Reeling and Rocking

A year or so ago I reviewed the Japanese girl rock movie, Linda Linda Linda, or rather, kind of reviewed it, while linking to a YouTube clip of the title song. I love that movie to pieces. So when one of my correspondents told me that they liked another Japanese girl rock movie better, I was intrigued. The movie in question is Nana (2005, directed by Kentarô Ôtani), which is based in turn on a manga. The movie itself isn't especially concerned with the healing power of rock and roll as an object unto itself (as Linda Linda Linda was), so much as it uses music as a plot device. It could be anything, really.

Anyway, the plot of the movie follows two girls who are named Nana who meet by happenstance on a train to Tokyo. The first Nana, who we first meet in a pre-credit concert sequence, is an aspiring rock star.  She is world weary and jaded already even though she's only 20. The other Nana is going to Tokyo in pursuit of a boyfriend who went off to art school there. The second Nana is a gushing schoolgirl at first. Naive is putting things mildly. Things end badly with her boyfriend, who clearly doesn't want her around him. Also by happenstance, the two Nanas wind up as roommates. It's a mutually beneficial relationship: rocker Nana teaches schoolgirl Nana to be independent, while schoolgirl Nana plays matchmaker for rocker Nana and her ex-boyfriend (now a successful rock star in his own right).

This all sounds fun, but it turns out limp. I think I knew it was going to be limp when it got into the habit of starting songs as diegetic musical numbers and then truncating them, almost like the filmmakers didn't actually have complete songs to play with (it eventually gets out of this habit, but the damage was done early; it's also likely that this was a casualty when the run-time of the film got long, unfortunately). I didn't dislike the movie, which should relieve my friend who recommended it, but I did resent that it wasn't better, and I wish it was more in love with rock and roll, and in love with better rock and roll at that. That's NOT a problem that Linda Linda Linda had.

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The three men profiled in It Might Get Loud (2008, directed by Davis Guggenheim) don't have a problem with loving rock and roll. They are, respectively, Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. The movie opens with White cobbling together a one string guitar from a board, a couple of nails, a coke bottle, and a pick-up. White is endlessly inventive. All three are endlessly inventive in their respective ways, about which the movie goes into in great depth. The conceit is that they've all three been assembled into a warehouse to talk about playing guitar and maybe to play some, too, which is the promise that the movie makes. Then it fails to deliver on it. Oh, there's a ton of guitar. True. But you don't really see the three of them come together and jam until they play The Band's "The Weight" under the closing credits. It's a good way to keep the audience in their seat during the closing credits, I guess, but it seems like a cheat. You never really have a sense of them interacting. One wishes that White's prediction at the outset, that "there might be a fist fight," had come true.

Still, it is a fair portrait of each guitarist in turn, with Jimmy Page coming off the best--he's really turned into a lovely old man with a twinkle of a boy still in him--as evidenced while watching him play air guitar to Link Wray's "Rumble" or playing air guitar with a theremin. It's White, though, that makes the strongest statement about the nature of his art, when he plays a Son House song and then declares that he's spent his entire career trying to play that song. In one other respect, the movie is a success: it makes me want to go home and play guitar.

Dribs and Drabs

I'm getting a little backlogged on reviews, so here are some quick hits to get caught up.

Horror and related:

I Sell the Dead (2008, directed by Glenn McQuaid), in which amiable grave robber Dominic Monaghan recounts his life of crime on the eve of his execution. Not really a narrative, per se, so much as a collection of vignettes; the horror movie equivalent of a picaresque. It has an interesting production design that recalls the roots of the horror film in the graphic arts, and a striking artifice that's the product of being filmed in front of a green screen. It's intrusive some of the time, but it works well enough. It's certainly better than some of the cheaper productions of the past (Ed Wood's cardboard sets for instance). The filmmakers obviously spent their money on the cast rather than on sets, including Ron Perlman as the confessor, Larry Fessenden as Monaghan's partner, and Angus Scrimm as the Doctor Knox figure. It has some good moments, particularly after our erstwhile resurrectionists start dealing in the undead, but on the whole, it's kind of lackadaisical. It takes a while to get where it's going. Still, parts of it are pretty funny, particularly the first encounter with other worlds.

Christine (1983, directed by John Carpenter) is one of Carpenter's most underrated movies. It's stripped down from Stephen King's ungainly novel into a lean, mean horror film, though it is perhaps let down by at least two of its leads. It has some terrific character work by Robert Prosky, Roberts Blossom, and Harry Dean Stanton, and it makes fun use of old rock and roll songs to boot. Still, the real star of the movie is the car, a menacing 1958 Plymouth Fury, which is appropriate given the eponymous title. The story itself strikes me as a masculine version of Carrie, though it's a bit more sinister than Carrie. It kinda sorta borrows the ending of Carrie, but only if you squint your eyes. It dispenses with the ghost story element of the book, and suggests that Christine was just born bad (which it accomplishes in a droll assembly line sequence to start the movie), much to the betterment of the whole. Unfortunately, I streamed this from Netflix and the print they have for streaming is in the wrong friggin aspect ratio and it's WAY noticeable. Note to self: revisit this sometime soon.

Civilian:

I'm sucker for a swashbuckler, and there was a LONG drought for swashbucklers in the last quarter of the 20th Century, so The Mask of Zorro (1998, directed by Martin Campbell) was a welcome return. The mantle of Zorro is passed from Anthony Hopkins to Antonio Banderas in the course of this movie, and there's a hint of The Count of Monte Cristo in the way Hopkins's elder Zorro goes about taking his revenge on the enemy who imprisoned him for 20 years. It's not canon, but it works. The film is so much fun to watch that I'm not inclined to be a stickler. What this film restores to the action film is charm and romance, a model adopted in part by the Pirates of the Caribbean films a couple of years later (they also borrowed Zorro's screenwriters). This is the film that made Catherine Zeta-Jones a star, and she was gorgeous in it, but the real pleasure for me was watching Anthony Hopkins, dressed all in black, snuffing out candles with a bullwhip. I started thinking wicked, wicked thoughts about that, and I can't remember the last time an action movie had that effect on me. But that's just me. The film's not without its faults, but it's at least in the neighborhood of the great Zorro films with Fairbanks and Power.

Chasing the Dragon

Taken on the level of its plot, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009, directed by Niels Arden Oplev) is not particularly distinguished from other similar crime thrillers. Disgraced journalist Michael Blomkvist is hired by a wealthy capitalist Henrik Vanger to find out what happened to his missing niece, who vanished some forty years in the past. The investigation brings Blomqvist into contact with professional computer hacker Lisabeth Salander, a goth girl savant with deep scars from her past, and in contact with a series of related crimes that appear to be motivated by the Vanger family's old ties to the Nazis. Pretty stock stuff, truth to tell--Agatha Christie would recognize its outlines--but expertly rendered. That's only the plot, and movies are often so much more than their plots. This one certainly is. The plot here serves mainly as a crucible in which to test its characters, and how those characters react is what makes the movie fascinating.

The original Swedish title of this film is Män som hatar kvinnor, literally "Men Who Hate Women." This is the major theme of the movie, and it's a narrative thread that brings Lisabeth out of the shadows of what would normally be a supporting role into the lead. The movie may nominally belong to Michael Nyqvist's Blomkvist, but it's Lisabeth who holds the screen against all comers. Played with brittle rage by Noomi Rapace, she's dramatically different from most movie heroines. Bisexual, pierced and tattooed, possibly an Aspie, she is a fundamentally damaged woman who nevertheless turns the tables on the narrative, just as she turns the tables on the rapist who abuses her. Rape and violence towards women are rampant in this movie, including at least two pretty graphic depictions, and it is tempting to class parts of the film as a rape/revenge fantasy. The movie is too smart for that, though. It weaves its rape content into a broader theme about misogyny on a far more sinister scale. This movie almost has to have a female protagonist, because putting a male protagonist amid these elements might seem apologetic.

The character arcs the film pursues for both Blomqvist and Lisabeth are essentially redemptive. Blomkvist seeks to recover the muse he has lost in the process of losing a libel suit, while Lisabeth is trying to live with a violent past. By the end of the film, both seem to have found their way back from the wilderness. Watching them work through their demons is the real pleasure of the film, and it's what keeps the audience watching--never bored in the least--as the movie unreels its longer than usual running time.

I have to say, though, that I was a bit disarmed when the credit for the Swedish Film Institute came onscreen at the beginning. It was like I was starting a Bergman film. Parts of the film look like Bergman, but that may be an unavoidable consequence of filming in the same light, because the filmmaking on display here is very different. This is the computer age, after all, and Lisabeth is a computer savant--the film actually shows what she's doing, which is unusual for hacker's in movies--and the movie takes its cues from multimedia, often providing exposition in layered images superimposed on one another. The obsession with images is descended from Blow-Up, if you want a reference point for this film's structure, but it doesn't look much like that film, either. I like, too, the way it inverts the gender dynamics of its final confrontation with the murderer, by making Blomkvist the loose cannon who goes poking around inadvisably and by making Lisabeth the knight errant. It's a neat trick on genre conventions. Finally, I like the relationship that develops between Blomkvist and Lisabeth--lovers, eventually, but an odd coupling. Lisabeth knows everything about Blomkvist, as he notes, but he knows almost nothing about her. She leaves him that way, too.

One measure of a good movie is whether or not the characters wear out their welcome. Do you want to spend more time in their company after the credits roll? For me, for this film, the answer is yes, and fortunately, this is the first film of a trilogy. The other chapters, The Girl who Played With Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest have already been filmed. I'm looking forward to them.

Seeing Red

On the whole, I'm glad I didn't take in the Red Riding Trilogy all in one go. I could have. My local theater ran them all at a special discount on one night. I think that might have been a bit much to take. One a night was just fine.

Red Riding 1974 (2009, directed by Julian Jarrold) sets things in motion. Someone is abducting and murdering young girls in Yorkshire. The police claim that they haven't any leads, but that doesn't stop young crime reporter Eddie Dunford from picking at the threads of the case and unraveling it. It's a story that leads him straight into a swamp of police corruption and shady real estate deals, to say nothing of s paedophile who sews the wings of a swan to the back of one of his victims. Pretty soon, the police take an interest in Dunford and begin pointing him in directions that serve their interests. They certainly don't serve Dunford's or the public's.

Red Riding 1980 (2009, directed by James Marsh) picks up the pieces of the first film, some six years later when the case of the Yorkshire Ripper opens the Yorkshire police up to scrutiny. The central figure in this film is one Peter Hunter, an investigator brought in from Manchester to sort things out. Hunter had his investigation of the Yorkshire police interrupted after the events of 1974, and he's looking to pick up where he left off with this case. This is complicated by dissension in the ranks of his own hand-picked squad of investigators, among whose number is an old girlfriend.

Red Riding 1983 (2009, directed by Anand Tucker) splits its purview to two protagonists: Maurice Jobson, a cop who we've seen in the previous two movies turning a blind eye to corruption that disgusts him, and John Piggott, a lawyer who is hired to represent the feeble-minded patsy that was framed for the child murders in the first film. Another child abduction sets off the action in this film, but the movie is constructed of the invisible elements of the first movie, and hinges upon it.

These movies were made for the UK's Channel 4 and in addition to being made by three different directors, none of whom is known for gritty, miserablist noir like this, they were filmed on three different film stocks. This has the effect of giving each of them a certain visual "feeling." The first film, for instance, has a distinctive visual murk resulting from filming on 16mm film, while the second film has the merciless clarity of deep-focus 35mm and the third makes use of high-def video to play with exotic lighting patterns and effects. Yet, in spite of the visual diversity of the filmmaking, there's also a visual unity that stems from the setting itself. It's a dour, dreary place, the north of England, even in the sunlight.

The movies are populated by some truly scabrous characters, and one strains at the thought that any police department in the developed world could possibly be as corrupt as the West Yorkshire police. Still, it has the ring of truth, even in a fictional setting. Our various protagonists are a mixed lot. Eddie Dunford is the purest of these characters, given that he's young and uncorrupted and given that Andrew Garfield plays him as a fairly likable crusader. Paddy Considine's Hunter is a bit more world weary, weighed down by his own personal transgressions and by a sense of failure regarding the events of the first film. Piggott and Dobson in the third film, played respectively by David Morrisey and Mark Addy, are both completely tarnished.

On the matter of filmmaking, these are made by expert hands, but there's a disconnect between the elan of the films and their narratives. The screenplay--all three films are adapted by Tony Grisoni from the novels by David Peace--takes some awful turns. Most disconcerting is the tendency of our various protagonists to become sexually involved with witnesses on very short acquaintance. This is most jarring in the first one, in which Dunford falls into bed with Rebecca Hall's grieving mother after she is clearly offended by him and the way he goes about his profession, but the way Jobson hooks up with the medium in the third movie is almost comical in comparison. Do real people behave like this? Probably not. And, while on the whole it is the second movie that seems under the tightest narrative control, it still asks us to believe that a hit squad of cops can get away with a mass shooting at a nightclub. More globally, the movie posits a universe in which the cops protect a child murderer as a matter keeping corrupt business propositions viable, one of which is a trade in pornography. This, even after the initial case is resolved. For the most part, it's best not to think about the narrative. If you do, the whole house of cards might come tumbling down. Best to groove on the moods and moral ambiance of the whole project, because as a mood piece, Red Riding is a piece of work.

Juvenile Delinquency

Every time I read something by comic book writer Mark Millar, I get the vague feeling that he's kind of a douchebag. I got this while reading The Authority. I got this while reading Ultimate X-Men. I got this reading a scattering of Civil War. I haven't read Kick-Ass, but I got that feeling again from watching Matthew Vaughn's 2010 movie version. It's a troubling film. It's an amoral film. It's a film that is undeniably fun to watch.

Now, I realize that I'm not this film's target demographic. This film wasn't made for middle-aged women. It was made for adolescent and just post-adolescent boys, and that's part of what troubles me about it. I'm not particularly troubled by the beating Frank D'Amico, Mark Strong's villain, delivers to Hit-Girl near the end of the film, as some critics are. I'm more troubled by the sexualization of Hit-Girl in the sequence immediately prior to that action mayhem. The movie puts eleven year old Chloe Moretz into a sexy schoolgirl outfit as a means of getting into D'Amico's headquarters. And just prior to that, we get some of the secondary high school boys lusting after her after seeing her capacity for violence. Seriously, this is just sick. We also get the dubious pleasure of watching that same eleven year old character watch her father burned to death. This is all part and parcel of Millar's playbook. He likes outrageous ideas like this for their shock value, and don't give me any bullshit about it being satire. It's an extension of trends in comics since Frank Miller uncorked the grim and gritty superhero archetype in the early 80s and protests of "realism" are going to fall on deaf ears when it comes to a movie in which our teen-age hero ends up donning a rocket pack and wasting a raft of bad guys with mini-guns mounted on his back. At its most basic, this is a more explicit, more virulent version of the superhero wish-fulfillment power fantasy, one that feeds both fanboy sensibilities of "cool" and their sense of entitlement to groove on even the most reprehensible imagery so long as it feeds that sense of "cool."

But does this matter?

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."--Oscar Wilde

In the interests of full disclosure, some of my favorite movies include the likes of Dirty Harry and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Dirty Harry is an even more troubling power fantasy than Kick-Ass could ever dream of being, and TCM's only reasonable justification for existing is the very force of its film making. So I need to own up to the fact that while I was watching Kick-Ass, I was grooving on how it was made. It's an accomplished movie that knows how to provide the kinetic thrills that are the stock in trade of action movies. It gets the adrenalin flowing. Not only that, but it's almost classically austere in the way it films action. It's not a run and gun movie. You see the geography of the scene. You see every loving bullet impact. You see bodies in motion, sometimes in slow motion that renders the action balletic in the manner of John Woo's best films. Since this is becoming a lost art, it's exhilarating to watch it executed well. Further, the various characters in Kick-Ass are performed with aplomb: Both Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz are destined for stardom (Moretz in particular is one of those preternaturally gifted child actors a la Jodie Foster or Dakota Fanning). It's reassuring to see what a fine actor Nicolas Cage can be when he's put in the right situation. Hell, hearing Cage affect a combination of William Shatner and Adam West as the voice of Big Daddy is kind of a hoot.

In any event, while I watched it, I was immersed in the world it was presenting and that's the aim of movies like this, after all. Shall I take the film to task for accomplishing exactly what it sets out to do?

If I apply Oscar Wilde's dictum, this is very well made, not badly made at all, and that's pretty much all she wrote. Right?

Right?

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As a side note, here's a further opinion on Mark Millar. Thought I'd share.

Hit to the Body

Audiences going in to Jennifer's Body (2009, directed by Karyn Kusama) expecting a quirky comedy horror lark on the evidence of screenwriter Diablo Cody's Juno can probably be forgiven for balking at the jolt delivered by this film's second murder sequence. This isn't what they were buying tickets to see. They got an actual horror movie. Likewise, teen age horror fans can be forgiven for balking at the film, baited by the promise of a topless Megan Fox (which doesn't happen) and a fun horror movie that delivers boobs and blood. What they got is a female-centric movie about women and the relationships they form. Again, not what they were buying tickets to see. It's a movie that's neither fish nor fowl. But it's pretty good at what it's trying to do.

The story involves two friends: Anita, whose nickname is "Needy," and Jennifer. They're an unlikely pair, with Needy being kind of a nerd while Jennifer is a wet dream of a cheerleader. But, as the movie rightly notes, playground friendships can be deep. One night, Needy is dragged away from her boyfriend to go see an indy band at a roadhouse with Jennifer. The band is looking for a break and they've decided on a pact with the devil. They need a virgin to sacrifice and they've chosen Jennifer. Unfortunately, Jennifer isn't a virgin, and even though the band gets the success they crave, Jennifer becomes a demon in the bargain, one hungry for human flesh. So she begins preying on her male classmates, with a special eye for the ones Needy is friends with.

Structurally, this is a distaff slasher movie, but there's a striking difference between this and a standard slasher movie: none of Jennifer's victims "deserves" it. The moral judgement is absent. The guys she kills aren't rapists or stoners or even womanizers. They're just normal kids. The movie compounds this by giving them quirks that show them to have normal interior lives. This is pretty good writing (and nevermind the Diablo Cody-speak that some people can't get past). There's a point to this: it's a repudiation of the moral universe of the slasher movie. By inverting the gender dynamics of the victims, it takes away the planks of that morality, because, when you come down to it, the victims in most slasher movies don't deserve what they get, either. This film is careful not to turn its monster into a hero, too. All of this has the perverse effect of amplifying the horror quotient in a way that a gorier boobs and blood opus might miss. Plus, it defuses the horror film's usual veneer of misogyny. This is important, because, as I said, this is a movie about women and their relationships. True, it's abstracted through the lens of the horror movie, but Jennifer's Body is still about two best friends who become estranged. The "BFF" (a grouping of letters explicitly referenced in the movie) is a kind of relationship that boys generally don't enter.

Amanda Seyfried's character, Needy, is an interesting variation on the slasher film's 'final girl' archetype. She's totally the type: socially awkward, nerdy. In another movie, it would be plain to see that she's the final girl the minute she walks on screen. But this movie twists things a bit. Needy, unlike Jennifer's man-eater and unlike every other final girl ever written, has what seems like a normal adult sexual relationship with her boyfriend. She doesn't pine for someone unobtainable to a girl of her social stratus. If there's a misstep with her character, it's the fact that no amount of frumpy clothing can hide the fact that Amanda Seyfried is gorgeous, though that too may be an intentional commentary on the usual frumpy girl who turns out to be beautiful behind her glasses.

Jennifer herself is a pathetic monster and by the end, the audience has some sympathy for her. This is accomplished mainly in the scene where she's sacrificed to the Devil. Give Megan Fox some credit here, she performs this scene perfectly: no longer the bombshell, she's a victim and a teenage girl who is in way over her head. She joins a long list of sympathetic monsters with whom audiences relate.

What really seals the deal for me regarding this picture's bona fides is the second murder scene, in which Jennifer lures Colin, one of Needy's gothy friends--a nice kid in spite of all the black clothing--to the killing floor. This is cross-cut with a sex scene that goes horribly bad in which Needy senses the awful things that Jennifer does even as her boyfriend enters her. It's a bravura scene that pushes the film out of the realm of the comic. It's a feel-bad scene and there's nothing funny in it. It goes for the throat.

Blast from the Past

One of the downsides of having a voracious movie habit is that you'll over-fish the waters eventually. I'm running out of good films noir, for example. I mean, I enjoy looking at the second tier noirs--some of those are even my favorite films in the idiom, but eventually you're into third and fourth-tier films and you find that the thrill is pretty much gone. Still, there are unearthed gems, so I keep poking around. I think that's the way that the Criterion people do it, too. How else to explain their interest and love for such forgotten films as Overlord or, more germane to my film noir problem, Blast of Silence. Blast of Silence (1961, directed by Allen Baron). This film is pretty obscure. While it was released by Universal (in their "Universal International" days), it comes out of the dawning New York underground movement. It also comes at the tail end of the classic noir period, and you can see the self-consciousness of post-noir filter into the way it's constructed. The voice over narration ties it to the classic noir, while the way it is shot ties it to the neo-Realists, and the French New Wave, who constructed their films in part from classic noir and the neo-Realists. It looks like a nouvelle vague film. Note the softness of this image:

That's not the kind of image that you find in the abstracted world of the classic noir. It looks more like one of Truffaut's shots of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows.

The story is mostly banal. We follow hitman Frankie Bono out of Cleveland on a job that takes him to the Big Apple at Christmas. Once there, one of the suppliers of the tools of his trade identifies what his job is and tries to shake him down, meanwhile, Bono runs across old acquaintances who don't know what he does for a living. He's torn between the ruthlessness of his job, the alienation it entails, and a desire for a "normal" life. These conspire to suck him into the bleak downward spiral of a classic noir protagonist. This narrative is accompanied by an interior narrative, delivered in voice-over by Lionel Stander, that's a portrait in anomie and psychopathology. This is a counterpoint to the documentary-style adopted by the camera, which portrays the hustle and bustle of Christmastime New York, from Rockefeller Center to Harlem to the bleak swamps to the east where generations of criminals have dumped bodies.

The beginning of the film is arresting, all right: the soundtrack tells us that all routs into New York are shrouded in darkness and that emerging into the city is like being born, full of piss and vinegar and hatred. This immediately marks Blast of Silence as an art film of sorts, rather than a stock genre exercise. Unfortunately, it never quite shakes off the genre, and it suffers for it because it doesn't trust the genre to cover its ass. There's a whiff of pretense in this movie. Still, it's better to take a swing at the fences than the alternative, I suppose. Plus, it's short at 77 minutes, so it doesn't collapse under its own weight.

In any event, this film can be seen as a kind of bridge between the classic noir films and the urban alienation film of the 1970s. It's hard to watch this movie and not see a bit of Travis Bickell in Frankie Bono.

Seriously...

It's always dangerous to take the Coen Brothers at their word, so when they say in the DVD supplemental material that the fake Yiddish folktale at the beginning of A Serious Man (2009) has nothing to do with the film that follows--that it's essentially a cartoon short before the feature--that should be an alarm bell right there. It has everything to do with the movie that follows. Or maybe it doesn't. And that's the point. Nothing in this film is certain. How appropriate is it, then, that when we first see our protagonist, Larry Gopnik, he is explicating the story of Schrödinger's Cat.

The opening scenes of A Serious Man concern a man on his way back from market who is helped on the road by a man who his wife claims has been dead for three weeks. He is a dybbuk, a ghost, and to invite one into your home is to invite ruin. This man shows up as invited and the wife stabs him with an icepick. Consequently, he wanders back into the night. Now, the question here is this: is this man actually a dybbuk? The movie doesn't say so conclusively. Do the actions of the wife curse their house? The movie doesn't say. Are the movie's actual protagonists related to these people, and are they therefore cursed? The movie doesn't say. The filmmakers invite you to make your own connections, and that's at the heart of the movie, because they've set things up such that you can never know what's actually going on. Is Larry Gopnik's wife having an affair? It doesn't say conclusively. Is his brother some kind of idiot savant, a mathematical genius? It doesn't say conclusively. Is God actively destroying Gopnik's life? The movie doesn't say. Without opening the box and killing the cat, we can't know. The Coens like this sort of thing. It's the box at the end of Barton Fink stretched out to feature length.

All comedies are predicated a little bit on schadenfreude. Mel Brooks once described the difference between comedy and tragedy thusly: "I cut my finger. That's tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That's comedy." The Coens know this, and push the envelope. This movie doesn't evoke gales of laughter. It's more interested in the nervous variety, the "thank God that's not me" variety. The movie darkens considerably as it goes, until there's nothing funny about the ending at all, except that it's not happening to the viewer. The film's casting is just about perfect for this, because everyone on screen is vaguely familiar, but not overly so. Michael Stuhlbarg as Gopnik in particular navigates a tricky performance that requires him to be sympathetic and pathetic at the same time, while raging against an indifferent cosmos. He's the lynchpin of the movie. But this is not a movie-star driven movie.

A Serious Man takes from Fargo the virtue of a seeming verisimilitude, drawn, as Fargo is, from the Coen's upbringing in Minnesota. This effect is amplified by the fact that it's a period piece, set just far enough in the past to cement the place and time in the mind's eye. I don't think this would work in a contemporary setting, but it works beautifully in the late sixties. The film's sense of verisimilitude is further cemented by the ethnic details, also presumably from the Coen's upbringing.

The ethnic details are more important than the time period though.

For all the Judaica on display in this movie, it might very well be an atheist's movie. You can't really tell. God, if he exists in the film's universe, is silent on the matter, and his representatives on Earth, in this film a series of ever "wiser" rabbis seem to be talking out of their asses. Gopnik, for his part, understands the math of the universe--he says so to a Korean student who may be bribing him or may be blackmailing him--but he doesn't understand the consequences. The student's father, who threatens to sue him for defamation, tells him to "accept the mystery." The end of the movie consists of two cross-cut sequences in which Gopnik caves to an act of "moral turpitude" then receives an ominous call from his doctor, while his son waits to get to shelter as a tornado touches down just beyond his school. Is this the hand of God showing itself? Or is it just a bunch of random disasters? More than one critic has likened the film to the Book of Job, because the film really goes out of its way to heap shit on our hero, but even at the end, it doesn't say for sure. And for a comedy, even a dark one, it sure does deliver a shuddering chill as it cuts abruptly to black.

Harried and Harryhausened

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977, directed by Sam Wanamaker) is very much the least of the Sinbad movies. It's woefully miscast. Patrick Wayne (son of The Duke) is WAY too white American to be a credible Sinbad, and it gives the juicier female lead to Taryn Power (daughter of Tyrone Power), rather than to Jane Seymour, who blows her off the screen. This is more or less the same movie as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, in which an evil sorcerer has disfigured the rightful ruler and Sinbad must convey that ruler to a magical wellspring. Along the way, monsters are battled, and at the end, our heroes look on as two monsters battle each other. Unlike that movie, this movie shows our heroes to be complete morons, especially the wise man, Melantheus (played by former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton). The heroes keep just telling evil queen Zenobia their plans, which is irritating in the extreme. If they keep mum about it, the movie has no drama. This kind of special pleading is a hallmark of bad screenwriting. Ray Harryhausen's monsters remain a delight, but there's not enough of them to sustain the movie, and even these show some flagging invention on the part of the artist. The first monsters we get are these demonic insect men:

These are pretty good. But it's downhill from there. The giant walrus seems thrown in just to have an encounter during a slow part of the movie (which, unwittingly pads its length).

And the final monster is this sabertooth tiger, which is not one of Harryhausen's finest creations. It looks like a stuffed toy rather than a threatening monster.

For the most part, you can see the roots of how modern blockbusters are made in this film: you have a monster encounter at the end of every reel--approximately every ten minutes--to keep the kids' attention from wandering. Unfortunately, that doesn't work any better as drama here than it does in more recent fare. Unfortunately.

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Speaking of Harryhausen, the new Clash of the Titans (2010, directed by Louis Leterrier) is surprising in at least one respect: it satisfies the Alison Bechdel rule. There are more than two women in the film with speaking parts. Two or more women speak to each other about something other than a man (in this case, Cassiopeia to her daughter, Andromeda, on the subject of defying the gods). Rah, rah, feminism. Otherwise, this sucks all kinds of ass.

This film is stitched together from bits and pieces of the original film without borrowing its overall design. Some elements seem thrown in just for the sake of echoing the old movie. Calibos, for example, seems like a throw in excuse to make giant scorpions. The contempt for the original film exhibited in this one is manifested in a throwaway bit, in which Perseus finds Bubo the owl in a bunch of scrap and tosses him aside. Mind you, the original is no great shakes and the owl was ridiculous, but why antagonize the people who grew up with it by trashing it. Feh.

Allegedly, the whole reason this exists is to update the special effects from Harryhausen's charmingly homemade stop-motion puppets to state of the art, photoreal CGI. But what, I ask, is the point of state of the art special effects if the film is edited so fast that you can't see anything? I challenge anyone to tell me what this film's harpies actually look like (apart from having wings). There were two points during this film where I said aloud "Hold. The camera. Still." If I say anything during a movie, I'm usually having a bad time, so this is telling of my experience. The way the film plays fast and loose with mythology is irritating, too, but not nearly as irritating as the way it wastes relatively good actors in the background in favor of Sam Worthington and Gemma Arterton, neither of whom exactly holds the screen. Polly walker gets four minutes of screen time? Elizabeth McGovern is even in this? Really? I almost gave this points for having some background extras at the palace in Argos dressed in the Minoan snake goddess outfit (sadly no boobs are visible), but screw it, it's anachronistic. Ralph Fiennes must have done this without preparation during some down time on the set of Harry Potter, because his performance is basically Voldermort in mythological drag. Lazy.

In a nutshell: Loud, pummeling, illogical, incomprehensible, pointless. Tremendous resources misapplied wholesale. A great steaming pile.

Silence is Golden

There's something wintery about the anti-Western. Altman felt it in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Sydney Pollack felt it in Jeremiah Johnson, and you get it full-bore in Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence (1968), a film that razes the Western to the ground and sows salt in the soil.

The movie is set in Utah somewhere during the period thought of as the Old West. I can't pinpoint it any closer than that, because the movie is strangely anachronistic. Utah is a territory in the film--Utah became a state in 1896--but our hero, Silence, carries a broomhandle Mauser rather than the stock guns of Western gunfighters. The broomhandle Mauser was first manufactured in Germany in 1896. So there's a disconnect. Further, the events of the film are based in part on the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857. As with most other Westerns, I prefer to think of this film as an abstraction of history, but this one seems even more anachronistic than most. Silence's gun of choice also Europeanizes the film, which may have been its intent.

In any event, our hero, Silence, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant without any dialogue, falls in with a group of "outlaws" who are being hunted by bounty killers. And by "outlaws", I mean Mormons, though the movie never uses the word. The bounty killers are led by Klaus Kinski's Loco, who'd rather bring 'em in dead than alive. It's a pretty stock set-up. What happens at the end of the movie is NOT stock. At the end, Loco draws a wounded silence out into the open by holding the captured outlaw families hostage. Silence has been sheltering with Vonetta McGee's Pauline, a widow whose husband was killed by Loco, presumably as part of the same bounty on anyone who wasn't a white Christian. She follows him to try to stop him. In the showdown, Silence, Pauline, and all of the "outlaws" are massacred. The end.

Sergio Corbucci's spaghetti westerns are all laced with with a Marxist point of view, and this one is no different, though it's more pessimistic than most. This movie is a critique of the Western's notions of heroism, when in Corbucci's worldview, the West was settled at gunpoint by genocidal murderers. This, at least, has some basis in history, and it may be why the rest of the movie is so ahistorical as a means of softening the blow. The heroic gunfighter prevailing against all odds, Corbucci seems to be saying, is bullshit.

As if to emphasize the point, the landscapes in this movie are bleak snowscapes. We first see Silence on his horse struggling through snowbanks, which eventually unhorse him. This is a kind of fimbulwinter for the West, a prelude to the twilight of the gods. It's the end of the world. The movie it most reminds me of is Hideo Gosha's Goyokin, which indulges in the same motifs of bare trees, snow, and crows. The symbolism is the same in both movies.

The silence of our main character, and his European-ness, are presumably both representative of Europe at the time the film was made. America was indulging in massacres anew in Vietnam in the name of its ideal of democracy, and Europe didn't have a voice in the matter. I could see Corbucci making the same film again in the 2000s.

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For what it's worth, the studio behind The Great Silence compelled Corbucci to film a "happy" ending for the film, which is included (appropriately without a soundtrack) on the Fantomas disc. This ending just goes to show that an ending doesn't need to be happy to be satisfying, because it's just ridiculous.

Angelic Visitations

So, I have a friend who loves Ewan McGregor and hates Tom Hanks. I wonder if she saw Angels and Demons, the 2009 sequel to The Da Vinci Code, and if she did, I wonder what she made of it. Director Ron Howard is back, and proves once again that you can never actually tell what your going to get from him from movie to movie, even within the same franchise. Regarding McGregor, because he's playing a priest and representative of the Vatican in this movie, there was NO chance that we would get to see his endowment in this movie, which, frankly is disappointing. But then, this was made before the current scandals that are tearing the Catholic Church asunder really started to break. A missed opportunity, but you're not going to get that from a Ron Howard film or a film starring Tom Hanks anyway, so what the hell, eh?

In any event, to recap: I hated The Da Vinci Code, which I thought telegraphed its plot so thoroughly that the CSI-style flashbacks were wholly unnecessary. The sequel is quite a bit better, and not just because it dispenses with the flashbacks. It also throws in enough red herrings to make the plot at least a little bit more surprising. Plus, it takes its cues from The Abominable Dr. Phibes, though this film is Phibes on speed. Hanks is back again as symbologist Robert Langdon, who in this film is recruited by the Church (as opposed to being thwarted by it in the first movie) to help decipher the clues in the abduction of the four preferati (leading candidates for the papacy), on the eve of the conclave. The evidence points to the reappearance of the Illuminati, about which Langdon knows a bit. Meanwhile, a vial of antimatter has been stolen from the Large Hadron Collider and turned into a bomb that threatens to destroy the Vatican. So we get another treasure hunt. In most respects, it's the same movie as the first one, minus the goofy conspiracy. The conspiracy in THIS movie is only preposterous, which is one of the reasons that this is better than its predecessor by quite a lot.

Some things I liked about this film are things I liked a great deal. First: Tom Hanks has a MUCH better haircut in this movie. You may think that's a small thing, but did you SEE the haircut they gave him in the first film? Seriously. In a more sober vein, I also like the idea that Langdon is an atheist hero and admits to it when pressed by McGregor's Camerlengo: "Tells me I'm not meant to. Faith is a gift that I have yet to receive." Further, he doesn't recant at the end of the movie, which is amazing given the strong Catholic appeasement the movie indulges. I also like the depiction of the Large Hadron Colider, which, lets face it, IS one of the places in the world that could probably make that quantity of antimatter. It's also a spectacular location. The science here isn't ignorant, nor is the movie's token scientist/eye candy, Ayelet Zurer, whose role is to explain what antimatter is and to act as a foil for Langdon, someone he can spout exposition to. It's not that bad, really. There have been a LOT worse versions of this character. I also like the film's instinct for the jugular. There are several "themed" murders in this film (a la Phibes), and they are wonderfully ghastly. Finally, Rome remains one of the most photogenic cities in the world. The Eternal City, indeed.

So, all in all, a surprise. It's not a great movie at all. It's a popcorn movie that's fun while you're watching it. There are even a few things along its running time that stick in the memory. I'm glad that I didn't pay money to see this in the theater, though, because when you insert an economic element, it tends to change the amount of slack I give a movie. Take that however you like.

A Dish Best Served Cold...

Of all the varieties of genre fiction, crime fiction has always been the one that has been most attractive to filmmakers with a more artistic bent. Oh, the reasons are easy enough to see: crime fiction can be sociological or existential, it can provide horrifying moral conundrums for its characters, it can examine the roots and consequences of violence. As a result, you're more likely to find a crime drama at the art houses than you are to find a science fiction film or a western. And the art house--and the video equivalent of the art house, The Criterion Collection--is where I found Revanche (2008, directed by Götz Spielmann), a film that takes a stock crime story and telescopes it out into a meditation on revenge, forgiveness, and guilt. It transposes a story that would ordinarily be filmed in some kind of stylized fashion by a more genre-oriented director into the flat, long take aesthetic of Eastern European art cinema. Director Götz Spielmann strips the film of anything that might heighten or manipulate the audience's emotions--no score, very few close-ups, an Ozu-esque camera placement, and cold, subdued light--and it lets the characters stew for the camera. Most of the characters' emotions are internalized. It's a cold, emotionally distant way of filming, and it will alienate some audiences. It took me a while to get into it, myself.

The story follows Alex and Tamara, he a low level flunky for the owner of a brothel in Vienna, she a Ukrainian prostitute. As the film opens, the brothel's owner is trying to move Tamara into a higher level of clientele, with strings attached, of course. Tamara owes the owner a large sum of money and Alex would like to raise the money to open his own bar, so he hatches a plan to rob a bank. In one respect, Revanche shares an element in common with more conventional crime films: When someone says "Nothing can go wrong," as Alex does, you know something WILL go horribly, horribly wrong. And so it does.

This brings the film's other major players into the picture. Robert and Susanne are a cop and his wife who are growing apart due to their inability to conceive. Robert ends up killing Tamara by accident during the course of the robbery, and Alex finds himself neighbors with Robert and his wife when he hides out with his grandfather. Revenge burns in his eyes. What follows is fairly surprising, and is not a turn of events that would ordinarily play out in a more commercial film. The universe of this film is more Krzysztof Kieslowski than Sam Fuller.

The shot that opens the film is a fair summary of the arc of the story: We see a tranquil lake with the woods reflected on it until someone throws a rock into it and shatters the reflection into a cascade of ripples. Most films would follow the ripples or cut away, but this one keeps its gaze steady and waits for the ripples to abate, restoring the tranquil lake and the woods, and that, more or less, is what the film as a whole does. The film couches things in other symbolism, too, as Alex repeatedly cuts logs into shorter pieces in his grandfather's barn (impotence), then takes to mechanically chopping wood with an ax (rage). At one point, Robert and Alex meet in the woods and Alex takes the high road and Robert takes the low, which telegraphs Alex's redemption and Robert's masochistic embrace of his status as a scapegoat. For the most part, though, the film doesn't club you with this.

Oddly enough, the film has it both ways. Alex has his revenge, in a way, in a harsh table top revenge fuck with Susanne, while the film diffuses it with Alex's refusal to take revenge on Robert with violence. It's a strange crime film, this, in so far as it promises revenge in its title, but steadfastly refuses to pander to the audience's desire to see it.

We are Stardust, We are Golden

Without claiming that The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973, directed by Gordon Hessler) is a great movie--hell, without claiming that it's even a good one--I have to confess that the experience of seeing it is one of the most treasured memories of my childhood. We--my dad, my brothers, myself, and one of my cousins--saw it at a shithole theater in one of the suburbs of Boston on a trip to see family in 1974. On this same trip, I also saw my first pro baseball game (Cleveland beat the Red Sox 4 to 3 at Fenway). Not a bad vacation for a kid on the first vacation she can remember. Anyway, I remember being totally entranced by Sinbad, and not only for the Harryhausen effects. A pre-Doctor Who Tom Baker was a deliciously sinister bad guy and John Phillip Law remains my favorite of the three Harryhausen Sinbads for the simple expedient of being the one least like an American White Man. In any event, it's the one that captured the mystique of The 1,000 Nights best, I think.

I haven't seen it since I was a tot, though. For some reason, this is the Sinbad movie that fell through the cracks. I can't ever remember seeing it on television--hell, I can't remember ever even seeing it listed on television. The first of the Harryhausen Sinbads, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, used to play all the time at kids matinees and then on cable, and the third one, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, came out just as cable television really started to ramp up, so it was gobbled up and put into the rotation on HBO a year or two after its theatrical run. But not The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. In order to see it again, I would have had to deliberately seek it on home video. And, frankly, I didn't want to revisit it as an adult, because I was afraid it would ruin my perfectly good memories of seeing it in the theater.

Obviously, I finally decided to revisit it. You can blame the instant watch feature on Netflix for this. It made the choice poisonously easy. Imagine my surprise to discover that it actually kinda sorta holds up. Oh, it's obviously a kids movie--Caroline Munro's heaving bosom not withstanding. The characters are mostly here to fight monsters or (in the film's climax) look on as monsters fight themselves. The Sinbad movies gave Harryhausen all kinds of artistic license to include anything he felt like animating. This movie gives us a centaur (who bears a striking resemblance to both the cyclops in the first movie and the troglodyte in the third), a gryphon, an animated ship's figurehead, a nasty little homunculus, and, best of all, a statue of the goddess Kali come to life. For my money, Kali is Harryhausen's best monster, and the fight between her and Sinbad and his men easily ranks with the skeleton duel in Jason and the Argonauts as a peak of his art. Kali is possibly Harryhausen's most convincing effect, but don't take my word for it. See for yourself:

Of course, you can see the flaws in the movie writ large in that clip, too. The natives on the isle of Lemuria (where our heroes and villains find the Fountain of Destiny) are goofy as all get out, kind of like a mime troupe improvising a native ceremony without any concrete direction. And Kali herself is completely ignorant of Indian culture. Be that as it may...

In any event, chalk this up as a pleasant surprise. Sometimes, an adult sensibility doesn't obliterate the things you loved as a child, and that thought makes me happy.

Ghost Stories

A friends of mine works as a rape crisis first-responder, and when I told her I was going to see The Ghost Writer (2010), Roman Polanski's new film, she said "Have a good time. I won't be seeing it." She views Polanski only as a rapist--with some justification, I might add--and boycotts Polanski's movies on general principles. For the most part, I can't argue with her, but I still go see Polanski movies myself. I justify this to myself by noting that more than a hundred people work on most movies, so it's not an individual enterprise like painting or music. I usually wind up having to re-think that position after I see a given movie. It's almost impossible to ignore the personal elements of Polanski's own biography in his films, and this one is no different.

The story here revolves around a ghost writer hired to doctor the memoirs of Adam Lang, a British Prime Minister whose previous ghost writer died under mysterious circumstances. During the course of writing those memoirs, Lang comes under indictment by The Hague for ordering the kidnapping, rendition, and torture of terrorist suspects on behalf of the Americans. Meanwhile, the ghost begins to piece together his predecessor's work (and the reasons for his death).

The parallels to Tony Blair are unmistakable, and I'll get to that in a minute. First, I want to point to the irony of Polanski making a film about a character who can't leave the United States for fear of arrest, which is a weird mirror image of his own situation prior to his recent arrest in Switzerland. As I said, you can't escape his biography in his movies.

The cast in this movie is uniformly excellent, and Polanski himself is in fine form. This is the kind of thriller he seemed born to make in his heyday. It reminds me of one of his "apartment" movies writ large, but it also has the merciless clockwork precision (and menace) of Chinatown. It's the kind of thriller that Hollywood itself is no longer interested in, one in which there are no action sequences as such, but in which danger is always elided. There's a shot of a woman standing in the background on a telephone in this movie, and when we hear a snippet of what she's saying, we know that only bad things are going to happen. Polanski always did paranoia well. This has a terrific cast, by the way, with Ewan McGregor as the ghost and Pierce Brosnan as Lang, and Tom Wilkinson, Kim Catrall, Olivia Williams, and even Eli Wallach in significant supporting roles. Brosnan, in particular, always surprises me in these kinds of roles. Add this to his resume along with The Tailor of Panama and The Matador as another anti-Bond performance. He's good at tired rage. If I have a quibble with the film qua film, it's that in order to set up its pessimistic ending, it requires the ghost to do something pretty stupid. But it's a small detail in a film that otherwise turns the screws tight. Plus, the final image is worth the contrivance.

I mentioned earlier that the parallels to Tony Blair are unmistakable, and I'd like to expand on that a bit. Amid all the ink spilled on movies about the Iraq war itself and their relative box office failure, one thing that seems to fly under the radar is the way that the war influences movies of all kinds, not just war movies. Examples would include movies as diverse as Dawn of the Dead and Iron Man. This movie is more overt than most, but it's still a smuggler, and a harshly critical one, at that. The war, the film tells us in the subtext, has exacerbated the sociopathic tendencies of intelligence agents and national security. It has created merry little fascists out of even the best intentioned of politicos.

In any event, what we have here is one of those caustic genre exercises that acts as a sly sociological commentary. They don't make enough of these these days. Maybe one day soon, one will be made by a director to whom I won't have to grant Orwell's benefit of clergy to enjoy.

Blog of the Dead

Of George Romero's original trio of zombie movies, the one I have the least acquaintance with is Day of the Dead (1985). This isn't really an accident--I didn't like Day of the Dead the first time I saw it and I didn't like it any better when I saw it again in the mid-90s. There are two reasons for this: first, it's populated by repellant characters, even the heroes (a fault compounded by generally bad performances from all involved); second, it's the most nihilistic of Romero's original trio by a long mile. Younger me found this off-putting. Older me still finds it a bit off-putting, but older me is also a bit more forgiving of this sort of thing. When I originally wrote about the film for my old web site, some thirteen years ago, I noted:

"Romero is too talented to make a totally uninteresting movie when he is working in his own self-invented sub-genre, and there is actually material here that holds one's attention, but most of the film's best moments are provided by Tom Savini's thoroughly repulsive grue. Given that the principal aesthetic virtues of Night and Dawn of the Dead are not provided by their grue would indicate that Romero is using his effects as a holding action until he can make the movie he really wants to make."

Some of those more compelling elements seem a lot more important a decade further on. Alone of Romero's zombie films, Day of the Dead is not an allegory, per se. True, you could consider the underground fortress in which the movie is set--a mine shaft littered with the detritus of a ruined civilization--to be a kind of a grave, but that's not what the movie is really about. What this movie seems to be saying is that our species needs to outgrow our propensity for violence or we will all die in a global abattoir. To this end, and to make the point, the movie's heroes maintain a corral of stockpiled of zombies as they pick over the corpse of the world looking for a way forward. This is the point of the first half of the movie and its tedious barrage of recriminations between the film's two factions. It's the bickering of children (certainly, the schoolyard taunts issuing from Steel and Rickles are intended to reinforce that view). The military gets the brunt of the film's disdain, bearing the world's racism and sexism as a matter of course. The film's mad scientist, Dr. Logan, is looking to impose his will on the zombies. It gets him killed in the end. By contrast, there comes a point at which McDermott (the helicopter pilot) is obliged to throw his gun away. He lives. We need to move past violence, the movie seems to be saying, but it may be too late. The movie has an ostensibly happy ending, with Sara (Lori Cardille) waking from a nightmare only to find the other two survivors fishing on the beach. But is this a happy ending at all? The movie begins with her waking from a nightmare, after all, and we've seen what that gets her. Further, the tropical setting of this end is foreshadowed by the tropical decor of McDermott's corner of the base, complete with soundtrack cue of calypso music. That, too, proved to be a false refuge. The nightmare continues.

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Some of the elements of Day of the Dead find their way into Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, a film that continues to surprise me. It originally surprised me by being worthy of its predecessor. These days, it surprises me by holding up to repeat viewings. This has the best cast of any zombie film that I can name. Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames invest the film with more committed performances than one would expect, and the movie is the better for it (in contrast, Romero's originals are plagued by dodgy acting). It also has terrific cues on the soundtrack, made possible by its big studio backing. This film also shows some influence from the Stephen King/Steven Spielberg school of horror when it grounds itself in suburban reality at its start. We see the world before the fall, rather than as the fall is in progress. Rather than soften the blow when everything flies apart, it intensifies it instead. But more than any of that, it has an instinct for the jugular. You see this in its razor sharp opening salvo, which is 13 minutes of pedal to the metal horror filmmaking. You see it in its willingness to follow the character arc of the film's pregnant character to its logical extreme. This jugular instinct is what it borrows from Day (rather than the original Dawn). Unlike Peter and Fran, who escape to an uncertain future in the original, our heroes escape to the universe postulated by Day in the remake. In fact, the filmmakers have it both ways in the remake, giving the audience who leaves before the final credits roll a hopeful ending, while giving die-hards a brace of nihilism on the way out to their cars. It's a neat trick.

One thing that struck me this go around (and which struck me with Day as well) is the way all of the children of Night of the Living Dead exist in the now. There is no chronology from film to film that makes any kind of sense. The zombie disaster is always a plague of the moment, and the fallout, whether it's the death of consumer culture in the 70s or the burning buildings on the horizon in the remake of Dawn (so reminiscent of 9/11 and Oklahoma City), is always the destruction of the present. This, more than anything, is what makes these films eternally popular, I think.

Crush Me With Your Thighs.

I have to say that after long periods of watching very serious movies with subtitles, I start to long for the simple things in life, specifically action movies that blow shit up real good. Right now, I'm sitting on a trio of very serious movies from Netflix, and I haven't been able to get into any of them. So I took a flier for the first part of March and went for the comfort food movies.

In the blowing things up real good department, I must express a certain amount of dissatisfaction with Hancock (2008, directed by Peter Berg), in which Will Smith plays a disaffected superhero trying to turn his life around. The movie is frontloaded with mayhem, but its big climax is surprisingly toothless. I mean, you have two superheroic characters in this movie, but at the end, in a shootout at a hospital with some common robbers, neither of them has any powers. This is a failure at a fundamental level, in so far as when you have superheroes, you need supervillains. Otherwise, you're just rehashing those Marvel Comics TV series from the 1970s where there was no budget for the heroes' heroics, to say nothing of any villain's villainy. In a Will Smith blockbuster? There's no excuse. Also, I wish the movie had forgotten about Will Smith and did something more interesting with Charlize Theron. All in all, a missed opportunity at every level. I watched this on Netflix's instant watch service, which seems an appropriate way to watch this, because I have the least amount I can invest in it other than time.

I'm trying to remember the last film by James Cameron where I didn't have to preface my enjoyment with some kind of apologia. Aliens, maybe. Certainly not True Lies (1994), a bang-up Schwarzeneggerian epic compromised by a deep and nasty streak of misogyny. This is a bit of a surprise, given that Cameron has traditionally featured strong female characters in his films, but this film, even more than The Abyss, seems informed by the director's serial marriages and divorces. It manifests itself in a "family values or else" storyline and in a casual use of the word "bitch" that starts to draw blood as the film unspools. By the time Jamie Lee Curtis's character finds her own inner strength, the film has gone to great lengths to degrade her and even then, her inner strength is defined by her husband and her strength has been fetishized. It's bad shit, and an unfortunate undercurrent for a film that, at its core, is a state of the art (in 1994) example of action filmmaking. The comedy bits mostly work--especially those involving Bill Paxton, who gives a particularly selfless performance here--and the big set-pieces are generally scaled and executed with aplomb. Pity.

The Pierce Brosnan reboot of the James Bond franchise confronts the essential sexism of the action genre Bond inspired head on. It hasn't changed Bond himself, who is just as unapologetically sexist and misogynistic as ever, but it has changed the world around him, which is why when Goldeneye (1995, directed by Martin Campbell) walks through all of the Bond tropes as if it were following a checklist, it all seems kind of fresh. This film provides Bond with a new, female boss. Judi Dench's M is prickly and harsh and doesn't have any time for Bond's charms. Samantha Bond is a radical departure as Miss Moneypenny. She seems to have a life of her own, and even if she IS still mooning for 007, she gives as good as she gets in this movie, as if there has been some leveling of the playing field. The movie-specific female characters are an interesting departure, too: Izabella Scorupco's Natalya has smarts and initiative on her own such that, when the time comes to choose between the love interest or the mission, it's her that does the choosing instead of Bond. And Famke Janssen's sadistic Xenia Onatopp goes into the Bond canon as one of the best evil henchmen. The erotic dimension to her depravity is refreshing for the way the movie puts it in the foreground. It doesn't hurt that Janssen holds the screen better than anyone else in the movie, and the expression on her face as she crushes her victims to death between her legs is an expression I wish someone would put on MY face in the throes of passion.

I wish Sean Bean was as compelling as the evil mastermind behind everything, but there's a kind of petulance in his character that puts me off--and, trust me, I would NOT kick Sean Bean out of bed for eating crackers under any other circumstances as a candidate for giving me that expression. In any event, all of the elements are put together perfectly--did I mention the credit sequence? One of my favorites from the Bond series, with Tina Turner doing the honors on the soundtrack--and even if it's not a transcendent Bond film, it's certainly an archetypal one. Director Martin Campbell saved the transcendent Bond film for Brosnan's successor in the role, some eleven years later.

A World of Hurt

According to the director herself, Kathryn Bigelow was given one day to prove herself on the set of Near Dark before the producers replaced her with another (presumably male) director. She used that day to maximum advantage, using it to orchestrate the motel shootout in which our band of white trash vampires find themselves dodging bullets and sunbeams. If you know the movie, you haven't forgotten that scene, and Bigelow kept on directing. At this writing, she's favored to become the first female winner of the Academy Award for best director for The Hurt Locker (2009), having already become the first female winner of the DGA award. I've already seen speculations that, if she should win, it's because she "makes films like a man." Bigelow's movies occupy a "male" space only if you believe demographic research that states that women don't like action movies ("'Action' is a label for video store owners," she has said in the past) or only like romantic comedies. What bullshit.

What strikes me hardest about The Hurt Locker, an account of a bomb disposal tech in the Iraqi theater who gets off on the adrenalin rush from his very dangerous occupation, is not that it has the point of view of a female director, but that it has the point of view of a director who has always explored the obsessional appeal of violence. She often eroticizes it (the movie The Hurt Locker most reminds me of is the director's own Blue Steel, in which Jamie Lee Curtis answers the question of why she became a cop with "because I get to shoot people"). And here, Bigelow's background in another genre--the horror movie--bleeds into The Hurt Locker. There are two specific sequences in the film that could not have been made by a director who wasn't in touch with the sensibilities of the horror film: first, the sequence where our squad of heroes explores a captured bomb-making facility only to discover the makings of a "human bomb." In the second, our protagonists are touring the aftermath of a nighttime suicide bombing and take off into the darkness in pursuit of the enemy. Neither of these sequences reads as "action." Both of these sequences are palpably horrific.

Another element of the movie that sticks out like a sore thumb: although Bigelow is using the "run and gun" style of shooting, presumably to give the proceedings a documentary feel, she never does so in a way that obscures the geography of the scene. You always know precisely where everything is in space. In this regard, Bigelow kicks the holy crap out of directors like Paul Greengrass at their own game.

Finally, The Hurt Locker is an interesting exercise in subtextual political critique. The film goes out of its way not to point fingers about the Iraq war, or, really, to pretend that it's about anything other than its very particular characters doing their very particular jobs. Some critics have taken this to mean that it's apolitical. I don't believe that. Its acquaintance with horror is one giveaway, which kills any kind of jingoist thrill that might transform the film into war porn. Another is the jump cut at the end of the tour that places Jeremy Renner's character in a supermarket, confronted with an oppressive consumer culture. "Is THIS why we're going to war?" is the unspoken question. This is a political film, all right, but Bigelow has used the time honored technique of "smuggling" the politics into the movie in the subtext. Sometimes, movies are stronger for the elements that the director hides. This is such a movie.

Gender Fixations

I don't remember who pointed me at Princesa (2001, directed by Henrique Goldman)--it was probably one of my friends on the IMDB, but I'm not sure--but I hope they aren't offended if I stop taking recommendations for transgender-themed movies from my cisgender friends. The movies themselves keep pissing me off. This is yet another dire examination of the life of a transsexual prostitute. What is it about European films about transsexuals? Do European transsexuals not pursue other professions? Surely they must. Anyway, Fernanda, the title character is from Brazil, but works the streets in Milan in order to save money for her operation. She initially lives with fellow trans prostitute Charlo (who is not transsexual, per se), and works for transsexual madame, Karin, who fancies her. For the most part, Fernanda treats the people around her pretty poorly, especially Karin, but none of these people is exactly sympathetic. One of her Johns, Gianni, is so smitten with her that he offers to leave his wife, take her in, and pay for her operation. She treats Gianni pretty poorly, too. The poor guy doesn't have any idea of why Fernanda does anything that she does. I doubt that a non-trans audience would understand why she would object to a partner who is a bottom and the movie doesn't explain it. When she's confronted by Gianni's pregnant ex-wife, she leaves him and heads back to Karin to reclaim her spot on the street.

So, given the opportunity to escape life on the street, she finds that living as a "normal" housewife is a suffocating set of gender roles and then goes back to the streets where "she feels like she belongs." What a load of happy horseshit. I mean, I "get" the point. The life of a housewife is oppressive, the film seems to opine, blah, blah, blah. It further opines that the life of a pregnant cisgender woman is more valuable than the life of a transgender woman (and has that transgender woman acquiesce to this notion). And it offers the noxious idea that trans women would choose sex work over another kind of life. Clearly, the filmmakers don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Oh, they throw Charlo at the audience, who develops AIDS and heads back home to her parents, but that's not really held as criticism. This is a film that really is slotting a life of desperate exploitation as superior for our heroine to a life of bourgeoisie comfort. Really? Give me a break.

In any event, it's all deeply offensive.

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There's something chilly and clinical about the early going in XXY (2007, directed by Lucía Puenzo), the first film I think I've ever seen about an intersex person. The characters--at least initially--seem like specimens under the microscope of the filmmakers. This isn't helped by the austere backdrop of coastal Uruguay, filmed by director Lucía Puenzo in a cold, blue light. The story in this film concerns Alex, who was born with both male and female sex organs but lives as a girl, and her parents, who are at a loss as to how to help her through puberty and the awakening of her sexuality. This material has the potential to be exploitation or to be the equivalent of an after-school special (which is another kind of exploitation). The filmmakers feel the tug, I'm sure, but for the most part avoid this trap.

As far as the plot goes, Suli, Alex's mother, has brought a renowned plastic surgeon and his family to visit in the hopes that they will push Alex one way or another. Their son, Alvaro, has his own struggles with sexuality and with a father who is indifferent to him. It's a nice contrast that speaks to the notion that everyone has issues with their parents and their sexuality, not just gender variant children. Alvaro and Alex are drawn to each other, and each exacerbates the other's loneliness.

The film thaws considerably in its last third, as Alex's marine biologist father looks into options for Alex on his own. This leads him to meet another intersexed man who was assigned a female identity at birth, but disagreed and changed it, and their conversation injects an unexpected warmth into the film. There's also a cautionary tale embedded here, as Alex is assaulted by a group of boys on a beach who want to "see it." She is, after all, a freak in their eyes and they feel an entitlement to gaze upon the freak regardless of her own desires even though they will never really understand her. The end of the movie pulls a neat trick: it's the "normal" Alvaro whose relationship with his parents is destructive rather than Alex. In one of the film's last images, Alex puts her father's arm over her shoulder as they walk. I almost wish the entire movie was as warm as this image, but nothing makes a thing stand out like its opposite, I guess.

In any event, as a statement of self-determination in matters of gender identity, XXY is pretty enlightened. It's certainly light-years beyond other transgender movies that still fall into the stereotypes of gender variance as defined by a cissexual (cissexist) dominant culture.

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In keeping with the theme of this post, one of the major villains of Chocolate (2008, directed by Prachya Pinkaew) is a transgender gangster who keeps among her henchmen a group of transgender thugs. Far-fetched, I know, but considerably less offensive than the crap in Princesa. Beyond that, though, this is an old fashioned martial arts movie, in so far as the plot and characters don't really matter. All that matters is jaw-dropping action, and, as in director Prachya Pinkaew's collaborations with Tony Jaa, this delivers on that count in spades. The story, such as it is, follows Zen, an autistic girl who is also a kind of savant when it comes to martial arts. When she sees martial arts--on television or in real life--she can duplicate it. A useful thing when your mother used to be a gangster's girlfriend who is owed a lot of money by mobsters, especially when said mother develops cancer and needs someone to collect those debts. This film has been described as Rain Man meets Iron Monkey, and I don't disagree with that. JeeJa Yanin, who plays our heroine, has awesome martial arts moves, and the copious ass-kicking lets her show it all off in increasingly complex fight choreographies, culminating in a 20 minute blaze of glory at the end of the film. This is one of those movies like the early 1980s Jackie Chan movies in which the viewer watches the insane stunts and thinks: "Oooh! That HAD to hurt." Like those films, there are copious outtakes at the end, showing that, yes indeed, it DID hurt. These people are crazy. In any event, this is a gas.