How many directors do you recognize?

I was invited to participate in a Facebook event through my Flickcharters group that involved voting on the films of Frank Capra, and it included a picture of Capra as its artwork. This picture, in fact.

It made me realize how few directors I tend to actually recognize, even the important ones.

It's understandable why I might not recognize Capra, as he died in 1991 and looked much older than this in my 18 years of being alive to that point. A bit more shamefully, I have not sought out any old interviews with him or any documentaries that might look into his earlier years (something like Five Came Back, for example).

But it's not just older directors like Capra. Something came up the day before I saw this that prompted me to look up Tom Tykwer, a favorite of mine for having directed two of my top 50 films of all time: Run Lola Run and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Tom Tykwer looks like this, but I wouldn't have known it:

Seeing the picture of Tykwer made me realize it was not the first time I'd seen a picture of him. But I clearly had not retained an image of him in my mind, as I couldn't produce this appearance when thinking about him. (And may not be able to the next time I try, either.)

But that's a rather fringe example as well, as Tykwer is not exactly a major director despite working regularly and having prominent examples of good films to his name. A more compelling example is that I have a hard time telling you exactly what Joel and Ethan Coen look like. They directed two films in my top ten (Raising Arizona and Fargo) and are some of the most celebrated directors working today. As you probably know, this is what they look like:

I knew they looked sort of like that -- like, I had the rough outlines of their appearance in my mind. But I guarantee you that if I ran into either of them on the street, I would not know it was them. If they were both together, maybe. If they were being followed by a group of people talking to each other in hushed tones and taking pictures, probably. But one by himself and without any fanfare? Highly doubtful.

It extends to others. Just thinking randomly of some of my favorite films by directors actively working, could I conjure a mental image of Alfonso Cuaron? No, no I could not. (I had a vague one, which I checked just now and was off a bit.) Guillermo del Toro? Closer, but not exact. Then again, I've got a perfect image of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (they are kind of the holy triumvirate of contemporary Mexican directors), but that may just be because he's won two directing Oscars in the past three years.

The point is, there's a strange disconnect for me, and for some other cinephiles I'm sure, between the extent that we revere the artistic exploits of these people and the extent that we'd be able to pick them out of a police lineup.

On some level it makes sense. We are not seeing them in front of the camera. And in the instances where we are, it helps tremendously. No one anywhere who knows anything about film could fail to recognize Orson Welles, for example. Or an example from my own recent viewing experience, Roman Polanski. He has that cameo in Chinatown, but he's the star of the Polanski film I just saw last weekend, The Tenant. Or an even more recent mention on this blog, Kevin Smith.

But if you're only behind the camera, you need to court media attention in some way to be recognizable, and I would say that the Coens do not particularly care for that. Someone like Christopher Nolan, however, is a lot more recognizable because you see him showing up to talk about his work pretty regularity.

I guess I'm not saying anything particularly profound here.

But I do wonder if it points to some kind of deficit in myself as a cinephile. It has occurred to me that although I continue to consume films at a ravenous rate, I may not be rounding out my knowledge of film history the way other cinephiles in my position -- or even more importantly, other critics -- would be. I almost never read about cinema in long form, for example. I read articles that I see posted on Facebook and the like, but I don't choose books on cinema for my next book the next time I'm looking for one. I think of this as a conscious form of counter-programming to my busy viewing schedule, but it means I'm not going in depth on the behind the scenes of these films, which I think is also essential to a well-rounded film education. I mean, most books aren't going to give you a better idea of what a director looks like, but they will create the greater all-around awareness of a person that is symbolized by the superficial element of knowing what they look like.

I won't think too deeply on it.

But I do wish that I had looked at that picture of Frank Capra and said "That's a picture of Frank Capra" and not "Who is that guy? Oh, it must be Frank Capra."

And it was interesting to me how Frank Capra did not look like Frank Capra -- or not how I thought Frank Capra would look, anyway. I think of Capra as a kind of reckless optimist, and this man looks too severe to conform to my preconception of him. Then again, Capra also directly The Lost Weekend so he can be just as dour as this photo implies to me.

What's perhaps worst is that I did not even know he was of Italian descent, another thing I discovered in just briefly looking up something about him now. Not that his descent is even particularly noteworthy, just that it challenges another wrong preconception I had about him, which was that he was born in America. A preconception I wouldn't have had if I had read up on this guy at all.

So, this just strengthens my resolve to do something I should have done a while ago: Make every other book I read be a book on film. Or I should say, at least a book that somehow deepens my understanding and appreciation of film. I guess if you are speaking cosmically you might say that every book does that, but in this case I'm clarifying because it will allow me to keep my planned next book on the docket, which is Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock (after I finish Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native). That'll be a worthwhile cinema-related reading experience as it will give me insight on how a film I love was adapted from its source material.

I'll become a better cinephile, dammit, one book and one director's face at a time.

If Neo and Lola had a baby

Three directors.

Two men and one former man who now identifies as female.

Two siblings (once brothers) and one who isn't related to them.

Two Americans and one German.

The directors of two of the best films of 1999 (The Matrix and Run Lola Run).

Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski, as they are credited. Always in that order. (Ladies first I guess.)

However you slice it, Cloud Atlas is going to be interesting.

But will it be good?

Cloud Atlas looks like the classic example of a love-it-or-hate-it movie, and so far, the hate-its seem to be winning. You could say that its 52 Metascore means that those two opposing sentiments are averaging out almost perfectly, but if you were translating that score into a letter grade, it would be an F, not the C you would expect for a love-it-or-hate-it movie. (Then again, a straight translation doesn't work -- whereas a score of 59 or lower is an F in school, you're really probably looking at a Metascore of 25 or lower for the equivalent of an F. So I guess 52 probably really is a C, since it is described as "Mixed or Average Reviews.")

Yeah, I probably could have reconfigured that last paragraph to remove my faulty initial assumption altogether.

In any case, Cloud Atlas looks very much like the next installment in my series of movies that are "Too Shebulba," as described in this post. To refresh your memory, the term was inspired by Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, in which the characters appear in several different time periods and the futuristic version of Hugh Jackman is left whispering the word "Shebulba!" at a tree floating through outer space. One of my commenters corrected my spelling of the term, explaining that the character is referring to the Mayan underworld Xibalba. However, the term was born as "Shebulba," and that's how it will stay for my purposes.

In fact, if Cloud Atlas most closely resembles one single movie, I'd say The Fountain is it. Especially as it seems to focus on a man and a woman whose love affair stretches out over generations and in different incarnations of themselves -- here Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, there Jackman and Rachel Wiesz. And if it does really resemble The Fountain, that's bad news for me, since I found that movie to be an interesting failure at best.

But then I return to the directors themselves, and consider some of the boundary-pushing movies they've made over the years. I mentioned The Matrix and Run Lola Run, but each director or directing pair has a second movie that I absolutely love -- in the case of the Wachowskis, even more than The Matrix, and in the case of Tom Tykwer, slightly less than Run Lola Run. The Wachowskis' Bound is among my 30 favorite films of all time, and Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is probably among my top 50. Both movies mesmerize me, and both demonstrate that these directors or directing teams have the kind of range that could make them perfect choices for an ambitious opus like Cloud Atlas.

I will probably find out Sunday night. Until then, I will continue to marinate in a sense of wary anticipation about what kind of weird and potentially brilliant oddity lies ahead of me.

Just the reaction I'd hoped for

Even though recommending movies is one of my favorite things to do, it does sometimes cause some low-level anxiety.

Namely, if you end up steering the person wrong, your judgment may suffer in his/her eyes.

This is especially a problem for me, because I'm guilty of overselling movies I like. Talking about movies gets me so excited that I tend to exaggerate how good they are, or how bad other ones are. "Exaggerating" is not really the right word, because my feelings are genuine. It's just that I use such breathless terminology to describe them, I'm setting them up to fail.

It's also a problem for me because I want people to trust my recommendations. In fact, my work is predicated on that assumption.

And so it was that I was really pleased when I had my breathless terminology echoed on a recent loaner from my collection, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

First, a bit on the film. I believe this is the last new movie I chose to add to my collection, though there have been gift additions since then. This is significant, because I've been on a trend toward owning fewer movies, just for reasons of frugality. This one crossed that magic "need to own" threshold on the basis of its absolute cinematic uniqueness: It's a film about the sense of smell. I had never heard of such a thing.

The reason there haven't been more films made about smell is that it's hard to visualize the olfactory sense. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. In fact, Stanley Kubrick, who was once considered to direct an adaptation of Patrick Suskind's novel, Das Parfum, called it "unfilmable." He was just one of a dizzying array of directors who have been attached to this project, including Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, Tim Burton, Milos Forman and Ridley Scott.

But Tom Tykwer didn't let that worry him. He used his unique narrative gifts to impart indelible images to the smells in the film, as well as paint a lush picture of 18th century France that's both appropriately grimy (the fish-strewn marketplaces) and appropriately opulent (the palatial mansions). The story's anti-hero is a gifted orphan who develops the world's most finely-tuned sniffer, and spends his life overwhelmed by scents, until it turns him into a murderer bent on cultivating the essence of woman as a perfume. It just plain works, and it's totally captivating. (The film also shows how perfume is made, in what I believe is another cinematic first).

A couple months ago, we had one of my wife's friends over for dinner -- he's my friend too, but I know him through my wife -- and since he's also a big film buff, I sent him on his way with Perfume. It was around this time that I also got another friend to take my copies of a second Tykwer film, Run Lola Run, and Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. I worried less about these two than I did Perfume, considering them both to be slam dunks, while Perfume got mixed reviews.

Time passed. I waited for feedback. Oh, I did other things in the meantime, but there was always a small percentage of my brain devoted to wondering when I'd hear back from these two guys on how they liked the movies.

This past Saturday night, at a friend's birthday drinks, I finally decided to ask the second friend about Run Lola Run and Children of Men. He had yet to watch either of them, but laughed while he said it -- as though I were trying to foist two turds off on him, and it would be a real chore to watch them. (To be fair, he hadn't requested these films -- he told me he hadn't seen them, so I brought them the next time we got together). What's worse is that since this guy and I have differed on several films in the past, he's got this running joke that my taste in movies is bad. For a guy who writes film reviews for a living, this is a shot to the heart, though I always laugh it off. In order to keep the joke going, he conveniently forgets the movies we've both loved, as well as those we've both hated. He just remembers when we differ.

I tried to "Oh come on" him -- I mean, we're talking about two of the best films of the last ten years (there -- more hyperbole for you). He grudgingly acknowledged that Run Lola Run was probably good, but said he'd heard mixed things about Children of Men. I immediately demanded to know the names of the people who told him this, and their addresses. Okay, I didn't, but I wanted to.

I wouldn't say this exchange really got me down. I mean, I do expect him to eventually watch them, and would honestly be surprised if he didn't enjoy them.

But it was still pretty well-timed when the other friend contacted my wife the next day to tell her how much he liked Perfume. I didn't read what he actually wrote or hear what he actually said (I can't remember what medium he used to contact her), but she conveyed me the message that he "loved it." This put a little smile on my face.

Then he repeated the praise directly to me yesterday. He posted the following on my facebook wall:

"dude - thank you for Perfume. I loved it. Very original and provocative. Only lame thing? Dustin Hoffman's superbad Italian accent."

Yeah, he's got a point there. Dustin Hoffman doesn't belong in a period piece, especially one set in France. And he does take you out of the movie -- just a little. But as you can see from his comment, it doesn't crucially damage a person's overall perspective on the film. (Plus, he's in it for 20 minutes or less).

This may be a lot of words to devote to a simple everyday social transaction -- a person liking or not liking a recommendation -- but hey, welcome to The Audient. More than anything, I hope this post will encourage my readers to check out Perfume, one of the great treasures I've discovered in the last couple years, especially if you like art direction and production design. You might even say I'm "recommending it."

Thereby putting my cinematic reputation at risk once again ...

Michael Jackson must be so disappointed

Why?

Because the thriller is dead.

Don't believe me? Well, when's the last time you remember getting really excited for an upcoming thriller? Don't hurt your brain.

The (at least temporary) death of one of cinema's most venerable genres first occurred to me over the weekend, as I was staring absently at a billboard for The International. I'd seen a trailer, and been unimpressed by it, several months earlier. Seems like another latter day paranoia movie about righteous people getting targeted by the corporate machine. Yawn.

This movie should theoretically have a lot to offer me, if not in terms of genre, then in terms of ingredients. Clive Owen may currently hold the honor of my biggest man-crush in Hollywood, and as for your run-of-the-mill heterosexual crushes, Naomi Watts ain't bad either. But perhaps most importantly, I love the director, Tom Tykwer. Despite having a couple duds on his résumé -- if you haven't seen Heaven, don't -- this man is truly an outside-the-box thinker, who brought his highly original perspectives to Run Lola Run and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. In fact, I own both films. If he can breathe exciting new vitality into a costume drama about conjuring fragrances, why can't he save the thriller?

Yet I have no interest whatsoever in seeing The International.

Maybe I'm gun shy from all the dreck that has littered the thriller landscape these last couple years. You know, the Firewalls, the AntiTrusts, the Disturbias. It's titles like these that leave me thinking the thriller is as dead as the horror was, before Scream came along.

Still don't believe me? Well, to further illustrate my point, I've taken a gander at my handy-dandy list of 2008 movies -- not the ones I saw, but the complete list, according to their U.S. release dates. Of the over 200 movies on this list, there were only nine -- that's right, nine -- I could feel fairly certain of classifying as straight-up thrillers. (I consider The Bank Job more of a heist movie, and the political thriller is a different enough genre to take Body of Lies out of contention). Granted, I don't recognize all the titles at a glance, but even if I've missed some, that still leaves the genre pretty darn scarce. And if there are thrillers on that list whose titles I don't recognize, that makes them fringe -- the kissing cousin of "scarce."

Shall we take a look at some of these films and how they fared?

88 Minutes. I saw this on a number of worst films of the year lists, as all of Al Pacino's shark-jumping tendencies really crystallized into a movie people could stand up and boo. I did not see this film, but am content to take its detractors at their word. U.S. box office: $17 million.

Bangkok Dangerous. Does a Nicolas Cage movie really count as a thriller, or is it its own idiotic genre? I should probably call this straight-up action, more like Max Payne or The Punisher: War Zone, neither of which I'm counting here. This film was a laughingstock, released on the first eligible date after Labor Day. You either count it as a failed thriller, which supports my theory, or don't count it as a thriller at all, which also supports my theory. I win either way. Clever, eh? U.S. box office: $15 million.

Cassandra's Dream. Woody Allen's Match Point was pretty definitely a thriller, and this was filmed on the same loooong trip to England as that film and Scoop, so let's classify it as a thriller. This film has less nuance than any Woody Allen film I've ever seen, with bluntly expository dialogue and almost a total lack of action. Boo-ring. Even Ewen McGregor and Colin Farrell can't liven it up, and U.S. audiences noticed in a major way. U.S. box office: $971,000.

Eagle Eye. This definitely qualifies as the most successful thriller of 2008, having crossed the $100 million mark in the U.S. How much of that can be credited to the filmgoing public's love affair with Shia LaBeouf is uncertain. Because you didn't hear critics saying much good about it, did you? The thing I thought was funniest about this film was that its poster contains no fewer than three anguished expressions apiece for its two stars -- anguished expressions on the poster being the dead giveaway that a movie's a thriller. I've included the poster here for your reference. U.S. box office: $101 million.

Lakeview Terrace. Supposedly laughable domestic thriller in which Samuel L. Jackson does everything but yell "I'm the police! King Kong ain't got nothing on me!" Interracial couples beware. This film was seriously derided by critics, but a couple people did see it. U.S. box office: $39 million.

Passengers. I would not be surprised if this Anne Hathaway starrer were really good, because Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives) is a really good director. However, this film was so under the radar that IMDB does not even show a U.S. box office take for it, after an October 24th limited release. U.S. box office: ???

Tell No One. This is the thriller I wanted to see in 2008. A French film with some supposedly excellent twists. Yet I was never aware of it playing at any theaters near me. Though it did quite well in France, its U.S. results were much more modest. U.S. box office: $6 million.

Untraceable. Yet another "serial killer taunts FBI agent" movie, starring Diane Lane. It did okay at the box office, but that would seem to depend more on having little competition when it was released last January. No one said anything good about it. U.S. box office: $29 million.

Vantage Point. A decent cast boosted this "differing perspectives" thriller to a pretty good box office. But again, no one I respect had a nice thing to say about this movie. And it's yet another film on this list that I did not see. If you're counting, the only one I did see was Cassandra's Dream. And I try to see a good cross section of what's out there, if I have half a mind to. U.S. box office: $72 million.

Proof? Hardly. Signs of a trend? Hell yeah.

And it doesn't seem likely that this trend will reverse itself anytime soon. I'm not expecting some 21st century Hitchcock to come out of the woodwork. But then again, who would have thought one terrifying phone call to Drew Barrymore -- which has now become a parody mainstay -- would revive the whole horror genre?

As for The International ... well, if I have to give someone the benefit of the doubt, maybe it should be Tom Tykwer.

Or maybe I'll just wait to see what my fellow critics have to say about it first ...