"The Key To Reserva"

The plot: Martin Scorcese takes three fragmented pages from an unfilmed Hitchcock script. The script is utter nonsense by the name of "The Key To Reserva" that Scorcese, imitating and honoring and becoming Hitchcock, shoots so smooth it's like the 60s never happened. Almost completely silent. Definitely completely perfect.

This thing is more exciting than almost any thriller made this year. It conjures a complete world out of thin air, in a single scene, with the bare minimum of dialogue. We understand everything we need about the characters, all at once. Watching this, and loving this, made me think of another short film this year that was directed for the internet by another great director - "Hotel Chevalier", which is sheer cinematic divinity. It's appropriate that I downloaded it from iTunes, since I treated it like a song that I love enough to pay for it and then play over and over again (on my computer, on my iPod, in my dreams) until I'm sick of it. Wouldn't this be a strange and wonderful way for directors who devote years to ever-expanding visions and budgets to just chill out and make a good old-fashioned movie. Don't you wish Sam Raimi could have cranked out a twenty-minute gorefest in between Spiderman 2 and 3? Or that Christopher Nolan could make a twisty little ten-minute noir?

Stop complaining that that would ruin movies. The short film deserves to become its own genuine popular art - all the early films were short, after all. The only reason movies turned into feature films is that DW Griffith made "The Birth of a Nation." People (adults) (lame ones) complain about short attention spans, but isn't this just a return to the pre-classical days?

Because great minds think alike - more likely because my life and philosophy have been shaped by his writing - David Thomson's latest entry is right on my wavelength:

Hotel Chevalier didn't mean very much, in a narrative sense, but it was riveting, and I wonder if there isn't a future for movie (as opposed to movies) as just arresting, enigmatic scenes or conversations - bits and pieces - on the internet.

I love David Thomson. I have a secret dream to write about television the way that David Thomson writes about movies. (I saw Thomson when he came to the Stanford bookstore to speak about his latest book, "Nicole Kidman," a beautiful and weird love letter to Kidman, actresses, the cinema, all life that is never quite lived. I was the only student there. I was one of only five people, and two of them were bookstore employees. He spoke. He signed my book.) In my secret dream, he finds me in a crowded theater after an awards ceremony that I didn't win. I'm sitting at my table, trying to look proud of just being nominated, but not at all, really. He walks up to me, and in his light british accent that sounds just a bit like Peter Ustinov, he says, "I'm proud of you, son." Actually, maybe that's my secret dream about my father, I forget.

Another hypothesis - this burgeoning boom in short films is the artistic leap forward from youtube videos - which have to be short, because of lack of money and lack of RAM, just like the old Noir films had to be shadowy to hide the missing walls of the set. "Detour" is only about an hour, took a week to shoot, and features one or two of the most mesmerizing scenes in cinema.

And even though this is a commercial, I dare you to find more thrilling, vital, exhultant, wild and yet controlled, kinetic, utterly useless and just perfectly fucking SMOOTH filmmaking this year:




Michael Mann is a genius.