TFT 144 – THE TOWN / I'M STILL HERE
posted by
Jett Loe
TFT 144 running time: 38 minutes 10 seconds – 17.4mb mp3
THE TOWN starts at 2 minutes 30 seconds
I’M STILL HERE starts at 21 minutes seconds
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 8:20 pm. It is filed under Action, Blog, Documentaries, Drama, Gareth Higgins, Gareth Higgins Reviews, Jett Loe, Jett Loe Reviews, Podcast, Reviews and tagged with film review podcast, movie review podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Wow, I had a completely different take than you guys. We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. But I’m not sure it’s quite fair to pretend to know the intentions of the film’s detractors. Seems to stifle debate. “You didn’t like the film because you were threatened by it. I can instantly dismiss all of your arguments.”
I think we posted our articles almost simultaneously, but I found it interesting that we both picked up on the Kaufman influence. To me though, it feels as if Phoenix is trying to be Kaufman in the same way so many actors try to be Bob Dylan with a side music career — with all the unearned exposure that being famous provides but none of the years of struggle and those pesky “chops.”
Interesting points of view as always. You made me think.
Can I come back and post next week? :-)
re: intentions of the detractors, you are correct and gareth said this as well that’s one can’t impugn motive – but i would argue that the ‘detractors’ (a word i didn’t use – i said ‘haters’ = specially the group of critics/bloggers with real problems with the film) may not even know themselves why they dislike it so much – there’s a huge whiff of defensiveness in the air with these folks – and it’s understandable – I’M NOT THERE is an indictment of the whole filthy system
p.s. of course you can come back – your posts always make me think – and you’re TFT Staff!! ;)
Hey Jett,
You did indeed say ‘haters.’ I incorrectly took that to mean all who did not like it. So much to digest about this film. I hate to admit it, but I may actually have to catch it again before it leaves the theaters.
Same here.
Jett, can you elaborate on how the system is filthy and how I’m Not There indicts it? Do you think the indictment was intentional by the filmmakers or just a side effect?
“filthy rotten system” = was quoting activist Dorothy Day: “”Our problems stem,” she said, “from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
http://www.meetingground.org/loavfish/lf798/day.htm
so for me I’M STILL HERE was, in its own small part, exposing an aspect of our system which by its very nature is dehumanizing – depending as it does on the exploitation of others
+ i don’t think it’s a side effect – the film to me seems conscious in this regard
Jett, this raises a very pertinent ethical question: how can it be exploitation when one participates willingly?
“Joaquin Phoenix”, as portrayed in the film (as opposed to the real person), is not forced or otherwise coerced into becoming a celebrity, or whatever he sets out to do.
The “haters”, as you call them, I believe responded so negatively because the film fucks with their fantasies about celebrity and stardom. They resented having a joke played on them. Or rather, resent not having been in the know about the punchline long before the joke was told.
These people like to pretend they’re industry insiders themselves, and when someone in that industry tries to manipulate them, they freak out. It confirms that which they’ve been desperately trying to hide or obliterate (possibly their entire lives) — outsider status.
re: “participates willingly” = you can be artist participating in your form and still critique the business/structure that has been created around that form -
the film doesn’t critique the art of acting – there aren’t scenes ‘on-set’ that expose that process as sick – it’s about an ‘celebrity industry’ that’s grown around it
I understand that the film’s target is the celebrity industry. (And it is an industry.) If an actor chooses to embrace celebrity, which Phoenix as done to some extent, then how is it exploitation?
It’s a two-way street. Stars need the industry just as much as the industry needs them. And it’s not as if they (the stars) don’t get anything out of it. That’s why millions of actors would gladly trade obscurity for celebrity.
not trying to shut down this conversation daveed – but i see in another post that you haven’t seen the film yet – shall we pick it up after you have then perhaps a richer conversation?
Sure thing. I was commenting more about whether celebrity in general was exploitative or not.
For purposes of this discussion, I don’t see exploitation as much as manipulation. People are manipulated — propagandized — into thinking celebrities are to be loved, adored, admired, emulated — when was the last time you read, saw, or heard anything that didn’t cast Tom Hanks as a hero?
Well, is he really a hero? In truth, we know Tom Hanks from his public appearances, on-screen roles, and from the image that “his people” have helped to cultivate. For all we know, he eats puppy-kitten stew in private, hires people to write computer viruses, and is secretly bankrolling the Fred Phelps “god hates the troops” / “god hates fags” church.
Or people are manipulated into thinking something closer to the opposite — we all know the script we’re supposed to recite at the mention of, say, Tom Cruise. He has weird beliefs! Maybe his marriage isn’t authentic! He’s desperate to keep certain things hidden! He bullies people into silence! Or whatever. What if, in private, he’s the only thing standing between us and the evil depredations of Tom Hanks?
I think people would get angry at a film such as this one for ridiculing people for falling for the public relations efforts that have given them everything they know about celebrities.
What’s the alternative?
We could refuse to draw any conclusions about celebrities until we know them as human beings. Um … how? I don’t live in LA, New York, or London. I’ve never been to Cannes. I don’t go to those parties and I’m not on those lists. I have no idea how I would get there, and as it happens, I don’t particularly want to get there.
Ignore all celebrities? Do Affleck and Phoenix truly want that world — the one in which the public simply tunes out celebrities? This strikes me as prima facie bad faith — no, they don’t want this response. They go back to working some crap job in crap-town like the rest of us under that scenario.
This satire is riding on the back of exactly that which it is supposedly satirizing.
The singer of Iron Maiden is now a marketing executive for a rather unexciting company in England (http://bit.ly/d4CWVW) — *that* is what you do when you think the celebrity life is silly, phony, dull, what have you. You don’t cut another record in which all the lyrics are about how stupid rock stardom, or even “the system of rock stardom,” is.
in response to dale i have no option but to submit the song ‘Real’ – William Shatner and Brad Paisley from Shatner’s album ‘Real’:
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/w/william+shatner/real+feat+brad+paisley_20306004.html
Jett – So … you’re implicitly confirming that Tom Hanks is secretly evil? That’s how I interpret your comment, mostly because this interpretation is provocative and interesting. Granted, not very. ;-)
I have absolutely no doubt that celebrities are human beings — no more, no less — but we don’t interact with them as human beings, and therefore this “absolutely no doubt” judgment of mine is bloodless, at a remove from my little reality. We interact with them in a very unnatural way, ultimately, and the results are, unsurprisingly, odd and unnatural from a strictly human perspective.
It’s undeniable to say we don’t experience or relate to them in the way we do our friends, coworkers, and family. How on earth would we? If we had friends and family who appeared to us on screens part of the time and in person part of the time, we might get some practice at that.
A few people happen to have a celebrity or two in his/her inner circle, but most people don’t. I don’t.
We interact with celebrities as — literally — two-dimensional projections who recite lines. The lines they recite come from screenwriters and PR experts (or the like). Sometimes they break through and say something truly their own — let’s suppose, for that’s all we can do — but if you count up the sheer number of words you’ve heard from Tom Hanks, Cruise, Selleck, Sizemore, or [celebrity X] in your whole life, I would guess a tiny percentage came from them and them alone.
This is the line of work they’re in, and this is how we, the flies-unbuttoned masses, experience them.
This is just an educated guess, but I would add that most celebrities would be horrified at the prospect of getting to know their fans — let alone their most opinionated fans, pro and con — on a face-to-face, authentically human, call-me-if-you-need-help-moving basis, and not only because it would leave them no time for anything else.
It requires an imaginative leap to embrace the insight that [celebrity X] is really, truly, genuinely a flawed human being just like you or me. Most people aren’t going to bother taking that leap, even if they recognize it’s there to be taken. It’s not clear to me why they should — why it should be a moral priority of anyone’s to abstain from saying something unfairly snarky about, say, Paris Hilton or Mel Gibson or Jonathan Franzen.
People like having heroes, and they also like having villains. They like having a mental store of human-ish heroes/villains who do, say, and experience things they can’t, and who lack all the boring features and limitations of the actual people in their lives. This is a strong impulse that accounts for the success of cinema-the-art, and probably all narrative fiction.
If Joaquin Phoenix wants to be received as something more than a character about whom the public is invited to have arbitrary opinions, an excellent start (it seems to me) would be NOT to play a character in a film called “Joaquin Phoenix,” who may or may not have things in common with the flesh-and-blood, imperfect, human called Joaquin Phoenix.
I realize he didn’t ask me — certainly not in any face-to-face, recognizably human-interaction-y way — and that too is part of our “relationship,” such as it is.
Throwing my hat into the ring a little late here, but I found the film at once fascinating and messy. Someone earlier raised the question of intentionality. It’s beside the point, aesthetically speaking, because the film is the film regardless of what the director thought he was making. But it also strikes me as abundantly clear that intentionality was never explicitly defined, even if just in the director’s head. For what it’s worth an interview on Ebert’s blog sees Casey Affleck admit that he thinks I’m Still Here is a film about our obsession with celebrity, but he didn’t know exactly what it was saying. Maybe I’m influenced by that interview, but walking out of the theater, I could have told you exactly that; it’s unfocused, hence the length, choppiness, and everything-and-the-kitchen-sink narrative amalgam (scatological humor and pensive melancholy, JP making an ass of himself and JP the folk hero casting off the chains of Hollywood).
To me, I’m Still Here boils down to an indictment rather than an exploration. It says “This is a problem” rather than “Why is this a problem?” It’s pretty great at it–all those inane interview questions and incessant photographers–but I’m far more interested in how the celebrity-industrial complex keeps us so docile and addicted.
Brandon, If that’s genuine — Casey A’s statement, I mean — it elevates the film in my mind, because it underscores what is evidently true, namely, that Affleck and Phoenix wanted to collect all their thoughts about celebrity culture and put them into a film, but because their thoughts are a bit of a conflicted mess — they’re not alone in this, mine are too!! — the film is, likewise, a conflicted mess.
I like artists who admit they’re not the complete masters of their own intentions or their chosen material. This approach feels real to me. I don’t ask Affleck or Phoenix (or anyone else) to present all the answers related to this in a nice neat bundle, and for that matter, I’m not sure I’d recognize the answers if I got them.
Thanks.
[...] on the patented swirly hair-flip for revealing. Though the childhood biography opening screams I’M STILL HERE, this film decries celebrity only accidentally. Charming moments transcend the construction every [...]