You Should Know
The decision to juxtapose the forgettable show tune “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” with images of galaxies, planets, a dilapidated Earth surrounded by defunct satellites, then a small robot working to clean up the dusty, trash-covered surface, this was the boldest artistic decision of the year across all films, and the most successful. Much has already been said about Wall-E’s opening act, but let’s for a second just focus on the movie’s first nine or so minutes. In this span, we learn exactly what has happened to the Earth in the intervening centuries between our time and the film’s. Thomas Newman’s eerie score, which fades in and out against the Hello, Dolly! track, works in conjunction with the hauntingly photorealistic images of a dystopic Earth. Holographic billboards, activated by Wall-E’s movement, provide, in addition to some biting satire (“Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space!”), just the right amount of exposition. Then there’s Wall-E. We watch him working, compacting large piles of garbage into neat little cubes, before heading back to his trailer for the night, his cockroach friend along for the ride. In his trailer, Wall-E adds the day’s finds (a garbage can lid, spork, and Zippo lighter) to his large collection of old Earth relics while an old VHS of Hello, Dolly! plays in the background. As he is about to close the trailer-hatch and retire for the night, he looks up at the sky as the thick smog parts briefly. Just for an instant Wall-E sees the stars, and we see them reflect on his lens-eyes. He clicks on his built-in stereo, and together we all hear “It Only Takes a Moment.”
This is film at its most sublime. No film released in 2008 comes close to matching the levels of artistry and storytelling economy Wall-E reaches in its opening minutes, let alone the entire film. How Wall-E sustains itself for almost eighty more minutes after such a magical opening is a testament to Andrew Stanton’s abilities as a writer and director. Stanton infuses his two main robot characters with remarkable levels of depth. With the film’s wonderful title character and all of his wonderful idiosyncrasies, it’s easy to miss the range of emotions Eve, Wall-E’s love interest, negotiates throughout the film. Her transition from the single-minded, irritated robot that blasts anything in sight to the heart-stricken character that races to replace Wall-E’s broken parts is a major accomplishment (her urgently blasting a hole in the ceiling of Wall-E’s trailer so he can absorb the solar energy that is his life force is the kind of character-based narrative symmetry rarely seen in movies). Through this intense focus on character and the love story between Wall-E and Eve, Stanton’s black humor and thematic explorations of eco-consumerism become not preachy, overbearing or heavy-handed but, rather, thought-provoking.
By employing and empowering artists like Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird, it’s easy to understand how Pixar Animation Studios continues to produce superb films like Wall-E and Ratatouille (which I think are the two best American films of the first decade of this new century). Here’s looking forward to the studio’s next film, Up, due out this coming summer!
Two thousand eight offered some wonderful performances, some expected, some seemingly out of nowhere. Heath Ledger’s incarnation of the Joker in The Dark Knight and Mickey Rourke’s turn as Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler hit this point home. Ledger’s performance was already getting heavy buzz before the actor’s untimely death raised expectations astronomically. To actually see Ledger’s performance exceed these expectations was a testament to his remarkable abilities as an actor. His performance also helped erase memories of Cesar Romero’s and Jack Nicholson’s interpretations of the character. I’ve always loved the Joker that exists the Batman graphic novels and Bruce Timm’s animated series—sinister, intelligent, and capital-D Dark, not flamboyant, giggly and clownish; it was extremely fulfilling to see a live-action actor play the character in this vein.
The success of The Wrestler, which represents a milestone for director Darren Aronofsky, mirrors (in a way) the careers of its stars. Marisa Tomei and Mickey Rourke had both fallen into near obscurity before Aronofsky cast them in the film that may define the careers of all three. Rourke is unflinching in a role that is extremely demanding, physically and emotionally. The pain the Ram endures in the ring, and Aronofsky viscerally presents this, is overmatched by the pain in Rourke’s eyes. Tomei too is captivating as a stripper who may be Ram’s love interest, Cassidy. Tomei plays Cassidy with warmth, honesty and the type wisdom that is believable of a working-class single mother. Kudos to Aronofsky for making such inspired casting choices and, hopefully, giving Rourke’s and Tomei’s careers the new chapters they deserve.
Three other performances stood out to me this year. Debra Winger and Anne Hathaway give Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married the type of staying power missing from most of this award season’s films. Hathaway’s turn as a recovering addict trying to make it through her sister’s wedding is no bullshit. And Winger’s comeback as Hathaway’s estranged mother—Winger is only on screen for ten or so minutes but brings a frustrating and harrowing level of emotion to the table. It’s good to see her on screen again. The final performance comes from one of the most obvious of choices, Meryl Streep, in one of the least obvious movies. Though she is ice-cold good in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, Streep’s best work this year came in the big screen adaptation of Mamma Mia!. Mamma Mia! is also my guilty pleasure of 2008. The film is absolutely effervescent. And Meryl Streep is the highlight. Her leading a group of about one hundred singing and dancing women on the coast of Greece during the “Dancing Queen” sequence is maybe my favorite movie-musical scene ever.
As the music is best left to the Captain, I’ll just mention my single favorite album of 2008: Everything is Borrowed by The Streets. Mike Skinner has finally made a worthy follow-up to 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free, which I still consider the last great hip-hop album (but that’s its own discussion). It’s fitting that Skinner recently announced that he plans one final album under his The Streets moniker. The Streets has always been a musical narration of Skinner’s own rise from the UK garage scene to worldwide phenomenon, and Everything is Borrowed makes it sound like Mike’s finally reaching a place of contentment. He’s left behind exploring the banalities twentysomething life and the neurotic meta-rumblings about staying sane while in the spotlight and turned more introspective. And this allows his first-rate storytelling skills, best showcased on A Grand Don’t Come For Free, to return to the forefront. The album’s title track and the memorable “On the Edge of a Cliff” are lyrically sharp while also displaying Skinner’s growth as a composer. A great record.
Lastly and most tragically, we lost one of the most powerful American voices in 2008. David Foster Wallace died on September 12, taking his own life. The extent of Wallace’s twenty-plus year bout with depression was not fully known until after his suicide. It was, to it mildly, arduous. And it adds a level of heroism to his writings, writings that are already the most interesting, most challenging and most intelligent of anything in contemporary American letters.
Often viewed as the heir apparent to Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, Wallace published his first novel, The Broom of the System, at the age of 24. Broom, a hysterical story about, amongst other things, a woman just out of college that is worried she is nothing more than a literary construction, originated as one of Wallace’s two senior theses he wrote while attending Amherst College. The second thesis, a very technical piece of analytical philosophy in which modal logic is used to refute Richard Taylor’s fatalism, speaks to Wallace’s near infinite intelligence. But it was the trappings of thought—self-conscious isolation, failures to truly communicate one’s own feelings to another person—that preoccupied all of Wallace’s fiction and non-fiction for the rest of his career.
Wallace is mostly known for his essays (his two collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster, contain too many great pieces to name here), and this is mainly because his fiction is so hard. Infinite Jest, his second and last novel, is one of those “classics” that many people reference but never read. Its length alone (1079 pages) puts most people off. This is unfortunate because its in Wallace’s fiction that he really shines. In all his work you see someone trying to fend off their own “default setting” and really communicate. Though most of his short stories and novels are sad, they are beautifully and movingly sad.
I got married this year, on September 12. I learned of Dave Wallace’s suicide while on my honeymoon. I spent the next month re-reading all of Wallace’s work. My wife asked me, “Is this your way of mourning or something?” We laughed and I answered with a maybe. But I think it’s true. Wallace is the only writer to ever impact me emotionally and inform my own growth as a writer. I bought Infinite Jest when I was a junior in high school, back in 1997. It took me a year to get through, but it was the first book that ever made me want to take writing seriously, in terms of style and substance. It showed me the true possibilities of both fiction and rhetoric in general. (To those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, my Captain Obvious pseudonym, “M. Pemulis,” derives from the character Michael Pemulis in Infinite Jest). So to think that Wallace decided to move on the same day that I decided to take the next step in my life added one of those awful coincidental moments one never wishes to have added to their lives. A.O. Scott of The New York Times called Dave Wallace “the greatest mind of his generation”; it’s tough to argue with that. He reached me on such a profound and personal level, and his loss will always make 2008 bittersweet. -- M. Pemulis
Listen:
MP3: The Streets - Everything Is Borrowed
MP3: The Streets - On The Edge Of A Cliff
