the authentic mime.

I'm Still Here
Directed: Casey Affleck
Staring: Joaquin Phoenix
Magnolia Pictures, Rated R, 117 minutes

Bathed in the audible hum of analog, I’m Sill Here opens with a home movie of, presumably, a pre-teen Joaquin Phoenix standing atop a boulder, overlooking a waterfall. He hesitates, looking and jerking his body around, measuring perhaps the distance of the jump, the intensity of the fall, the depth of the water. But his father is watching intently from the other side of the stream, and the camera is recording. He pauses. Then, without warning, he jumps.

This is the remainder of that fall, filling in the gaps between what we’ve seen and what we’ve imagined. That gap began in late 2008, when Phoenix announced his retirement from the acting world during the premiere of what suddenly transformed into his final feature film. From there, he began his pursuit of a legitimized rap career, denouncing his naysayers and openly voicing his contempt for fame, the Hollywood system, and all the other pitfalls that come with having too much too soon. We witness his gradual exit from the limelight and into the darkness, with the lens present for everything from his sudden announcement to his total decline. But while the arc seems gradual, it is quite evident that Joaquin Phoenix had already left the building a long time ago.

That idea of perception — of who Phoenix is or should be — is at the root of whatever the film is presenting: his disintegration? His performance art case-in-point? It’s unclear, at times unbearable and often uninteresting. You can’t stop watching, but that doesn’t mean you care. And that’s Phoenix’s whole point, right? That this industry has come to define him, and that definition is built on simply the act of watching and assessing. Which is why he wants out. Which is what sparks the obvious point that filming this is somewhere between counterintuitive and hypocritical.

Of course Phoenix is aware of all this. He’s a smart man, even amidst crumble. His roguish good looks are all but erased, hidden behind a scruffy paranoiac beard that looks like a cross between Kaczynski and Kubrick. His body is deteriorating, and his psyche seems to follow suit. In a crazed state of coked up delirium, he calls a pair of hookers to join him and his entourage. He waxes philosophical in between cigarettes and coughing fits. He brutally berates his colleagues regularly. Who is this man and what are we supposed to feel for him?

The camera, it seems, feels nothing. Intimate only in proximity, it feels detached and cold — a spectator at a circus. Casey Affleck’s raspy voice of reason interjects every so often and appears on camera once during the film’s opening moments. But as the filmmaker he keeps appropriate distance. At first it’s because of professionalism. Eventually it seems rooted in horror. The deeper into Phoenix’s fall he and the crew get, the more removed they are from his crisis.

Phoenix’s decay is devastating. His attempts to break into the rap world are repeatedly derailed, and eventually, after a failed production meeting with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, Phoenix, while using the frame of his sunglasses to snort a rock of cocaine, has a moment of self-realization. “I’m totally fucked!” he blubbers as he races out of his limousine in search of something natural. What he finds is the stone wall surrounding Central Park, another block. “They think I’m a joke. They think this is all a joke.”

Forget the joke. What to make of a mess? How are we expected to react? The problem with this subgenre — Hoax Cinema — is that its intrinsic curiosity lies in whether or not the film is “real”, a relative term if the medium has ever heard one. Films that dabble around questions of authenticity, either textually or narratively, serve as distractions. Their points become muddled, their goals become gimmicks. Were we scared of The Blair Witch Project because of its power or because of its manipulation? Its potential to be scary or its potential to be true? How do we forge emotional relationships with these texts when that relationship begins with a question?

I’m Still Here almost shames you for your focus, for simplifying either Phoenix’s breakdown or his point altogether into fact or fiction. It muses on your misgivings: Phoenix acknowledges the contradiction of documenting his escape from the camera lens in front of another one, and recognizes questions of whether this is all some sort of stunt. But the reality is that it feels irrelevant. I find myself feeling the most painful emotion one can towards something so personal, which is indifference. Indifference to the question of whether this stunt is a stunt at all; indifference to the trials and tribulations of a star whose decay seems self-imposed; indifference to those around him who, while eventually finding themselves on the receiving end of Phoenix’s lashings, were the first to find humor in his self-brutality.

There are skeletons of interesting questions posed in passing: what is the nature of identity when you are publicly perceived? Are we molded into those preconceptions or are they molded out of us? And, perhaps most importantly, can we ever truly escape our brobdingnagian status as reluctant icons? During Phoenix’s most overt embarrassment, he attacks a heckler at a Las Vegas show clad with a strap on beard meant to look like the very one Phoenix himself has let grow disheveled. Even amidst his rejection of pop he finds himself inevitably canonized. This is his pain realized.

But Affleck’s camera is uncomfortably close, and when the film should feel emotive it simply it feels exploitative. Whether it’s of us or of Phoenix is unclear, but no one is left unscathed by the time the ambiguous credits begin to roll: if the film is a hoax (which, if the “written by” credit during the film’s closing is any indication, it could very well be) then what emotion is it hoping to garner? Sympathy for Phoenix? His growing paranoia and brutal diatribes prevent that. Curiosity for where the tale will lead? If you’ve seen one shot of Phoenix mumbling his way through a performance, you’ve seen them all. So then the film is simply left as some slice of post-millennial media life. But it feels too contrived to feel real and too overtly operatic to resemble anything close to pain.

Yet Phoenix himself is mesmerizing, and that does not change depending on realism. After his famed disaster of an interview with David Letterman, the closest thing the film has to a climax, Phoenix slums into his changing room, and Affleck closes in on his scruffy face, the sunglasses off and devastation reeking from his tired eyes. Here, fake or not, Phoenix is a broken man.

a heart or two guitar pics?

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
Directed: Edgar Wright
Starring: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Universal Pictures, PG-13, 112 minutes

It’s hard to say if Andy Warhol would love Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but it’s safe to say he’d watch it. Embedded with the lifeblood of culture, and walking the fine line between contemporary and nostalgia, it’s pop euphoria but without the irony. Warhol stood for that; he encompassed that. But what Warhol did was sell back to us our own disintegration. Our obsession with celebrity and consumerism made capitalism chic, so he crafted these products into art. He celebrated emptiness; the joke was that we did too.

Scott Pilgrim is in effect that emptiness realized. But there is something profoundly fascinating in the confidence with which its struts that same superficiality. For so long the idea of “style over substance” has been seen as a branch of negative cinema, where the aesthetic is the sole provocateur. Our emotional connection to film, it seems, has been resigned to the nether regions of pretension: “make me think! It’s the only way I can feel!” But Scott Pilgrim’s feel is based on just how little we’re asked to think. It’s not bound by logic. It giddily bounces between bevies of generational signifiers — the retrograde video games of the 1980s to the social networking info tablet of the Zero’s. Its confidence is in its volume.

Michael Cera is Michael Cera. We’ve come to expect nothing more, and we’ve also come to hate him for it. Once, Bogart would strut on the screen and part of the joy was the way he wouldn’t disappear into a role. That we’d be able to watch him and know that we’re watching Humphry Bogart, his rock-gruff face displaying nothing close to a smile, and his voice, the last remaining links between cinema and vaudeville. Michael Cera is no Humphry Bogart. He bumbles less than usual, but he still can’t make any honey. But if Pilgrim is the definitive flick of the new media era, where geek chic has invaded culture to the point of ironic obscurity, than Cera’s casting is almost metatextual — he holds more clout than maybe even he realizes.

He falls hard for a puckish pixie named Ramona, who isn’t your ordinary girl as evident through her vibrantly changing hair color and Doc Martin clad demeanor. To win her affection, Scott is forced to battle her Seven Evil Exes, all of whom contain some ounce of humorous embellishments (Chris Evans plays a cocky actor whose eyebrows should nab a Best Supporting Actor nomination; Jason Schwartzman oozes something else entirely). These battles are sized up via video game aesthetics: power ups help Scott fight dirty; coins are collected when he succeeds; a +1 Life token comes in handy at one point. These gamer nuances (can it be called a nuance if it’s drenched on screen?) make up the action, the joy, the candy-infused scenery and sincerity of Scott Pilgrim; Lichtenstein meets Sega.

Scott’s gaggle of buddies always strives to keep him in check, most notably Kieran Culkin as his gay roommate, whose sexuality is understated to believability; Anna Kendrick also nags admiringly. They attempt to ground the movie into something that resembles reality, standing out delightfully. Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) is Scott’s scorned ex, abandoned at the first sight of Ramona’s Crayola locks. As the embodiment of Western fetishism —a young schoolgirl who drips of Anime ink — her moments are perhaps the film’s only attempt at emotional sincerity. A maturity that is at once a welcome breath of fresh air and a distraction from the film’s giddiness.

There is, I think, this belief that we collectively both recognize and remain ignorant to, which is that a film can only reflect us culturally if it is calm. This isn’t a widespread truth: The Matrix is perhaps the perfect pre-Y2K construction, and brutally telling; the ten years in between It and Avatar perhaps even more so. But these are abstractions. They’re hyperbolically telling — a madman mistaken for a preacher. But the films that are always culturally resonant are the ones that reflect our ideological struggles, which are always narratively depicted as being more tranquil than they really are.

Scott Pilgrim is a lot of things, but tranquil it is not. It is so busy that it perhaps captures our current blip in the historical radar better than anything in recent memory; it’s nearly schizophrenic. Some may call it self-aware, but that’s not exactly right. It’s not that the film is aware of itself, but rather that it’s aware of everything else. It willfully frolics somewhere between childish and revolutionary, but that’s not just the fun, but also maybe even the goal. Finally we have a film that captures the giddy cerebreality of youth: unbound, but appreciative of that freedom.

Edgar Wright possesses that same post-modern pop that Tarantino did in the early-90s. But where Tarantino employed his sensibilities through use of the casual (talking about movies had never before been just as cool as watching them), Wright goes for the stark opposite. His characters don’t breath, they heave. What makes it work, as is often the case, is more up to us than it is to him. As within anything so influenced by context and congregation, the result is similarly participatory. It works only as much as we understand it.

This is why the film is important: because what you think of Scott Pilgrim speaks, loudly, about the kind of person you are; because it is, in effect, the sum of everything we’ve decided as relevant over the past two decades; because it is immune from real criticism the same way Tarantino was: to deny it simply means “you don’t get it”, which may be true just as much as it isn’t fair. The film feels like it bounces between both a visualization of the Nostalgia Age and an example of it. Mary Elizabeth Winstead gives balance to Ramona and the film. If Knives is the gamer’s dream, Ramona is the reality realized. Scott may fall for her, but the real world still feels just far enough.