresolved tension between what seems like the filmmaker’s sympathetic portrayal of David’s unwillingness to compromise as an act of libertarian boldness—in the land of the free (market), who has the right to police anyone else’s asset management or consumption?—and the damning evidence Greenfield presents of the family’s ugly gluttony.
Greenfield, a photographer who inserts stills of luridly colorful tableaux into her video vérité, followed the Siegel family for several years, though the film’s time frame is fuzzy, and she has admitted that material presented in Versailles as though it occurred pre-crash was actually shot later. The film hardly feels hastily pasted together: Greenfield filmed long enough to document physical changes in her subjects. For one thing, the oldest biological Siegel kid ages on camera from a chubby, awkward preteen to a coltish teenager, a queenbee type whose notable poise is only belied by the constellations of acne visible in close-up. It’s a powerful visual metaphor for maturity as a process: As conscious as we’ve all become of economic reality in recent years, we have a long way to go.
How far have the Siegels come? Versailles’s conclusion on that matter is complicated by a defamation lawsuit David Siegel filed in concurrence with the Sun dance premiere and updated recently to implicate distributor Magnolia Pictures. David, whose filing calls the documentary “a staged theatrical production, albeit using nonprofessionals in the starring roles (as themselves),” insists the film’s portrayal of his fall from glory is exaggerated and inaccurate. He has since managed to reverse Westgate’s fortunes. Given that he’s apparently back to predatory business as usual, perhaps he’s most regretful of the contrite stance he seems to take in the film’s final moments, in which he drops catchphrases (“We need to live within our means”) suggesting he has learned the error of his hyper- capitalist ways. But Siegel needn’t worry—in the context of the film, this sudden turnaround reads at worst as total bullshit and at best as too little, too late.
Sound/Vision
The ranging gaze of Deborah Stratman’s experimental films
Probing the elusive terrain where technology, disruptive phenomena, and the contradictory human impulses for order and chaos meet (and often collide), the films of audiovisual poet/essayist Deborah Stratman set off alarms both literal and figurative. Curated into three thematically distinct programs, “Forces and Gazes” highlights the artist’s signature juxtapositions of everyday banality with haunting, evocative images and sounds. In the first batch, quick, careful cutting gives a nondescript upstate New York bungalow metaphysical gravity in The Magician’s House (2007), while its centerpiece, From Hetty to Nancy (1997), achieves an eerie whimsy. Blasé, whinging voice over courtesy of the titular English tourist’s letters home from Iceland drones over shots of the island’s harsh landscape, as its hearty inhabitants nonchalantly go about their business, and periodic first-person intertitle crawls detail disasters far worse than the narrator’s leaky tent.
Closer to home but no less ominous, the second program includes a historical audit of comet fear that plays like Armageddon reinterpreted as historical fever dream (. . . These Blazeing Starrs!, 2011) and the harrowing, longer-form showstopper In Order Not to Be Here (2002). This disquisition on American surveillance—and the illusion of control it fosters— is book ended by infrared chase footage, with the climactic chunk orchestrated by Stratman herself. It leaves little doubt that the sci-fi dystopias cooked up over the past couple of centuries have unequivocally come to pass and, incredibly, has a happy ending.
The final program delves more fully into the politics of place and features a loving ode to Chicago’s South Side (Shrimp Chicken Fish, 2010), as well as the series’ weakest (Energy Country, 2003) and strongest (Kuyenda N’kubvina, 2010) entries.
Cumulatively, “Forces and Gazes” reveals Stratman’s vision as a deceptively complex, hyper-distilled alchemy of rigor and spontaneity. The pointedly repetitious Village, Silenced (2011) repurposes scenes from a 1943 reenactment of a Nazi invasion as a précis of oppression, while the moving and beautifully edited Kuyenda provides (among other things) an object lesson in how popular culture transcends social boundaries even as it’s inevitably defanged as the amount of money involved piles up. Shot in a relatively straightforward style in destitute Malawi, Kuyenda is as close as Stratman gets to documentary, and it puts most docs to shame. This uncanny versatility is bolstered by a mastery of sonic punctuation suitable for mainstream horror (albeit with a formal control that genre typically lacks), resulting in a rapturously cinematic body of work that coaxes us into seeing—and hearing— the familiar in invigorating, uncomfortable new ways.
This Has Happened
James Murphy and a new concert doc reflect on the end of LCD Sound system
When we started the band, suddenly we were, like, New York famous. We could get into anyplace, but you know—I was never recognized on a plane.”
James Murphy, former frontman of self reflexive post-punk dance band LCD Sound system, has called to talk about Shut Up and Play the Hits, a new film documenting LCD’s sold-out April 2011 farewell concert at Madison Square Garden. He’s attempting to explain why he chose to call it quits on a band that, 10 years after the landmark first single “Losing My Edge,” was indisputably at the peak of its success. In addition to the predictable ubiquity in Silver Lake and Williamsburg, LCD’s third and final full-length, This Is Happening, had debuted in the overall Billboard Top 10 and displaced Lady Gaga at the top of the dance chart. Anna Kendrick starred in one video; Spike Jonze directed another. The higher profile was part of the problem.
“I felt the band getting bigger, but I was always like, well, it doesn’t matter when I can come back to New York, where nobody gives a shit. And then I came back to New York, and people started giving more of a shit, so I was at the beginning of me not wanting, um . . .”
Murphy, chatting while en route to his home in Brooklyn, interrupts himself. “I’m looking out of my car, up at Terry Richardson having an animated conversation through a window,” he says. “He’s flailing his arms a lot. He’s looking at me.” The legendarily sleazy photographer, Murphy suggests, is the epitome of “New York famous”—a household name in enough households to improve his standard of living without impinging on his actual life. “I wasn’t that interested in actual famous-people fame, you know what I mean?”
Murphy has never been a typical rock star, and Shut Up is by no means a conventional rock doc. Co-directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace condense the four-hour, 29-song MSG show into a few full performances of “hits” like “North American Scum,” “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” and “I Can Change,” interwoven with excerpts from an interview with Murphy conducted a week before the show by pop-culture pundit Chuck Klosterman and vérité footage of Murphy shot the morning after MSG, tracing his first day as a 41-year-old rock-and-roll “retiree.” Moments of onstage transcendence are sandwiched between Murphy’s preshow contemplations of pretension and rock-star mythology and postshow evidence of life going on at its most mundane. Talking to Klosterman, Murphy marvels that even the most superhuman pop star “is just a dude. He has to check his e-mail.” The morning after his triumphant goodbye show, Murphy still has to get out of bed to walk the dog.
“We were very deliberate about the day after being the perspective from which we view the story,” Southern says. “You have this huge show at this iconic venue, and it’s a kind of euphoric event. And the best position to look at some of the reasons why you would end the band and what that would feel like the day after— the sobriety of the next morning and the fact that nothing really happens.”
“I wanted it to be about what it’s like when you make things,” Murphy says. “The band, the movie—everything in some way is always about what it feels like to make something, the actualities. Not the myth of being a maker.”
Lovelace and Southern’s approach allows them to expose the psyche of a man walking away from fame while contextualizing how that move fits into Murphy’s ongoing personal conflict between his interest in highbrow and/or obscure art, music, and literature and his compulsion to make music that makes people want to dance. The coexistence of serious ideas and genuine emotion in party songs with often hilarious lyrics— that’s LCD Sound system in a nutshell.
Lovelace and Southern use the phrase “end of an era” to describe the significance of LCD’s demise, which Murphy rejects—“I can’t pinpoint what the era is.” Whatever it is, Murphy seems to have been pointing to the end all along. In a reflection of the times that spawned it, LCD earned its stripes in hipster culture in part by brilliantly and affectionately skewering that culture through songs like “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” and “Losing My Edge.” In Shut Up, Klosterman begins to suggest that “Edge,” a spoken-word dance track in the voice of an aging scenester, is essentially a novelty song. “That song’s serious as a heart attack,” Murphy argues, likening the experiences that inspired it to “a sad, hipster DJ Revolutionary Road.”
“Audiences had changed, the way people consume music had changed, and I think James was kind of one of the first people to catch on to that,” Southern says. “‘Losing My Edge’ is the song I think they’ll be remembered for. I think it must be a strange thing to have done that in your first record. That’s a hard one to follow up.”
Eleven years after first forecasting his own obsolescence, those changes in cultural consumption are still on Murphy’s mind. Record stores, he says, were replaced with online affinity groups amounting to “People Who Agree With Me dot com. A record store, you go in, and you’re faced with, like, the gauntlet. There [were] defining queries that you put yourself through, which are missing now. Now you just get told you’re awesome all the time, and if someone tells you you’re not awesome, you just unfriend them.”
In the film and in conversation, Murphy is ever aware of his comparatively advanced age. At its most basic level, his rejection of the rock-and-roll lifestyle is a question of self-preservation. Every time he tours, Murphy says in the film, he returns with markedly more gray hair. “That’s the visible sign,” he says. “What’s going on inside? I don’t want to, like, die.” He pauses a beat, then says more firmly, “I don’t want to die!”
“Health is a big reason [to end LCD],” Murphy says today. “Life is a big reason. I didn’t live a normal life for a long time. I toured and made records and toured and made records. I didn’t want to be stuck being in a professional band and not having a life.”
Not that he has exactly been a homebody since the days chronicled in the film. He went to Sun dance to promote this movie and another, The Comedy, in which he acts. He went to London to work on the Shut Up sound mix. He has myriad projects in some state of development, including a boutique in Brooklyn and a disco-themed exhibit at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, scheduled to open in fall of 2013. “I don’t know quite what my role is,” Murphy admits. He adds dryly, “I can’t compare it to my previous curatorial work.”
In Shut Up’s morning after, Murphy notes that he feels “disturbingly normal”— he hasn’t had time to process. And now that he has had a year?
“Nothing is out of whack from my experience of being in LCD Sound system,” Murphy says. “Yet, when I go make a record that’s not an LCD Sound system record, that’s gonna be weird.”
Shut Up and Play the Hits
Opens July 18 for one night at various theaters and on July 27 at the IFC Center
30 Beats
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEXIS LLOYD ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS OPENS JULY 20, VILLAGE EAST
It is a safe bet that 30 Beats, which was filmed in the summer of 2009 and boasts a distinctly mid-’90s “funky, sex-positive” vibe, is seeing a release because of the elevated profile of Paz de la Huerta, one of the film’s ensemble cast, who has achieved a measure of stardom on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Even more certain is the reason it was shelved in the first place: It is absolutely terrible. Set in New York City during sweltering summertime, 30 Beats is structured around a roundelay of sexual liaisons. A couple meets and parts, one is followed to his or her next encounter, after which the new partner is followed to his or her own next encounter, and so on. The inspiration is La Ronde, a fin de siècle play by the Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler; it was previously filmed in 1950 by Max Ophüls, while Schnitzler’s work also provided the basis for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. What was for Schnitzler an opportunity to explore the hypocritical sexual mores of his Vienna, with lovers cutting across boundaries of class, is for writer-director Alexis Lloyd an opportunity to string together a series of unfunny skits centered on inconsequential sex, starring de la Huerta, an extremely foggy Jennifer Tilly, Lee Pace, and dozens of others who thought their résumés were safe. NICK PINKERTON
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
DIRECTED BY TAKASHI MIIKE TRIBECA FILM OPENS JULY 20, IFC CENTER
The crap-and-gore, genre-mincing Tasmanian devil of Asian pulp psychosis Takashi Miike we’ve come to know and, well, kinda semilove since 1999’s Audition seems now to have finished evolving into a tasteful, even resonant art house master. It has only taken him 50 movies or so. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is more than just another bid for respectability, like 13 Assassins—it may well be Miike’s best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology. Readapting Yasuhiko Takiguchi’s novel (Masaki Kobayashi had an international hit with it in 1962), Miike takes on the portentous shogunate territory of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa with authority; architecture dictates composition, and iconography speaks for itself. In a feudal lord’s palace, news comes from the gate that an unemployed samurai wishes to perform seppuku in the estate courtyard. “Another one,” the head honcho (Kôji Yakusho) grumbles, already apparently weary of “suicide bluffs.” The would-be gut-cutter (Ebizô Ichikawa) has hidden agendas, not the least of which is to confront the heartless neocon samurai ethos head-on. Miike’s movie is filthy with moments of grace, from the rain that slowly turns to snowfall as bad news looms to the climactic, torrential one-against-many anti-battle. Japan’s own fifth-gear Tarantino engine, Miike salutes golden-age Japanese cinema the right way—by respecting its heart and celebrating its iconic dazzle. In fact, his detour away from the Hyperactive gore and genre excess that made him famous, by way of this deep-dish morality tale, feels positively heroic. MICHAEL ATKINSON
Wagner’s Dream
DIRECTED BY SUSAN FROEMKE SUSAN FROEMKE PRODUCTIONS OPENS JULY 19, WALTER READE THEATER
Exhaustive to the point of being occasionally exhausting, Wagner’s Dream charts the audacious efforts of opera director Robert Lepage to stage Wagner’s four-part Ring cycle—the medium’s most daunting challenge and one even Wagner himself had never satisfactorily pulled off—at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2011–12. Susan Froemke’s documentary details the four-year process of putting together this show, which is defined by the immense creative and logistical risks of employing a complicated multi-plank set (replete with video projections) that severely diverges from more conventional, literal past productions. Expertly assembled by editor Bob Eisenhardt, Froemke’s footage covers every aspect of the lead-up to and debut of the opera, a process that requires not only massive planning but also last-second problem solving when the inevitable technical glitches, illnesses, and performer anxieties threaten everything. Froemke’s comprehensive backstage pass of a film has run out of drama. Nonetheless, it remains a rousing portrait of creative renewal and, specifically, the way in which—by attempting something daring and new in the face of an opera culture deeply invested in tradition—Lepage proves that classic art can survive and flourish in a marriage with modern technology and imagination. NICK SCHAGER
The Well-Digger’s Daughter
DIRECTED BY DANIEL AUTEUIL KINO LORBER OPENS JULY 20, QUAD CINEMA
In one of The Well-Digger’s Daughter’s most telling scenes, 18-year-old Patricia (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) spends several minutes on the verge of tears as she defends her honor to a would-be inamorata (Nicolas Duvauchelle) whose lewd advances she has just spurned. An appropriate response, to be sure, but one that plays out in a way that’s too stately and reserved to get under either character’s skin—a problem the film runs into time and again. In one of many acts of restraint, co-writer/director Daniel Auteuil elides the offending act itself and leaves it to us to imagine the particulars. Here and elsewhere, though, this tale of an unwed mother doesn’t give us much reason to assume that what we don’t see is much more scandalous than what we do. There’s some striking imagery—late-afternoon sunlight peeking through wheat stalks, a quiet stream running through the French countryside, bright interiors—and an airy, evocative score courtesy of Alexandre Desplat, but the characters’ dealings with one another (whether romantic, businesslike, or otherwise) are too routine to live up to the formal elements encasing them. Stirrings of dignified outrage via the eponymous well-digger eventually go a long way toward energizing the film, which improves markedly once it shifts its focus from the World War I–era milieu toward how quickly a naive young girl can turn into a fallen woman and the ways in which that fallout affects her father, her family, and apparently most importantly, her name. MICHAEL NORDINE
Billed as director Nolan’s final contribution to the franchise he revived with 2005’s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises opens eight years after the events of 2008’s The Dark Knight, eight years after the death of Harvey Dent, a/k/a Two- Face, still honored as a hero through the print-the-legend contrivance of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman, returning), and eight years after the villainized, fugitive Caped Crusader was last sighted in Gotham City, which has settled into a fragile peace. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has hung up his Batman suit and become a Howard Hughes–like recluse, only lured into the world again by a couple of women: a socialite investor in Wayne Enterprises’ clean-energy programs, Miranda (Marion Cotillard), and a cat burglar who penetrates his sanctuary, Selina (Anne Hathaway, repeatedly proving the “No-Fun” Nolans’ ability to make comicrelief one-liners fall flat amid their sepulchral, master-builder cinema.)
The overarching theme of the Batman films is the moral problem of vigilantism, as played out by name-tagged figures of virtue and vice. “The idea was to be a symbol,” Wayne says of his anonymous alter ego in The Dark Knight Rises—and so this most solemn of superhero franchises duly marches ahead with the process of ominous signification, having established itself among those who accept its self-regard at face value as not just another blockbuster but the multiplex State of the Nation for the 21st century. If The Dark Knight openly invited interpretation as the War on Terror Batman, then The Dark Knight Rises, whose creators obviously scented the class discontent in the air, is the Occupy Wall Street installment. “You think all this can last?” down-and-out survivor Selina says upon meeting Wayne at a fancy-dress masquerade ball. “There’s a storm coming.”
That storm breaks in the form of the living incarnation of Have-Not rancor, Bane, played by the hulking Tom Hardy, face indistinguishable behind the ventilator apparatus clamped over his mouth.
The visage will remind many of the unmasked Vader, though his fruity, magniloquent purr is closer to Vincent Price talking through a window fan.
Bane was “born and raised in hell on earth”—a pit prison on the other side of the world. In order to punch in Bane’s weight class, the softened, fresh out- of-retirement Wayne will first have to join the 99 Percent, eventually enrolling in the same third-world school of hard knocks that spawned his opponent. Training in dismal, prehistoric conditions trims away the fat of techie decadence and reinvigorates Wayne’s sense of the ethical obligation of privilege. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Wayne did a similar piece of slumming in Batman Begins. It is also the theme of Rocky IV.
As in The Dark Knight’s conflict between Wayne and the Joker, Order versus Anarchy, the face-off between Wayne and Bane is a dialectical battle between personified concepts. Wayne is Gotham City’s philanthropic chaperone; his company develops technologies with great potential for help and harm, which Wayne then keeps away from a polis that he protects without trusting. Bane is, in posture at least, a radical revolutionist, setting himself up as the champion of the disenfranchised, though it is difficult to imagine who would be seduced by his tactics or his plan “to return control of the city to the people,” followed by the neutralization of law and order and the foundation of a Gotham Commune.
For the Nolans, it is characters who voice seemingly utopian goals such as “restoring balance to the world” of whom the most is to be feared. And while The Dark Knight’s climax hinged on finding faith in the common man’s decency, upon witnessing the goings-on in Occupied Gotham, it is impossible to imagine this revolution accomplishing anything decent— the citizen’s tribunal kangaroo court, a fantastic production design flourish by Nathan Crowley, is Reign of Terror by way of Kafka, while a parody of the Bastille is played out before Blackgate Penitentiary. The Dark Knight Rises is not a reactionary movie outright—it would be more respectable if it were—but only on a villainous technicality. The perpetrators of the city-upending mutiny have no interest in a new order, only in seeing Gotham purged in blood with a rote ticking time bomb, an apocalypse that precludes the possibility of revolution either failing or succeeding on its own terms.
The Dark Knight Rises is a shallow repository of ideas, but as a work of sheer sensation, it has something to recommend. At two hours and 45 minutes, it’s no fleeter of foot than its plodding predecessors, but Nolan has continued his experimentation with the IMAX format, and the sheer mass of what he has constructed inspires a dull awe—it is impossible not to be cowed by a film that’s five stories tall while Hans Zimmer’s stampeding orchestra tramples you. As throughout the Batman films, Nolan is at his best symphonizing second-unit footage, illustrating how the shock waves of an assault resound across the infrastructure of an entire city, a coordinated attack on Gotham’s pressure points being a particular highlight here. (The city is composed of bits of Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, with New York City for establishing shots, including a half-complete new WTC tower available for suggestive effect.) The history of Batman’s burden is, however, increasingly cumbersome, and it’s Mr. Bane who finally makes the pertinent point: “Gotham is beyond saving and must be allowed to die.”
The Nouveau Crash
In The Queen of Versailles, time-share royalty’s time might be up
KARINA LONGWORTH
‘I don’t want to give you lessons in self-denial and social responsibility,” an art dealer tells her billionaire boy client in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, by way of refusing to entertain his demand to buy the Rothko Chapel. “Because I don’t believe for a second you’re as crude as you sound.” This scene occurs in David Cronenberg’s soon-to-be-released movie, but the question of whether “self-denial” is a “social responsibility”—particularly when it comes to rich so nouveau it doesn’t realize its appetites strike others as crude—is more vividly brought to life in Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary, The Queen of Versailles.
The titular royal is Jackie Siegel, a fortyish IBM engineer turned model turned trophy wife to seventyish time-share mogul David Siegel. Jackie is a shopping addict who admits that she wouldn’t be raising eight kids (seven natural, one “inherited”) if she couldn’t afford a staff of nannies. As the film begins, the Siegel clan’s 26,000-square-foot Florida mansion teems with bodies (kids, maids, dogs) and accumulated detritus. Rather than cut back or clean house, the Siegels are halfway through construction on a new “house,” a complex the size of Fantasyland in the form of a replica of Versailles—modified, natch, to include elements of Vegas’s Paris hotel.
And then comes the crash. The Siegel fortune comes from Westgate Resorts, whose salesmen are indoctrinated in the nobility of talking working-class Americans into buying vacation time-shares they probably can’t afford. But after the 2008 market collapse, the customer base no longer has access to quick and easy credit. Westgate is soon unable to pay outstanding costs on its new flagship property in Las Vegas, the Siegels have to halt construction on Versailles, and Jackie and her kids must begrudgingly adopt a more conservative lifestyle. The matriarch is quick to play the victim. “The banks made us do it,” Jackie claims after Westgate lays off 6,000 workers. “I thought that rescue money was supposed to be passed on to the common people,” she says of the bailout. “Or you know, us.”
I’ve seen The Queen of Versailles twice, and both times the audience laughed frequently at the Siegel family’s sheer tackiness: their life-size oil paintings of themselves, the piles of expensive garbage stacked throughout the family manse, the pet poop drying on what seems like every carpet, the limo Jackie takes to McDonald’s. Schadenfreude is fair play, I guess, but bad taste and questionable hygiene are not crimes—or really even all that LOL-worthy. Putting aside David’s admission that he “got George W. elected president, personally” through means that “may not necessarily have been legal,” the Siegels’ real offense is their complete obliviousness to the way they’re perceived or to the fact that many find how they’ve made or spent their fortune offensive to begin with. It simply never occurred to them that just because they could build the biggest private home in the United States doesn’t mean they should.
Eventually, it emerges that David can either turn over the Vegas Westgate to the bank and lose the $400 million he has already invested while keeping the rest of his empire and all of his personal assets, or he can delay, potentially allowing the property to fall into bankruptcy, and risk losing everything. He picks the latter, and the implication is that there might be something righteous to his stubborn refusal to kowtow. Fueling Versailles is a nagging, unresolved tension between what seems like the filmmaker’s sympathetic portrayal of David’s unwillingness to compromise as an act of libertarian boldness—in the land of the free (market), who has the right to police anyone else’s asset management or consumption?—and the damning evidence Greenfield presents of the family’s ugly gluttony.
Greenfield, a photographer who inserts stills of luridly colorful tableaux into her video vérité, followed the Siegel family for several years, though the film’s time frame is fuzzy, and she has admitted that material presented in Versailles as though it occurred pre-crash was actually shot later. The film hardly feels hastily pasted together: Greenfield filmed long enough to document physical changes in her subjects. For one thing, the oldest biological Siegel kid ages on camera from a chubby, awkward preteen to a coltish teenager, a queenbee type whose notable poise is only belied by the constellations of acne visible in close-up. It’s a powerful visual metaphor for maturity as a process: As conscious as we’ve all become of economic reality in recent years, we have a long way to go.
How far have the Siegels come? Versailles’s conclusion on that matter is complicated by a defamation lawsuit David Siegel filed in concurrence with the Sun dance premiere and updated recently to implicate distributor Magnolia Pictures. David, whose filing calls the documentary “a staged theatrical production, albeit using nonprofessionals in the starring roles (as themselves),” insists the film’s portrayal of his fall from glory is exaggerated and inaccurate. He has since managed to reverse Westgate’s fortunes. Given that he’s apparently back to predatory business as usual, perhaps he’s most regretful of the contrite stance he seems to take in the film’s final moments, in which he drops catchphrases (“We need to live within our means”) suggesting he has learned the error of his hyper- capitalist ways. But Siegel needn’t worry—in the context of the film, this sudden turnaround reads at worst as total bullshit and at best as too little, too late.
Sound/Vision
The ranging gaze of Deborah Stratman’s experimental films
Probing the elusive terrain where technology, disruptive phenomena, and the contradictory human impulses for order and chaos meet (and often collide), the films of audiovisual poet/essayist Deborah Stratman set off alarms both literal and figurative. Curated into three thematically distinct programs, “Forces and Gazes” highlights the artist’s signature juxtapositions of everyday banality with haunting, evocative images and sounds. In the first batch, quick, careful cutting gives a nondescript upstate New York bungalow metaphysical gravity in The Magician’s House (2007), while its centerpiece, From Hetty to Nancy (1997), achieves an eerie whimsy. Blasé, whinging voice over courtesy of the titular English tourist’s letters home from Iceland drones over shots of the island’s harsh landscape, as its hearty inhabitants nonchalantly go about their business, and periodic first-person intertitle crawls detail disasters far worse than the narrator’s leaky tent.
Closer to home but no less ominous, the second program includes a historical audit of comet fear that plays like Armageddon reinterpreted as historical fever dream (. . . These Blazeing Starrs!, 2011) and the harrowing, longer-form showstopper In Order Not to Be Here (2002). This disquisition on American surveillance—and the illusion of control it fosters— is book ended by infrared chase footage, with the climactic chunk orchestrated by Stratman herself. It leaves little doubt that the sci-fi dystopias cooked up over the past couple of centuries have unequivocally come to pass and, incredibly, has a happy ending.
The final program delves more fully into the politics of place and features a loving ode to Chicago’s South Side (Shrimp Chicken Fish, 2010), as well as the series’ weakest (Energy Country, 2003) and strongest (Kuyenda N’kubvina, 2010) entries.
Cumulatively, “Forces and Gazes” reveals Stratman’s vision as a deceptively complex, hyper-distilled alchemy of rigor and spontaneity. The pointedly repetitious Village, Silenced (2011) repurposes scenes from a 1943 reenactment of a Nazi invasion as a précis of oppression, while the moving and beautifully edited Kuyenda provides (among other things) an object lesson in how popular culture transcends social boundaries even as it’s inevitably defanged as the amount of money involved piles up. Shot in a relatively straightforward style in destitute Malawi, Kuyenda is as close as Stratman gets to documentary, and it puts most docs to shame. This uncanny versatility is bolstered by a mastery of sonic punctuation suitable for mainstream horror (albeit with a formal control that genre typically lacks), resulting in a rapturously cinematic body of work that coaxes us into seeing—and hearing— the familiar in invigorating, uncomfortable new ways.
This Has Happened
James Murphy and a new concert doc reflect on the end of LCD Sound system
When we started the band, suddenly we were, like, New York famous. We could get into anyplace, but you know—I was never recognized on a plane.”
James Murphy, former frontman of self reflexive post-punk dance band LCD Sound system, has called to talk about Shut Up and Play the Hits, a new film documenting LCD’s sold-out April 2011 farewell concert at Madison Square Garden. He’s attempting to explain why he chose to call it quits on a band that, 10 years after the landmark first single “Losing My Edge,” was indisputably at the peak of its success. In addition to the predictable ubiquity in Silver Lake and Williamsburg, LCD’s third and final full-length, This Is Happening, had debuted in the overall Billboard Top 10 and displaced Lady Gaga at the top of the dance chart. Anna Kendrick starred in one video; Spike Jonze directed another. The higher profile was part of the problem.
“I felt the band getting bigger, but I was always like, well, it doesn’t matter when I can come back to New York, where nobody gives a shit. And then I came back to New York, and people started giving more of a shit, so I was at the beginning of me not wanting, um . . .”
Murphy, chatting while en route to his home in Brooklyn, interrupts himself. “I’m looking out of my car, up at Terry Richardson having an animated conversation through a window,” he says. “He’s flailing his arms a lot. He’s looking at me.” The legendarily sleazy photographer, Murphy suggests, is the epitome of “New York famous”—a household name in enough households to improve his standard of living without impinging on his actual life. “I wasn’t that interested in actual famous-people fame, you know what I mean?”
Murphy has never been a typical rock star, and Shut Up is by no means a conventional rock doc. Co-directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace condense the four-hour, 29-song MSG show into a few full performances of “hits” like “North American Scum,” “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” and “I Can Change,” interwoven with excerpts from an interview with Murphy conducted a week before the show by pop-culture pundit Chuck Klosterman and vérité footage of Murphy shot the morning after MSG, tracing his first day as a 41-year-old rock-and-roll “retiree.” Moments of onstage transcendence are sandwiched between Murphy’s preshow contemplations of pretension and rock-star mythology and postshow evidence of life going on at its most mundane. Talking to Klosterman, Murphy marvels that even the most superhuman pop star “is just a dude. He has to check his e-mail.” The morning after his triumphant goodbye show, Murphy still has to get out of bed to walk the dog.
“We were very deliberate about the day after being the perspective from which we view the story,” Southern says. “You have this huge show at this iconic venue, and it’s a kind of euphoric event. And the best position to look at some of the reasons why you would end the band and what that would feel like the day after— the sobriety of the next morning and the fact that nothing really happens.”
“I wanted it to be about what it’s like when you make things,” Murphy says. “The band, the movie—everything in some way is always about what it feels like to make something, the actualities. Not the myth of being a maker.”
Lovelace and Southern’s approach allows them to expose the psyche of a man walking away from fame while contextualizing how that move fits into Murphy’s ongoing personal conflict between his interest in highbrow and/or obscure art, music, and literature and his compulsion to make music that makes people want to dance. The coexistence of serious ideas and genuine emotion in party songs with often hilarious lyrics— that’s LCD Sound system in a nutshell.
Lovelace and Southern use the phrase “end of an era” to describe the significance of LCD’s demise, which Murphy rejects—“I can’t pinpoint what the era is.” Whatever it is, Murphy seems to have been pointing to the end all along. In a reflection of the times that spawned it, LCD earned its stripes in hipster culture in part by brilliantly and affectionately skewering that culture through songs like “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” and “Losing My Edge.” In Shut Up, Klosterman begins to suggest that “Edge,” a spoken-word dance track in the voice of an aging scenester, is essentially a novelty song. “That song’s serious as a heart attack,” Murphy argues, likening the experiences that inspired it to “a sad, hipster DJ Revolutionary Road.”
“Audiences had changed, the way people consume music had changed, and I think James was kind of one of the first people to catch on to that,” Southern says. “‘Losing My Edge’ is the song I think they’ll be remembered for. I think it must be a strange thing to have done that in your first record. That’s a hard one to follow up.”
Eleven years after first forecasting his own obsolescence, those changes in cultural consumption are still on Murphy’s mind. Record stores, he says, were replaced with online affinity groups amounting to “People Who Agree With Me dot com. A record store, you go in, and you’re faced with, like, the gauntlet. There [were] defining queries that you put yourself through, which are missing now. Now you just get told you’re awesome all the time, and if someone tells you you’re not awesome, you just unfriend them.”
In the film and in conversation, Murphy is ever aware of his comparatively advanced age. At its most basic level, his rejection of the rock-and-roll lifestyle is a question of self-preservation. Every time he tours, Murphy says in the film, he returns with markedly more gray hair. “That’s the visible sign,” he says. “What’s going on inside? I don’t want to, like, die.” He pauses a beat, then says more firmly, “I don’t want to die!”
“Health is a big reason [to end LCD],” Murphy says today. “Life is a big reason. I didn’t live a normal life for a long time. I toured and made records and toured and made records. I didn’t want to be stuck being in a professional band and not having a life.”
Not that he has exactly been a homebody since the days chronicled in the film. He went to Sun dance to promote this movie and another, The Comedy, in which he acts. He went to London to work on the Shut Up sound mix. He has myriad projects in some state of development, including a boutique in Brooklyn and a disco-themed exhibit at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, scheduled to open in fall of 2013. “I don’t know quite what my role is,” Murphy admits. He adds dryly, “I can’t compare it to my previous curatorial work.”
In Shut Up’s morning after, Murphy notes that he feels “disturbingly normal”— he hasn’t had time to process. And now that he has had a year?
“Nothing is out of whack from my experience of being in LCD Sound system,” Murphy says. “Yet, when I go make a record that’s not an LCD Sound system record, that’s gonna be weird.”
Shut Up and Play the Hits
Opens July 18 for one night at various theaters and on July 27 at the IFC Center
30 Beats
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEXIS LLOYD ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS OPENS JULY 20, VILLAGE EAST
It is a safe bet that 30 Beats, which was filmed in the summer of 2009 and boasts a distinctly mid-’90s “funky, sex-positive” vibe, is seeing a release because of the elevated profile of Paz de la Huerta, one of the film’s ensemble cast, who has achieved a measure of stardom on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Even more certain is the reason it was shelved in the first place: It is absolutely terrible. Set in New York City during sweltering summertime, 30 Beats is structured around a roundelay of sexual liaisons. A couple meets and parts, one is followed to his or her next encounter, after which the new partner is followed to his or her own next encounter, and so on. The inspiration is La Ronde, a fin de siècle play by the Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler; it was previously filmed in 1950 by Max Ophüls, while Schnitzler’s work also provided the basis for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. What was for Schnitzler an opportunity to explore the hypocritical sexual mores of his Vienna, with lovers cutting across boundaries of class, is for writer-director Alexis Lloyd an opportunity to string together a series of unfunny skits centered on inconsequential sex, starring de la Huerta, an extremely foggy Jennifer Tilly, Lee Pace, and dozens of others who thought their résumés were safe. NICK PINKERTON
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
DIRECTED BY TAKASHI MIIKE TRIBECA FILM OPENS JULY 20, IFC CENTER
The crap-and-gore, genre-mincing Tasmanian devil of Asian pulp psychosis Takashi Miike we’ve come to know and, well, kinda semilove since 1999’s Audition seems now to have finished evolving into a tasteful, even resonant art house master. It has only taken him 50 movies or so. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is more than just another bid for respectability, like 13 Assassins—it may well be Miike’s best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology. Readapting Yasuhiko Takiguchi’s novel (Masaki Kobayashi had an international hit with it in 1962), Miike takes on the portentous shogunate territory of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa with authority; architecture dictates composition, and iconography speaks for itself. In a feudal lord’s palace, news comes from the gate that an unemployed samurai wishes to perform seppuku in the estate courtyard. “Another one,” the head honcho (Kôji Yakusho) grumbles, already apparently weary of “suicide bluffs.” The would-be gut-cutter (Ebizô Ichikawa) has hidden agendas, not the least of which is to confront the heartless neocon samurai ethos head-on. Miike’s movie is filthy with moments of grace, from the rain that slowly turns to snowfall as bad news looms to the climactic, torrential one-against-many anti-battle. Japan’s own fifth-gear Tarantino engine, Miike salutes golden-age Japanese cinema the right way—by respecting its heart and celebrating its iconic dazzle. In fact, his detour away from the Hyperactive gore and genre excess that made him famous, by way of this deep-dish morality tale, feels positively heroic. MICHAEL ATKINSON
Wagner’s Dream
DIRECTED BY SUSAN FROEMKE SUSAN FROEMKE PRODUCTIONS OPENS JULY 19, WALTER READE THEATER
Exhaustive to the point of being occasionally exhausting, Wagner’s Dream charts the audacious efforts of opera director Robert Lepage to stage Wagner’s four-part Ring cycle—the medium’s most daunting challenge and one even Wagner himself had never satisfactorily pulled off—at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2011–12. Susan Froemke’s documentary details the four-year process of putting together this show, which is defined by the immense creative and logistical risks of employing a complicated multi-plank set (replete with video projections) that severely diverges from more conventional, literal past productions. Expertly assembled by editor Bob Eisenhardt, Froemke’s footage covers every aspect of the lead-up to and debut of the opera, a process that requires not only massive planning but also last-second problem solving when the inevitable technical glitches, illnesses, and performer anxieties threaten everything. Froemke’s comprehensive backstage pass of a film has run out of drama. Nonetheless, it remains a rousing portrait of creative renewal and, specifically, the way in which—by attempting something daring and new in the face of an opera culture deeply invested in tradition—Lepage proves that classic art can survive and flourish in a marriage with modern technology and imagination. NICK SCHAGER
The Well-Digger’s Daughter
DIRECTED BY DANIEL AUTEUIL KINO LORBER OPENS JULY 20, QUAD CINEMA
In one of The Well-Digger’s Daughter’s most telling scenes, 18-year-old Patricia (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) spends several minutes on the verge of tears as she defends her honor to a would-be inamorata (Nicolas Duvauchelle) whose lewd advances she has just spurned. An appropriate response, to be sure, but one that plays out in a way that’s too stately and reserved to get under either character’s skin—a problem the film runs into time and again. In one of many acts of restraint, co-writer/director Daniel Auteuil elides the offending act itself and leaves it to us to imagine the particulars. Here and elsewhere, though, this tale of an unwed mother doesn’t give us much reason to assume that what we don’t see is much more scandalous than what we do. There’s some striking imagery—late-afternoon sunlight peeking through wheat stalks, a quiet stream running through the French countryside, bright interiors—and an airy, evocative score courtesy of Alexandre Desplat, but the characters’ dealings with one another (whether romantic, businesslike, or otherwise) are too routine to live up to the formal elements encasing them. Stirrings of dignified outrage via the eponymous well-digger eventually go a long way toward energizing the film, which improves markedly once it shifts its focus from the World War I–era milieu toward how quickly a naive young girl can turn into a fallen woman and the ways in which that fallout affects her father, her family, and apparently most importantly, her name. MICHAEL NORDINE
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