BY ALEX HO

In print | January 25, 2007

Recently, I have found myself obsessed with publications of really bitchy film criticism. Journals like “Slant Magazine,” which calls “Babel” “Amores Perros 3: World Police,” and “Reverse Shot,” which describes “United 93” as “a very special episode of 24.” Their dense reading of films and biting sarcasm just sends the movie snob in me aflutter with joy. Around this time of the year, film critic circles are preoccupied with their coverage of the sickening superficiality of the awards season and ranting is at an all time high.

Notwithstanding the personal enjoyment I take in reading these critics’ reviews, it’s sad that less and less seems to qualify as good cinema nowadays. Are movies getting worse? Or are critics just becoming more elitist? The answer seems to be a little of both. Audiences are looking for more and more instantaneous entertainment, a trend that’s sped up tenfold with the advent of digital technology. Today, the movie theater is looking less appealing against cheaper alternatives, from file sharing to Pay-Per-View to NetFlix. Meanwhile, Hollywood studios are at a loss on how to herd in consumers and the fares they offer even in their specialty divisions are growing less and less daring (take, for example, the indie to a tee “Little Miss Sunshine”).

It goes without saying that technology has also drastically changed the modes of filmmaking. Digital video has democratized visual media. Now, anyone can shoot the events of their day on a camera phone and post them on YouTube. Vlogs, podcasts — all of these new forms of entertainment that can be easily accessed without having to leave your seat are silently threatening the integrity of film. Celluloid no longer seems the immortal medium it used to be and critics are fighting harder than ever to still matter.

Two recent films, “Miami Vice” and “Inland Empire,” are interesting anomalies. Both were shot on digital video and don’t purport to be anything more than fluffy, irrelevant entertainment, yet the two films have shown up on many critics’ best-of-2006 lists. In both cases, the films seem to be favored less for sheer love of the work and more for reverence of their impenetrability. “Miami Vice” is Michael Mann’s remake of the pulpy 80s TV show about undercover cops, violence, drugs, sex, etc. Mann carries all of these elements into his updated version, but by no means does that make “Miami Vice” an especially easy movie to sit through. It’s as though the film is so drunk on its images of sweaty dance clubs, expansive cityscapes, passionate lovemaking and ugly shoot-outs that it forgets about a story entirely. Characters aren’t given any introduction. Conversations are so steeped in jargon that it almost seems like we’re meant to be left not understanding.

“Miami Vice” is all about mood, and having been shot on a mid-range digital camera, its mood is distinct from anything ever shot on film. With an infinite depth of focus, exterior scenes seem to explode across the screen. The dimmest sources of light have been extracted, and the night skies are more often red and purple than black. But the images are also undeniably grainy. The result is a film that seems more in the present while simultaneously more surreal. Lobbing an axe at literal-minded comprehensibility is a given in any David Lynch film, but in “Inland Empire”, he takes his strangeness to an entirely new level, so much so that “Mulholland Drive” seems conventionally narrative-driven by comparison. After a series of completely inscrutable scenes - the liaison of two blurred-out lovers speaking Polish in a hotel, a weeping woman staring at a TV, a parody of a sitcom with rabbit-headed characters - the film finds some grounding in the story of an actress, played by Laura Dern, who gets a part in an over-the-top melodrama and begins a dangerous affair with her romantic lead, and soon enough they are confusing themselves with their roles.

This all seems similar enough to “Mulholland Drive,” but then in one “Oh my God”-worthy scene, Dern’s character finds herself in a seriously messed-up situation and it’s no longer possible to tell where, when, or who she is. The movie plunges into a hellish dreamscape of disjointed sequences, some taking place in Poland, some in a trailer park in the South, some in Hollywood. We encounter what seems like an endless stream of weirdness — a woman with a screwdriver in her hip, a handkerchief with a hole burnt through by a cigarette, something about a circus and the “phantom,” just to scratch the surface. “Inland Empire” defies any explanation, but at three hours, it forces its audience to inhabit it and ride its emotional trajectory.

Complementing this whacked-out experience is the low-resolution digital video he chose to film it on. Blown up to 35 mm in a movie theater, its pixels are chunky as rhinestones. The images look like crap, but that’s the whole point for Lynch. He uses all the visual ambiguities to his advantage.

My reactions to both films were guarded admiration; Mann and Lynch have taken movies to completely uncharted territory. Still, did they have to make their films so hard to watch? I didn’t like being manipulated into empathizing with Gong Li’s character in “Miami Vice” when I had really no idea what was happening to her. And while I can accept being in the dark in Lynch’s films, I was initially taken aback at the how cheap and ugly “Inland Empire” looked and was more than a little disturbed by its faint misogynist and racist undertones. These are both uncompromising visions, films that will frustrate, humble and ultimately reward those who take entertainment seriously.

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