2012, dir. Roland Emmerich (2009)
In an interview with USA Today, Roland Emmerich announced that 2012 would be his last disaster movie. “I said to myself that I’ll do one more disaster movie,” he explained. “But it has to end all disaster movies. So I packed everything in.” The film is meant to serve not only as the end of the world, but as the end of a genre and the end of a chapter in Emmerich’s career.
What’s bizarre about 2012 is that the scope of the disaster is so immense and the characters are so close to death that the necessities of the genre itself become all that matters. There are pretenses here, to be sure—but the only logic is the logic of Hollywood itself. As Woody Harrelson says in the film, “This is a plot that only could have been hatched in Hollywood.”
Dead Birds, dir. Robert Gardner (1964)
I saw Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds this weekend, when Gardner received and honorary degree at Bard College. A panel preceding his award featured Stanley Cavell, Luc Sante, Ian Buruma, Susan Meiselas and Gardner himself. The panel (d)evolved into a celebration of Gardner the Man (he mentioned, casually, that he flies his own plane) and a defense of Gardner the high humanist, who operates with the utmost respect for the autonomy of his subjects, never interfering in the world he records. Gardner, everyone seemed to agree, was a prophet of the objective camera.
[Whew. So it only took four months to finish this series that began as a basic review of three films, Julie & Julia, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, and (500) Days of Summer. The earlier posts can be found here and here, respectively.]
