Barrett’s cinema blog

Speed Racer. Two things struck me while I was watching this movie; first… I liked it. Quite a bit. I thought it was an incredible technical accomplishment and a psychedelic freakout that nobody has seen the likes of before. Corny script and plot points one can see a mile away sure, but if you submit to the fact that its really not the story that’s sucking you in its a helluva mind trip through the rest of the movie.

The second thing I thought of was who on God’s green earth ever thought this movie would make money? Who thought pouring [a reported] $250-300 million into producing and marketing a movie that numbed its audience quite like this? Who thought nearly two and a half hours of hyper color madness like this could appeal to a mass audience? Have the Wachowski’s gone so far into madness that they thought their fluke success with the first Matrix movie would parlay into two Matrix sequels and Speed Racer being such stylistic cultural landmarks? Ok thats more than two things I thought, but its all on one center thread.

Let me therefore thank Speed Racer’s knuckle-headed producers into torching so much money into making a massively budgeted indie-movie, one that could be appreciated by a smaller audience who appreciate mind-bending style-heaps like this. This is a rare treat to see something made so large for so few.

Incidentally, I had just finished a long awaited rewatching of Gone With the Wind before heading off to the theater. That is, I went from the greatest financial and critical success ever to what may end up being the largest financial disaster of all time. The core principal dividing the two? Gone with the Wind was driven by the Mad Producer (David O’Selznick) while Speed Racer was driven (not to mix puns) by the Mad Director (The Wachowski Brothers).

The Mad Director has a much higher disaster rate by bending the rules and allowing their “great” visions run amok,. Often convinced a previous success has been such an artistic and cultural breakthrough, they insist on being bolder and more wreckless with a new project that it spirals away from any practical sense of what will appeal to a mass audience. They begin to believe they’re Stanley Kubrick working on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not everyone can be Kubrick. Even Kubrick was barely able to be Kubrick. His madness ended up consuming his life and his work until they were only shadows of former greatness. Mad Directors are ones blessed with remarkable talent only to waste them by refusing to play by any rules whatsoever and cannot co-exist with any creative talent outside his own. Terry Gilliam is perhaps the best living example. Orson Welles was the all-time heavyweight champ.

The Mad Producer however has the kind of sense to know what audience’s will like and, therefore, make money. Gone With the Wind has all the right pieces in a finely executed, lavish spectacle that’s as easy on the eyes as much as it is on the ears. The script is well polished, the characters are rich and interesting, the actors are inspired casting choices with all the right movie star appeal. The sets, costumes, photography, music, all perfectly large and expensive and balanced so nothing overshadows anything else and the result is a movie that continues to enrapture audiences even after nearly 70 years.

That’s not to say the Mad Producer can also swan-dive into disaster. Robert Evans burnt himself out after the 70’s and continued to put together bloated, overweight period movies or uninteresting “concept movies.” Edward Zwick convinced himself he could also direct and has made dull, sappy movies for 20 years now, his biggest successes coming when he is listed only as producer (Traffic, Shakespeare In love, Dangerous Beauty). Martin and Michael Bregman saw their big league career end when they put together The Adventures of Pluto Nash which lost 95% of its very expensive cost. Nonetheless, any ambitious producer knows that the only way to see tomorrow is to make a picture that makes money. Follow certain rules and you’re bound to at least recoup costs.

The Wachowskis have talent, that much can’t be argued. They obviously have some sort of vision, but they need a leash. They’re not changing the world quite yet and some producer who knows what he’s doing should step in and slap them around a little. But then, when more than $200 million goes away and doesn’t come back, they’re likely not to have a job in the morning. Should the Wachowskis be allowed to make another film ever, it should prove interesting to see what they come up with. Then again, we’re still waiting for the triumphant return of Michael Cimino.

So, back to work. Idle hands find time to write, but the hands of the overly employed find time only to flick the TV remote before bedtime. Now that I have two jobs more than when I started to write the blog, the consistency of output has noticeably diminished. Not that anybody should notice I think… because (wait for it) I am about to write yet another review of a movie that is likely not on anybody’s radar. That’s right! A movie by a relatively obscure director that will scarcely be remembered in the mainstream. Maybe that should be the title of my blog. “Barrett’s Reviews of Oddy-Knocky Shit That Nobody’s Heard of.” More to come in the future to be certain.

Regardless, I have watched this week a movie I have been waiting for for quite a long time. Since it played at Cannes over a year ago, I have been looking forward to Wong Kar-Wai’s “My Blueberry Nights.” This is without argument the best movie title to exist in years. I can’t even remember the last movie title to compare. This brilliantly colored film concerns a young woman, who after her boyfriend leaves her for another woman, begins a trek across America to remove herself from her broken relationship and to find herself in a clearer image. Its the classic road movie. The major difference here is the gorgeous color and imagery the immensely talented director ladles upon us.

His first English-language film, he has mostly been noted previously for In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express. His movies often deal with dejected young characters, often in positions of a life transition or a position of love or affection that cannot be properly displayed. Blueberry Nights is no different, except for the fact that it’s now an American mythos he’s dealing with. His Hong Kong films dealt with a Chinese mythos that was a more reserved and traditional style, more often centered around a male character, and often ending with a love unspoken. Honor and dignity were usually kept well intact.

In the wild wild west however, he’s free to explore a much different angle, while keeping structurally similar. Here the main protagonist is a woman, played by blues maestro and first time actress Norah Jones. After being two-times by her boyfriend, she leaves New York on a whim, but not before befriending Jude Law who runs a local diner which seems to be a nexus for broken hearts. Law keeps behind the counter a jar filled with keys, dropped off by halves of former couples who expect them to be sought at the diner. Just in case they’re being looked for, Law keeps the keys ready. When Jones drops off her keys to be picked up, she finds a friendly ear in Law who lends her some relationship wisdom in the form of pie slices. The title refers to the time she’s spending with Law eating the leftover blueberry pie nobody wanted.

She then begins a trek across America meeting interesting characters along the way, such as a alcoholic policeman who drinks to forget his wife, a wife who sleeps around to forget her husband, and a card shark who won’t take a gamble on her own personal life. Its stuff you’ve likely seen before, the road movie genre is a playground for such situations, people in search of themselves find people who inadvertently or even advertently teach the protagonist about themselves in ways they never could have predicted. Lessons are learned, wisdom is shared.

In many ways this film is quite similar to another classic American road movie called Paris, Texas. In Paris the story concerned a drifter who is hospitalized after collapsing in a desert-town cafe. His forgotten family comes to pick him up and care for him, and slowly his past comes into sharper focus. The drifter, played by Harry Dean Stanton, hit the road in the first place when he couldn’t stand the torment of jealousy surrounding his siren of a wife played by Nastassja Kinski. You see, she’s the kind of woman who drives a man crazy, even without going so far as to fool around. She just has to be apart from him. This very storyline is mirrored in Blueberry Nights with the David Straithairn and Rachel Weisz characters. Kar-Wai even goes as far as to give Weisz the same wild, tousled hairdo that Kinski wears in her film. Paris, Texas was incidentally directed by another foreign-born master filmmaker, German-born Wim Wenders, who was also making his English-language debut.

The American road and the elusive American Mystique seem to be quite attractive to foreign audiences and directors. Perhaps not so incidentally, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) is coming to Hollywood to direct a Francis Ford Coppola-produced adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. The last bastion of the Wild West is the great expanses of two-lane blacktop that spans our mammoth continent. Spotted alongside these roads on foot, in cars, or in roadside diners exist the sort of existential human detritus that make these films so memorable. Along the way these characters drop into the picture and then disappear like apparitions only to re-assimilate with the Great Road. Such is the road movie, such is its formless beauty.

However… never has a road movie looked like this. Never have we seen one with such a colorful vibrancy, with such a visual style, with such panache! Kar-Wai fills the frame with colors that blister through the screen a thousand at a time. Joy in life is seeing a Wong Kar-Wai film for the first time. The visuals in a film like this come only once for the first time, and then you can only repeat the experience like you would remember your first kiss. It becomes nostalgia. But thank God for the masses that there are so many of his films yet to be discovered. And also that there are so many more to come! He is now planning a remake of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai as his next English language feature, and I wait with bated breath for the beauty that it will surely behold.

So I finally made it to the cinemas this week, unfortunately it is still something that is not on most people’s radar. Though just released, Snow Angels is playing on one of the smaller screens at the Embarcadero Center Cinema and sure to be out of theaters in a couple weeks. And perhaps for the best, it is not the strongest entry in the oeuvre of the young talented filmmaker David Gordon Green and seems unlikely to find a large audience. Previously handing in notable works such as All the Real Girls, George Washington, and most notably Undertow, he is still well below the cultural radar though his talent is remarkable, especially given he has finished his fourth feature by the age of 31.

The story concerns a group of small town folk all struggling to adjust to life around the event of a Very Bad Thing. The story hovers mostly around a teenager (played by Michael Angarano)at the local high school whose father just moved out for dubious reasons, his old babysitter (Kate Beckinsale) and her loser ex-husband (Sam Rockwell) who tries to reform and be a good father but just isn’t any good at it. There are also peripheral relationship issues with the teenager and his parents, the babysitter and her mother, and the ex-husband with about everybody.

This is not a plot driven movie. The characters are slowly drawn and developed until about halfway through the movie when the Very Bad Thing happens. Afterwards the movie focuses on how everyone near the incident reacts and changes. Green takes this as an opportunity to examine human frailty and subtle human strength in times of crisis.

A beautiful aspect of this film is the fact that these are very real people we are watching. Very real people with very real problems and very real hangups and very real emotion. Nothing is made grand or overwrought during or after the events involved, the easy tears are eschewed in favor of watching people change. Some evolve, some collapse (not unlike the movie’s tagline come to think of it, “Some will fall, some will fly”).

Where the movie falls short unfortunately is the casting of Kate Beckinsale. She’s just not that good. She’s fine when it comes to playing the friendly, flirty but conflicted mother in the first half, but when the drama unfolds she just doesn’t display the emotion required for the film’s most difficult moments. In later scenes involving her the drama ends up falling short. Scenes that really deserve more impact feel bland and weak. If Green couldn’t avoid casting Beckinsale in the role he should have at least minimized the time that she needs to feel grief on screen.

Rockwell on the other hand is surprisingly effective in those scenes. I’ve only ever noticed him in roles where he plays smarmy, funny guys with slight moments of drama (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Matchstick Men). This is quite the opposite for him. A mostly dramatic role with slight moments of comedy. Perhaps thats why it was a little hard getting used to him in the first half playing a down-on-his-luck loser of a father struggling to keep a job and be on time to take his daughter out for an afternoon. His born-again, sober character only feels slightly bogus because its obvious how much his character is working for it. It really isn’t very long at all before he returns to the bottle and lets everything in him fall out. And when the drama hits home for him its a cool simmer where you can actually watch a man break down quietly and slowly. Other movies with similar characters are often much more blunt in this respect, more heavy-handed. Rockwell goes for the subtlety and humanity of such a poor character and brilliantly succeeds.

Also well crafted is the story of the teenager who works with Beckinsale’s character and the romance that blossoms between him and the new girl at school. The relationship takes its time to develop and unfold letting the viewer feel the anxiety and beauty of young love as though they might be experiencing it all over again. Its soft and gentle and a marvel to watch. It is easily the warmest and most beautiful thing in the movie, which says a lot. Green took a whole movie to explore this realm with All the Real Girls, and here he lets us experience one more little taste of it while showing how it affects the boy in reaction to all that is happening around him. His is possibly the most well-drawn character in the film, but Green knows better to let him or any other character devour the scenery.

Up next for Green is the Judd Apatow-produced comedy The Pineapple Express starring Seth Rogen and James Franco. He seems like an odd choice to bring in as a hired director (this will mark the first film he makes that he didn’t write the script for), but should land him some much-deserved attention.  I’ve wanted for some time to see what Green can do with a budget, and this should give him a big chance and likely open some bigger doors for him in the future. Here is a director to pay attention to. One day people will be looking back over the early films of David Gordon Green and see his early evolution into the talented filmmaker that he will be soon recognized for. Time to get in on the ground floor while its still fleetingly there.

Netflix’s watched this week: Love in the Time of Cholera, the 1969 thriller Z, I am Curious (Yellow) and Melvin and Howard. I look forward to a better crop coming in a couple days when The Great McGinty and A Little Princess arrive.

I’m beginning to realize just how video-centric my blog has suddenly become. No point in nothing but film geekery and watching obscure movies just to write about them, sadly there’s been so little at the theaters really worth going to lately. Living in San Francisco there are some wonderful repertory theaters like the Castro, the Red Vic, the Roxie and sometimes the Lumiere that will show old films, but then I wish I was keeping up on contemporary movies for fear of losing my touched, devoted following of beloved readers.

April promises to be a much better month for it I think, there are releases like Leatherheads, My Blueberry Nights (whatta great title), Shine a Light, Street Kings, and yes… Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo. A full slate of promising, top-rate entertainment. Right now the only movies in theaters quasi-worth seeing might be Run Fatboy Run and Stop-Loss, but so far the available batch of Iraq movies have yet to distinguish themselves from Vietnam movies. Both genres seem to be about what-the-hell-are-we-doing-here-in-this-war kind of movies, and Vietnam covered that pretty well. Politics aside, I think important issues get discussed and all but it seems like most of these movies exist just to prove that particular point. The horror… the horror.

So I’m stuck on Netflix until something worth $10 to see comes around. In sticking with my theme then, Love in the Time of Cholera was alright, passable entertainment but ultimately forgettable. Javier Bardem is great as always, but the film had the unmistakable feel of a “great book adaptation.” This means that a great work of literature is given the sumptuous treatment replete with beautiful, lyrical photography, exotic locations, expensive, detailed sets, and large amounts of extras swarming around in the background. However it also suffers from the syndrome of the same genre where the filmmakers try to cram every bit of story from a very detailed book from an extremely detail-oriented writer and stuff it all into two hours. This usually results in the book missing the heart and soul that the book contains, while also glossing over some of the more lewd details of the plot (e.g. the lovers of the central characters are often made about ten years older in order to circumvent certain statutory-rape taboos). A great adaptation is much more focused on finding and exploring this heart and soul while not fussing over the plot details. Try instead films like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Trainspotting to understand more what I mean.

Z was a tightly woven thriller surrounding the possible assassination of a public revolutionary in what seems to be Greece in the 60’s. Not quite what I expected, I think I anticipated something more on the lines of The Battle of Algiers or something, but it was more a story of the investigation that followed and the consequences. Entertaining and thought-provoking. Based on true events it was a response to the assassination of a Greek doctor and activist whose subsequent investigation led to the downfall of the Democratic government in Greece and ushered in a new, modern era. “Z” in Greek means “He lives.”

Melvin and Howard was also not what I expected. Its based on the true story (supposedly) that a man named Melvin Dummar finds a decrepit man laying hurt in the desert and gives him a ride back to Las Vegas. Along the way he professes to be Howard Hughes. After Hughes died, an amount left in a Hughes will left the amount of $156 million to Melvin. I think I expected Howard to be in the movie more, where instead he’s almost completely done after the first ten minutes, and then tells Melvin’s story up until the will is discovered. I found him to be a pretty uninteresting character, someone who can’t hold a job, a wife, or just about anything he owns, and ultimately he received the full bounty of the American Dream for it. I think I was just expecting Jason Robards as Howard Hughes to be in the picture more. When you pay for Jason Robards and all you get is Paul le Mat its easy to feel a little cheated. Still, the story of the American Dream touching down anywhere at all is still very heartwarming.

I am Curious (Yellow) was the controversial 1967 Swedish import that was seized at US Customs for being obscene. It subsequently won a landmark case with the Supreme Court that helped  usher in a new age of filmmaking in the US. It tells the story of a 22 year old girl who is curious about everything around her to the point that she explores the things that incite the most passion in her, namely politics and sex. An interestingly told story, I read about this film while in film school and thought it was mostly going to be a sexual exploration. Its really mostly about politics. Swedish radicals who want their government to condemn the US in Vietnam, who want to close the borders between Sweden and Franco-era Spain, and who want to adopt the non-violence teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. (who is interviewed in the film) for use by their own country’s soldiers. The film combines film and documentary and bizarre social commentary in a very unique way, with the directory of the film Vilgot Sjoman showing up as himself directing the film as it progresses, and also showing jealousy towards the main actress during her affair with a man named Borje, after it shows Vilgot and the actress having an affair at the beginning of the film. A two-part film, the companion piece I am Curious (Blue)  should be arriving in a few weeks. I’ll write more about it then I think.

Sometimes a movie simply has too many ideas. Sometimes there is simply too much going in a two to three hour movie that it ends up choking on itself. And then it begins gagging. And barfing. And then you simply can’t tell at all what it is anymore. It doesn’t even matter if they’re too many good ideas or two many bad ones. Southland Tales for instance, has way too many really good ideas and its suffocating on all of them.Southland Tales is the new movie by the apparent visionary Richard Kelly who also delivered the equally bizarre and puzzling Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko was a underground hit that dealt with a troubled teen who sees visions of guys in bunny suits and learn to harness time and space to save the world (can’t Hollywood think of anything original anymore?). It was clever, well constructed, a good cast gave good performances, and it was baffling enough to ensure repeat viewing to figure out the labyrinth of mysteries through the whole film.

Southland seems to be emulating the same basic structure, “basic” being used loosely, in that there’s a story being told that becomes more and more epic as the film progresses. It seems to be about a dystopian future, World War III has reduced at least the Southwestern portion of the US into wastelands of shattered cities and morals. There’s a movie star who also is an amnesiac who’s trying to produce a screenplay which just might be a real forecast of the end of the world. There’s a former pornstar who has her own talk show with other pornstars who talk politics. There’s an army sergeant who is kidnapped and replaced by his evil twin. There’s a bizarro scientist who develops a life-changing source of energy called “liquid karma” who then becomes a power-mad savant who wears too much makeup. There are factions of revolutionaries who are out seemingly to bring down the establishment by showing incriminating footage of the movie star who’s also the son-in-law of a powerful Senator. Also there’s some kind of time/space rift in the Arizona desert that some of the characters may or may not have gone into. So basically, I have no maddening clue as to what its all about. Except maybe a parable mirroring Revelations, seeing as how the some characters keep going back to passages from it and, oddly, Robert Frost poems as well.

See what I mean? Lots of stuff going on. All divided into George Lucas-esque chapters, beginning with chapter 4 and ending with 6. Apparently then first three chapters were designed as graphic novels and released before the movie to pique interest.

The strangest element of the film may be the casting. Richard Kelly in his first outing with Donnie Darko managed to rope in actors like the siblings Gyllenhaal Jake and Maggie, Mary MacDonell, Patrick Swayze, Drew Barrymore, Noah Wyle, Jena Malone and even Katherine Ross into key roles. Pretty good for an indie movie with a weird script. Southland has at least four times as many characters and they’re all played by the likes of Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock, Mandy Moore (in a truly thankless role), Sarah Michelle-Gellar, Seann William-Scott, Wallace Shawn of all people as the mad scientist, Justin Timberlake, and other small roles being handed out to Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, John Larroquette (!), Kevin Smith, Nora Dunn, Curtis Armstrong, Jon Lovitz, Bai Ling, Christopher Lambert, Miranda Richardson, and Janeane Garafalo. The weirdness doesn’t stop.

And it sure doesn’t stop there. With the weird cast one might expect the weird acting that follows suit, but it seems to have a particular style of acting that seems intentional. Like David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner, there is a brand of acting that’s wooden but oddly intentionally wooden at that. One gets the feeling that Kelly instructed all of his actors to go over the top and hope for the best. It works in a way I suppose, everything is so strange and chaotic the viewer hardly has time to wonder why a cast like this aren’t delivering more sensitive performances.

Sometimes this structure works; for all those who loved Starship Troopers like I did you weren’t fazed by the pretty-boy cast and corny script, the movie was funny and well told through those devices. Southland Tales is exploding out of its frame and numbing brains in the process. There’s no doubt some visionary material on screen, there’s just too damn much of it. Maybe the director’s cut will make more sense.

On the distant other side of the genre of alienated people and alienating societies, Netflix coincidentally delivered me Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura just after Southland. L’Avventura is a film about a group of Italians who go out on a cruise to an island where one girl mysteriously disappears. The movie is spent looking for her, but its hardly a mystery movie or any kind of a thriller. Its instead a failed romance movie and an examination of how poorly people can be equipped and communicating with one another.

In terms of presentation it is the polar opposite of Southland. Where Southland was ambitious, loud, expensive looking, filled with futuristic special effects and sets, and crammed full of mellowing Moby music, L’Avventura is quiet, brooding, oblique, and sparse in photography and locations. Very mellow, in fact this is my second attempt to watch it and the second time I’ve fallen asleep during it. I blame trying to watch it late at night when I’m already tired, but Antonioni has a notorious knack for putting his audience to sleep. He, like Richard Kelly, also shucks conventional plot and story structure for something much more internal. Something you have to think about for a while if you’re ever going to understand what you just saw.

Both films are likely to attract just as many fans as detractors, and L’Avventura has been doing just that since its 1960 release. Many people decried it as being too meandering and boring while not ever being about the very thing it sets its premise up to be. L’Avventura, not unlike Donnie Darko, has built up a mammoth following since its release and many now consider it to be a pure masterpiece. Something that was ahead of its time. Perhaps time will show that Southland Tales was miles ahead of the competition and broke ground while others were planting seedlings.

By the time I finished L’Avventura I found myself in t a similar state after watching Darko. I found myself thinking about everything I just watched and how it all did or didn’t fit together. There was much that touched me and that I found achingly beautiful. There were other elements that just scribbled a big “?” over my head like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Other elements made me wonder why I should care. I felt these same reactions after Southland, but days afterwards I still avoided thinking about it because the headache it gave me tended to return once I did. Donnie Darko prompted me to watch it again within hours and after I wrangled a few more of my friends to come over and watch it with me.

One of these days L’Avventura will be playing at a local rep theater and I will rush over to see it on the big screen and come out overwhelmed by its beauty. One day I’ll be at a friend’s house while Donnie Darko is playing and we’ll all talk about it and fawn over it like we did when we first saw it. One of these days I’ll catch the second half of Southland Tales on late-night IFC and after a few beers it will suddenly click and make some miraculous kind of sense. I’ll have to write more about it then.

There is a long debated topic in film circles as to which form cinema is predominantly geared towards; there is the strictly entertainment angle, where the audience is moved by a story to laughter, tears, and consideration over a well told story; and there is the artistic angle, where cinema is considered by many filmmakers alike to be the embodiment of a complete art form, one that encapsulates all other art forms into one majestic conglomerate. And both sides will concede that art can be entertaining and that entertainment can occasionally be artistic as well. This debate has been going on for the last hundred years and shows no sign of abating. I would argue of course that cinema is simply both, like any medium can be used for multiple purposes.

One purpose, I might argue being a overshadowing presence on both sides, is one of extreme voyeurism. Film, like no other medium, allows us to take part in other people’s lives without having the guilt or shame of, say, peeping through a family’s living room window. We can see into other people lives, lifestyles, cultures, even their minds without ever having them know we were there. People too timid to raise fists in real life might find themselves drawn to the violent cinema to see what its all about. A sex-starved bachelor or bachelorette might watch films of a sexual or romantic nature (or good old-fashioned porn, but there’s another article) to see what’s lacking in their lives , and so on and so forth. All of this raises another argument, does a person with deviant curiosities make them deviant people? I have long thought that cinema serves as a useful cultural tool to provide people with the window to explore such curiosities without engaging in the act themselves.

This is evident on a cultural level. The cinema of America for instance is, while prudish regarding sex and sexuality for instance is dripping with depraved violence and vulgarity. Similar for Pacific-rim countries such as Japan and Korea whose extreme cinema is horrifically violent while the sex is quite tame. The cinema of Europe is quite the opposite; sex and nudity is widely accepted in not only film but on television adverts and city billboards. I remember watching a butter commercial in Holland where a nude woman dives into a pond, only to emerge with full-frontal nudity to spread butter on some bread at her picnic cloth. Violence is practically non-existent compared to America and Asia.
But I digress. Simply put, voyeurism is a large part of what makes movies so FUN! Hitchcock knew this well and his films were giant smashes. Less to the extreme with graphic violence for the large part, but he was depicting movies where the protagonists were casually watching other people in their private lives and unapologetically getting kicks from it.

More to the extreme side of explicit voyeurism lies Michael Haneke, whose American remake of his own Funny Games I just watched. A quick disclaimer; I have not yet seen his Austrian original, but when I learned that his remake was a shot-for-shot remake, I decided to hold off on the original and judge the new one for itself. Haneke has said that he was inspired by America’s obsession with violence in our culture when he made the original, and that he always considered it an “American film.” One that he wanted to show to a broader audience. And it is a sad fact that to broaden the appeal of a brilliant foreign production it must be told in English. But again I digress. If we watch violent cinema, it doesn’t necessarily mean we enjoy violence or want to be violent in our real lives. But on the screen it still means you can experience it without repercussions. So what if we want to see into the lives of killers? And not just some creepy, obviously broken Silence of the Lambs-esque killer, but a charismatic, thoughtful, utterly sadistic and very human killer. Here we go…

The story is a tale of sadism from the get go. We see a blissful American family in the car on their way to their summer house by the lake. They play a game in the car where the two parents try to guess the composer and composition of whatever piece the other has put in the CD player. The serene and calming music is disrupted violently when the opening titles blast onto the screen in huge, bright red letters and the soundtrack is shifted to ear-rattling death metal music. The family continues enjoying their tranquil game while the son plays his game boy, but the setup couldn’t be more clear. They are in for some funny games of two teenagers who have a much different sense of humor and entertainment. It isn’t long before two cherubic youths, deceiving those around them by dressing the local part of white shorts-clad yuppies. Arriving at the unsuspecting family’s house armed with nothing but charm and malevolence, the two youths, their names apparently Paul and Peter though the names they call each other changes constantly, begin to torture their captives with a series of physical and mental games where untimely death is only a matter of time.

Sounds cheerful right? The kind of film you would want to take the whole family to during the Easter weekend? Kids gleefully torturing and destroying an innocent family for no other reason but for their own enjoyment. Funny Games is likely to do to teenagers and tranquil family getaways what Jaws did for getting in the water.

Here’s another intriguing angle for the film; you never see any of the violence first-hand. Almost all the violence happens off-screen. This could easily be the kind of movie that would fit into the so-called “torture-porn” class of movies such as the Hostel and Saw franchises, except of course for the strange lack of violence! “Torture-porn” relies heavily on the gimmick that you are watching somebody carve another poor sap into pieces and get his rocks off during the process. Most of the discomfort arises from that visceral engagement with violence and gore. Funny Games takes the same approach but lets the viewer fill in the violence for themselves. And its not hard. Haneke is quite right in the regard that Americans are so immersed in violence that filling in the blanks of his movie is not difficult in the slightest. This is perhaps the overlying point of the movie, certainly not any kind of celebration of violence, though there is a perverse pleasure in the filmmakers to have the audience as uncomfortable as possible, something Haneke has always delighted in (see Cache or Benny’s Video to see what I mean).

(possible spoiler alert) What makes the murderous youths in the film so much more disturbing is the fact that they’re so charming and seemingly naive. They don’t have any nervous twitches, scars, heavy breathing, bizarre fetishes, or voices-from-within that usually designate serial-killers in ordinary crime movies. They have no desire to defile the bodies once they have done away with someone, they don’t desire money or property or seek revenge of any kind. They don’t target morally loose victims or someone people would miss. Its not even the act of killing they seem to look forward to so much as the sheer pleasure of destroying people mentally before doing away with them. They thrive on the games they’re playing, the abuse the victims endure. They target a family, take a night to annihilate them, then take on another almost immediately. No explanations. No reasoning. Just enjoyment of the mental anguish they’re giving their victims.

The apparent alpha of the two boys, played in the film by Michael Pitt (who is becoming highly adept at playing young sociopaths, this is not his first outing as such), playfully jerks around not only the victim family, but also the audience. No regard is given to the “4th wall” of cinema, that being the one between the action on screen and the audience themselves. In one scene he begins asking the family if they have had enough, then turns to the camera to ask the audience if they have had enough, then answers the question for everyone by wheeling out more torture. In one fantastic sequence, he even robs the family and the audience of a brief moment of catharsis when a violent act is overturned and given a second chance in order to fail. I’ve already spoiled enough if you haven’t seen it. I couldn’t possibly say more.

(here’s a real spoiler alert) So no relief is given. Not ever. There is no moment of emotional release. The killers destroy with ease, do not learn any lesson about violence, morals are not exchanged, the victims get nothing but their own destruction. The “torture porn” series of films are clearly designed to shock and unsettle, but they have the sick feature of showing you all th guts and glory, if thats what you’re into. Funny Games gives you nothing of the sort but only the shock and unsettling feelings. This is not torture porn. This is something else. But what? Is Haneke trying to say something poignant about violence? Is he trying to say something about American violence in particular? Is he trying to say something about corrupted youth? Or is he just fucking with us? Perhaps this is Haneke’s own funny game, and if that’s the case, then it is uproariously hilarious.

Netflix delivered me two Criterion copies of classic films today, one of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, and the other the 1963 version of The Lord of the Flies directed by Peter Brook. I watched them both in one afternoon, and I tucked into the DVD extra features through the evening. I don’t think I’m the only one who still doesn’t understand Bresson’s work yet. While I’m the only one of my friends who has ever watched a Bresson film, therefore taking away the possibility of conversation and discussion regarding his work, I just don’t quite see it.

The story is simple enough. A young girl, Marie, befriends a juvenile donkey and names him Balthazar. She isn’t allowed to keep him as a pet, but as their lives unfold they take strangely parallel paths. Balthazar is passed through the hands of various owners who treat him cruelly, working him to exhaustion and beating him at every opportunity. Marie finds herself being deceived and manipulated by a group of young sadists and feeling betrayed by the failures of her farmer father. She ends up abused and ruined and Balthazar ends up abused and left for dead by cruel locals. Uplifting story eh? But there is a strong sense of humanity in the path that Balthazar travels. He has even been likened to Christ and other Biblical allegories.

I think I understand what Bresson is trying to do, in terms of craft; shoot a film that’s as realistic as it could possibly be. He never uses professional actors, only non-professionals he calls “models,” and he has been known to do up to fifty takes of any shot until the individuality of an actor has been obliterated and they recite the lines without any acting being involved. Interesting approach granted, but does it really work? I have the feeling that it must because there is endless literature and cult followings of Bresson’s work. He was never a successful filmmaker in that his films made lots of money or won trucks full of various awards, that being the usual and modern indication of how good somebody is, but I’ve read a number of top-10 lists from various filmmakers, critics and writers who constantly hail his work, notable Balthazar, Pickpocket, and Diary of a Country Priest. I haven’t gotten to Priest yet, but the other two I’ve watched and maybe I just need to see them again or something. There’s something I’m missing.

I felt the same way twelve years ago after watching Fargo. I hated it when I watched it but I realized that I was in such a minority of opinion that I forced myself to watch it a couple more times, ultimately… still not getting it. Some films just don’t connect I guess. The difference is that I LOVE the Coen Brothers, but Bresson has yet to speak to me. I recognize the beauty in the film, I think, I see the humanity that he tries to express and the simplicity of the filming and acting techniques, but its just so dull. And don’t get me wrong. I love dull. I love Jarmusch and Tarkovsky and Antonioni as much as the next cinephile. Maybe I’m just waiting for the day that I see it playing at a repertory theater and I come out sobbing from the beauty I just witnessed. Maybe my time for Bresson hasn’t arrived yet.

The Lord of the Flies however I thought was terrific entertainment. I never read the book (quick confession; I am a terrible reader. It takes me weeks to read one book and so many of the classics assigned to me in school I never finished or, sometimes, even started. My love is for the silver screen, and lately my flat-screen tv. I am a lover of most types, genres, and nationalities of film and I can watch them over and over again. And I do. But tangents aside…) so I don’t know the accuracy of the story, but I loved watching these kids slowly grow into feral killers. This corresponds to the earlier article I wrote about Ondskan and boarding school scenarios being perfect arenas for good vs. evil. Take a few dozen boys, strand them on a desert island (or a school where adults are less present), and watch nature unfold.

At first they try to maintain a semblance of society by designating a leader and dividing boys into groups for hunting, foraging, building shelters, and keeping a signal fire. When the hunting boys first discover the thrill of killing wild pigs however, their bloodlust begins to slowly cross over into something more sinister. But you know the story I’m sure. What I liked was the craft in which you watch this deterioration of humanity into wild beasts. At first I was caught by how stiff the acting was, but then I realized I was watching a large cast of child actors no more than twelve or thirteen who had little if any previous acting experience. Of course they would be a little wooden. As the movie progresses however, you see these boys beginning to enjoy the building chaos and anarchy they’re getting their little hands on. This is most apparent in the campfire scene where you see them leaping around throwing their arms and their spears into the air yelling and screaming and chanting their hunting mantra over and over. They can taste the blood of the pig on their lips. They are carnal savages, no longer well-bred little schoolboys at all.

Even the leader Ralph is seen during the campfire eating a hunk of pig flesh and enjoying the crazy scene around him. Having been battling the hunting leader Jack for control of the boys and control of the society he’s trying to keep from deteriorating, he clearly enjoys a moment of animal pleasure. He recoils in horror when the scene turns violent and a boy is slaughtered when he is mistaken for a wild “beast” that the boys all fear. The hunters, which now outnumber the others 2:1, regard the incident as a mere accident. But that doesn’t stop the boys from tasting the blood on their hands and wanting more. They now target the fat boy “Piggy” who has been the subject of much ridicule and discrimination throughout the film.

In the extra features the director mentions how he ended up discarding much of the script in favor of letting the boys improvise quite a bit on the set. While this may detract from the closeness the film keeps to the book, it does allow these boys to be a bit more organic in their acting style, and not so confined to the words they’re speaking. Perhaps since I watched the two films in one day I tried to think how Robert Bresson would have shot a film like Flies. Would he have let the boys improvise as they did and erupt into the carnage the inevitably happens? Probably not. But then that may be why Bresson never touched a film like Flies, opting instead for the small slices of realist humanity he can detail in much more intimate films. Had Peter Brook directed Balthazar however the actors would have surely been more explosive and expressive, and the story of the donkey would have been severely overshadowed.

That is perhaps one thing I understand about Bresson, the films be makes could certainly not be told by any other filmmaker. At least with Balthazar, any other filmmaker would have missed the point or failed to highlight the donkey’s struggle by allowing his actors to roam more freely. Maybe I’m starting to understand Bresson after all… well, not yet. Appreciation doesn’t necessarily equal high regard. For instance I can appreciate Jean-Luc Godard’s contribution to cinema, but I don’t particularity like his movies. Perhaps if I were alive in the 60’s when these films came out and saw how different they were to movies that preceded them I could understand their brilliance a little bit more. As it is, I’m not that old, I have no such perspective. And pundits please, don’t think its just because I was raised on blistering Hollywood over-productions. I love the small movie, but like anything I have to connect to it first.

Oh why can’t Hollywood be this efficient more often? Why can’t we see more films made with such precision, with such gentle artistry, with such a well developed script, sense of style, cast so brilliantly, as The Bank Job? Why? It seems unfair. This is the kind of film that just makes all the other films in the caper genre look bad. The Bank Job is not an all time masterpiece, it will not win any Oscars, it will likely not end up on anybody’s best of the year list, but it is pitch-perfect genre entertainment. The kind of movie that should make the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie weep for the day that they thought they could craft movies this well.

Roger Donaldson, the ever-reliable Aussie director who has been behind quality genre-movies for decades, has come through once again, and this time is no exception that people will fail to remember his name. The man who put together the period remake of The Bounty, the fanboy favorite Species, and most recently the wonderfully saccharine-free heartwarmer The World’s Fastest Indian, has made a movie that looks so slick and stylish without a single fancy edit, without showcasing an older, faded star of the time period, and without filling to the brim super-duper catchy dialogue. His craft is so good and simple that nobody will notice the skill behind it. At least he has the decency not to broadcast that fact. Were it any number of other hot-shot directors the movie would be splashed with all sorts of over the top references to how great the guys at the helm are. This zealousness often leads to quality pictures breaking down or becoming so glitz laden that nothing ends up believable at all.

The story is one that would seem so incredulous and reeking of the post-Pulp Fiction lust to write in far too many characters, too many subplots, and too many clever situations. That is until you remember that this is a true story (don’t worry, the movie lets you know it). The heist itself, pretty simple by today’s Ocean 11 standards, has the decency to play itself out. It lasts a good 45 minutes or so. The drama as always is in the aftermath. It all catches fire when the robbers realize that the reason the bank was robbed in the first place was to recover some very compromising photos of a certain member of royalty. When other compromising photos of some Lords in Whitehall are uncovered even more people join in the increasingly violent chase for all and everyone involved. There’s also a book of police payouts kept by a shady pornographer that gets him into the mix.

And perhaps a word about casting; so often we have a beautiful story like this that simply never gets made unless there is some Hollywood A-lister attached, regardless of the point that they may not be right for the part. Jason Statham however, the great but very one dimensional cockney actor made famous in the Transporter movies and Guy Ritchie crime flicks, plays here exactly what he was meant to play, a Cockney man of the streets, hustling for the one big score that will take him and his family out of the dangerous street life once and for all. Statham is not a dynamic actor that needs to be seen in the thankfully underseen period adventure movie In The Name of The King. He is one of those rare finds like Jason Lee that needs to play characters that he understands. A semi-streetwise Cockney Londoner is exactly the role Statham needs to play.

A short note to finish, and I mean this with all the warmth in my heart, I pray that Roger Donaldson never wins an Oscar.. Oscars have a tendency to taint the career of the director who win them. Most often they go to directors who make it a point to craft artistic films that are meant to be seen as such. Occasionally however, they go to directors who thrive in the genre-film side of the industry who happen to make something that is massively well-received. Sadly for them, expectations get raised up with each subsequent movie they make. Directors like John G. Avildsen (Rocky), John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton), even Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) all continued to make well-made genre pictures post-Oscar though critical reception often suffered because they didn’t always strive to make the Oscar-caliber pictures that people now came to expect. Too bad for them. They were just enjoying their work. I therefore hope that the likes of Donaldson, Matthew Vaughn, and to a lesser extent Stephen Frears and Peter Weir never win the big one but get to keep making their terrific movies in peace rather than be subject to post-Oscar frenzy.

As I begin this blog, I would like to first preface everything on explaining my position. Any schmo can write a blog these days, and they do. Cyberspace is littered with hundreds of thousands if not millions of long, winding online journals in which the authors do nothing but bitch and moan about things that piss them off or what is wrong with things around them. If they move to praise of anything, it is mostly to state the very obvious. For me, I often find it very difficult to find a movie forum where conversation can remain civilized before the name calling begins, then I realize that I am dealing with teenage rookies.

But there lies something else, I myself am indeed a rookie. Let me explain my credentials. I have none. Though I am a graduate of film studies at UC Santa Cruz I don’t consider that adequate training. Film students may learn about film and the underlying theory that accompanies, all very valuable indeed, but what is missing from the curriculum is something much more simple, that of appreciation.

As a film student, I found the opposite. I learned to detest film. A film student learns to dissect film much like a biology student dissects a frog. I learned to see inside a film, without ever first stopping to see how beautiful it might have been first. I sought out what the film was based on, that is I tried to see what was wrong with it. Underlying social values and prejudices, hidden meanings and psychological explanations for the directions cinema has evolved. Now, that is all very fascinating in itself. Very important stuff to learn, very enriching material, nevertheless I felt the most important aspect of film was lost completely. You are supposed to enjoy film. I suppose then if you can balance your enjoyment with insightful critique, then you could have the makings of a critic.

So there is what I aim to be I suppose, a critic, even though I cannot stand critics. This brings me around to one of my first complaints I made which is these days everybody is a critic. Everybody has an opinion and well they should I guess, but I don’t understand why everybody has to be so venomous about it. Discussion boards on IMDB.com are insanely repetitive, name calling and chest puffing happening so quickly that any insightful question or topic is either trivialized or the subject completely changed to something more explosive within just a few postings. By way of this blog, I can open topics of conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating, or illuminating (credit please to James Agee).

Those who know me might be expecting me to next start waxing on the majesty and perfection of such recent releases like the recent Oscar giants There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Perhaps all in good time. Enough has been written about them for now. I recently restarted my dormant Netflix account and, gotta love it, all 418 movies in my queue are still there waiting for me. After the predictably slow winter season of movies where Hollywood unleashes all the slop not fit for tent pole seasons, I’ve settled back into watching a lot of the older and foreign movies I haven’t gotten around to watching again. Such treasures I’ve recently uncovered for myself include A Canterbury Tale, The Witches of Eastwick, Dead Ringers, if…, Kind Hearts and Coronets, as well as a number of gems by Michael Haneke and the irrepressible Preston Sturges.

The most recent film I saw and my first one delivered to my doorstep was Mikael Håfström’s Ondskan (Evil). The story of a violent but bright youth who following expulsion from his high school finds his last scholastic opportunity in a stuffy private boarding school where the students keep the law and the teachers remain only in the classroom. I love movies like this. The setup with the lead character, Erik Ponti, pummeling the bejesus out of some poor kid prepares you for a movie where “the violence” must and will come. For no matter how hard he tries to keep a low profile and strive to do well his nature forces him into a corner where he must either cower on his knees or stand up and fight. Ponti is a boy who will never assume the former.

Films of this sort, that is the boarding school sort, are the perfect realm to showcase a microcosm of society, where good and evil is allowed to be worn very plainly on everyone’s sleeve. There is very little room for gray area. The lead character or characters in such films must find a way to fight against the stuffy or obsolete powers that be so that they don’t lose who they are and the don’t submit to rotten society. If lucky, stay a student at the same time. But its all or nothing. The protagonist will either succeed or fail, others may be sacrificed along the way. Brutal, often sadistic punishments are handed out and the division between warring factions stretches the length of an ocean. Its essentially the same plot structure of a fantasy movie, which may be why Harry Potter is such a wild success. Two similar genres blending together so seamlessly creates and environment that while few people have been in such situations, we can all inherently identify with.

Håfström had shown a fluid sense of direction and scenery with his film. So fluid that it scarcely felt foreign at all save the subtitles translating the Swedish dialogue. The move to Hollywood felt all but assured, and sure enough after Ondskan’s success Håfström found himself moving to California and never looking back. He has so far given us the misfire Derailed and the terrific horror-thriller 1408 during his American residence. After 1408 Håfström seems to have found his footing in Hollywood on the quality side of town (its a small but prosperous neighborhood) so to speak, and his next project is an ambitious period piece called Shanghai featuring John Cusack and Chow Yun-Fat. Should be interesting, Håfström is clearly a very capable talent and evokes very strong performances from actors of all walks, and I have little doubt that he can be a Hollywood acquisition of top form as long as he doesn’t get too comfortable like the blown talents of Wolfgang Peterson and John Woo. Please Mikael, don’t forget your roots whatever happens. While Derailed worried us forminute, you’re too good to go to waste.