This weekend the New York Times reported on the controversy surrounding Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris's new documentary about the Abu Ghraib case. "I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise," Morris said in a statement. He considers the possibility that he should have revealed the payments in the credits, though he says he "didn't feel the necessity."

The story highlights an interesting and little-remarked-upon dichotomy between  journalism and movie documentaries: newspaper, magazine, and Tv interviewers rarely pay subjects, while film producers commonly do. In fact, the dicier issue seems to be whether the New Yorker violated its standards by publishing in its March 24 issue an excellent piece by Morris and Philip Gourevitch that drew from the interviews Morris collected for the film. Especially fascinating is its treatment of Specialist Sabrina Harman of the 372nd Military Police Company, who began snapping digital photos inside Abu Ghraib as a way of indemnifying herself against what she knew were abuses but wound up incriminating herself instead.

The Times is also hosting a blog by Morris, where he considers in two posts his technique of staging reenactments for the specific purpose of isolating and focusing on key moments in a complex chain of evidence. There's a fair amount of this in Standard Operating Procedure, though the stagings are mostly for emotional effect. The evidentiary burden falls mainly on the prosecution's reconstruction, by synchronizing digital photos from three soldiers' cameras, of the chain of events as prisoners were abused and ritually humiliated. And Morris's interviews with Harman and Lynndie England are chilling--paid or not, they starkly capture the dehumanizing environment inside Abu Ghraib.

Decided to punish myself last weekend with Judd Apatow's latest assembly-line homage to all his good-guy high school buddies, Enduring Sarah Marshall . . . whoops, fucked up the title (excuse my French, apparently it's contagious), but y'all know what I'm driving at. Just the familiar beta-male blend of regressive gender fantasies: self-pitying schlub hero (calling Mrs. Portnoy!) wins over va-voom! mannequin brunet after being dumped by equally va-voom! mannequin blond (who comes to regret the dumping, natch) and providing a couple of R-rated peeks at his bashful schlong (not to rub it in, but even the latex extender in Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy is more transgressive—not to mention a whole lot funnier). And Jonah Hill's in it too . . . like, yyyaaaaaaahhhhh!

Which is why I'm still feeling grateful for Sunday's double-feature companion, Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, as antidote to the spoiled-Hawaiian-pineapple aftertaste of Judd. Only Blueberry's been getting ho-hum reviews and Sarah mostly good ones—so why is that? Since even with its multiple glaring flaws (and the distributor's own mutilations/excisions/abridgments), Blueberry's the only one of the two I can imagine myself voluntarily—even eagerly—watching again. What could be more seductive—from the unreadable cursive lettering on the windows (which immediately put me in mind of Orson . . . I mean, Norman Foster's Journey Into Fear, all the environmental wordplay that nobody knows how to decipher) to the convertible enchantments of Natalie Portman at the wind-whipped end of her tether, as suggestively wrung out as the hardscrabble Nevada landscape that engulfs her.

Which of course I'm a born sucker for, these nonnative excursions into the Great American Vacancy—Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, Wenders's Paris, Texas and Don't Come Knocking ... even Bruno Dumont's critically thrashed and pummeled Twentynine Palms (another flawed fave of mine), with its lines of windmill generators and endlessly rolling boxcars and surreal explosions of highway detritus—auto dealerships and Tastee Freezes among the strip-mall palms, etc—set down in the Death Valley middle of nowhere. So nondescript and desperate that only a sodden romantic could love the place. Which is probably all Jean Baudrillard's fault.

Postscript: Don't everybody applaud, but this is probably the last post I'll be doing for a while. I'm having arthroscopic surgery 4/29 (right rotator cuff—oww, oww!) and won't be able to assault my computer for at least a couple of weeks. Whether any of this will affect (or, heaven forefend, improve) my writing or thinking about films remains to be seen. But at least I'll be able to throw my infamous hanging screwball again. In any case, ciao for now . . .

Tried baiting the hook re Hou Hsiao-hsien in my April 9 post, but nobody's been biting so I guess a more direct approach is in order ...

A lot of what we typically get from Hou—e.g., the "crowd scene [that] swallows its own visual cues" (so you don't know how to parse it out), actors who "declaim with their backs to the camera"—are exactly the kinds of things they warn you against in film school. Of course, in Hou's case they're indisputable proofs of "genius," whereas for you or me or, let's say, feckless Mexican primitives of the 30s, they're just as indisputably the opposite. So why the double standard? And is it really a double standard at all?

Let's start with a comparison, between Hou's films and Manoel de Oliveira's, that inexhaustible nonagenarian Portuguese. Superficially they're similar, especially in their commitment to long, static takes, but in terms of film philosophy, the ways in which their works imply a specific view of the world, they're more like light-years apart. Hou's the phenomenological "realist," an artist of interpretable surfaces without symbolic content: his only "revelations" are what the camera immediately sets out in front of you. But Oliveira's the eternal symbolist, spinning out images from the depths of Plato's cave: what his camera reveals is a cover for nonmaterial "essence," that exists beyond appearances, beyond the literal/accessible surfaces of things.

For Hou though, these surfaces are everything, or maybe the only thing—there's no "beyond" to connote, only a tangibility that the camera inevitably throws back in your face. The basic riddle in all this is what these "antisymbols" are up to—in other words, what exactly are we looking at ("is this a dagger that I see before me?"—that kind of material-inflected puzzle), and how do you actually read the images the camera dishes up?

Which is what makes Hou's camera just another underprivileged observer, with no more access to "truth" than any of the film's human principals. Only what the lens gives you, just as, for post-Newtonian empiricists like ourselves, there's only what's in front of our eyes. Which isn't the way movie cameras tend to operate, being more or less intrusive, seeing from every possible angle with a kind of infinite fluidity: we can go here, even if we're not right now. So, e.g., in Hitchcock's Notorious the camera glides effortlessly past the wine-cellar door without hesitation in an all-seeking quest. But in Hou's Flowers of Shanghai (1998, pictured above), a closed door stops the camera cold, as it might any human witness: only a sliver of light from under the locked panel, with voices bickering in the mysterious room beyond. The camera records, it doesn't penetrate or arrange—which is why we get lost in the crowded frames, watch the backs of receding speakers, etc. Or, again as in Flowers, get stuck at the wrong end of a banquet room when all the significant action is taking place in the street. 

So the camera has limits, as palpable and physical as our own, and in Hou's work these limits are self-created—though since Millennium Mambo (2001) he's added an extra wrinkle: still only revealed surfaces, but now without implied focus or direction, as a kind of ur-sensual, aleatory riff (unlike Flowers, where we know what we should be looking at, even if we can't quite make it out). Eschew the abstract, the manipulation of meaning, seems the mantra of the hour. Or make of it what you will, a free-form surface that incrementally unfolds, that insists on its own material thereness. Not something they're likely to teach you in film class.

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Hou's latest feature, The Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), opens this Friday at the Music Box; showtimes are here.

Schlepped out to the U. of C. last Thursday for the opening-night screening in Doc Films' new "Golden Age of Mexican Cinema" series. Not that there's anything remotely new about it, since the films are all venerable antiques, dating from the 1930s through early '40s—also, based on a handful of viewings (and leaving Emilio Fernandez "poetically" aside), relatively unwatchable, at least in the narrowly modern sense of narratives that cohere, of cinematography, blocking, performances, etc, that conform to fussbudgety notions of cinematic excellence. But who cares, it's all marvelously seductive, a raw celluloid rush ...

Also terra incognita for at least one viewer, since I'm hardly familiar with this period ethnicity at all. Like an archaeological dig in a forgotten corner of the planet, where even the lowliest potsherd becomes a vehicle for transcendence, the rapt "illumination" of the gods, exploring cross-cultural mind-sets and ad hoc vizualizations that may never see the light of day again. So when a crowd scene swallows its own visual cues and actors declaim with their backs to the camera—as happened a couple of times in the first-night's program—it's almost like reconnecting with the Lumieres: cinema language in its baby-steps phase, which more often than not leads to an evolutionary dead end. When Hou Hsiao-hsien does it, of course, it's genius. But in 30s Mexico it's just filmmaking on the verge ...

But opening night did yield a fascinating relic—not the film originally scheduled (La Llorona, a pioneering entry in the indigenous "crying woman" genre, which never showed at all) but Adolfo Best Maugard's La Mancha de Sangre (1937), an exotic combination of professional Hollywood savvy (multiple camera setups, haphazard bursts of soft-focus expressionism, etc), vanished reels, and pure howling ineptitude. Its claim to notoriety, both then and now, is a full-frontal nude striptease that aroused the Mexican censors' ire (try imagining that even in precode Hollywood!), though a later scene with Estela Inda (the mother in Buñuel's Los Olvidados) dusting her apartment in a negligee is, if anything, even more inspirational. Or maybe I should say mystifying—shot apparently for the cleavage (except the camera's set back too far for that), it's a time-and-motion study of domesticity run rampant, filmed in literal duration without significant breaks or edits. Like Jeanne Dielman before the fact, you could argue—or maybe it's just a bizarre "film grammar" experiment gone horribly/deliciously wrong.

Among series highlights to come: El Fantasma del Convento (April 10) and Dos Monjes (April 17), both exploring the perennial Mexican theme of haunted clergymen on the loose, and a trio of groundbreaking westerns cum rancheras—Vamonos con Pancho Villa (May 1), Alla en el Rancho Grande (May 8), La Zandunga (May 22)—by Fernando de Fuentes, aka the "Mexican John Ford" (an opinion I don't share, but what the hell, it's what he's sometimes called). Also, more or less inevitably, Emilio Fernandez's Maria Candelaria (May 29), our southern neighbor's gift to American art-house tastes, plus an encore screening of La Mancha de Sangre (tentatively May 15) and a selection of titles/filmmakers I barely recognize that seems pretty inviting anyway (for complete schedule with times, click here).

And maybe La Llorona will show up yet. When I asked Doc Films about it last week, they promised they'd give it a try ...

In a March 24 LA Times article (linked through GreenCine Daily), Patrick Goldstein speculates on one of the great questions of our time: What ever happened to John Hughes?

"Hollywood is full of older masters who've been mentors to younger acolytes," Goldstein (over)generously concedes. "But Hughes, 58, is the only one who's disappeared without a trace; he quit directing in 1991, moved back to Chicago in 1995 and has basically stayed out of sight ever since."

Something I've wondered off and on about myself—assuming Hughes hasn't simply mutated into Judd Apatow Incorporated while none of us was looking. But Apatow himself apparently feels the loss, which presumably explains why he'd exhume an old Hughes story idea as plotline for Drillbit Taylor (starring Owen Wilson, pretty in pink as always), the Judd factory's current teen-market outing.

"John Hughes wrote some of the great outsider characters of all time," Apatow insists. "It's pretty ridiculous to hear people talk about the movies we've been doing, with outrageous humor and sweetness all combined, as if they were an original idea. I mean, it was all there first in John Hughes's films. Whether it's Freaks and Geeks or Superbad, the whole idea of having outsiders as the lead characters, that all started with Hughes."

Taking the notion another step toward absurdity, Dogma's Kevin Smith hyperbolically argues that Goldstein's hermit of the North Shore is actually "our generation's J.D. Salinger."

"He touched a generation and then the dude checked out," Smith mourns his departed hero. "If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be doing what I do. Basically my stuff is just John Hughes films with four-letter words." 

Which is probably why Dogma schmoes Jay and Silent Bob considered a slackers' tour of Shermer, Illinois, mythical burb cum high school of Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller fame—also, not coincidentally, pseudonym of choice for Hughes's hometown, Shermerville being what suburban Northbrook originally was called. It's rumored Hughes still hides out there—though maybe it's churlish of me to bring it up, since he's taken so many pains to cover his professional tracks. Better no mentors at all than this kind of Hollywood schmoozing and dealing—a realization too late, for Hughes anyway, if not for the aspiring auteurs in his commercial wake.

But at least we'll always have Planes, Trains & Automobiles—so what kind of wonderful is that?

Something to puzzle over ...

No Country for Old Men: serial murderer, deaf to every human appeal for mercy, goes about his business with implacable dispatch—Academy Awards: best picture, best supporting actor, etc.

Michael Haneke's Funny Games remake: serial murderers, deaf to every human appeal for mercy, go about their business with implacable dispatch—back of the critical hand, lots of righteous huffing and puffing, etc.

Not much difference between the two, at least in my opinion, yet one movie's lionized, the other savaged as exploitive swill. Except arguably the Coens distance themselves more thoroughly from the corpse pile than Haneke ever could, who's more into closing the empathy gap vis-a-vis. (Or is he?—more on that below.) And if human investment's lacking it's the Coens and their (modified) gargoyle brood who seem the more culpable parties. Score one for the vilified Austrian there.

Still I'm wondering if visceral, pandering "violence" is actually the problem. Sadism or cruelty, yes, more a matter of gamesmanship than literally inflicted injury, and a lot of offscreen suggestion, the way both films indulge the audience's discomfort with sights and actions unseen. But who or what's to blame for that, the respective auteurs or our own willingness to be self-righteously disgusted? Especially in Haneke's case, where the deck's stacked from the beginning. Not only are his human punching bags helpless—and Haneke's extremely astute about this: not a lot of "blame the victim" strategies available, all the psychological escape routes covered—but so is the audience in relation to the ethical trap the director wants to set. Which, as in the original '97 version, is this: "Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, and anyone who stays does." Now there's a funny game for you!—as if, after plunking down our ten bucks, we're already planning an exit to avoid the moralizing taint. But even if we do leave, the outcome's already anticipated, preemptively arranged. Or maybe it's performance art: paying for the privilege of applauding our own outraged stomachs. But stay or leave, we're losers either way, another clutch of "victims" in a disempowerment bind.

Like the family in the film—though actually not like them: their cooperation's too patent, too dramatically foreordained—I kept trying to escape from Haneke's manipulative grasp, negate the implied assumption that only he can call the tune, define the moral high ground, determine what our relation to the bloodletting and terror should be. So how's this for equalizing leverage? First scene after the kid's been slaughtered, blood on the TV, the walls, everything bottomed out emotionally ... and why is Naomi Watts being framed like a Georges de La Tour painting, profile an artful nimbus against the surrounding chiaroscuro gloom? What's the relentless aestheticizing for, especially now when the only credible response seems utterly nihilistic—to give the whole game up, dispense with all the fussy embellishments? And what's Haneke's own relation to the designated snuffs: are they worth his (and by extension our) falling apart for or simply another opportunity for aaarrrrttt?

Which seems worse than anything he can accuse the rest of us of doing—or not doing, as the case may be. But exiting the cinema isn't an option for our moral arbiter in chief—since somebody has to backlight the corpses, make elegant objets d'art from human desolation and hysteria, etc—the only artist's alternative being to soldier on, on, on ...

So much for the everlasting high ground. Is our funny game over yet?

I'm good friends with Wim Wenders, but it doesn't mean I have to like his movies. —Roland Emmerich in a March 7 Guardian interview

So are we still friends, Roland, or is 10,000 B.C. the deal breaker? Not that it's any worse than the rest of the schlock he's cranked out: a little of this, a little of that, a whole lotta going through the motions—to get the job done, get the damn thing marketed, brute commercial savvy being the first item of business. Which is pretty much what's expected in any case—plus: what can be more delightful than toting up anachronisms, playing the village literalist to 10,000 B.C.'s stupid historical uncle. Whoa, mammoths in the desert! Like, who the hell cares?

Anyway, a bunch of my favorite B.C. howlers—not an exhaustive list, so y'all feel free to add on more:

Saber-toothed cats Still lurking in the Neolithic biome, the fearsome smilodon, for one or two more millennia, in fact—but only in North and South America, not Eurasia/Africa, which is where the movie's supposed to be taking place (though actually it's hard to tell—see below).

Woolly mammoths A brave new theory of why they became extinct, as imported slave labor on "Egyptian" proto-pyramids. Only the logistics of transport, from arctic tundra to subtropical desert, don't make any sense. Where's the food coming from? Who's sweeping away the dung? Aren't body thermostats prone to failure in the desert sun, under all that maladaptive fur? Plus costs of provisioning and upkeep presumably outweigh the benefits of production. But maybe they can feast on their fallen comrades—pachyderm cannibalism, no wonder the species died off.

Horses Probably not domesticated before 5,000 B.C. And those thoroughbred stallions are out; ditto bridles, reins, all the horse-riding paraphernalia ...

Where are we? From tundra to rain forest to desert, everything's smooshed together in one visitor-friendly package, like a trip through a Disney theme park or Gondwana before the continents drifted apart. (But Gondwana's 150 million years in the rearview—so what about Apocalypto World II?) As for that speculative ur-Sahara: mostly arid grassland around the 10,000 mark, with desertification setting in only after the monsoon patterns changed—another 6,000 years in the future ...

Sailing down the Nile Or whatever the river's called—sand to the water's edge, not a hint of riparian fertility, what the Nile's historically been known for. Some pretty impressive craft though, like modern dhows and feluccas—except sails weren't invented till the fourth millennium BC. And forget about the double rigging.

Pyramids Which require organized infrastructure—cities, towns, government, etc—which requires an agriculture-based economy ... which won't be happening anytime soon, or at least for a couple thousand years.

Dinosaur chickens Not since that runaway asteroid hit the earth at the end of the Mesozoic. Sqwaaarrrrkkk!