The September Issue (2009) - starring Anna Wintour, directed by R.J. Cutler

(This always looked pretty compelling on the video store shelf but was always out when I would think to pick it up. The day it was in, it looked a little less compelling. I remembered, once I had it in my hand, that I had not had such luck with movies about fashion. But it still looked compelling enough.)

The September Issue is a documentary about the all-powerful and greatly feared editor of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour. Anna Wintour is credited with creating a “fashion bible” through Vogue, jump-starting the careers of young designers, centralizing the power of the fashion industry in a circle around her, striking fear into the hearts of subordinates, reigniting the fur industry, and ending grunge.

The movie covers the creation, which Anna Wintour oversees, of the 2007 September issue of Vogue – the bible part. Here, Anna Wintour is a woman who loathes small talk, is self-aware of the relation fashion has to the rest of the world, works incredibly hard, tries to not get mad when others don’t work as hard, uses words more than facial expressions to communicate, is incapable of following her grown child’s every move without adoring and irrepressible love in her eyes, reacts to things she dislikes with silence and reacts to things she likes with genuine praise. She is not primarily negative and she is not a trash-talker.

When I was watching this, I couldn’t remember if this is what our culture thinks a bitch is or if this is a very generous portrait of a woman and an industry.

Sure, you feel for the people who quiver in her uncomforting presence, but you also hope for a bit more integrity of character. If fashion really is an intersection between art and commerce, we think mostly of the commerce part in these moments. We also see that Anna Wintour does believe (or hopes) that fashion is meaningful and that art is involved. Her relief is obvious when people around her seem more preoccupied with the art than with winning her favour for obvious and easy reward. Her relief is most notable here in relation to Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director. The working relationship between these two women forms the poetic spine of the movie.

Anna Wintour’s immensity of character was the subject of another movie - fictionalized in The Devil Wears Prada, a movie based on a book of the same name that was written by one of her former assistants.

For The September Issue, the man allowed in to document the real Anna Wintour is named R.J. Cutler. R.J. Cutler’s production company is called “Actual Reality Pictures” (quite a tall claim in these early 21st century times, but anyway). Based on the production company’s name, and the other projects listed on their website, it appears as though R.J. Cutler is a man who thinks that reality TV is not real and that he is the man who will make it real. Though this just means his is a old-school documentary filmmaker whose weakness will be in forgetting his own subjectivity and impact on his subject (or his subject’s impact on him).

All in all, not a bad fit for a real person who was referred to fictionally as “The Devil” right there in the title of a Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep. How much worse could it be in an old-school documentary? Not worse, though also not great. And clearly Anna Wintour is a subject worthy of something monumental.

If I was Anna Wintour, I too might have invited R.J. Cutler of “Actual Reality Pictures” to take my picture after I was fictionalized as “The Devil”. Had “The Devil” not happened, maybe someone from the production company “Not So Much Actual Reality But Still Kind Of Reality and Killer for Deeper Truth About Humans” would have gained access and made a complicated mountain out of this mountain of a subject. There is still time.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) – written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

(I didn’t know too much about “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” but I liked the title and I had half-noticed that the word “art” kept being used in relation to it. Somehow the “art” was not mentioned in either a flattering or negative way, just a descriptive way. “Art” can mean a lot of things, like that the characters will have a lot of feelings or that it will be either pretty unpleasant or extremely pleasant to watch or that the movie will be going after something difficult to catch. Very quickly into “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”, it was clear that the “art” in this case related to the words “intuitive” and “unusual” - and also maybe “going after something difficult to catch.”)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is made up of separate stories that happen in various times and places. They are connected literally and/or metaphorically by the title Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Servants carry a princess through the jungle. It looks pretty unpleasant to carry a princess through the jungle. But also, it looks maybe a little bit erotic. The princess has a face darkened with a scar or birthmark. The party comes to rest at the base of waterfall. There, the princess tries to convince herself that intimacy with one of her servants is love. It doesn’t work. She sends the servant away and collapses alone by the water’s edge. She cries and voices out-loud her longing for pure and white skin and also for true love. At this point of despair a catfish begins to talk to her from the surface of the water. “Are you a ghost?” she asks the catfish. “No, I am a catfish”, the catfish says. She eventually enters the water with abandon and has sex with the catfish. Something is being promised to her but we are not sure what it is.

There is a big bull tied to a tree. We stay with the bull for a while in the half-dark. We start to relate to him like any character in a movie. He makes a noise and we sort of know what it means. It seems kind of awful for such a big creature to be tied, by the neck, to a tree in the middle of a field. But maybe it’s ok. In a quick moment he yanks his rope free and lightly runs his giant body to the outskirts of the jungle and then stops there for a bit. Eventually, a man finds him. The man gently leads the bull back towards the field.

Uncle Boonmee has a farm where he grows tamarind and sweet and sour honey. Uncle Boonmee’s kidneys are failing and he thinks he will die in two days. He wonders if it’s because of his karma. “I was bad to the communists”, he says during his dialysis treatment. On the porch, he eats dinner with his sister-in-law and her friend when it is dark outside.

At the dinner table, the ghost of his long-dead wife appears. His ghost-wife looks like a normal wife, but younger. Then a monkey-ghost, the transformed body of his long-lost son, comes to sit down. The monkey-ghost looks amazing. He explains that he was trying to capture something with his camera, on the outskirts of the jungle, when he mated with a monkey-ghost and became a monkey-ghost himself. He explains that now the creatures and ghosts can sense Uncle Boonmee’s illness and are coming closer.

They all sit together at the table quietly. There is very little small talk. The whole movie feels like this, as though every living thing is cautiously acting and speaking as simply as possible in order to make room for some understanding.

Eventually, the wife-ghost and the monkey-ghost are shown photo albums of the years they have missed.

Later on, we are shown still photos too. The photos we see were taken in a field during the day: of a monkey-man being led out of the jungle with a rope tied around his neck by a soldier in camouflage. These photos are the strange cousins of horrific photos we are familiar with from history, but here, in this movie, we see and think about the photos in a different way. Which is good because they are difficult to understand in a logical way.

There is another photo of soldiers, laughing and smiling – it seems like something bad is happening to the monkey-man. Then there is a last photo of the soldiers and the monkey-man posing together, the rope still tied around his neck, everyone smiling. Maybe it is OK we think, but probably it really isn’t.

Later, back in real life at Uncle Boonmee's farm, Uncle Boonmee, his ghost-wife, his sister-in-law and her friend start on a journey away from the farm and into a field and down into the jungle. The ghost-wife is leading. Uncle Boonmee is trying to make the best sense he can out of his good and bad deeds before he dies. This journey is the best he can do now. They go deeper and enter a cave that looks like the frozen stalactites of centuries-old falling water. They travel deep down into the cave, Uncle Boonmee moving slowly. At the very bottom, they find a tiny pool of albino catfish. This is where Uncle Boonmee lies down.

The movie is not an exploration of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wild ideas. It is him trying wildly to make sense of the best and worst of life’s absurdities by expanding and examining them with intuitive logic.

If you are adept at intuitive logic (and with navigating the trauma that was the 20th century) his film will be as clear and seductive as early dusk. It will be as practical and as heartbreaking as any story about injustice, hope and despair could possibly be. Funny too. And beautiful.

The Social Network (2010) - based on a book by Ben Mezrich, screenplay by Aaron Sorkin & directed by David Fincher

(I went to this at a big movie house with Misha Glouberman and Jon Davies. I was pretty excited to see it. After the screening, we realized our friend Carl Wilson was sitting behind us. We all sat around talking as the credits rolled. Jon was surprised at how the movie didn’t stupidly go on and on explaining what Facebook is - like you often see in some movies about blogs or in that 1998 Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan vehicle that explains what email is. One of us suggested that maybe it was easier with Facebook to find the actual number of those in the know so that they could count the potential audience and see that they didn’t have to worry about it so much.)

The Social Network falls into one of my favourite genres: The nearly-present-just-recently-past historical drama - like Oliver Stone’s W. (about George W. Bush while he was still in office) or Stephen Frears’ The Queen (about The Queen). One of the good side effects of telling a story still so tied to the present is that it becomes less plausible to make the main protagonist a hero or a god with all the banal evidence still in plain view. But in any case, seeing the more life-size protagonists and daily banalities blown up as big as cinema screen is just as surreal as watching a bunch of gods portrayed in a realistic setting. We are not missing the “awe” factor. The Queen in The Queen is freakishly life-size while the story, both weirder and more familiar than normal, remains a healthy contender for a new kind of epicness.

There’s always a bit of complaining when turning a section of life into a bio-pic. Primarily the complaints involve accusations that elements of the truth were sacrificed for the romance of the story, but it’s not just Hollywood that turns things into big stories – our brains do it all the time too, even with our own boring lives. Personal media framing websites like Facebook and Youtube help to speed this up. Luckily, most of us know better than to completely trust the history books or our own memories. Now we just have to learn how not to always trust our own eyes.

The Social Network is framed by a typical boy-losses-girl-then-says-internally-I’ll-show-you!-then-becomes-important-though-never-forgets-the-girl kind of story. The boy is a Harvard undergrad, Mark Zuckerberg. He is the founder of Facebook. Most of the movie is set at Harvard. Harvard looks more excitingly foreboding than Hollywood here with all of its old-school and discreet power. The girl goes to a different university and we can’t quite remember her name. Because the movie is framed this way, the narrative tension and resolution rests on this simple arc and not on the other details of the complicated Facebook founding story. This is good news because it allows the Facebook story to be ever-complicated and truthfully unresolved while we still get the delicious full sandwich of a tidy story.

The untidy part is up for interpretation. There are the Winkevosses - handsome, gentlemanly identical twin brothers. They are Harvard elites who are only a touch sinister. They seem to represent not only each other, but many of their kind that we can't see. They believe that they have gotten their idea of a Harvard-only networking site swiped from under their noses by Mark Zuckerberg. They probably have, but it's hard to worry about them too much. Some of us are not accustomed to this much privilege and it seems more wondrous and strange than what they think they got cheated out of.

After Mark Zuckerberg gets Facebook up and running, we're happy for him when he becomes friends with Sean Parker (founder of Napster). We imagine that it feels great to find a colleague who is just as obsessed by the same kind of creation as he is. We imagine that they have a lot to talk about. In this movie, this is when Mark Zuckerberg looks happiest, though the creators seem to credit the excitement to cheap glamour more than creative interest.

It is hard not to take pleasure here in a representation of the older generation's frequent blindness over Internet matters, as though the kids are talking about a pretend world that doesn't really matter. The freedom of not being seen feels thrilling here.

And it’s hard to get too upset with Mark Zuckerberg when he royally and legally cheats his best friend/ business partner, the sweetheart Eduardo Saverin, out of his fair share of the business. We’re not sure if this was one more move on top of a series of fights between the two friends, or if it was just a callous business decision. But we have known since the beginning of the movie that Mark Zuckerberg has always been a bit of a jerk, even when he was just a best friend that was a nobody. This last move should not have been too much of a surprise to Eduardo Saverin.

We feel for anyone who has been unpleasantly suprised by a friend even when they shouldn't have been surprised (Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg included). It happens to the best of us - especially when we are young and patient and become friends with people who might not be such a good fit. Nevertheless, we have some optimism that these two may re-friend each other some day (in the imagined post-movie movie-life of this particular movie).