Elite Squad

book by André Batista, Rodrigo Pimentel, Luiz Eduardo Soares
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani, José Padilha, Rodrigo Pimentel
directed by José Padilha
USA, Brazil; 2007

Elite Squad, the winner of Berlin's Golden Bear award this year, is told from the perspective of a special forces police captain in Rio de Janeiro's inner city. The BOPE carry assault rifles, have skulls tattooed on their arms, and are called in to raid Rio's favelas—shanty towns—when violent crime overwhelms the regular police. The setting is similar to 2002's' City of God, though far less glossy and cinematic, offering (if you can imagine) an even sharper depiction of what violence is like in that sprawling megalopolis. But if City of God had anything to do with awareness, this one has something to do with offering a solution, however difficult. COG's most important point was that an endemic community is of the highest value, despite its socio-economic difficulties. Much of the literature and intellectual architecture that surrounds Latin and South America in the last half-century centralizes around this concept. Thus, the left-leaning response to such meddling manifestations as CIA-backed dictatorships and oligarchical Banana Republics is described in Padilha's film as bureaucratic and corrupt, because social problems remain. In Padilha's Rio, revolutionary thought comes from the right of the political spectrum. It's a funny concept to Americans, whose power systems since the '80's have been shifting ever rightward, and current revolutionaries fit the traditional leftist model.

The film is an example of where the art house meets the frat house. It takes a visceral, instinctual audience to appreciate this worldview. In order to elicit the response, though, Padilha is forced to use the traditional tools of narrative cinema, and in this he pulls no punches. The torture and death scenes are unrelenting, and the hand-held proximity of the action is nauseating. The plot is long, winding, and hinges on some over-used contrivances to keep it in gear. The story, on the other hand, is simplistic and dull. It's good guys versus bad guys. Why is it that every time major studio money is involved (because the Weinsteins are majors now, right?), quality is lost? Also, why are elite American power brokers (the Weinsteins, Hollywood, et al.) funding right-wing projects in resource-rich countries? Sound familiar?

The major failure isn't even in the filmmaking, it is that Padilha's intellectual platform is entirely faulty. His brand of societal order is based on bloodlust rather than belief, as the BOPE training camp creates mindless death machines, not ideologues. Later sequences featuring BOPE's infiltration of the favela are reminiscent of the media that filters in from Iraq. Soldiers bash down doors during starving families' dinners, and torture practices involving pain and humiliation destroy hearts and minds instead of capturing them. This death squad's eventual success is the revenge-driven assassination of a two-bit drug hood, nothing more and nothing less. There is no belief involved. A police state is an artificial institution that attacks everything that is different from itself. There is only one system in a police state, and it is an imposed one. Also, because it is a system based on suppression, it requires dystopia to survive. How could such an institution identify and ameliorate problems like rich-poor gaps and violence-based capitalism? You gotta have crooks to have cops.

Burn After Reading

written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
USA; 2008

Just to be clear, this film is gut-busting funny, but there's something missing.

It's an antithesis to No Country, perhaps? Instead of intelligent characters perpetually out-smarting each other in a death dance of existential meaninglessness, a bunch of ninnies play a retarded intramural spy game that hardly sticks to any kind of arc whatsoever, nor does it hold any allegorical resonance. It's definitely closer to O Brother, where the stupidity of the characters is so unbelievably far-reaching that the only real option is to keep laughing. Lebowski was a masterpiece for many reasons, but chief among them was that every character's choices made perfect sense in that weirdly skewed and morally corrosive L.A., while somehow Burn After Reading's playfully domesticated Washington D.C. tropes pale in comparison to the real-life malignancy that overshadows that completely disgusting and evil city. Don't the Coens ever read the news?

There is complete freedom extended to this Hollywood A-Team, yet there is hardly a grain of respect extended to the characters themselves. McDormand's and Pitt's Linda and Chad are basically thrown to the sharks. It's funny as hell, but I think it's near impossible for any sentient humans to make such poor decisions. Malkovich drowns in a shallow pool of scripty hard luck, pulling some laughs through a parody of himself and a ubiquitous and glorious "What the fuck!?" For Swinton's Katie, there is written only one degree of cold, to which she responds with an apparent spill-over from Narnia's Ice Queen performance. This time her weapons are less mythic. Money and property are a far scarier arsenal than swords and steel, and an army of lawyers is pretty much the same thing as an army of ghouls and goblins, isn't it? Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but the smartest moments come as subtle critiques of corporate suburbia more than anything else.

Also, what's with the sex chair? To me, Linda, Harry, Harry's wife, Katie, and everyone else seem to be exhibiting healthy, and quite normal, adult sexual behavior until this strange coital eccentricity appears and has an actual significance in the story beyond its non-sequitur humor. It's probably due to the ambiguity that surrounds Harry. What is this guy all about? The Coens lobbed this complete freedom role to Clooney and he seems to have merely reprised his O Brother character, but instead of covering his selfish motivations with distracting language, he doesn't seem to have any discernible motivations whatsoever besides a serious commitment to upper-middle-class living. It's not until he shows a truly vulnerable side that any of his character information is at all interesting.

In prior Coen films, it's the character actors that really provide the magic, and not the stars. It's a Shakespeare trick, where a single line spoken by a castle guard or a peasant will often have as much resonance as all of the protagonist's subsequent stanzas. This star vehicle (because that's what it is, let's not entertain any illusions about it) allows its multiple stars nearly complete freedom to fuck around, but however funny it is, freedom ain't free. There is far too little discipline here, and once again, the most interesting performances come from the likes of J.R. Horne's divorce lawyer, Richard Jenkins' gym owner, and J.K. Simmons' CIA director. Hollywood's star system is systematized for a reason, Joel and Ethan. You can break the 180-degree line all you want but you can't F with the personality cult.

Frozen River

written and directed by Courtney Hunt
USA; 2008

Why this film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance is an indication of the way most audiences watch independent and art-house cinema. To the movie-goer that doesn't live and breath film the way some of us do, an art-house movie is a piece of culture that causes the viewer to be placed on a higher plane of awareness. It's a talking point at a social gathering, or an impressive venue for a date. So it goes hand in hand that films based on "issues" from "real life" become such hits. The problem is that these films often set themselves up to fall, as the tightrope between social cause and narrative art piece is a very thin one to walk. Paradoxically, though, most viewers of art-house cinema will forgive a film for its narrative, dramatic, visual, or other artistic shortcomings in the name of its worthy social cause. Often the issue is hardly explored, as in the case of Frozen River, and it's as if this simplification makes it more powerful, perhaps because it's easier for audiences to digest. In the end, the filmmaking is distracted and ultimately suffers, but it's the coverage of the issue itself that suffers the most. Print articles, news media, and even documentary films are more appropriate outlets for journalism than narratives.

Frozen River's director Courtney Hunt employs some silly plot contrivances to drive a dull story. The climax requires a significant stretch of the imagination in order to make any sense at all, but what's really sad is that actress Melissa Leo's skillful performance as hero single mother Ray Eddy is sabotaged by a horribly contrived character flaw. She has no problem trafficking Chinese people across the Canada-US border, but when a "Paki" family hops in her trunk, she objects with: "As long as they're not the kind that blow up themselves and everyone else." Why Ms. Hunt would imbue an otherwise intelligent character with such a rock-headed red-state racism eludes me, other than perhaps to imply that "simple folks" have "simple ideas," or some other such nonsense. It's pathetic, and it merely serves to motivate Ray Eddy's decision to leave an important "package" on the ice and add some narrative spike to an otherwise flattening story.

The scenes at home in the trailer are far more interesting than this manufactured story, or the vague glimpse Hunt provides into a seedy underworld that barely scratches the surface of what is involved with human trafficking. The trailer scenes at least resemble a well-made film. By the end, though, there is too much clunky plot in the way. The entire climax plays out with two scared and omnipresent Chinese women in the background. I refuse to be tricked by narrative convention into caring more about Ray Eddy's comparably luxurious existence when Hunt quite clearly is allowing me to see a much larger problem looming in the background. Want to raise awareness? Skip the narrative and make a documentary.

American Teen

written and directed by Nanette Burstein
USA; 2008

Halfway through the film, Megan Krizmanich commits an irresponsible act of vandalism, bordering on hate crime material. She is suspended from her student council position, and nothing more is mentioned about it. It's a confusing sequence, incongruous and, in this unresolved state, doesn't serve the story. Director Nanette Burstein quite obviously alternates between reality and drama, and often confuses the two, as if she is unsure whether to prove that art imitates life, or the other way around. It's an old conundrum, and it's no surprise that she stumbles. Colin Clemens' father, Gordy, offers a half smile every time he mentions Colin's college prospects. He is a man who is afraid of committing, and uses his sense of humor to overcompensate. This is confusing and frustrating to a son that clearly loves him and harbors many interior insecurities himself. I'm a lay psychoanalyst (having almost no training in the area, admittedly), but this is what I gleaned. This is what I gleaned despite Ms. Burstein's mishandling of this same material. Again, it's as if she is unsure whether this will make good drama (a father who tells his son that a basketball scholarship is the only hope for a college education) or a glimpse into a deeper cultural issue (the complex relationship between a father and his son). She's in directorial limbo, despite a Sundance win in the Directorial category no less (the animation by the way? wtf?). To be fair, with this kind of comprehensive coverage it's hard for a critical audience not to indulge in some deep psychological prying, and likewise it's hard for the subjects not to find themselves in a constant performance, making simulacra of themselves in an effort not only to define their own personal identities, but also to remain interesting subjects for the doc. But as a straight story most of this is old hat, while conversely there is far too much of the editorial hand to take it seriously as a verité thought-piece.

The hero is Hannah Bailey, whose emotional crisis prevents her from performing ad nauseum. Poor girl, Burstein attempts to make a story out of her rebound romance, even creating an odd-man-out fifth character of the guy, putting him on the poster, etc. This guy serves as nothing if not a cookie-cutter foil to Hannah's explosiveness. She's the star of the show, and it's for all the same reasons that her story is a difficult one to tell. Hannah's best moments are when she is utterly confused, because confusion is the prevailing state of most high school seniors. Certain elements are very confusing in Hannah's story, like the staged conference with her conflicted parents, an ambiguous relationship with her best friend, a lack of real insight into what her home life is like. In retrospect, Burstein should have embraced a more confused take on the footage, rather than fit poor Hannah into the Ally Sheedy arty misfit role and move on. To be fair, there is an attempt by the filmmakers to allow their subjects to transcend these social roles, but the weight of the stereotypes drag down this film in the end.

Doc films and reality television have created an environment where performance is second nature to many subjects. A film that resonates is Operation Filmmaker, which premiered earlier this summer and tracked the European sojourn of an Iraqi film student whose school had been destroyed in the bombs. Filmmaker Liev Schreiber, in a moment of humanitarian action, offered this student, Muthana, a position as a PA on the production of his film Everything Is Illuminated in Prague. Muthana at once sees himself as the star of the show (considering filmmaker Nina Davenport's camera follows him everywhere), and, like many young men with stars in their eyes, objects to the menial role of assistant and the labor involved with it. In his case, there is a war surrounding his life, and the hollow performance is coupled with real feelings of sympathy. American Teen similarly invokes real sympathy for high school seniors and the perils of that position. The characters perform in some culturally mandated response to the original sin of adolescence, even going so far as to provide epigraphic apologies during the closing credits. But Muthana and the "A-Teens," no matter how you look at it, are still performers.

Encounters at the End of the World

directed by Werner Herzog
USA; 2007

Herzog's on screen persona has changed slightly as of late, probably due to a newfound popularity after the success of Grizzly Man. Not that he's never been funny, far from it. Humor has been a major element in Herzog films since his auspicious beginnings, often providing viewers some stability through several of the more challenging sequences. His doc work especially is peppered with in-jokes and absurdities: the rooster man in White Diamond, a sardonic self-awareness in My Best Fiend, the entire concept behind How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck. This newest one, though, part of a string of American releases, has a different kind of humor. Werner this time is conscious of himself as a joke-teller, and yuks it up quite unabashedly. Where in the past the filmmaker would have made a much more subtle comment and allowed the humor to happen naturally, Encounters is lined with witticism after forced witticism, and Herzog's usual "play dumb" persona loses its charm. Whether this is a product of his "arthouse buzz" status or yet another element of filmmaking with which Herzog is experimenting remains to be seen.

The marvelous underwater photography, Herzog's reason for visiting the continent, is interesting enough, but quite rightly the filmmaker devotes more time to examining the strange underwater sounds of the seals and other arctic creatures. A weird natural phenomenon like some kind of alien implantation on earth, this is classic stuff of Herzogian mystique. The humans, though, are far more run-of-the-mill. There's the scarfed British volcano expert, soft-spoken in a hard environment, the career travelers, one of whom can fit herself into her own suitcase, the dry humor of an introverted penguin expert. Everywhere Werner goes, he digs up the fringe fascination that exists there, yet at the titular "end of the world," he appears comparatively bored. It took Herzog a trip to the most distant refuge of humanity to out-weird him, and all he can do is crack jokes about it.

The "bucket-head" sequence is a perfect statement about the film. Most documentary makers, on Discovery money, would have shot the penguins, the icebergs melting, the sunsets. For better results, Herzog finds the most interesting thing happening is a white-out training session where people tie themselves together and fix buckets over their heads to simulate zero visibility. A far cry from penguin shots, we instead have images of a string of humans with white 5-gallon buckets and painted-on faces, inching their way across the white arctic frost. Later a liberated penguin breaks from the flock and waddles away toward the mountains, alone. Later during a conference between two researchers excitedly discussing a new species discovery, Herzog obtusely asks, "Is this a great moment?" Images like these will stay with audiences for a long time, and Herzog continues to prove why he's one of the greatest but in the end, this installment should be considered a minor effort, whatever that means.

Man On Wire

directed by James Marsh
USA, UK; 2008

Though the directorial strategy is derivative of Errol Morris and his signature expressionist re-enactment sequences, the interview material is significantly less anxious, more matter-of-fact. This is where Marsh's film succeeds most. Where Morris, in his recent fashion, would have charged his interview footage with an intensity and an urgency (through unnerving frames, perpetual jumpcuts, positioning the focus of his subjects' eyes toward the depths of his camera lens, etc.), Marsh allows his interviewees some breathing room. It's a fine complement to the urgency of his re-enactments, and the humanistic story that unfolds only adds to the fascination contained in the documents. There are photos, diagrams, notes scrawled on graph paper, even color 16mm footage of the lads planning the coup, as they refer to it. By the time Monsieur Petit tightropes across the top of the industrialized world, any notion of "stupidity," and words like "maniac" or "foolhardy," have been washed clean from the tips of the tongues of the audience. Even the dreaded words "September 11th" seem to be relegated to a parallel history while Marsh's story is told. What remains is bliss, and an appreciation for all that is fascinating in the world.

For the duration of the film, and while image after towering image showcases what used to be the World Trade Center, and even as the Petit cell's plans and actions vaguely resemble a terrorist strike, a nostalgia for the Manhattan of the 1970's seems to replace the usual 9/11 anxiety. There is no mention of the attacks, a deliberate directorial move, and it quite suits the film. The interviewees reminisce, the re-enactments illustrate, and the documentation depicts a world (and two buildings) that existed at a different time. I found myself thinking not about what happened in 2001, but about what might have been happening in the Middle East while Petit schemed. Ah, the innocence of nostalgia. Errol Morris' films may take on subjects as dire as war and its collateral, but despite the urgency, his inability to draw out a story (at least in his two latest films) renders them impotent. Man On Wire is a piece centered around joy, and its potency is unstoppable.

I found myself coupling feelings of sadness with feelings of joy. I am not necessarily sad about the 9/11 event itself, more at the idea that a piece like Man On Wire can stir more powerful emotions than all the politics Errol Morris can muster. Joy is a more powerful force than sadness, yes, but it's a also a far easier force for most of us to handle. The images of a man walking between the twin towers represent the idea that the towers actually existed at a place in history. This is unchangeable, and as long as story and documentation exists, permanent. History is sad and history is joyful.

The Dark Knight

written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan
USA; 2008

"At least it was better than Batman Begins," in the words of my brother. I couldn't agree more. Yea, it was solid, it was fine. Nolan's first Batman offering had its share of cool bits but man, did it stumble often. A mystical Tibetan (?) madman that comes back to rid the world of the plague that is Gotham? That's admitting that there's actually a world outside Gotham, something Nolan keeps hinting at. Also, the frozen lake kendo fight.. Laughable. When does Batman ever use a sword? Tim Burton's pair take themselves far less seriously and are more fun than these newest installments and thus come off as far more satisfying, more complete. For the record, though, I'd give anything to see David Lynch direct the next sequel. You wanna see dark?

About this film.. I see Harvey Dent working thematic overtime here. First, his story is a passing of the torch. Something like what Tolkien put forth in the LOTR trilogy, mythology takes its ideals along with its heroes and rolls them over onto society. As the myth of the Batman subsides, it is left to humanity to take up the torch in the fight against evil. But as the heroes phase out, so do the villains. Thus, humanity is left with the legacy of both good and evil, and the choice to commit to either. Harvey Dent/Harvey Two-Face also embodies this idea. Not only does this character speak to the archetypes, but there are real-world ideas here too. He is responsible for choosing between public service and private safety. He is even responsible for the tactical choices as well! It's a ton of bricks to lay onto a character, and it's why Harvey's end transformation is not suitably built in, and never quite sells. If it sounds like this film is about Harvey Dent, that's because it is. Batman's screen time is negligible. Which is fine, because frankly he's running out of gimmicks, and you can only carry a hard-headed internal conflict until the movie count moves to a second hand. Unless you're Michael Myers or Tackleberry from Police Academy.

There's a glimmer of promise when The Joker starts talking about "The Plan" and some bit of anarchist theory shines through. Follow through, Nolan. What are you scared of? Also, there's a mention of mass surveillance, and a moral question! Follow through, Nolan! Now this one I can't forgive him for. If this director was at all responsible as a thinking person, there would have been a comment about the government, or wiretapping, or anarchists, or just people that are tired of the system in the same way that it seems all these characters are exhausted living in modern-day Gotham. Doesn't living in this brutal, exploitive system just exhaust you? Follow through, Nolan. Also, this is the only review of this film that doesn't use the words H____ L______. He was a good actor, he died, his character was interesting, but it still doesn't top Nicholson's version, how's that?

Redbelt

written and directed by David Mamet
USA; 2008

David Mamet wrote that the only questions a film audience should be asking themselves are Who wants what from whom?, What happens when they don't get it?, and Why now? Why now? I know the answer, particularly because Mamet telegraphs it in the final scene, as if we needed a justification (and we do) for why we we've been watching a story about Mixed Martial Arts. Did you say "mixed martial arts"? Yes, I did. The sport has been around for years in Brazil and Japan, but has only become popular in the United States in the last few years. I know this because that's a line from the film. So there, I know why it's about mixed martial arts. Does anyone else laugh when they hear that term? And why Chiwetel Ejiofor? Isn't he that romantic comedy guy? Yes, but apparently he can fight, and apparently he's pretty awesome at it. Then explain Tim Allen, you say. Seriously, he plays himself and he's pretty awesome at that, too. And Joe Mantegna is in it.

The story begins innocently enough. Mamet follows all the rules: we see the gun, (spoiler alert!) the gun is fired. That tenet will come back to bite main character Mike Terry in the ass, by the way. We see the sleight of hand, we see the videotape, we see the setup. It all comes back, but not before this film really starts cooking with a cool double cross, totally blindside, "there's always an escape," etc. Not this time, Mike. Who wants what from whom? It's exciting trying to figure this stuff out. I was on board for the setup, and I was really on Mike's side with the ethos stuff. I was even starting to see a Hollywood sell-out parallel. All honor when it comes to banal competition, but starstruck and all over the fax machine when Hollywood comes calling. I bought the suicide thing. Loved Mantegna (How could one not?). I wasn't jiving on the weird quiet training sequences with the female lawyer, though. What was she, a love interest? Why was her approval so important in the end? And why does she care whether he fights or not? Improve your position, Mamet. What happens when they don't get it? Interesting. In this case the bad guys get everything they wanted, until...

The final scene. Oh, the final scene. What a piece of garbage. Honestly, the theater broke into a peal of laughter when the Japanese fighter handed him the belt. That's what happens, I'm going to ruin it for you, by the way. Mike fights his way through the crowd at the end, making his way to the title fighter, fights him for some reason (the guy had nothing to do with anything), and then the Japanese fighter hands him the championship belt. That's it, that's the end. Oh wait, then the ref hands him the symbolic red belt. That's what happens.

Chris and Don: A Love Story

Directed by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi
USA; 2007
It's not until somewhere in the second act that Don Bachardy's magnificent drawings are revealed. It is a revelation, a story element that adds another level of complexity to this already engaging tale. Don Bachardy was a wide-eyed teenager swept off his feet by an older and considerably more cultured gentleman, a man whose renowned joie de vivre had been lifting spirits at affluent parties on both sides of the Atlantic for three decades previous. Directors Mascara and Santi begin with a run-down of Chris Isherwood's illustrious life prior to his meeting Don, describing through interview, photo archives, and narration of Isherwood's journal the handsomeness and great attraction of this man. By the time we meet Don, the impressionable youngster, it's certainly no surprise how quickly he falls for the older fellow. The two make a fine pair, radiant and lovable, openly gay in a conservative era (but what era isn't?), and proud to be in love, despite the gauche age difference. But there is a stereotype happening, and as barrier-busting as this power duo seems to be, their story is as old as storytelling itself. Almost two thousand years ago, Ovid's Ganymede and the Eagle was describing a similar story, where an older patrician (in that case Zeus, king of the gods no less) seduces a beautiful young boy, and takes him away to a luxurious and chic lifestyle on Mount Olympus, not much different from the Hollywood of the 1960's and 70's.

However progressive their relationship, and however significant this pair's cultural leap is considered, it is not the mere premise that makes this film so rich. The interviews with Don tell the story of a man who grew into a distinct individual within those relationship confines. He has a similar British accent, yes, from his developing years under Isherwood's wing, but it's his voice that is different. And somewhere in that second act his drawings are revealed. Don's sheer talent as a painter suddenly increases the plane on which this film sits, in truth providing a reason to remain interested in the story. What makes for a good personality doc are these various shades of complexity that form not just a good linear story, built on a good linear premise, but a fascination that goes a step beyond. As the film moves, the pair of lovers depicted in the seemingly endless cache of 8mm home movies (some of the most skilled home cinematography I've ever seen, by the way, is this 16mm?) become more than the stereotypes, three dimensional humans in fact. But stereotypes there are many. Don describes the infidelities of the relationship as maintenance countermeasures, something done in order to maintain true love, but mostly just succeeds in reinforcing the notion of gay promiscuity. Aside from a few stumbles such as this, some funny expressionist directorial choices when visually describing Don's daily routines, and a failure to actually recognize much of what I'm saying here, this film is right on the mark.

Mister Lonely

Directed by Harmony Korine
Written by Harmony Korine and Avi Korine
UK, France, Ireland, USA; 2007

A little over three years ago I was able to catch Harmony speaking at Ryerson University in Toronto. It was a fantastic Q & A session, hosted by Bruce LaBruce, who is awesome. Clips from Harmony's (ridiculously few) films played on the screen above the two, and it was the first time the filmmaker had actually watched any of the work since the bygone era in which he made it. He cringed, literally, after some of the harder-to-digest bits, but there was an unmistakably proud sparkle in those eyes as well. He mentioned a film in the works, a sad tale he was writing with his brother Avi, about celebrity impersonators living on a commune in France. Flash forward to last Saturday, when New York and I caught up with Mister Lonely, a film that's just exactly what he promised it would be. The shotgun semiotic technique—where art direction and a shooting script are replaced by a grocery list of iconic symbols—has been Harmony's signature in the past, and this newest piece may be a step removed from his first two films, but it's still a fine continuation of tradition. A young Buckwheat impersonator recalls many of the strange and semi-improvised Gummo performances, only this time feels more organic as a stand-in for Harmony himself, who was apparently raised on a hippie commune before his famous sojourn in New York City. Fate, free will, and personal choice comprise solid thematic ground on which much of the film rests, a nice change from the lily pond of content that makes up all of Harmony's other work. There are still a lot of nice Gummo moments, though, like the scene of Larry, Curly, and Moe shooting the sheep, or Sammy Davis Jr. dancing on the roof. In fact any scene including the impersonators, which is nearly every scene of the film, takes on the hyper-reality characteristic of Harmony's method. Other icons include The Pope, The Queen, and an Abe Lincoln who drops the F-bomb like it was slavery laws.

Werner Herzog makes another appearance, this time as an overzealous but well-meaning missionary somewhere in the Spanish-speaking jungle. See this film, if for no other reason than to experience his introductory scene—not so much a Harmony move, but more of a classic Herzog one. A local man (this is all documentary footage, I'm guessing, probably just a local Panamanian hanging around the set that they befriended) is prompted to confess his infidelity and plead forgiveness from Father Herzog, in costume with the camera rolling. The man eventually admits to having cheated on a woman, while tears stream down his cheeks. Herzog plays it straight, says a prayer in Latin, and absolves the man of all sin. Un-fucking-real. Next are the nuns, falling out of airplanes unscathed, basking in God's grace as they careen through the grainy blue sky on bicycles in some of the most beautiful photography of the film. Of the film? Try "of the year," for that matter. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind is a usual Michael Winterbottom collaborator, and A propos, definitely take a look at both of these guys' work. Mister Lonely's photography is absolutely gorgeous, though. Highlight of the film by far. In the spirit of indulgence Zyskind goes old school, uses big-ass lenses, with shallow depths of field, loves slow motion, gets a little grainier than Gummo's Escoffier (may he rest in peace), but not as much as julien d-boy's Anthony Dod Mantle, a DP Zyskind worked for on 28 Days Later as it turns out. Take one look at the opening shot, Diego Luna's Dangerous-era Michael Jackson riding a tiny motorbike with a stuffed monkey attached to the back, all coming at you in ultra-slo-mo. Un-fucking-real.

Harmony spoke at Saturday's screening as well: "After tonight, I'm going to go home and write another movie. I'm not going to be so precious about things any more." In regards to his body of work, he took the words right out of my mouth. And in regards to the other movie, I'm certainly looking forward to it.

Awesome things I didn't mention:
Denis Lavant as Charlie Chaplin was great.
Leos Carax as a creep was perfect.
Samantha Morton gained weight for the Marilyn role, but she is still such a doll.
What was with the talking eggs?

My Winnipeg

Written by Guy Maddin and George Toles
Directed by Guy Maddin
Canada; 2007


Winnipeg's night skyline is framed by the window of Mr. Maddin's (played by an actor but actually narrated by the filmmaker himself this time) sleeper car on a passenger train on an endless loop around the city, like a thought bubble above his restless noggin. You sure can't take the city out of the boy, but apparently you can't quite take the boy out of the city, either. The loop is something of a fitting metaphor for the paradox of light rail in North America, where the Canadian public transit ridership is two to three times what it is in comparable American cities, but the public spending on infrastructure and upkeep in Canada is only about half that of its southern neighbor. That's a hard, sourced fact, something Mr. Maddin certainly won't give you. Disproving truth, or what cinema conventions would usually tell us is true, is basically his m.o., and in this newest film he's taken it to the next level, telling flat out lies about his hometown and its history. This self-narrated hodgepodge of experimental docu-fantasia (that's the term he uses) describes what we Americans would recognize as the de-industrialized capital of a midwestern swing state (do they have those in Canada?). The city has fared well, it seems, through a mad century of capitalization and subsequent demolition at the hands of those storybook robber barons, the department store speculators.

Those robber barons. Robber barons that have subsequently demolished the city. This narrated track (I'm so upset I missed the live narration performed only once at Tribeca this year, by the way. I was probably at that stupid Pangea Day thing. Doesn't anyone else see this crap as globalization? Anyway...) this narrated track is written with such repetitive eloquence. The phrases and rephrases are almost like chapter headings. At this point in Guy Maddin's career, though, his stylistic moves are no longer groundbreaking, and really only serve as branding while we experience the unique elements of each piece. It is exactly this fact that allows My Winnipeg to work so nicely as an essay, for one, because it's not necessarily about putting together a cohesive film experience, but more about reconciling a specific set of ideas while the hodgepodge illustrates. This is a technique perfected from the inside out by Su Friedrich in 1990's Sink or Swim, a film in which Freudian parent-child relationships, personal insecurities, and the idea of the innocent persona in the big bad world are all intellectual and emotional issues (as in Maddin's best work, Careful, The Heart of the World, My Father is 100 Years Old), rather than, however funny, mere jokes (as in his less successful Cowards Bend the Knee, and Brand Upon the Brain!). There are extremely funny moments here, especially during the NHL sequences and the domestic reenactments, which are both somehow bizarre and familiar at the same time, recalling the very best David Lynch moments, or perhaps a Kurt Vonnegut description of a dying family in a dying city. This is another move in the right direction for Maddin, and if his methods—once so mind-blowing but now old hat—can keep pace with his mad rush of ideas, than we can expect the delights to continue.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

Written and Directed by John Gianvito
USA; 2007

A sad quality of Americana is that it's only a celebration of a diffuse slice of our history, the one in which Henry Ford's preserved historical villages don't include union organizer meetings, Norman Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With doesn't include cops spraying lunch counter patrons with firehouses, and Superman fights communists while holding down a day job as a yellow journalist. It's a sad fact, too, that most history books tell the rich people's established version of history, perhaps because it's easier to research than it is to launch investigations into how the other half lived. Just ask Howard Zinn what kind of a process that involves, or ask Chris Harman. Uncovering what the ruling class would have preferred us to forget is borderline revolutionary! There are so many people that history has forgotten to mention, either out of laziness or a concentrated effort by powerful interests, that it doesn't seem at all possible for it not to repeat itself. And when we're talking about business interests, isn't that the idea? Andrew Carnegie named a school after himself, Reagan branded an economic paradigm, and Sam Walton's legacy is as strong as his market share, but what kind of institutions are keeping alive the name of Lucretia Mott? How many students learn the name of Uriah Smith Stephens, the founder of the Knights of Labor, one of the first successful national labor unions in the country? This national hero is buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia. Not only has history misplaced him, but it has also failed even to label his remains.

John Gianvito's stunning Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind was the New York Society of Film Critics' Best Experimental Film of 2007, and rightly so. Here is a dedicated soul, and passionate filmmaker, who not only knows how to construct a powerful cinematic experience, but is also one of the rare historians willing to trek through miles of weeds and historical records in order to find these unmarked graves. Gianvito, a teacher at Emerson, set about to make a very different kind of documentary, but was taken aback by the kind of treatment history has shown not only the two aforementioned heroes, but dozens of others including Henry David Throeau, Soujourner Truth, Fanny Lou Hamer, Cesar Chavez... the list goes on and on. Gianvito decided to concentrate only on the earthly remains of these labor organizers, civil rights activists, and humanitarians. PMATWW inter-cuts between snippets of the lonely grave sites and the delicate movement of wind through the pines and the grass that usually provide Americana with an artificial warmth. Under Gianvito's discerning video lens, these elements are quite cold and become quite eery by the end of the hour-long piece. Occasionally through the trees or behind a particular memorial we catch a glimpse of a McDonalds, or a WalMart. The end sequence is punctuated by common protest signs, popular movement, and community organization. Slowly, the title becomes that much more pertinent, and the loud cracking of the drums shakes us to the depths of our moral hearts. The film is dedicated to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and Gianvito is pleading with us not to forget those lessons learned therein.

Standard Operating Procedure

Written and Directed by Errol Morris
USA; 2008

We're at a cultural point where intellectual coolness, a plea for middle America humanism, and blogs in the NY Times about the vague metaphysics of documentary photography can't justify a failure to make a real statement about why things are wrong in the world and who are the culprits. Mr. Morris, at a talkback after the Tribeca premier of his latest piece of polished softcore, made for great entertainment by pointing his finger to the ceiling and shouting in his characteristically cartoonish timbre (perhaps what the offspring of Betty Boop and Foghorn Leghorn would sound like): "This thing goes all the way to the top!" Apparently the PFC's responsible for the Abu Ghraib debacle can rest easy, because according to Errol Morris, George W. signed the Code Red. He also went on to name a CIA member involved in the torture proceedings hinted at in Standard Operating Procedure, although none of this stuff is in the actual film. He continued to generally made a bleeding heart lefty case for the untold human story. Sorry, Errol, but while 1999's Mr. Death was saved by a fascinating fringe aspect and the fact that Holocaust Revisionists are hardly ever taken seriously, in 2003 you had the devil himself on the stand and couldn't, or wouldn't, make him say what every progressive thinker in this country needed to hear. The Fog of War backed down from what could have been a revelation from the life of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, rather than a watered-down "lesson" where, among other silly pontificating, the modern world's colonial rottweiler tried to take Ralph Nader's credit for automobile safety rather than admit that it was he who orchestrated and perpetuated the Vietnam War, America's biggest ever foreign policy failure. Well, second biggest at least.

Which brings us to Iraq. Morris described at the Tribeca screening how he couldn't gain clearance for interviews with any of Abu Ghraib's offending GI's, nor did he find any Iraqis involved in the incidents, nor would any high-ranking US officials speak to his Interrotron (the camera and video playback system he uses for interviews so that it appears his subjects are speaking directly to the audience). I'm genuinely surprised nobody over in the Bush clubhouse would speak with him, considering how good he made McNamara look in 2003. Bush Sr. and his buddies are perfect protégés of the original empire gangster, maybe they could have used an Errol Morris film to improve public image in the eyes of lefties who cling to Errol Morris and his political jello-spine in the same way that people who shop at Whole Foods and build giant houses in the middle of untouched forests think they're environmentally-conscious. Anyway, Morris couldn't get any of those really good interviews, so he put together a crappy humanist story about the innocent 21-year-old privates who didn't do enough jail time for their lack of decency. He also made some half-assed comments about the power of photography and its ability to tell a story (but, shocking! it's not the whole story). Slap some Robert Richardson photography in there, close-ups of blood drops, an ace with Saddam's face, and a paper shredder. Call up Danny Elfman and ask him if he can do a Philip Glass impression. You've got yourself another hit, man. But instead of a real money shot, we're left only with simulated. Errol Morris is becoming the Shannon Tweed of the doc world.

i saw this first...

My Blueberry Nights,
just in case you missed it. I saw this during its Asia release, because my life is so glamorous I spent four nights in Singapore catching up on movies..

Boarding Gate

written and directed by Olivier Assayas
France, Luxembourg, 2007

Sandra blurts out the point so obviously in the second scene that it completely takes the fun out of the subsequent ones. "You always got harder when you told me what we were going to do than you did when we actually did it." Great line, though. The story is more interesting in between the action sequences—of which there are few. I'm hoping, though, that this isn't merely an effect caused by Sandra's appearances in lingerie—of which there are many. Olivier Assayas' latest film in a career-tainting string of disappointments after 1996's Irma Vep (although I quite liked his Paris, je t'aime segment) flirts with redemption in a way similar to main character Sandra's vain, last-ditch attempt at the same. Assayas continues in BG to plug seedy sexual attractions, B-movie genre bends (self-admitted this time, as if he needs to remind everyone why he keeps making films at all?), and an anti-bombshell femme fatale into his usual formula. The resulting meta-fest ends up with its lead actors simply chasing each other around the x-axis, taking turns in the focus range. It resembles less an exploitation film and more a Directing for Film 101 final project. At least it's interesting until we decide who's chasing whom. One talent of Assayas', like so many critics-turned-filmmakers, is he really makes an audience leave the theater feeling smart as long as they understand what the hell just happened. Sandra whored herself around for a long time in her twenties, and now that she's burned out in her thirties she seeks, through that same lifestyle, to phase herself out of the game. Simple.

Asia Argento is so terrifyingly attractive, I'll forgive her butchering this potentially effective script. The photography and soundtrack fall under the same category. That is to say, effective on the surface. Assayas and fellow heady shooter Yorick Le Saux (I don't really know much of this guy's work. I only say "heady" because he's French, too) keep things either too dark to see far enough into the scene, or are careful to keep a sharp focus only on the foreground, leaving the rest completely indecipherable. An easy visual metaphor for surface beauty. For such a complex filmmaker, Assayas' techniques are usually fairly straightforward when broken down. Asia Argento is so terrifyingly attractive, I'll...(did I say this already?) Moving on, Asia Argento is so... I just can't shake it.

Anyway, Asia has been excellent before. I call in question The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a film where she played a convict with the kind of conviction it takes to bring to life not just a bad-girl (which she is anyway), but a real embodiment of desperation. BG doesn't see her with any commitment to this world. I'd call it a problem with theory-devotional filmmaking. Argento's foray into filmmaking shows something like holistic ignorance of a critical reception. It's a don't know/don't care attitude that really keeps a film like that one breathing. This one, like the rest of Assayas' career, is marked by a fear of commitment. Non-film theorists often make the best filmmakers. And for the record, in regards to Assayas' non-actors, well, let's just say Kim Gordon was WAY better on stage.

Bob Muir and the Enemy Below

"That's just so wrong," say the T-shirts, the website, the people in the audience, etc. Bob stands to stage right, while The Enemy Below positions himself opposite. Sandwiched between these two irreverent scoundrels are Insect Girl (the evil hottie) and Trafalgar the Square (the good hottie). With S-Dog on keys and The Dude! rocking the skins in the back, this sex-tet (literally) combines rock and roll, burlesque, and poor, poor taste with a unique ease. "Chain me up, tie me to the bedpost/ Oh, whip my ass till it looks like a French Roast," I could go on for pages describing the demented genius in the songwriting, but lines like these speak for themselves. The band's modest mission is to "shock and amuse, nothing more," or so they claim. I had the supreme pleasure of a Bob Muir and the Enemy Below experience on Tuesday night at The Delancey, and not only am I shocked and amused, but I'm also befuddled, flabbergasted, disgusted, and totally aroused (all at the same time). I make fun, but honestly, the experience is one in a million, and the band is so fucking loveable I simply must go see them again at their CD release show, May 31st at Brooklyn's Luna Lounge, and you should too.

Check them out at myspace.com/bobmuirandtheenemybelow. Just so you can get a sense of what I'm talking about, here's a set list I stole from the stage floor after the show, amazing...

CJ7

directed by Stephen Chow
written by Stephen Chow and Chi Keung Fung
Hong Kong 2008




Stephen Chow has always made grown-up movies that appeal to kids. Or maybe it's kids' movies that appeal to grown-ups. Or maybe his brand of unabashed stooge slapstick, a commitment to the campiest of visual effects, and an eye for the contemporary despite leanings toward a cultural universality (literally this time), are just the elements that happen to get results across the age spectrum. Chow's grown up characters, most notably the ones he himself plays, act in many ways like children, while his children fill the opposite role. And there are enough smarts, formal attention, and cinematic references included in the overall zaniness to keep the arthouse snobs coming back. It might sound a little like I'm describing the Pixar regime, but (thankfully!) there's an essential difference between Chow's work and that steaming pile of pandering Disney crap. Pixar films play to the lowest common denominator through a diffuse self-censorship made up of market research, focus groups, and tested material. Stephen Chow's films, despite their whimsy, take a large amount of risk, as many of the jokes don't land, the effects are at times over-the-top, and even narrative flow is interrupted in the name of whatever greater cinematic awesomeness seems to fit at the time. Where Chow's recognizable themes are used to sell a formal--and often personal--cinematic vision, Disney's sale is not quite as noble.

But CJ7 doesn't succeed the way Shaolin Soccer and certainly Kung-Fu Hustle do. For one, there's a morality tale happening, structured something like an Aesop Fable, that is never reconciled with the story. A remarkable and hilarious Jiao Xu plays Dicky, the kid whose adherence to a working class ethical code is blown apart with the introduction of a high-tech toy. There are some beautiful (and funny) allusions to the corrosive nature of power, but ultimately the moral material, which was loaded on so thickly from the outset, is either lost to melodrama during the father's accident, or a messy plot wrap-up during CJ7's exit. As usual, though, Chow's best moments come when he detaches from a conventional structure (Ieaving Pixar in the dust), and uses the elements of film like a kid would a Lego set. The closet-to-galaxy sequence is incredible, part DirecTV commercial, another part Flight of the Navigator. Dicky's father's 12 by 12-foot shack in the junkyard is ridiculous yet picture perfect (All the shots are from overhead! There's literally nowhere to put the camera! Amazing..). But Chow's struggle with narrative reconciliation is a losing battle. The attempt to ground such playful segments like Dicky's fantasy victories into a kind of plot framework is futile, and what was hilarious a second before suddenly becomes jarring. As usual, the supporting cast is perfectly side-splitting, and in this case gold stars go to Shing-Cheung Lee's role as the pathetic Mr. Cao. Chow's move away from the ensemble conventions is in this case what muddles the film, though there's a touching personal story in there somewhere.

Maldeamores

[written for Global Nomads at http://www.janera.com/]

directed by Carlos Ruiz Ruiz and Mariem Pérez Riera
written by Jorge Gonzales and Carlos Ruiz Ruiz
Puerto Rico 2007

Three twisting love stories make up Maldeamores, the most recent offering from a small Caribbean island not exactly known for its film scene. The Puerto Rico Film Commission would like to see that notion changed, though. Boasting the largest tax incentive of any community in the Caribbean, the PR government offers a 40% break for producers of cinema, television, and original soundtracks. How wonderful it is, then, that the first project born of this new plan is about as native Puerto Rican as they get. First-timers Carlitos (as he's affectionately billed) Ruiz Ruiz, and wife Mariem Pérez Riera not only direct this gem but appear in a comical opening sequence, laden with the kind of subtextual angst that only a married duo could muster. A silly argument over gum quickly results in near catastrophe on a mountain highway. The film continues without the pair, and follows three unconventional love stories on different parts of the island. The film's title translates into English as "Lovesickness", but what this film brings is certainly not the kind of sappy sentimentality with which that word is usually associated. A better translation would probably be "sickness from love." This opening bit is just a taste of the struggles to come, and if the kind of dark humor that absolves jokes involving neck braces isn't your cup of café con leche, perhaps you'd better steer clear of this one.

In story one, we're introduced to a grieving family. Well, at least Lourdes (Teresa Hernández) is grieving over her recently passed grandmother. Her adolescent son (Fernando Tarrazo) struggles with his tears in the back seat, more interested in putting on a big front to impress a darling cousin. Lourdes' husband Ismael is played by the only recognizable actor in the ensemble, Luis Guzmán, a Hollywood mainstay and PR native. A usually vibrant Guzmán this time only blandly fills the role of the unfaithful Ismael, but the standout is easily the exchange between Ms. Hernández and Norman Santiago, who plays her brother-in-law Macho. Santiago's clumsy ne'er do well is as vacant as the sun-bleached neighborhood, and Lourdes' temper only shortens. The relative obscurity of this cast certainly doesn't affect its impact, though. Next up is easily the shining star of the vignettes, a septuagenarian love triangle that depicts a hilarious exchange between a saucy--yet sensible--old flirt, her curmudgeonly companion, and to complete the trifecta, the most cavalier of ex-husbands, a model of that smoothly benign Caribbean machismo. His 70 years of likeability are quite infectious, and this lovely triangle resolves itself extremely well despite the difficulties. Silvia Brito's Flora, through obvious faults of her own, finds herself in the middle of a battle for her highly regarded attentions. On one side is Cirilo (Chavita Marrero), the mean-tempered but endearing live-in mate of Flora's. On the other side is Miguel Ángel Álvarez's charming Pellín, his abject advances--despite decades of delinquency--are only justified when he asks Flora an interesting rhetorical question, "Have you ever considered the fact that we're all going to die?" Love and death, some would say, are the only two questions to ask. It's in these moments that the film takes leave of its comic lightness and breaks into more interesting territory. For young filmmakers, Ruiz and Riera are tackling some very sophisticated themes.

The third vignette continues on the theme of love and death. The story centers around a daily bus passenger, Miguel, played by Luis Gonzaga. Despite an overly attentive mother, his loneliness drives him to an obsession with Marta, the driver (Dolores Pedro), and a suicide attempt becomes a hostage situation. Fortunately, Ruiz and co-writer Jorge Gonzales keep things on the lighter side and the situation devolves into a kind of wedding. Love, death, and hostages. Ruiz and Riera certainly don't shy away from depicting the omnipresent Virgin Mary watching over the affairs in supremely Catholic Puerto Rico. Maybe we're all hostages when it comes to love, and perhaps the filmmakers are posing the question as to whether maybe the Virgin isn't better off?

Despite some clunks, the three narratives complement each other well. An adulterous man loves too much, a bus driver too little, and three elderly socialites reflect on lives that included a little of both. Eduardo Alegría's and Omar Silva's score is marvelous in its simplicity, the piano an artistic accent rather than an emotional cue. Ruiz, Riera, and cinematographer P.J. López again rein in the arthouse indulgence on the photographic style, instead opting for a realistic impressionism that highlights performance and drama over heavy-handed camera work. This style, though, allows for those small observational details to translate nicely into some beautiful, yet fleeting, visual moments. It's almost as if the photogenic Caribbean beauty can't help but escape into the frame. Though in a film that centers around love, death, and hostages, perhaps escape isn't such a surprising thing.

Paranoid Park

directed by Gus Van Sant
screenplay by Gus Van Sant
novel by Blake Nelson
France, USA 2007

What Gus Van Sant has done this time around is he's slightly shifted his main focus. Elephant, Last Days, and his more recent Paris, je t'aime segment are so interesting because they walk a fine line between familiarity and extreme strangeness. In 1942, Albert Camus imprisoned his "stranger" for a failure to assimilate, emotionally, thus removing him from the existential trap posed by the world. Van Sant has been positioning his own emotional strangers in what we would have assumed were familiar environments, and deliberately allowing them to remain, unbridled, until some inevitable natural dissonance. I'm seeing this latter phase as a transition from the formal ambitions of his earlier years to a more zen-like acceptance of the inconsistencies that represent a so-called "normal" life in the weirdness of today's upper middle class society. The past three releases have also seemed to drop that passionate devotion to the angst of youth in favor of a clinical indifference. This quiet, contemplative phase sees Van Sant exploring--rather than battling against--the strangeness. In PP, however, there's a return to that passion. What was strange for us in Elephant--the diverse social lives of children, confused sexual attractions, a world that literally comes in and out of focus--now helps to define main character Alex. Rather than holding up a carnival mirror, distorting the lives of children in order for a grown-up audience to understand the inconsistencies in their own lives, PP really invests in the worldview of Alex and his skater friends, while still pointing out that unnamable, universally frustrating dissonance.

Part of that frustration stems not from Alex's crisis of conscience (which throughout the film nicely serves as a moral weathervane, the old kind, where it's ambiguous which way it's actually pointing), but from the constant reminder that it's possible for rich white males to get away with murder. Detective Liu is sickeningly cordial with Alex. With no pressure from an interrogation, it's not surprising that he's able to breeze his way through the ordeal. In a world such as Larry Clark's, for instance, skaters are pushed around and dehumanized, while Gus Van Sant's counter-culture are treated with the kind of retroactive immunity popularized by today's corporate-controlled leadership. Have we reached the point where skating is finally an acceptable outlet for our children, rather than a dangerous sign of rebellion? One more subcultural trend transcending into the mainstream, perhaps.

While this kind of incongruity is happening, Van Sant follows, with a great degree of compassion, his youthful subjects. He and cinematographers Kathy Li and Christopher Doyle (my favorite; he's Wong Kar-wai's go-to guy) seem to enjoy spinning the rings on the lens, as this time not only the focus shifts, but the exposure as well. It's a nice touch, providing a kind of physical punctuation to color Alex's internal (and the audience's external) struggle. This photographic style is quite interesting in that it provides a visceral tension without the usual discordant music, jagged editing, disturbing content (although there is some of that included in one of the many flashback sequences), hand-held jumpiness, straight out of the textbook, etc. And speaking of flashback sequences, we're once again provided with an incongruity. The story being framed within Alex's own narrative, the question is posed as to why certain story elements have been included earlier and some later. I would argue the plot follows a familiar path from establishment and foreshadowing, through decision and complication, and finally to resolution. The question, then, is why would such an obviously novice writer choose to tell it in such a way? Perhaps the point is that we see our own lives in terms of plot structure, in a sort of an attempt to make sense out of the mess.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

directed by Andrew Dominik
screenplay by Andrew Dominik
novel by Ron Hansen
USA 2007

One of the more interesting things about this film from sophomore writer-director Andrew Dominik is the narration. Actually many exciting moments come through here, despite its documentary style and a cadence reminiscent of a Sunday morning on National Public Radio. Far too description-y to forget it's there, this anachronism of voice-over contrasts with what seems to be the aim of most writers--to provide information as discreetly as possible. Conventional methods and Robert McKee steer us away from a pronounced narrator, but in Assassination the effect is more holistic than ever. In the appropriate fashion of 19th Century newspaper drama, there is an off-handedness that somehow passes judgment while remaining as close as is possible to the version of history most widely regarded as fact. Sounds like a tough task, but upon reflection is probably what many of those same newspaper writers dealt with as the Wild West died out. An idealistic sinkhole. The kind of mythos surrounding Jesse James and his exploits made for fine storytelling, but when the rest of society caught up to the frontier, the party was over. Bankers, industry men, and politicians weren't looking for exciting outlaw serials, they looked to the papers to tell them whether or not the James gang would conceivably be robbing their shipment.

But the poets are the unsung victims, even though they die along with their work. The next generation of writers and historians pay hardly a mention as their forefathers die out. A more important extinction, that of Jesse and his outlaw lifestyle, makes the front page weekly. Assassination sticks around during this stagnation and allows a glimpse into the pathetic lives of a few remaining gangsters, still trying to live the dream. Bob Ford at least, played with such perfect strangeness by Casey Affleck, is the only one to acknowledge the idea that he is living out a childhood myth. Brad Pitt is such a nice choice to play the other title role because he instantly provides megastar status, despite appearing as hollow and lifeless as is expected of Jesse James, legend of a bygone era. Even brother Frank, played by Sam Shepard, knows when to quit. When things start getting too lonesome even for Shepard, then, well...

As far as disintegration goes, though, it's an extremely watchable one. Humans act with survival in mind, and not only is the James gang fighting to survive the end of an era, we're reminded of another cornerstone of civilization. As these guys squabble, weasel each other out, lose interest, and altogether fall apart, the real beauty of the West shines through. Dominik can't help but mock the paltry posse of fur-clad deputies struggling their way through the snow. He can't help but force an exasperated Charley Ford over a precarious frozen lake. All the wonderfully physical aspects of the West are still here, and it resonates much longer than the death dance of human mythology.

Darkon

written and directed by Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel
USA 2006

Role Playing Games, on the level of Final Fantasy or WOW, allow players to assume control over a complex environment without the use of social skills. Sadly, success in the real world is almost entirely dependent on social interactions and politicking rather than intelligence and imagination. With a certain degree of brains and an inclination toward creative thought, you could easily become a Chess master, but even the most menial job requires a completely different skill set usually detected more in facial gestures than quality of work. The D and D phenomenon has, to millions of gamers around the world, provided a model of upward mobility for even the dullest and most awkward personalities. It's no secret, whether it's success merely over the Playstation or over legions of multi-players around the globe, RPG's empower the socially challenged. But LARPing (that is, Live Action Role Playing) is a completely different story. In Darkon, the subjects' obvious performing for the camera, usually such a detractor in documentary material, is moot. The Darkon experience is all about performance in the first place. Whether there's a camera or not, Lord Bannor would still be hamming it up for the armies of players around him. Also, quite explicitly stated, it takes politics to succeed in Darkon. War councils may convene, strategies devised, and battles planned, but usually it takes a backdoor deal with Elven mercenaries to muster a victory. It's an important point, because it sets LARPing apart by re-introducing a social requirement.

It's not surprising that many of these characters are so charismatic and well-spoken. This type of gaming attracts extroverts and natural performers. If you can't talk the talk in Darkon, you won't get a speaking role. Directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel present aspects on both sides of the reality divide, intertwining the lives of their subjects with their subjects' characters. But socially, which is the way most people understand their own lives anyway, aren't these two aspects on the same level? At a back table in Denny's, Skip tries to retain the loyalties of his Laconian countryman, but at the same time isn't he just trying to retain a friendship? The Darkon event footage, including camp-outs, battles, and meetings, provides the same character information as the interviews at work and home. The most interesting departure from these character sketches are the staged sequences of the Darkon story, where the gamers are so completely ingrained in performance, and the real attraction to Role Playing is evident.

I can't help but see an allegory here. An offshoot of the intelligentsia that has pioneered gaming from its humble days of Chess and Backgammon to an MMO RPG empire, LARPing is the exploitative and power-hungry next generation. It is propagated by the movers and shakers and by the politicians. One Laconian puts it bluntly, "..that real world mentality keeps coming back. To be better than somebody else..." Those who can play the political game enjoy success in Darkon. Those with actual intelligence are largely forgotten in favor of likeability, charisma, and brute force. It's much like the capitalist democracy we deal with on a daily basis. Ralph Nader and the citizen advocates are either smeared or disenfranchised by the silver-tongued Party politicians. NGOs and established intellectually-based environmental organizations are silenced by George Bush and his puppet policy-making agencies on issues like peak oil and global warming. In the realm of Darkon and all over the real world, smooth talkers silence the meek with the power of social skills. And also much like the rest of the world, the decision makers of Darkon are usually men, they are usually short-sighted, and they are usually white.

Gone Baby Gone

directed by Ben Affleck
screenplay by Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard
novel by Dennis Lehane
USA 2007

For whatever it's worth, let's not forget the guy's an academy award winner. Though it has been buried by years of so many completely ridiculous performances and juicy off-screen tabloidery, Good Will Hunting was a timely, intelligent, and tasteful piece of writing that should at least be recognized as an exciting offering by a couple of future super-celebs. Also let's not forget the obvious brains behind the Askewniverse roles. His inclusion in the Hollywood silliness self-awareness campaign of Kevin Smith (i.e. "...Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.") at least belies Entertainment Tonight's cookie cutter version of the adorable but intellectually irrelevant leading man. So upon closer review of the evidence, perhaps a solid and smart directorial debut for Ben Affleck is not so drastically surprising. In fact, I don't think I'm the only one who had some inkling of curiosity as to when this lug would deliver on some of these vague promises.

Gone Baby Gone is not without its shortcomings, but there's a unique message that slowly builds a case as each new piece of tainted evidence comes to light. Young and attractive Patrick and Angie watch the neighborhood crisis on TV, a step removed from the world just outside their doorway. A shameless and domestically challenged Helene spits venom at her sister-in-law, and Patrick and Angie's underlying relationship tensions are like a drop in the ocean of trouble that is blue-collar Boston (or any city, for that matter). Angie, in another nice directorial touch, is deftly pushed aside for the entire first half of the movie, until she explodes past the men, over a hundred-foot cliff to certain peril. Ineffectual masculine power struggles are easily blown apart by the raw passion of the fairer sex. It's here that the film changes, and as Patrick becomes caught in a torrent of harsh difficulties, something in the filmmaking itself feels wrong. There are recognizable genre elements, but certain plot details become unimportant, while others are seemingly forgotten. Patrick slowly picks his way through the mess, and likewise the plot eventually makes sense out of the strangeness. In contrast to the Coens' No Country for Old Men, for instance, where we have a cohesive and meticulously formulated plot carrying us through the difficult intellectual material, GBG instead nearly falls to pieces in its construction of a similarly alienating environment.

In the end, Patrick champions the working class against the meddling upper-echelons. But in this case it's not a case of corporate exploitation, or any such Moore-ian social injustice. Affleck and novelist Dennis Lehane (also the author of Mystic River) have embedded an indictment of that same working class. What a statement! To boot, there are overtones of the fate vs. free will argument. Very nice. Lastly, Amy Ryan's portrayal of Helene is wicked. Only a serious commitment to a view of the world from the bottom up could have produced such righteous selfishness. It must have been a terrifying experience.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

directed by Julian Schnabel
written by Ronald Harwood
novel by Jean-Dominique Bauby
France, USA 2007

The first act feels abbreviated, as if Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby could actually will himself into acceptance of this condition on the strength of his considerable charisma. The man rocketed through an explosion of prestigious fame and fortune before his stroke, and in an inspiring way, rather than a rock star sequence coming to a crashing halt, this momentum seems to carry him through the initial shock and adjustment process, the Dark Passage of dealing with a delibitating event. Spielberg's photo man Janusz Kaminski shoots from a one-eyed perspective with mesmerizing focus pulls and pivot games. His and director Julian Schnabel's emphasis throughout these tender opening scenes is so obviously focused more on a visceral delivery of the Bauby experience than anything else, perhaps in hopes of somehow bringing to life that connection between sensory perception and imagination, body and mind. The man's body, though--as is revealed in the (frustratingly mostly expository) subsequent scenes--is secondary to what has formed him as a professional and as a man. A debilitating condition has the effect of bringing issues of human composition to the table. With such limited expressive capabilities, what is it that makes up the man? Schnabel's butterfly theme crowds the frame with light, pretty people, poetry, and an array of the Sun King extravagance of Versailles. Distracted from the more human attention usually given to cinematic in-patients, one must assume that Bauby's verve and consequent success, both post- and pre-trauma, can be attributed merely to his acceptance of the aristocracy. Before the sickness, rich people danced pirouettes around him, and after the sickness, rich people continued the act.


Schnabel's first film, 1996's Basquiat, told a similar story from a different perspective. Jean Michel Basquiat encountered that same doting personality upon his entry into the New York Gallery scene. A nobody to begin with, and a natural iconoclast, Basquiat eventually rejected the aristocracy that wanted nothing more than to buy and sell him in the name of humanism. Jean-Do Bauby's success, though, was built on harnessing this energy and putting it up at retail prices. A speedy and opportunistic adjustment to a life-changing event, something Basquiat failed to achieve, marks Bauby's saga. It's a fine story, even inspirational, but isn't it just the aristocrat in all of us that can appreciate it on that level?

Michael Clayton

written and directed by Tony Gilroy
USA 2007

Rather than just another issue-based left hook, Michael Clayton delivers a more cinematic glimpse at the underbelly of an otherwise canopied corporate world. Although the plot centers around a law firm and its mega-corporate client's criminal negligence, writer-now-director Tony Gilroy concentrates instead on the upper level power struggles involved, and deftfully brings to life an exciting interplay of major corporate movers and shakers. You might think this sounds like an irresponsible blockbuster stunt, going so far as to foresake its centripetal issue (corporate greed and the human costs), but happily this film is refreshingly far from typical Hollywood material. Gilroy keeps the morality theme interesting by removing his titular character one step from the dilemma of conscience (Clayton is played by an ever-resourceful George Clooney, who has mastered the puppy-dog trick of channeling a tendency to appear vulnerable into shere loveableness). The guy with the dilemma is Tom Wilkinson's Arthur Edens, something of a Peter Finch character from 1976's Network, who spits hellfire and brimstone at Clayton eventually in vain. Clayton is unaffected not because he's a cold corporate drone, but because he has a kid, a mortgage, debt, retirement anxiety, a family member with a personal problem. He's dealing with a lot of stressful shit, and now you're asking him to care about humanity?

If these things sound familiar it's because they happen to just about everybody. Gilroy attempts to show that these big money Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Corporate Robots have issues like the rest of us, and they're just trying to stay afloat in the arduous journey that is life. Corporate interests aren't happy when they poison communities with byproducts, but they're locked into a system that forces them to put aside morals in the name of personal stability.

Gilroy takes it too far, though. The end is a pitiful Hollywood bit of wrapped-up closure, where Clayton and the rest of those on the correct end of the moral spectrum get back at the bad guys. The point is that everyone is a victim, even those bad ones. The system is the problem, and Gilroy makes no further attempt to examine it. His cinema chops are fine, and it's a nice ride while it lasts, but it's almost as if this director is another character in his own story. He's got a job to do, a career, probably a family, etc. Eden's ethically-charged ranting falls on Gilroy's deaf ears, too, and though a nice film comes out of it, the issue is completely gone.

No Country For Old Men

written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
novel by Cormac McCarthy
USA 2007

I finally decided what nails me about this film, and it was only after something my friend Brian mentioned. The Coen brothers prove to be masterful nearly all of the time, combining taste and imagination with solid physical delivery of information within the film, for instance a dog chasing a man down a river is not only an awesome idea while the physical sights and sounds of it are pretty awesome in themselves. This is a usually unnamed feat that marks great filmmaking but in the Coen universe is held in higher regard than the film itself. It's similar to movies seriously immersed in genre, but the essential difference is that in those films thematic material--i.e. the message of the filmmaker--is allowed to surface due to that genre adherence, while in Coen work this thematic material gets completely lost. Any themes that exist in No Country, because they certainly exist, come across as some kind of sideline attraction on a cinematic rollercoaster.

The idealogy of competitive men, that violent motivation that runs the world and in a significant majority of cases supercedes that of all other human sects, including women, children, socialists, etc., is once again on full display. Can you name a 2007 film that doesn't, for lack of a better term, fetishize human masculinity? In the case of No Country this reliance on such a thematic mainstay is the only reason the film actually leaves any resonance. We pay rapt attention to the man-dance on stage and whatever existential struggle that plays out is unfortunately overshadowed by the many years of man that came before. OK, I'll admit it's about time existentialism is treated with the hilarious irony it deserves. Rather than some Sam Shepherd world, taken a shade too seriously, Cormac McCarthy's story bounces not only with the absurd humor of founding thinkers like Ionesco and Albee, but somehow these days this absurdity makes complete ironic sense. Either way, there's some solid filmmaking here that only seems to get in the way of it all.

There Will Be Blood

directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson
novel by Upton Sinclair
USA 2007

Rather than stick to the usual Daniel Day-Lewis program of: 1) point camera, 2) record every sound out of his mouth, and 3) sit back and watch, P.T. Anderson has once again proven his considerable directorial skill by harnessing the presence of this master of method-acting into just another tool in his sizeable kit. The opening shot explicitly demonstrates Anderson's control over the turn-of-the-century world he creates, blasting discordant sounds that resemble music over a rugged landscape. It's an old move (like one of my favorites, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock), but like all of Anderson's moves, he executes it with such taste and discretion so as to nicely garnish his storytelling. Very soon after, Daniel's body lies at the bottom of the well-shaft, the crude itself glistening in what little light filters in, an omen of riches to come. For a second, there's no plot or narrative content as the gems of oily reflected light dance around, and the crude oil itself is the scene-stealer, a reminder that even the great Daniel Day-Lewis/ Daniel Plainview, both actor and character, despite such power and resilience, are but a drop in a barrel in this world. Anderson proceeds to out-frame, under-light, and exert countless other subtle strategies toward his leading man in order to further embed him in the picture.

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood punctuates the film nicely with an interesting take on a jazz fusion/modern chamber music score. The horns and sax reminisce the best bits of Punch Drunk Love, though the violin often seems heavy-handed.

The theme is slightly confusing when the film takes its departure from the spirit of Upton Sinclair, on whose story the screenplay is based. Where Sinclair was an unrelenting, trust-busting social activist, P.T. Anderson is an entertainer. Daniel Plainview's story, quite deliberately, is not representative of the oil industry, an industry that today earns record-setting profits and has absolute dominance over the entirety of human society. When Plainview refuses Standard Oil's million-dollar offer, he becomes something other than this industry. His snide quips about Standard owning the railroads is Anderson's sliver of social commentary, perhaps dividing the world of capitalism into Old money vs. New money, and illuminating a fringe element of humanity therein. The titular blood is spilled by a capitalist renegade, a new-money man, and a fierce competitor, not by the old-money establishment. What's left after the blood is clear is just another well-told character piece, pulling its punches at some truly great opportunities to break into the dirty mind of state-sponsored capitalism.

My Blueberry Nights

directed by Wong Kar-Wai
written by Won Kar-Wai and Lawrence Block
Hong Kong, China, France 2007

So I come to Hong Kong, and Wong Kar-Wai goes to New York. Maybe we both needed to tread water for a little while.

Craftsmanship has always been idealogically divided against itself. The perfection of mass production is balanced by the imperfection of authenticity. Likewise, in the past Wong Kar Wai's strict formalist visual tendencies (i.e. In the Mood for Love, 2046) have made for such flawless delivery, while his playful chaos of shutter speed effects and hand-held trickery (i.e. Chungking Express, Fallen Angles) has beautifully roughened the edges of his ouevre.

My Blueberry Nights may be Wong's first to attempt a reconciliation of these contrasting styles, and he is aware of the craftsman's existential trap. Norah Jones gives a perfectly atrocious performance as Lizzie, an impossibly naive fish out of water, despite hailing from New York of all places. Wong's foray into the American experience is so wonderfully similar, a non-actress fills this title role with that universal authenticity of imperfection. To Jones' credit, this script is so clunky that even naturals Jude Law and Natalie Portman can't escape without some black and blues. But the blacker the blueberry, the sweeter the juice, and Wong seems to run with the idea, forsaking naturalist dialogue for a few excellent lines between clunks ("I'm the king of the white chips," "I beat that game on its ass!"). It's another extension of his reconciliation, like some impossible-to-deliver David Mamet script; stumbling gives the auteur some cred.

The theme of dishonesty is so auspicious in this film, as well. It's not only that Jones can't sell her lines, or that much of these characters' backstories is left unsaid. It's hard to believe that Leslie in fact beat that game, or that Lizzie really was mugged on the subway, or even that Jeremy's key stories are all true. Like Wong himself, his characters struggle with success. A winning image isn't authentic. It's only when we've been roughed around the edges that we've actually lived through something.