I see nothing wrong with (and bits fantastic about) Ron Rosenbaum‘s daunting appreciation of the art of Tony Scott over at New York Observer: “I was talking to a woman I know about my Tony Scott Disorder Theory. That in his last two films, Man on Fire and the sadly neglected (though profoundly insane) Domino, Tony Scott has done what his brother Ridley Scott had done with Blade Runner: given us the most hallucinatory accurate visual embodiment of the disordered madness of early 21st-century life. The cinematic equivalent of “the pyrotechnic insanitarium” we inhabit… I was going on about the way certain films and certain filmmakers (and their cinematographers) had indelibly changed the way we see the world and ourselves, just through the cumulative effect of the never-before-seen look of their work… Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Peter Brook’s King Lear, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Blade Runner… Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and, most recently, David Gordon Green’s George Washington and All the Real Girls. (If you haven’t seen the last two, especially the former, you’ve missed something inexplicably powerful and almost mystically beautiful.)” Rosenbaum breaks his further appreciation into two parts, “The Redness of Red” and “The Greenness of Green.” … “[T]he redness of red” is a common buzz-phrase in the philosophy of mind, when the perennial unanswerable question is asked and analyzed: How do you know that what you see as red, your “redness of red,” is the same as my redness of red? Couldn’t my redness of red look like your blueness of blue? How can we know? … I still love Blade Runner, but it will never have the vision-changing impact it had when I first saw it. Then, it was a sudden glimpse of the implicit future; now that it’s been incorporated into everyone’s vision, it seems more a nostalgic, almost antiquated futurism. Sometimes we’re not even aware of the way films change the way we see things—or, as in the case of Tony Scott’s Domino, which practically nobody saw (but which I want everybody to see), the way a film captures, purely with its look, the way we look. Holds a mirror up to our distorted nature… [W]hat Scott has been doing in his last two films—Man on Fire starred Denzel Washington in what I thought was a beautiful, melancholy take on a hired bodyguard in Mexico City, who loses, avenges and then regains the child he’s supposed to protect—just hasn’t gotten the respect it deserves… What is he doing? … I wouldn’t claim that he’s the only one who does it, or that every technique is his invention, or that it doesn’t partake of techniques pioneered in avant-garde TV commercials or Brazilian cinema (or that he didn’t cop a plot device from Point Break in Domino). But I would say he’s taken it to another level. Synthesized its incoherencies, taken them to the max. He’s made films that—more than just about any mainstream films I’ve seen recently—have embedded violence and violation together in its very molecular matrix.” At this point, the absence of a copy editor seems apparent in a giddy fashion: Scott’s “films seem not to be made from film stock, celluloid—rather, a creepily cellular green slime-mold emulsion, electro-slime, poison neon green. The green of Love Canal. The colors themselves are a violation, almost an emotion. The motion itself is an act of violence 24 frames a second. All the images are as if from an illuminated manuscript of Satanic verses… Domino may not have been a commercial success, but it will be a cultural referent longer than many movies that make more money. It’s our flyblown, electro-slime “Wasteland.” Our Dreamland Burning.” Please read more at the link. Martin A. Grove‘s marathon banter with Scott about its visual style—”It’s funny, my life began as a painter and I still think and function like a painter”—is here.

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