The Ho-Dome

Short Takes: "Kill Zone," "The Caine Mutiny"

2010-09-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

Kill Zone (2005, Dir. Wilson Yip)

Welcome to the New Wave of Hong Kong police thrillers -- technically polished, solidly acted, visceral and brainy. So why does it feel like something's missing? Kill Zone offers a few clues to answer that one.

But first, the good stuff: Simon Yam is as reliable as ever as Chung, a guilt-ridden cop who adopts the daughter of a gangster who was killed before he could give evidence against crime kingpin Wang Po (Sammo Hung, decked out in a goatee and silk suits). Aiding Yam is a triumvirate of police buddies (Kai Chi Liu, Danny Summer, Ken Chang) who aren't above twisting the law to nail Wang, while Wang relies on a grinning assassin with a predilection for long knives (Jacky Wu). The wild card is Chan's imminent successor Inspector Ma (Donnie Yen), who has a reputation for hotheaded behavior and an unflinching moral code that doesn't take too kindly to Chan's efforts to frame Wang. Add in an over-the-top complication (Chan is suffering from a brain tumor that may kill him at any moment), and you have the recipe for hard-boiled mayhem, Hongkie style.

Kill Zone holds your attention from moment to moment, and of course the marquee martial arts stars (Yen, Wu and Hung) get to have their big throwdown at film's end, with even a nice karmic zinger thrown in. But does it all hold together? Not quite. Caught between the frazzled realism of the Infernal Affairs movies and the postmodern moves of a Johnnie To flick, director Wilson Yip can't quite commit in either direction. Everything with Yam and his cop buddies (all of whom are sketched out in deft if obvious strokes) sticks doggedly to the policier template, while Yen has little to do except glower between the scant action scenes. When the fights do come, the old-school kung-fu seems distinctly at odds with the story's downbeat grit. It's all filmed in slick style, and Yen's face-off with Wu in an alley is a pulse-quickener, but Kill Zone is neither flashy enough to appeal to the reptilian brain stem, nor deeply felt enough to register as a tragic drama.

The Caine Mutiny (1954, Dir. Edward Dmytryk)

It's easy to forget that many of the classic Hollywood stars were most interesting when they went against type. Take Jimmy Stewart, who brilliantly inverted his everyman persona in his westerns with Anthony Mann and Hitchcock's films. Cary Grant often went from the height of urbanity to the depths of slapstick within the same film. And then there's Humphrey Bogart, who was never all that easy to pin down to begin with: always the hard-bitten cynic, his characters forever seemed an inch away from giving into darker impulses (we remember his bared teeth in The Maltese Falcon, his alcohol-fueled rage against Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca). One could say that The Caine Mutiny is the third of the "Bogart loses it" trilogy, and while it's not on the level of the other two (Treasure of the Sierra Madre and In a Lonely Place), it's a reminder of how good an actor he could be.

Based on the novel by Navy vet Herman Wouk, the novel is essentially a World War II remake of Mutiny on the Bounty -- that is, if you can picture the HMS Bounty as a garbage scow. Assigned to the minesweeper Caine to whip the crew into shape, Bogart's Commander Queeg quickly reveals himself to be a paranoid taskmaster on the verge of cracking up, as minor snafus (a sailor's shirt not tucked in) escalate into the accidental severing of a mine cable, an unordered retreat from a battle zone, rants about stolen strawberries, and finally faulty decisions during a typhoon that risks the lives on everyone on board. Wouk cannily splits his tale between two points of view: most of the action is seen through the eyes of Willie Keith (Robert Keith), a fresh-faced ensign from Princeton with illusions of naval grandeur, a girlfriend sick of waiting for him to pop the question, and a serious mother complex, while the latter stages of the film belongs to the "real author of the Caine Mutiny," Lieutenant Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray), the ship's resident cynic and a frustrated writer who isn't afraid to throw the Freudian book at Queeg behind the man's back but is too yellow-bellied to go on the record about his boss's failings. (One wonders if Wouk divided his own persona between these two polar opposites.) Caught in the middle is the ship's super-competent, addled exec, Steve Maryk (Van Johnson in fine form), who bears the brunt of naval law when he decides to relieve Queeg.

The Caine Mutiny skirts the fine line between ambivalence and simplicity -- no doubt due to the ever-watchful eye of the Navy during production, the story is soft-pedaled a bit so that the sea services don't come off too badly (the film sets forth the quaint notion that a cowardly captain is an impossibility), and Keith's on-and-off-again romance with his girl (May Wynn) takes up far too much of the film's time. Still, there are surprising shades of gray (the Caine's lackadaisical crew aren't necessarily blameless in the affair), and director Edward Dmytryk does a fine job of pacing the narrative. He's aided by a stellar group of players, including scene-stealing Jose Ferrer in his final-act appearance as Maryk's legal counsel, Lee Marvin, and E.G. Marshall, among others (Francis is the weak link in the cast, but he is convincing enough as a by-the-book mama's boy). MacMurray in particular stands out: just glib and canny enough to foment trouble, like his Walter Neff from Double Indemnity, he nonetheless has a rueful side, all too aware of his cowardice: "I'm too smart to be brave," he quips.

As you would expect though, the film ultimately belongs to Bogart, teetering between naturalism and theatricality. Sure his habit of rolling steel balls in his hand is now near-laughable shorthand for "crazy," but every moment he is on screen he is the very definition of unpredictability, ready to erupt, implode, cajole, or plead; he supplies the film's buzz. While The Caine Mutiny may seem a bit stolid by today's filmmaking standards, one need only compare it to Tony Scott's Crimson Tide, wherein Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman take turns mutinying against each other to service another nuclear doomsday action scenario, to appreciate the former's devotion to character, and the outrage and sympathy it inspires for its tormented captain.

Gentleman Abroad: "The American"

2010-09-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

The American (2010, Dir. Anton Corbijn)

I'm not very good with machines.
-- George Clooney, The American

The American promises to be an escape from the machinations of the typical summertime action blockbuster -- sure it has Hollywood's most dependable leading man of the moment in George Clooney, and sure it has enough weaponry to satisfy the most discerning of arms fetishists, but its tone and intent harken back to paranoid thrillers of the '70s, in which danger hangs around like a pungent mist, indefinable and therefore that much more chilling. Take for example the first five minutes of the film, which are literally as chilling as you can get: a sudden ambush on a frozen Swedish lake that culminates with Clooney putting a bullet in the head of the innocent woman he slept with the night before. No all-American hero here. Or is there? (Hold that thought.)

Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentleman, upon which the screenplay is based, is a sleight-of-hand piece in which nothing and everything happens: we circle around the titular character as he hides out in a remote Italian mountain village, but despite his wry observations on the world and his courtly interactions with the locals, we ultimately learn very little about him except that he is an expert maker of assassination weapons and has good reason to be wary of everyone. Private and deadpan to the end, Booth's gentleman skirts around anything that resembles human connection, and the book's conclusion is like a mordant sigh, as our anti-hero escapes scott-free once again to continue his empty existence.

Anton Corbijn's film version takes a different tack -- as written by Rowan Joffe and essayed by Clooney, the American (whose name may be Jack or Edward or neither) is a bundle of raw nerves on the run from unknown assailants, a fine-tuned instrument on the verge of popping a spring. Although a quick-and-dirty chase is tossed into the middle of the story to ensure the audience is still awake, the filmmakers are more interested in the existential dread that shadows Clooney's character wherever he goes, and as the camera rests its gaze on him, we read suspicion, paranoia, and weariness on his hooded countenance. And who can blame him? Corbijn places us by Clooney's side as he isolates his star in the center of the frame, the world around him a suspicious blur from which all manner of peril might emerge.

Still, this is Italy after all, the land of people and passions, and despite himself, the American is drawn into the lives of those around him: bemused interactions with the local priest who is out to save his soul (Paolo Bonicetti), faintly teasing repartee with his latest (and perhaps last) client Mathilde (Thekla Reuten), and most importantly, a half-guarded, half-passionate affair with a local prostitute named Clara (the aptly named Violante Placido). Juxtaposed against these detours into humanity is his latest job: the construction of a portable sniper's rifle for Mathilde. The scenes in which Clooney whittles, fiddles, deconstructs and reconstructs the rifle with a craftsman's ease are among the film's best. Despite his protests to the contrary (see the quote up top), the American is more than adept with machines -- he's quite the slick piece of machinery himself. (In a puckish bit of humor, renowned photographer Corbijn has Clooney pose as a photojournalist, rather than as the butterfly collector in Booth's novel).

If you think the above suggests a simmering psychological study, you would be half-correct. In a welcome change from the excesses of most modern thrillers, Corbijn keeps things cool and elicits solid performances from his actors, his sinewy camerawork resisting the temptation to show off (save for a couple of gaudily lit nighttime shots that look like outtakes from U2's latest album art). In the end, though, the story is too slight to convince as a character study, and overdone symbolism (tattoed and real butterflies make constant appearances) and clunky dialogue take hold, with the affable Bonicelli saddled with lines that belong in a late-period Goddard film: "You are American. You think you can escape history. You live only for the present." Clooney's dogged (and hangdog) performance is credible, and it's a pleasing thrill when the American begins to suspect that he may be constructing the instrument of his own doom, but Corbijn sidesteps the existential implications -- and thus the thrust of Booth's novel -- in the latter half of the movie to focus on the doomed love between Clooney and Placido. Ah yes, the romantic fatalism of noir, what could be more American?

Ghost in a Shell: "Inception"

2010-07-23T11:14:00.006-07:00

Inception (2010, Dir. Christopher Nolan)

Eames: You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.
[Pulls out a grenade launcher]

Of today's big-budget filmmakers, Christopher Nolan has always been the most prosaic, in both the positive and negative senses of the word. Watching a Nolan film can stir a strange melange of reactions -- one appreciates the brainy themes he touches upon even as he plays within the confines of genre (superhero flicks with his Batman films, ostensible mystery-thrillers like Memento and Insomnia), the sly literary flourishes, the way his narratives can coil back on themselves, our sense of reality called into question with a simple sleight of hand. And yet he's probably one of the squarest directors out there, still a relative neophyte when it comes to mastering cinematic language. Take for example the ferryboat climax of The Dark Knight, wherein the Joker sets the table for an awful moral dilemma with hundreds of innocent and not-so-innocent lives at stake, and instead of a white-knuckle sequence, we get something staged and shot in the clunkiest manner possible -- it's like watching a balloon tied to a lead weight.

So we now arrive at Inception, a project supposedly a decade in the making, and whatever the concept might have been in its early days (one wonders what kind of film it would have been had it been made around the time of Memento, minus the big-budget trappings), its current form is something the Hollywood execs must have slobbered over: It's got cool dream CGI effects, and plenty of big action scenes! And oh yeah, it's got some philosophical stuff sprinkled in there for the geeks. Nolan's movies have always centered around mentally unbalanced (or at least untrustworthy) protagonists, and this one is no exception. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), thief-for-hire, is an expert at dream infiltration and the stealing of ideas, but when a raid on the mind of oily businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) goes astray, Cobb is presented with an unusual request: dive into the mind of Saito's competitor Fischer (Cillian Murphy) and implant an idea which will lead to Fischer breaking up the industrial empire he is poised to inherit from his dying father. What the break-in entails is a convoluted dream universe involving multiple levels and the need for an expert team of infiltrators: Cobb's right-hand man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the "forger" Eames (Tom Hardy), the "architect" Ariadne (Ellen Page), and the "chemist" (Dileep Rao). The wild card in this setup is Cobb's own subconscious mind, which is plagued by memories of his children he left behind ("Projections," he scoffs, none too convincingly) and his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who pop up, wraith-like, at the most inopportune moments.

Yes, the central mystery circles back, as it does in Memento, to a dead wife, and DiCaprio and Cotillard strike some very real sparks in the scant moments they share together, but Inception is too busy racing through reams of exposition and meticulously edited dream plots to linger over their melancholy for long. To his credit, Nolan keeps the whole shabang moving at a decent clip, doubly impressive given that the rules of this particular dream game must be explained down to the granular level (DiCaprio holds everything together, tossing out cockeyed concepts with a pro's ease). Compared to the lugubrious mood that often weighs down his Batman films, this affair has a lighter feel to it, despite Hans Zimmer's affecting but sometimes ponderous soundtrack and the big-budget bloat. Inception is at its best in its first half as we're exposed to some dazzling sights: Paris folding in on itself like a puzzle box getting packed away, Escher-like staircases and perspectives, and in probably the film's eeriest passage, a figurative elevator ride down into the depths of Cobb's subconscious. These teases suggest that when we finally enter Fischer's mind, we'll be treated to some wondrous, surreal passages.

Or... not really, because Inception is at once Nolan's most ambitious and most prosaic movie yet. In its settings (everywhere from Mobassa to Tokyo to a dream ice fortress in Canada) and its attempt to create whole universes of dream life from whole cloth, it's epic all right, but when we finally enter the subject's brain, we find a dusty collection of tropes borrowed from other genre entertainments. We get a little Grand Theft Auto with machine guns blazing and cars swerving into each other, a mountain assault that plays out like an unholy marriage of On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Ghost Recon, and a few musings on reality vs. dream borrowed from The Matrix, Dark City and other virtual reality potboilers. "You can create anything you want," Cobb says enticingly to Ariadne early on, but Nolan is too much of a control freak, too preoccupied with setting up plot movement like chess pieces on a big board, to let his imagination soar in the dream sequences and come up with something big, apart from coming up with bigger guns (as the quote up top demonstrates). There's none of the tonal shifts, the non sequiturs, the sense of freedom and chaos that often infect a dream, and even Cobb and his team of infiltrators seem dour and earthbound, tied down by physical laws when they could be soaring in this universe, much like the characters do in Dreamscape, Satoshi Kon's Paprika or even Nightmare on Elm Street. Gordon-Levitt gets to engage in a neat hallway battle in zero gravity that would have impressed Fred Astaire, and the amusing sight of several sleeping bodies tied together and floating down the hall holds the promise of more whimsical, deranged heights -- it's a pity the story never aims for them.

But it would be a mistake to completely dismiss Inception as another mindless blockbuster flick -- even if Nolan doesn't have the visionary nuttiness of a Philip K. Dick or David Lynch, there's an aggressive intelligence in how he builds each dream layer (which all operate on different planes of time and reality) like a house of cards, and then unleashes a barrage of cross-cutting and parallel climaxes as it all gets shot to hell. Much like The Dark Knight, the fun comes from watching how pieces of action in different locales are all linked together. It may not stir the soul, and it may not stand up to repeat viewings -- indeed, even after one viewing, there's plenty of holes one can poke in the basic laws of dreaming that the film sets up -- but it certainly gets the mind racing.

Amidst the bustling plot, all the actors acquit themselves well, even if they don't have characters to inhabit -- it's fitting that we really only know them for the function they play, much like avatars in a video game (Tom Hardy as the brawling, wisecracking Eames comes off best). In the end, though, Inception is really about Cobb and his redemption... or is it? Without revealing the final image of the film, suffice it to say that Nolan leaves us with the possibility, however slight, that we may not be out of the world of dreams at movie's end. I'm sure there will be entire tomes devoted to picking every frame of the movie apart and positing which levels occur in the "real world," and already I've read an explanation that suggests that Cobb might still be in Mobassa... but isn't this beside the point? In effect, Inception is one big shell game, but for once, we get the sense that Nolan is aware this it's all a game and not some Big Statement about existence and life as we know it, and he's simply having fun flipping his shells around. Whether you enjoy it or not depends on your taste for street magicians.

San Francisco International Film Festival: Capsules

2010-05-02T14:35:00.000-07:00

Cargo (2009, Dir. Ivan Engler & Ralph Etter)
Purportedly Switzerland's first science fiction filmand made on a shoestring budget, Cargo is certainly an impressive technical effort (some of of the outer space effects are bit too CGI-flat, but most of the others have a lovely simplicity). The story itself begins as a haunted, hushed study of a lonely space traveler (the appealing Anna Katharina Schwabroh) as she signs on for a tour of duty as doctor on a grungy interstellar freighter, but naturally not all is as it seems. It leads to plot developments that are about equal parts Alien, The Matrix and Solaris, a bit too derivative and undercooked to truly stand on its own, but the acting is uniformly fine and the film doesn't overstay its welcome.

Cold Weather (2010, Dir. Aaron Katz)
My first exposure to the "mumblecore" genre. Comedy-cum-mystery centers on the unambitious Doug (Cris Lankenau, a brainier Jessie Eisenberg), who has forsaken getting a degree in forensic science in Chicago to crash with his acerbic sister (Trieste Kelly Dunn) in Portland and work in a local ice factory. When an old flame shows up and then vanishes, it's up to Doug to play Sherlock (he's a big Conan Doyle fan) and figure out what's happening. Touching on noir conventions (a man called "the cowboy," pornography rings, misappropriated cash), the film has an agreeable shambling pace and some nice deadpan zingers in the dialogue, plus some striking photography of the Pacific Northwest courtesy of Andrew Reed. The mystery plot comes to an underwhelming finish just as it starts cooking, but the final scene of conciliation over a cassette mix tape sticks in the memory.

Father of My Children (2009, Dir. Mia Hansen-Love)
Up-and-coming director Mia Hansen-Love apparently based this film on a famous French producer who committed suicide (sorry, spoiler there). The film splits into two, with the first half following increasingly harried and despairing producer Gregoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and the second his grieving family, including his wife (Chiara Caselli) and eldest daughter Clemence (Alice de Lencquesaing
). As you might expect, things head to a que serra serra conclusion, minus the Hollywood tearjerker histrionics. Maybe it's too tasteful -- apart from Clemence's side story of bitterness and acceptance (perhaps not surprisingly since the character is the closest to director Hansen-Love in age), everything plays out on an even (flatlined?) keel. Still, the children are adorable and the digs at the French film industry (including a Lars von Trier-type) are just snarky enough to maintain one's interest.

Last Train Home (2009, Dir. Lixin Fan)
"You want to film the real me? This is the real me!" It's a line out of a reality TV show, but the reality depicted in this documentary cuts deep, as we witness the travails of a Chinese family named the Zhangs over a period of three years. The parents spend virtually the entire time on the other side of the country working for pennies in a garment factory to support their dream of putting their kids through college. Every Chinese New Year they make the near-impossible train ride home to visit their children and remind them that they must do better than them when they grow up. (Having survived the Guangzhou train crush myself, the footage of crowds seemingly bunched for miles around the station, waiting for a slim chance to return home, brought back vivid memories for me.) It all goes painfully awry for the Zhangs when Qin decides she wants to forsake school, become a migrant worker herself, and take the "new way" to success and fortune. Qin's climactic outburst (the quote above) and director Lixin Fan's unsparing eye throughout is riveting.

Littlerock (2010, Dir. Mike Ott)
An absorbing film from a fresh filmmaker, and one of my favorites from the festival. The setup is simple: brother and sister Rintaro and Atsuko (Rintaro Sawamoto, Atsuko Okatsuka) are road-tripping through central California when their car breaks down in the titular town. Rintaro senses the dead-end nature of the place and is raring to keep going, but Atsuko falls in with her surroundings and gets mixed up in an almost-love-affair with the dorky artist-wannabe Cory (Cory Zacharia, who basically steals the show). Not a whole lot happens in the movie, but director Ott gets plenty of mileage out of his characters' shifting perceptions and emotions, easily sidestepping cliche (for example, Cory runs afoul of the local loan shark, but the side-plot doesn't resolve the way you think it might). Throughout one gets the sense of dislocation and lack of connection, but also possibilities for fleeting moments of companionship if not necessarily understanding. A final phone call conducted in Japanese and English puts a nice bittersweet capper on the affair.

Senso (1954, Dir. Luchino Visconti)
Reprint of the classic Visconiti film. Melodramatic? Sure. Gaudy? You bet. Shocking in its emotional realism? Yes. Alida Valli practically trembles with pent-up emotions as an Italian countess who gets involved with an officer from the occupying Austrian army (Farley Granger) in the 1860s, their frothy affair growing ever more forlorn and coarse as it follows the fortunes of the war. Backed by swelling music by Bruckner and Verdi, and set in sumptuous opera houses and sprawling rustic farmlands, the lovers' story reaches grandiose proportions of loss and betrayal before it is all but swallowed up by the grim realities of the ongoing conflict, the concluding shot of an execution as hauntingly matter-of-fact and final as a blade coming down. They truly don't make 'em like these any more.

Splice (2010, Dir. Vincenzo Natali)
Almost venturing all the way into Grand Guignol David Cronenberg territory, this horror-thriller about genetic manipulation is more intelligent than most in the genre, and features a striking performance by Delphine Chaneac as the artificially created being who blossoms before its makers' (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) eyes, with unexpected results. For a while the steely build-up of the narrative keeps us engrossed, with just enough humor thrown in to leaven the tension, but by the final reel and a seduction scene that will either leave you shaking your head or laughing in disbelief, the tone veers off wildly, culminating in a less-than-thrilling finale and a denouement about the depersonalization of corporate life that is well taken, but not necessarily fresh.

Transcending Lynch (2010, Dir. Marcos Andrade)

Pseudo-documentary of David Lynch's book tour through Brazil is really an infomercial for transcendental meditation (Lynch's pet religion). This doesn't necessarily sabotage the project, but director Marcos Andrade's ham-fisted direction does. Want to see interminable footage of fawning Lynch fans waiting to get his autograph? (Hey, I don't blame them, I'd be pretty stoked too -- I blame Andrade's editor.) How about Lynch's musings on "catching the big fish" when it comes to artistic inspiration -- the same shtick he's used in interviews for decades now? How about a near-creepy passage in which Lynch addresses hundreds of kids in transcendental school and tells them they're the hope for the future? Scientology, eat your heart out.

Vengeance (2009, Dir. Johnnie To)

You have to hand it to Johnnie To -- he's been doing variations on the old-school Hong Kong thriller for years, and he still finds ways to keep things interesting. This time out it's a plot strand borrowed from Memento (a man out for revenge is losing his memory), tossed in with the cool men-on-a-mission vibe from The Mission. Former French heartthrob Johnny Hallyday projects dry-as-leather authority as the man out to avenge his daughter before a bullet in his brain renders him a complete amnesiac, and as usual, Anthony Wong is a showstopper as the leader of the hit squad that Hallyday recruits to help him. Throw in some nifty setpieces (a roving shootout through downtown Macau, a battle royale in a delapidated junkyard) and absurdist bits of humor (an ex-moll who is now very pregnant dolls herself up to seduce one of the baddies), and you have another worthy entry in the To catalogue, even if it lacks the revelatory staying power of Running on Karma or Fulltime Killer.

Wild Grass (2009, Dir. Alain Renais)

Alain Renais' latest is a frothy concoction. What plot there is concerns a dentist with shocking red hair who also happens to be an amateur aviatrix (Sabine Azema), and the lonely, addled man who finds her wallet (Andre Dussolier). What should be a simple thank-you call turns into an off-kilter tale of obsession and obligation that flirts with the possibility of becoming a thriller (the man has some criminal activity in his background which is never elaborated upon), a romantic comedy (including missed connections, befuddled cops and face-downs between a wife and a mistress), or an existential drama (no surprise given that Renais helmed Last Year at Marienbad), all voice-overed by an all-seeing narrator who may also happen to be the scruffy mechanic at the local airfield. By the time someone's pants zipper gets stuck, leading to a crazy accident and a concluding scene that is seemingly out of nowhere, you may throw up your hands and give up, or you can take the movie's title as a clue and appreciate the random bits of beauty and strangeness that Renais throws at you, like fertile ground blooming in all directions.

Woman on Fire Looks for Water (2009, Dir. Woo Ming-jin)

As you'd expect from a film about fisherman in the sleepy village of Kuala Selangor in Malaysia , this film has a slow (some would say funereal) pace. It's all about love or lack thereof as fisherman Ah-Fei (Ernest Chong) pursues the hard-to-get Lily (Foo Fei-ling), while his father Ah-Kau (Chung Kok-keong) gets involved once again with the love of his life, who has moved on to marry a richer man. The delicacy of these stories is juxtaposed with the realities of the characters' environment, where working at a shellfish factory may mean the difference between gaining the woman of your dream's hand or never having enough money to skate by. There are some nice comic touches (Ah-Kau's rival for his ex-love's attentions refuses to believe he's even worthy of being a rival, and Ah-Fei gets sandbagged into a possible arranged relationship with the daughter of a local fish factory magnate), and some oblique storytelling as well (the fate of Ah-Kau is implied but never completely spelled out). Woman on Fire isn't for everyone's taste, but it'll satisfy those in the mood for a languorous, delicate piece.

Yellow Sheep River (2009, Dir. Liu Soung)

A political documentary this ain't, but this steady, engrossing, nearly wordless look at the life of farmers in distant, impoverished Gansu province is an intimate portrait of the rural life in China. We follow various families as they go through their rituals -- harvesting, transporting their crops, visiting relatives, going to school, or just hanging out -- and these rituals generate their own hypnotic power. Some of the soundtrack gets a bit heavy-handed on the Western-style strings, but the folk songs (courtesy of blind musician Chen Kai-yo) are stirring, and the cinematography is attentive to the details of a grain harvest, or the unabashed joy on the faces of kids as they run down the hill to school. More than just a mood piece, it's a tribute to a way of life that just may continue to persevere through economic and political changes.

Bond Voyage: "Quantum of Solace"

2008-11-12T18:45:00.000-08:00

Quantum of Solace (2008, Dir. Marc Forster)

M: Bond, we need you back.
Bond: I never left.

A car chase. Fractured bursts of machine guns. Head-on collisions barely averted. A beautiful purring gray Aston Martin reduced to a battered hulk with a missing driver-side door. Another daring escape from death, another deadpan quip from our hero, roll opening credits...

Quantum of Solace begins as many James Bond films do, but in its frenzied four minutes of prologue summarized above, one gets the sense that things are a little different. For one, the puckish humor that has characterized just about every other Bond setpiece in the past is absent. Even the sight of that driver-side door getting ripped from its hinges is a throwaway -- Bond (Daniel Craig) is too busy avoiding perforation to raise a laconic eyebrow at the sight. The entire sequence is an assault of fast cuts, images condensed to near-blurs, the "you are there" aesthetic codified by Paul Greengrass in his Bourne films (no surprise that the second-unit director is Dan Bradley, who filled the same role in the latter two Bourne movies). And when it comes time for Bond's payoff quip, the moment is caught in an unexpected freeze-frame, any potential chuckles caught in our throats as we regard the frozen countenance of our hero, awaiting a twinkle in his eye that never arrives.

So it is with the rest of the movie. Make no mistake, Quantum of Solace has a sense of humor, but it's the kind best suited for the gallows -- witness the scene where Bond severs an assailant's femoral artery and watches with a twinge of impatience as the man expires. Or another bit where Bond incapacitates another baddie in a bathroom, and imprisons him inside by tearing off the door handle and tossing it away as thoughtlessly as throwing away a chewing gum wrapper.

Of course we've seen this type of behavior before -- it was the raison d'etre behind Casino Royale, which reinvigorated the Bond mythos by presenting its hero as a bull in a china shop, happier busting heads and bruising his knuckles than choosing the best dinner jacket to wear or ordering a particular kind of Vodka martini. The thrill of Royale lay in the frission between this cunning thug and the man we all know he becomes: suave, confident, world-weary, the feral intensity of an animal lingering behind his eyes. More than any Bond since Sean Connery, Craig embodies these traits, and his performance in Royale still stands as a bracing reinterpretation of the character; when he announces himself as "Bond, James Bond" at movie's end decked out in a three-piece suit and machine gun, past Bond and present Bond are merged into something altogether new.

Quantum of Solace doesn't backtrack from that progression, but it doesn't necessarily advance it either. For the first time, the story is a direct continuation from the previous film: having apprehended the slimy Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), the money man behind Bond's previous nemesis Le Chiffre, Bond and M (Judi Dench) look forward to some good old-fashioned torture to wring out the skinny on the organization White works for. In a twist that wouldn't be out of place in paranoid 70's conspiracy thrillers like 3 Days of the Condor, it is revealed that the organization (aka Quantum) has implanted moles inside governments all around the world, and when Bond, still smarting from the betrayal and suicide of his love Vesper from Royale, investigates on his own, indiscriminately killing off a few miscreants in the process, he finds himself distrusted by his own people, who in turn may be misled by Quantum's allies...

The promising setup is an interesting riff on Bond author Ian Fleming's vision of the world as a collection of cowboys and Indians, where even the cowboys must act like Indians from time to time. What to do when the cowboys actually are Indians? While Fleming's Bond always had staunch belief in Queen and country even in his most cynical moments, Craig's everyman Bond can only survive by operating outside the system, trusting only his own abilities, all too knowing about the misdeeds that governments do as he sneers at his CIA colleague Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) over the US "carving up" banana republics for its own benefit. It all snaps into focus about halfway through the picture when Bond infiltrates a secret meeting of Quantum members held under cover of a gaudy performance of Tosca alongside an Austrian lake. In a pungent commentary on nefariousness being the domain of the upper class, the bad guys are respectable yuppies in black ties, while Bond steals his own tux and revels in his own impropriety when he announces his presence to Quantum: "You people should really find a better place to meet!" Bull in a china shop, indeed.

The opera sequence, punctuated by a wordless pursuit and shootout underscored by Puccini, is the film's clear highlight and one of the best passages in any of the latter-day Bond films. There are other pleasures to be had in Quantum, as well: director Marc Forster does a better job than most Bond directors at mise en scene as 007 jets from Haiti to Austria, Italy and Bolivia, and there is rugged intelligence in his visual design -- this is certainly one of the handsomest Bond movies to date. One must be more attentive to the plot than usual as Bond follows a paper-thin trail of clues that leads to prime villain Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric), but in contrast to the ransom-the-world megalomania of past Bond villains, Greene's scheme is refreshingly low-key yet insidious: suffice to say, Bolivia's innocent civilians will suffer in the process.

Low-key might be the best word to describe this film, despite some of its more outrageous elements. Clearly uncomfortable at the prospect of falling into formula cliches that have marred so many of the other Bonds, Forster is intent on coating Quantum in a tasteful real-world patina. Instead of a superhuman henchman, we get the ineffectual Elvis (Anabole Taubmann), who is notable primarily for his toupee. Instead of a larger-than-life adversary, we get Dominic Greene, a shady businessman more at home brokering evil pacts in a hideous flower-print shirt than a sinister suit (Almaric is creepy but underused). Instead of imperious M doing what needs to be done come hell or high water, we get a flummoxed M browbeaten by the Minister of Defense, who may be under the direct sway of Quantum. Instead of briefings in mammoth conference rooms concerning the fate of the world, we get documentary-style montages of local Bolivians suffering from water shortages. Not since The Man with the Golden Gun has a Bond film had such a sour outlook on the world and its characters; at least in Golden Gun we had some slapstick (albeit bad) and the magisterial presence of Christopher Lee to break up the solemnity.

Casino Royale also played around with patented Bond formulas, but it was propelled by character nuances that the latest film lacks (character development in a Bond flick, fancy that!). Try as he might, Forster cannot camouflage the fact that the form and content of Quantum is business as usual. Structurally, Quantum even mirrors Casino in its development: a bang-up footchase to kick things off, the middle third of the film given over to plot intrigue before it all culminates in a blow-'em-up-finale inside a confined space (in Casino, a collapsing palazzo in Venice; in Quantum, a heavily guarded hotel in the Bolivian desert conveniently outfitted with very flammable gas tanks). The devil with these films has always been in the details, and as the action scenes in Quantum grow more protracted and unintelligible (a boat chase that lacks even a basic sense of geography, an airplane dogfight sabotaged by dodgy free-fall effects) one senses the plot curdling when it should be gaining momentum. Just when it's poised to go big, the film goes depressingly small, as if afraid to do anything, you know, flamboyant.

Lacking the novelty of Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace would have stood up to its predecessor if it deepened and fleshed out Bond and his world -- it's a pity Forster seems more preoccupied with hurtling on to the next major plot point than letting the characters breathe. Olga Kurylenko (as a half-Russian, half-Bolivian(!) agent with her own revenge agenda) and Gemma Atherton (as a smartypants British agent) float in and out of the action, and Bond's old allies Leiter and Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini, wry as always) show up for brief spells, but Craig is very much a man alone in this one, his Bond taciturn and distant, with no one to bounce off. There's little left to focus on except for the fact that Bond gets just as bloody, bruised and sweaty as he got in the previous film -- already we're reaching the point of diminishing returns on that one.

The film's frustrations become apparent by the final conflagration -- for all of Forster's insistence on grit and realism, he and the scriptwriters still can't some up with anything beyond standard-issue explosions and hand-to-hand combat. And yet miraculously, the snowy denouement of Quantum, wherein Bond settles his accounts with Vesper's ghost, is everything the rest of the film isn't: delicate, measured, succinct in its depiction of Bond as hard-bitten but ultimately loyal civil servant (as the dialogue atop this review attests). At odds with the rest of the film, it leaves a sliver of hope that this new iteration of Bond will indeed fulfill its promise and approach the grandeur of what the later Fleming books became; it would be a pity to see that potential squandered on future films as wan as this one.

In Beijing: Part 3

2008-06-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

Xu Wu (l) and Rong Rong (r) behind the Bell Tower, at the Drum & Bell Bar.

The Great Wall at Simatai

2008-05-28T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Great Wall, 3 hours away from Beijing:

In Beijing: Part 2

2008-05-27T17:29:00.000-07:00

Houhai Lake, just outside our front door:

Wangfujing Shopping District:
People's University of China:

Summer Palace:

In Beijing: Part 1

2008-05-26T17:51:00.001-07:00

The brand spanking-new International Terminal in the Beijing Capital Airport:

My place of residence in Beijing -- an old-style courtyard home, updated with modern amenities (like the Internet access that I'm using to write this email):

Urian Brown, traveling companion, dead tired:

Raiders of the Lost Youth: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"

2008-05-23T23:01:00.001-07:00

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008, Dir. Steven Spielberg)

It's not the years honey, it's the mileage.

So said Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) back in 1981, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and 27 years on, those words take on an additional poignance. Now it's about the years and the mileage, as the 65-year old Ford and weathered filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas release the fourth chapter of the Jones saga. As Spielberg has said, there was never a pressing need to make this film -- the third film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), concluded with Indy and his tetchy father, Henry Jones Sr. (Sean Connery) literally riding into the sunset, and in the protracted hiatus since then, rumors and ideas for a new adventure floated about much like the crazed spirits that were released from the Ark of the Convenant in Raiders. No, claimed Spielberg, this film wasn't necessary, but it would be a valentine to the fans, a salute to their devotion to their pulp hero over the years.

Raiders still towers over the genre as its own unique creation -- unashamedly inspired by the pulp serials of Lucas and Spielberg's youth, it upped the ante with A-class production values, a knowing sense of humor, and action sequences that were fleet-footed and bone-jarring. Raiders' lesser sequels Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and the Last Crusade tended to lean towards cartoonish bombast, but the die had been cast: these films set the template for action extravaganzas of the '80s and '90s, and their influence can be seen everywhere, from the increased action quota in the recent Bond films to the Da Vinci Code and the tongue-in-cheek "hunting for buried artifact" hijinks of Sahara and National Treasure.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a conscious throwback to those halcyon '80s days, right down to the old-style Paramount logo that opens up the picture. Like the Bond series, Indy subsists on familiar signposts -- the beat-up fedora hat, the dusty booby-trapped tomb, Indy's phobia of snakes, the scenes of old-style planes buzzing towards far-off destinations that are helpfully outlined on a map, a familiar face or two for extra comfort. This time around we're in the year 1957, nearly 20 years after the last adventure: Indy is put on a trail that leads to a rumored lost city of gold in the heart of the Amazon when the young, well-coiffured Mutt Williams (Shia LeBouf) shows up on his university doorstep with a tale of a lost, mad professor (John Hurt) and a cadre of Soviet spies on his tail. This comes after a prologue in which Jones is kidnapped by the same Russkies, escorted to Area 51, where all of this country's secret artifacts (including the Ark of the Covenant, nudge nudge, wink wink) are squirreled away, and asked to locate a magnetic coffin containing the skeleton of what appears to be an alien (close encounters of the third kind, indeed). Leading the Commies is special agent Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), Stalin's golden girl and a self-proclaimed psychic expert eager to claim the all-seeing knowledge of the aliens for Mother Russia. Working with Spalko (or against her, depending on whim) is Cockney mercenary Mac (Ray Winstone), whose money hunger knows no bounds.

Naturally, not all is as it seems, and plenty of twists and turns crop up before Indy and friends arrive at the fabled city. It's no big secret that Mutt is the lad Indy sired with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), the feisty heroine of Raiders, and most of the fun of the movie's first half comes from Indy and Mutt's guarded interactions. The older man is bemused at the younger man's incredulousness at his exploits; the younger man has a chip on his shoulder and a way with a switchblade, when he's not making like James Dean on the back of his motorbike and saving Indy during a fun motorbike chase across Yale University's grounds. Soon we're off to the Nazca lines in Peru, and then to the heart of South America's jungles, where the principals take turns betraying each other and stealing the titular crystal skull, which holds the key to the lost city.

For a while Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is genial entertainment, preferring to lay back and lay on the exposition while pep is added with a few nifty action sequences. Certainly it approximates the look and feel of your standard lavish Indy adventure, as cinematographer Janusz Kaminski deliberately echoes the great Douglas Slocombe's rich palette from the '80s films. The movie's major setpiece, a motorcade chase in the jungle in which the antagonists find themselves playing musical jeeps, has a sprightly momentum when it's not cutting away to the sight of Mutt making like Tarzan with a multitude of CGI monkeys.

Yes, CGI -- before too long it becomes apparent that Kingdom is crammed wall-to-wall with it, from imagined exotic locales, computer-generated groundhogs and killer ants, and a finale featuring a collapsing city that might as well be a bunch of floating pixels. The earlier Indy adventures didn't shy away from effects, or even dodgy ones, but the settings and practical stunts maintained an earthbound quality to them -- here, your eyes are apt to glaze over when you see two combatants clash swords as they stand on separate jeeps zooming at 60 miles per hour in a green-screened jungle. The concept is good in theory, but the artificiality of the effects blands out the edge.

While Spielberg's reflexes as an action filmmaker are still very much present, these movies require more than muscle memory -- they depend on zip, economy, and a devil-may-care brio. Tons of things are explained in Kingdom, plenty of confrontations occur, and John Williams throws in some familiar musical motifs in an effort to get the blood flowing, and yet the movie lacks urgency, and a reason to care. Scene after scene wafts by, and historical explanations and mumbo-jumbo over clues and locations pile up. A Spielberg in his salad days would no doubt push pedal to the metal in order to get to the good stuff, and he might have had the room to do so if it wasn't for Lucas (who came up with the basic story with Jeff Nathanson). It's clear Lucas hasn't shaken off the over-talkiness from his Star Wars prequels, and the result is a protracted, distracted plot. Character interactions suffer the most with this approach: Marion and Indy trade a few zingers, yet their rekindled love receives a grand total of about 30 seconds on screen, while Indy and Mutt's easy chemistry tends to get lost amid the dusty caverns, trap doors and collapsing structures that seem to occupy every inch of the frame during the story's latter half. Her face jutting out from beneath a black bob cut and dressed in fatigues that would seem more suited for a plane mechanic, Blanchett is cartoonish yet alluring as Spalko; it's a shame her character isn't allowed to develop into a true threat. Old pros Hurt and Winstone are basically relegated to the scenery. Ford slips into the role of Indy like a weatherbeaten pair of slippers, and for a 65-year old he shows admirable energy and physical grace. Still, there is a touch of dullness in his performance, as if he (like Spielberg and Lucas) is shaking off the cobwebs even as he tries to pull the old moves.

For all its subplots and hinted-at themes (how to age gracefully, the pursuit of knowledge for power), Kingdom lacks the unity of the previous Jones adventures, hoary as they sometimes were. In Raiders, the overriding idea was that some things are not meant to be known, even as it celebrated the derring-do that goes into the quest. The darker Temple of Doom was a parable about Bogart-like nobility in the face of despicable subjugation, while the more family-oriented Last Crusade suggested that family bonds are way more important than archeological glory or even immortality. Spielberg's values have always been conservative; in the end, new-fangled gadgetry and obsessive quests for the ultimate in power or knowledge take a back seat to home, hearth, and old-fashioned American home life, whether that home is a staid university classroom or the wedding inside a blindingly white church that occurs at the end of Kingdom. But apart from that sweet conclusion (and a final sly shot of Mutt, or should we say Henry Jones III, holding Indy's fabled fedora in his hands, a faraway look in his eyes), you'll find little that's actually transporting. If Raiders was a race car ride through the desert, sand and wind flying in your face, then Kingdom is a meandering bus tour complete with jokey tour guide: you may look fondly upon the land as it passes by, note spots which seem mighty familiar, and remember when it was all fresh and new, when we all had a little less mileage on us.

Dodge and Parry: "Redbelt"

2008-05-18T21:33:00.000-07:00

Redbelt (2008, Dir. David Mamet)

Let's go to court ... let's go to Brazil ... Insist on the move, insist on the move ... Improve the position, improve the position ... Breathe. Breathe. Look for a way out. There's always a way out.

Couched in the vocabulary of mixed martial arts, the rhythms of the above quotation are rat-tat-tat, as you would expect in any action film concerning humans pummeling other humans, and yet in their insistence, their obsessive repetition, they could only have come from one man: David Mamet, playwright, film director, and black-belt jiu-jitsu artist. It seems almost shocking that Mamet has never tackled a film in the martial arts arena before -- the idea of a ritualized confrontation between two men in a ring is a perfect counterpoint to Mamet's verbal jousts, which are just as bruising as any physical combat.

But there's more to Mamet's work than conversational pugilism -- he habitually undercuts his foul, fast-talking characters by plopping them in a funhouse of cons, feints, and trickery. In House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Spartan, and others, the verbal volleyball serves as the dense surface beneath which the machinations of plot, fate, and a cruel world threaten to overwhelm his heroes.

That fate awaits Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the easygoing yet focused jiu-jitsu instructor who's not terribly keen on making money or entering official competitions; as he puts it, he doesn't train people to win, he trains them to "prevail." Married to nagging Sondra (Alice Braga), who dreams of making it in the fashion industry, Mike is content to skate by -- until a chance encounter with strung-out lawyer Laura (Emily Mortimer) leads to a near-impossible accident in which the gun of one of Mike's students, police officer Joe (Max Martini) is discharged, smashing the glass window of Mike's establishment. In seemingly unrelated plot threads, Mike is sought after by shady fight promoter Marty Brown (Ricky Jay) as the undercard fighter in a match that could net him 50 grand, and also makes the acquaintance of just-past-his-prime actor Chet Frank (played by just-past-his-prime Tim Allen) when he defends him from some drunken hoods, leading to a job offer as a fight choreography consultant on Chet's latest film, as well as an offer of financial assistance from his manager Jerry (Joe Mantegna).

It doesn't take a red belt or even a black belt to know something is rotten in the state of LA, and that the movie folks and the fight promoter folks are hungering for a pound of flesh. Redbelt's symbolism and theme are apparent from the very first image, in which two white marbles and one black marble are dropped into a hat -- the fighter who chooses the black marble will be handicapped in the match (i.e., one arm tied behind his back). One is reminded of a shell game on the city streets, where the odds are stacked in the dealer's favor every time. The questions Mike faces are who are the con men, and which of the balls is black?

Mamet sprinkles plenty of red herrings and suspicious hints in the narrative -- there's the cocky magician (Randy Couture), a Brazilian fight promoter (Rodrigo Santoro) who happens to be Sondra's brother, the faxing of a document of fighting rules that may or may not constitute property theft, a gold watch that might be stolen goods, and walk-on parts by Mamet standbys (David Paymer, Rebecca Pidgeon, Jay, Mantegna) as affable managers, cultured wives, sympathetic loan sharks. Yep, it's as fishy as a salmon processing plant, and it's saying something that Laura the lawyer turns out to be the most honest of the bunch.

Mamet is clearly plugged into the ideal of martial arts in its purest form: as a guide for living, a philosophical striving for nobility. For Mike, taking part in competition is defeat, and honoring the sanctity of the martial arts code is worth disgracing oneself (or in the case of one character, dying) for. Occupying nearly every frame of the movie, Ejiofor is the eye in the center of the storm, beleaguered, hustled, and eventually pounded, and yet never lacking in dignity. Mamet's skills as a director have improved over the years; even though his environments and staging still have the whiff of the theater about them, he knows how to throw in nifty visual touches, as when the lights of a drug store wink off in the span of time it takes a wiper to move across a windshield, or when a vicious knife fight is presented from two perspectives -- fast-cutting confusion when it happens, and fluid, almost balletic precision when it is viewed on a security camera tape in the aftermath.

Does it all hold together? Not quite. Once all the cards are played and the veil is parted, there are enough holes in the plot to riddle a slab of cheese, and for all the machinations, Mamet's nervy way with language doesn't come through very often. A few of the exchanges have the old Glengarry Glen Ross spice to them ("The fuck do I care?" is a common refrain), but Mamet is too busy manuevering his pawns into place to truly savor the dialogue. Normally one can enjoy the grace notes Mamet throws into his characters; here they're all ciphers, and if no one seems trustworthy (even if they are), it's because it's difficult to trust blanks. Needless to say, Mike is forced into the ring, though not in the way you might expect, and the finale pits him against a world-class Brazilian fighter in an offstage brawl that loses him his 50 G's but preserves his honor. After all, it's not about winning, but doing the right thing, and the sentiment is a welcome antidote to the typical Hollywood ending in which the hero gets it all -- too bad the ending is filmed like a low-rent Rocky, with everyone in the crowd, friend and foe and competitor alike, rising up as one to pay tribute to the honorable fighter, and you can be sure that a red belt will be involved. When the finishing move in the climax is cribbed straight from a Jackie Chan comedy, you have to roll your eyes a bit at the shlockiness of it all, which runs counter to Mamet's otherwise bracing look at the games people play. "There is no situation that you can't turn to your advantage," Mike says early on, and by the end of Redbelt, that moral unfortunately sounds less than a sage piece of hard-earned wisdom than it does something that your typical action hero lunkhead would say.

Light Metal: "Iron Man"

2008-05-10T22:02:00.000-07:00

Iron Man (2008, Dir. Jon Favreau)

Jim Rhodes: That's the coolest thing I've ever seen.
Tony Stark: Not bad, huh?

Among the ever-growing pantheon of movie superheroes based on Marvel comics, Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) is unique -- rich as Bruce Wayne but ten times the wiseass, brilliant as Reed Richards but way hipper, as human as Peter Parker but with more grown-up concerns -- a drinking problem and assorted pieces of shrapnel lying inches away from his heart, for example. It's only fitting then that the first in what will surely be many films featuring the character is the first superhero film for grown-ups that we've seen in a while.

Oh sure, we've seen plenty of "mature" superhero movies -- Batman Begins and The Punisher, just to name two. But subtract the grim trappings of those films and you're essentially left with adolescent wish fantasies. In Batman's sex-less universe, the prospect of a mature relationship with a woman would seem just as outlandish as, well, dressing up as a bat to fight crime. Likewise, the Punisher is too busy cracking skulls to even contemplate a romantic entanglement (and if Thomas Jane couldn't get excited at the prospect of Rebecca Romjin in the film version, then there's simply no hope).

There's plenty of fun kid stuff happening in Jon Favreau's Iron Man, but at the heart of it all (no pun intended) is Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), and just as the character of Tony Stark took '40s-era Howard Hughes as its initial inspiration, so too does the film, as it harkens back to the breezy fun of '40s Hollywood action potboilers. Following the spirit of the Iron Man comic (if not the time period, as the original was set during Vietnam), the story traces Stark's spiritual awakening. Weapons manufacturer mogul, genius inventor, Malibu resident, and all-around playboy, Stark thinks nothing of bedding beauties from Vanity Fair magazine and turning his private jet into a strip club, complete with willing stewardesses, but when he's abducted by a terrorist cabal known as the "Ten Rings" during a trip to Afghanistan, and ordered to construct a version of his company's latest and deadliest missile, he comes to see the folly of building weapons that everyone, including the bad guys, can get their hands on. Wounded and kept alive by a chest-plate magnet that prevents shrapnel from entering his heart, he befriends the wry, moral Yinsen (Shaun Toub, making the most of his small role), and decides to outsmart his captors by building the prototype of what will eventually become the new armored suit he will use to fight terrorists (industrial as well as ideological).

An American millionaire saving the lives of innocents in Afghanistan utilizing state-of-the-art gadgetry? Put that way, it sounds dicey, but fortunately Favreau is more interested in Tony Stark the man than Tony Stark the idealist. Riffing and joking like there's no tomorrow, Downey makes the movie -- he's a wiseass, but a wiseass with a soul. When Stark sets about perfecting his suit with the help of his computer Jarvis (voiced by Paul Bettany) and the silent little helper 'bots in his lab, the film reaches a state of daffy grace, as Stark goes through a painful trial-and-error process with each successive experiment. A near-seamless mix of practical effects and CGI, the suit is an impressive creation, and although you always face a problem when you have a superhero whose features are hidden when he's suited up, Downey's presence more than compensates. In past roles, he perfected his ability to be both irreverent and sincere, and both attributes serve him well here.

Favreau, who cut his teeth on whip-smart confections like Swingers, isn't an ace visual stylist or pop mythologist, but his strength -- letting his actors have fun -- plays right into Downey's (and the film's) strengths. The characters get plenty of opportunities to engage in old-school repartee, with one-liners that are sexy as well as funny. All the best lines belong to Downey ("Give me a Scotch, I'm starving"), and he strikes sparks with Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts, Stark's Girl Friday. Some might see Paltrow's character as a major step backward following on the heels of empowered heroines and female superheroes in recent Marvel films (speaking of heels, she sports some doozies in this flick), but at least she isn't reduced to damsel-in-distress mode at the end of the film, and her snappy comebacks to Downey suggest that the two will eventually be equals in love, if not social stature.

Better still is Jeff Bridges as Obidiah Stane, Stark's co-partner at the company. While it becomes apparent pretty quickly where Stane's allegiances lie (warning: a businessman with a bald head and a long beard in a suit is not to be trusted), Bridges underplays the part nicely, his trademark drawl and ice-blue eyes more sinister than any histrionics. The only weak link in the cast turns out to be Terrence Howard as Jim Rhodes, Stark's Pentagon liason and future partner-in-heroism -- affable and loose-limbed, Howard is too laid-back to convince as a top-ranking Air Force colonel.

For a superhero movie, Iron Man is thankfully scant on eardrum-busting action sequences. The first two major setpieces, both set in Afghanistan, are zippy, rousing, and to-the-point. Favreau maintains the human element even when the effects get hot and heavy -- a breathless chase involving two U.S. Air Force jets and Iron Man is nicely punctuated when Iron Man gets a call on his cell phone from a suspicious Rhodes ("What the hell is that noise?" "I'm driving with the top down"). Things only bog down at the big finish, in which Iron Man takes on an enemy in a gargantuan powered-up suit; superhero movies these days seem to feel the need to tack on a climax that involves mass destruction, noisy explosions, and soaring orchestral surges on the soundtrack, and Iron Man sadly cannot escape this particular paradigm. Fortunately the denouement is a delight, as Stark, giddy with the realization that the mysterious "Iron Man" has become a celebrity, wrestles with the idea of revealing his identity at a press conference ("I'm not the hero type ... clearly ..."). Iron Man won't change your life and it doesn't try to; instead, it delivers on the wit and sophistication, two elements you don't find in many action extravganzas. Superheroes may appear and disappear from the scene, but men like Tony Stark, with their devil-may-care charm and human foibles, are sorely needed.

SFIFF '08: "Not By Chance"

2008-05-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

Gridlocked: Not By Chance (2007, Dir. Philippe Barcinski)

"We are all particles. We move. That's what we do. We attract and repel."

-- Enio, Not By Chance

What does it say about world cinema when the latest export from Brazil (São Paulo, to be exact) could easily be mistaken for a Wong Kar-Wai movie? Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing. When a film like Mongol borrows its aesthetic and plotting from Gladiator, and a Thai film like The Unseeable (which I caught at the recent Asian-American film festival) is more M. Night Shyamalan than Bangkok Dangerous (getting remade as a Nic Cage potboiler, by the way), it's clear that filmmaking's cultural and ethnic boundaries are breaking down, or going very gray.

As a believer in Mikhail Bakhtin's theories on multivocality, though, I'm all for these collisions of time and place and influence. If other arts have become a goulash of influences and stolen motifs, why not do the DJ mash and revel in the odd combinations that result when you throw everything in?

Which is not to say that Not By Chance, the first feature-length film by shorts director Philippe Barcinski, is a confused mess. In its precise intersection of individuals and tragic events, it's Crash minus the hysterics. In its laid-back romanticism, it's an antidote to recent Brazilian films like City of God which launched Mean Streets-style filmmaking into the stratosphere with its presentation of a lawless, bombed-out São Paulo. Not By Chance is São Paulo rehabilitated as urban wonderland, sometimes dangerous, oftentimes lonely, but with a hint of reconciliaton at the end of the road.

Yes, road: streets and stoplights and traffic jams are the province of Enio (Leonardo Medeiros), a supremely competent but otherwise socially withdrawn traffic controller who holds the fate of the city's daily traffic in his hands. From his lonely darkened outpost, he presides over every intersection in the city via spycams and computer readouts of avenues and alleys, playing God to motorists everywhere. Waxing poetically about the fluid dynamics of traffic, this sad-sack soul is a dead ringer for the intelligent, lost bachelors who populate Wong Kar Wai movies –- a man lacking connections to everything, including himself. What he needs is a random element in his personal fluid formula, and that element arrives in the form of his chipper daughter Bia (Rita Batata). When Enio's ex-wife is killed in a traffic accident, Bia shows up on his doorstep, and he is energized by her spontaneity even as he is frightened by it.

The second plot thread revolves around twentysomething Pedro (Rodrigo Santoro), son of a pool table manufacturer, young and in love and content with his modest lot, ready to inherit his father's business even as he dreams of competing in pool tournaments. He whiles away the time by calculating every possible shot he can take on a pool table, dissecting a complete game into a series of geometric equations. When the accident that claims the life of Enio's ex-wife also leaves Pedro bereft, he seeks solace in a most unusual place -– beautiful, upscale commodity trader Lucia (Leticia Sabatella), an expert at coffee beans who could use a break from her own overcaffeinated lifestyle.

Not By Chance is a slick affair -– the opening helicopter shots of the city, with the film's titles floating by on the sides of skyscrapers, are a direct lift from David Fincher's Panic Room, and suggests that we might be in for a heavy-handed thriller or drama. We're spared from such a fate, although Barcinski sometimes gets a little cute. At one point, a character's fate is decided when she decides to run out of the house instead of tarry for two seconds, and like a photographic afterimage, we see what would have happened if she lingered for those extra two seconds -- it's an episode of Hesitate, Lola, Hesitate. All the usual elements of urban fantasia are in place: snapshots of lovers that gain totemic significance, a burnished afternoon spent at the local park, the idea that a career-minded businesswoman would fall for a young ne-er-do-well in the span of a single day. But above all, Barcinski is a graceful director, his short-film training making him adept at indicating a cliché and moving on before we're overcome by the hoariness of it. Like Wong Kar-Wai, he is a breezy humanist: none of these characters are necessarily complex, and yet he has sympathy for them as they tend to life on their own obsessive terms. While Wong's plots are overwhelmed by saturated cinematography and his characters' oblique ruminations, Barcinski is more of a straight shooter. He shoots in simple, unadorned yet attractive style; best are the passages in which characters are allowed to walk in and out of focus, their intimate moments crystallized seconds at a time.

The subplot involving Enio and Bia fares better, with Medeiros and Batata enjoying a bemused, touching chemistry, although if you can't see its conclusion from a hundred miles off (hint: traffic controller), you need to bone up on your clichés. More interesting is how the two story threads converge at the end, but not in the way you might think. Not By Chance concludes with a thermos of coffee on a doorstep, and two people biking down an inner-city freeway –- in other words, transport this film to Hong Kong, New York, or virtually any other metropolis in the world, and you would have the same exact impact (although to be fair, maybe it wouldn't be as sensual or hip without the Brazilian pop and electronica soundtrack). If you see the universality of Not By Chance as a sign that the world is becoming one great mass of McDonald's-like conformity, I couldn't necessarily argue with you; but I hold out hope that even a movie that refers to other movies from other places can find its own identity, and its own little slice of heaven.

SFIFF '08: "Mongol"

2008-05-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

Genghis Begins, or the Wrath of Khan: Mongol (2007, Dir. Sergei Bodrov)

We've come a long way, baby. Or have we? In 1956 Howard Hughes took a stab at the Genghis Khan myth when he produced The Great Conquerer, which is generally acknowledged as the worst film John Wayne ever starred in. Filmed in Utah (where, as urban legend has it, radioactive soil caused the eventual deaths of Wayne and dozens of other crewmembers to cancer), burdened with the, ahem, unusual sight of John Wayne playing the great Mongol in a Fu Manchu mustache, The Great Conquerer belongs squarely in the "so bad it's hilarious" category of shlock moviemaking, and we haven't even mentioned Susan Hayward as a spirited Mongol highlander.

Flash forward half a century later, and in our search for the latest exotic, far-flung, mystical land to canonize, the wheel has spun around to land on Mongolia once again. So instead of a big-budget Hollywood production starring a Caucasian cowboy as the Khanmeister, we get a joint Russian-Khazakstan-Mongolia production helmed by a German, with a Japanese man (Asano Tadanobu) as the Khanmeister. It's progress of a sort, I guess.

The film starts promisingly: it is the 12th century, in the border country of Tangut, and a lone man sits in a dank prison cell. The harsh strains of Mongolian throat music blend with the requisite symphonic score on the soundtrack as we're taken back to the steppes of Mongolia 20 years before, when the man is a 9-year old named Temudgin (Odnyam Odsuren), being groomed by his father Eusegi (Ba Sen), the local khan, for an arranged marriage to a chieftain's daughter.The plan goes awry when Temudgin's heart is stolen by the willful, free-spirited Borte (Bayartsetseg Erdenebat), and a marriage pact is made. When Eusegi is poisoned by a rival clan, his former tribesmen take advantage of the situation, imprisoning Temudgin and awaiting the day he becomes a man so they can kill him, as custom dictates. With that setup, we're off and running, ready for a tale of "revenge is best served hot."

Mongol is essentially a superhero origin story, as we witness Temudgin's transformation into the cunning strategist, romantic figure, national leader, and ferocious warrior we all know and love. Packed with incident and narrative, the plot rockets from point A to point Z at breakneck speed; you would probably get whiplash if you turned your head away from the screen for a moment. And therein lies the problem. Batman Begins came to mind more than a few times as I was watching: both films chronicle the painful education of a hero, and both suffer from similar pacing issues. Each scene plays out briskly, and the editing rhythms get same-y after a while. When Temudgin is reunited with Borte (Khulan Chuluun) as an adult, we're meant to swoon at the passion of it all, but when we cut away to marauding horsemen as soon as the couple share a single kiss, how can we work up any heat?

There's plenty of combat, of course, and the battle scenes, replete with CGI weather effects and arterial blood sprays, should satisfy most slaughterhounds. Better still is Sun Honglei as Jamukha, Temudgin's blood brother and eventual greatest rival for control of the burgeoning Mongolian empire. Of all the actors, Sun seems to be the only one who is aware that this is all a bunch of hooey; armed with a proto-punk buzzcut that is sharper than any blade wielded in the film, he chews the scenery to pieces, his wry little twists of the head and musical mutterings serving as punchlines. But best of all is an almost anecdotal passage in which a Chinese monk attempts to help the imprisoned Temudgin by transporting a bone necklace charm to Borte. As the monk wordlessly crosses mountains and deserts on foot, dogged in his determination even as his body slowly fails, one finally catches the whiff of genuine mythmaking.

Unfortunately, in a film that is all about myth creation, that's as much as you're going to get. In its rush to present the life and times of the Khan, critical events are glossed over or deleted completely. One moment Temudgin is a nomad on the run from his treacherous former tribesmen; the next he has a clan of his own. At one point he is a fugitive from the Tangut Kingdom with nothing to his name; the next he has assembled an army for a St. Crispin's Day moment vs. Jamukha's numerically superior forces. Bounced from event to event like a ping-pong ball, this Genghis is a cipher. Tadanobu Asano is a fine, quirky actor who's best in roles that take advantage of his natural reticence; as Temudgin, he manages to be soulful and noble, but the script allows him to be little else. Khulan Chuluun fares slightly better as Borte – if it's a good thing to be "better" when you're playing the straitjacketed role of dutiful, ever-faithful wife.

Mongol does exactly what it intends to do; it serves as the launching pad for a sequel or two (the end of the film practically begs for the subtitle "To be continued…"), and does it with what passes for epic style these days – a few monumental vistas, a few faces covered with grit, a few shouts of anger and slashes of sword, appropriate swells of music on the soundtrack, and a storyline that would snuggle comfortably inside a comic (Conan the Barbarian, anyone?). But whatever your reaction to the film, you can still marvel at the magnificent scenery and dream your own dream of a epic that would be more intimate and substantial than what we see on screen. We've come a long way, baby.

SFIFF '08: "Lady Jane"

2008-04-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

A Dish Served Cold: Lady Jane (2007, Dir. Robert Guédiguian)

"He who seeks revenge is like the fly that bangs on the window without seeing that the door is open."
-- Armenian proverb

The above serves as the epitaph to Lady Jane, and if that doesn't spell it out enough for you, the film closes on the faces of four people, all of them consumed by revenge or disillusioned by it. One man gazes upon his sleeping daughter, a gun in hand and tears rolling down his face; another sits in a car with a bag of jewelry and a fatal bullet wound to the gut; another walks down a midnight street towards a dead-end life of tawdry strip clubs and slot machines; and a woman stands in the center of a rock concert, stock still and traumatized as young teens rave around her.

Yes, it's film noir, all right, and despite the heavy-handedness of its approach Lady Jane makes for a decent addition to the genre. It all begins in straightforward fashion when seemingly mild-mannered, middle-aged Muriel Ariane Ascaride), the owner of a fashion shop in Marseilles, receives a message from her son Martin's cell phone: the image of Martin held at gunpoint by an unseen kidnapper. Muriel enlists the help of her grizzled buddies François (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and René (Gérard Meylan) to help pay the 200,000-euro ransom, but soon hints are dropped that not all is what it seems. For one thing, Muriel's left forearm sports a very noticeable "Lady Jane" tattoo, replete with an image of marijuana. Then there's the fact that Muriel hasn't been in touch with François and René for 15 years. And when the kidnapper taunts Muriel by texting her, "Why don't you rob a jewel store?" the trio's past misdeeds cast a shadow over their present predicament.

The kidnap plot is resolved soon enough, and its tragic outcome opens up further wounds. René, plump with dissolution and sleeping with a limber girl half his age, is a hard-boiled cynic wanting nothing to do with his criminal past even as he beats up local grifters who misuse his slot machines. François, still besotted with Muriel even though he has a respectable wife and two girls, isn't above ripping off local drug runners or deep-sixing a few hoods to help Muriel out of her jam. When Muriel and François visit an old "godfather" in the neighborhood and we see a poster of Angels with Dirty Faces on the wall, we know the inevitable outcome will be as happy as a bullet to the gut.

This is my first exposure to the director Robert Guédiguian, who is probably best known for his films The Last Mitterrand and Beneath the Rooftops of Paris. All three principal actors have appeared in most of his films, and Guédiguian's "stock company" serves him well here. Meylan is particularly good as the world-weary hustler -- one pictures a downtrodden Gérard Depardieu. Filming in matter-of-fact style, Guédiguian invests Marseilles with seedy elegance, and the movie's two central murder scenes are jarring in their real-time suddeness.

The film tries to give a humanist spin to the shenanigans as it concludes with the trio tracking down Martin's kidnapper. Even though Muriel turns out to be no Lady Jane, or even a lady, the climax opts for fatalism over catharsis. It all fits together neatly, perhaps a bit too neatly. Lady Jane wants to recapture the spirit of classic French noir films like Bob le Flambeur and Elevator to the Gallows, in which plot is driven (and even usurped) by character motivation, but when the curtains part and all is revealed, precious little sticks with you besides the magnificent ruin of Meylan's face. Favoring plot twists over fully fleshed-out characters, Lady Jane is a fun, nasty little movie with a feel-bad finish; just don't approach it as something as soul-searching as its epitaph suggests it is.

SFIAAFF '08: "Option 3"

2008-04-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

Better to Travel: Option 3 (Dir. Richard Wong, 2008)

"So have you thought about what I said?"
-- Jessica, Option 3

I seem to be one of the not-so-proud few who witnessed the world premiere of Richard Wong's latest film Option 3 without having seen his first indie feature, Colma: The Musical, which I am told is charming and inventive (it's already in the Netflix queue). Wong is clearly on the rise, with Colma's success and a recent collaboration with Wayne Wang on Princess of Nebraska, and from Option 3 it's easy to see why. He assured the audience before the film started that this latest project is nothing like the earlier one, although it does have a musical number in the middle, and that it is as far from a commercial, marketable project as one can get. Nevertheless it's a bracing work, and a good opportunity to see what San Francisco indie filmmaking is like circa 2008.

The film starts with the above quotation: we are at a restaurant, and Jessica (Theresa Navarro) has just popped a question in the face of Ken (Preston Connor), and after an uneasy silence, he excuses himself to go the bathroom. When he returns, Jessica has disappeared but her cell phone remains; a mysterious caller known as "Bison" orders him on a Quixotic quest for a McGuffin-like package if he wants to ever see her again.

From there the chase is on, through the nocturnal streets of San Francisco, and we hop across genres and moods: Wong clearly loves the kinetic energy of Run Lola Run and the nightmare-logic disorientation of David Lynch, as Ken dashes from location to location, seeking red and green keys that unlock doors and boxes. Rigorous in its geographic consistency, we follow him from the Mission through downtown SF, down the Broadway Tunnel, through the Pacific St. Playground and back to SOMA before a final chase through Golden Gate Park that climaxes on Ocean Beach. Highlights include a disorienting scene on a merry-go-round (and few things are as creepy as a merry-go-round at night), and a long, uninterrupted Scorcese-style take as Ken maneuvers himself around a ballroom where Chinese oldsters practice their ballroom dancing, leading to a shocking bit involving a stairway and a closed door. Seeping through it all is the sense that Ken has failed Jessica, that he has failed in the relationship somehow, as shards of memory (and a few choice Emily Dickinson quotes – "some say the word is dead") interrupt the narrative. Speaking of interruptions, the most memorable moment occurs when Ken stumbles upon a random acoustic guitar and launches into an (imagined) musical number with the homeless folks at the Transbay Terminal, a mournful plaint for his lost love.

Even as it cribs from a multitude of sources, it's clear that as a visual stylist (he is also the director of photography), Wong has talent to burn. Unerring in his close-ups and movements, his mix of light and shadow in stairways and alleyways, his ability to wring the most interesting image out of his budget-conscious cameras and setups, he transforms San Francisco into an urban wonderland, velvet-dark and dangerous (and as a long-time SF resident, I can say how difficult that can sometimes be – I don't think I've seen The City look this sinister since Fincher's The Game). For most of Option 3 we're carried along on this quest, as unspecific as it may be (nothing in the plot or character relationships is necessarily explained), purely because of the rush of images.

Wong does overplay his hand at the climax, when Ken faces down Bison's kung-fu-savvy right-hand man in a manic bicycle chase and fist fight that seems better suited for a more straightforward satire – coming on the heels of the feelings of loss and isolation that permeate the rest of the film, it does feel a bit "boys' own adventure," like something an 8-year old might come up with to conclude a film. Likewise, the finale on Ocean Beach is meant to be tragic but doesn't necessarily communicate much besides the idea of "taking it like a man" when you've screwed up a relationship. Director Wong and co-screenwriter H.P. Mendoza freely admitted after the screening that much of the story was made up as they went along, and that it was a response to Wong's own feelings of loss and responsibility after the break-up of a recent relationship. As such, perhaps Option 3 can be forgiven for its workbook-like quality, and its somewhat clunky approach to its main themes. As a process without a fully satisfying conclusion, Option 3 is fascinating; if Wong can get hold of a screenplay that allows him to utilize his cinematic talents unfettered, watch out.

SFIAAFF '08: "Memory Arcade" (Shorts)

2008-04-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure who said or wrote it, but someone once said that if novels are love affairs, then short stories are kisses in the rain. I think of that whenever I see a shorts program at a festival. And like a kiss, shorts can be tantalizing, uninspiring, awkward, but even if you can't stand them, they're over and done with in a matter of moments.

Kiss-sized takes on "Memory Arcade," which the SFIAAFF program describes as "a poetic collection of shorts, a memory arcade of recollections, recordings and imagined realities bridges the distance between longing, dreams and reconciliations":

"Recollections" (Dir. David Oh, 12 min.)

Shot on digital video, within the confines of a single apartment (Director Oh mentioned it's set in southern Cali). A retired Korean man's health slowly fades, as the mundane facts of his existence (a spider crawling across the wall, infrequent visits by doctors and strangers looking to buy his furniture) break up the monotony. Juxtaposed with these slices of life are reminiscences of his younger days in Korea, delivered straight to the camera, along with glimpses of old photos and happier times. The remembrances (unscripted) have more power than the episodic moments, but the film is simply but effectively shot.

"Silence" (Allen Ho, 5 min.)

A young man recounts the language barriers between himself and his Mandarin-speaking, estranged parents -- something most Asian-Americans can relate to. Amusing and mournful, The story ends in suspension, the son confronting the father after a long absence. Cinematically it's gorgeous, with color-saturated, intimate camerawork (influenced by Wong Kar-Wai, the director said).

Pierre-Pierrot (Dir Nith Lacroix, 27 min.)

Probably the most involving entry in this shorts program, and the only true documentary. The film is split in half: in the first passage we (through the eyes of a first-person video camera) find ourselves in a Laotian town, visiting with the rotund, genial Pierrot. As we meander around, bearing witness to customs and daily rituals (a funeral ceremony, folk festival and church events, a walk down the street to greet the familiar faces of merchants, a folk song that speaks to the region's long-standing isolation and sad past) it becomes clear that this video is a "video postcard" to be sent to Pierre, who emigrated to France years ago and has not been back since. The second half of the film switches to France, where Pierre (who turns out to be Pierrot's twin brother --it's a delightfully startling reveal) lives the life of an expatriate, presiding in bemused fashion over a community of Laos emigrees who attempt to maintain the old traditions and customs against the backdrop of this strange Western world. With subject matter like this, one only needs to point the camera and shoot, and Lacroix does so. It's an elegy to a dying way of life, and a potent demonstration as to how the technical magic of film can cut through geographic and political boundaries.

The Nothing Pill (Dir. Yu Gu, 6 min.)

A student film project from USC, and it plays like one -- for good and ill. THX-1138 meets Buckaroo Banzai in a crazed future dystopia set in 2110, where a scientist must escape "individual termination" by coming up with a new drug that will cure isolation and loneliness. Reminders of the past and her parents come through as a hallucination in which Mom and Dad dress in China Red Guard costumes and dance to phonographs, all within a Kirk-era Star Trek milieu of red and blue lighting. Stuffed with zig-zag camera moves and elaborate sets, it certainly assaults the senses; harder to say if there's a heart beating underneath, though.

Cross Fader (Dir. Chihiro Wimbush, 5 min.)

Shot in stark black and white, this is a mood piece, as a woman finds her way into a radio station and listens to a tape left to her by her ex-boyfriend DJ -- a recollection of a day spent driving to the beach, accompanied by fractured images of that trip. Originally intended to be a mystery-thriller by the director, the piece has morphed into a collage of visuals and sound that resolves into the pure white noise of surf pounding on sand. Slight but atmospheric, with some nice visuals of night-time Portland (where the director is based).

Dan Carter (Dir. Alison Kobayashi, 15 min.)

At first inexplicable, then beguiling and an all-out hoot. A performance piece that has the rigor of Kabuki theater, the concept is simple: utilizing a soundtrack taken from a tape full of answering machine messages to the title character, Kobayashi proceeds to act (or mime) the parts of all the characters leaving messages. We have laconic girlfriends, a raging ex-wife, winsome sons and daughters getting dropped off for visitation, representatives of the local church seeking donations, lawyers attempting to clean up messes, harried employees at the welfare office. Filmed in trailer-trash hell interiors and exteriors (Kobayashi hails from Hamilton, Canada), it's a chintzy fuzz carpet of a skit, and an impressive piece of acting.

24 Frames Per Day (Dir. Sonali Gulati, 7 min.)

Visually this film is confined to a single shot: the front hallway of an apartment, captured over the course of many days and nights with time-lapse photography, figures and sunlight and shadows and night flitting by like flies. As we watch this kaleidoscope pass before us, we hear a conversation between an immigrant (the director) and her cab driver as he takes her home from the airport. Beneath it all seems to be a barbed statement of racial and national identities (the driver says at one point, "You're Indian? As in red dot Indian, or feather Indian?"), but the issue gets muddy when the driver brings up topics (like Hindus vs. Muslims in India) that no self-respecting American yokel would be familiar enough with to debate. What does it all mean? Damned if I know, but it's an interesting audiovisual collision.

Dream of Me (Dir. A Moon, 10 min.)

Whatever else one can say about this one, one can't dispute its intensity. A library newspaper reader ratchets away at whiplash speed, barely pausing on obituaries and seemingly random bits of news -- and this goes on for five minutes (potential epileptics, beware). Beneath it all is a jumble of voices, and slowly we begin to understand that a long-lost sister has died, and yet knowledge about her life is hard to come by, due to family estrangement and legal obstacles. Just as we arrive at the official obituary, the only available evidence of her life, the scene abruptly switches to home movies of a European woman who coincidentally has the same name as the dead sister, a woman who is the friend of the unseen narrator, and has taken her role as a surrogate sister. It's a lot of emotional and narrative content to pack in a short film, too much probably -- things only became clear when the director explained the background after the screening (all based on her real-life experiences), but there's certainly something obsessive and intriguing about this project, as incoherent as it may be.

The Chestnut Tree (Dir. Lee Hyun-min, 4 min.)

A touching childhood reminiscence, told fairy-tale style with airy, simple animation strokes, rotoscoped ballet moves, and a tinkling little piano waltz. This one would fit in nicely with any animation program, and is a winsome conclusion to the program, following the knottiness of the previous two shorts. Even an SFIAAFF shorts collection seems to understand the maxim of show biz: send 'em home with smiles on their faces.

SFIAAFF '08: "The Terrorizer"

2008-04-03T20:44:00.000-07:00

Hopscotch: The Terrorizer (1987, Edward Yang)

"Changes are merely rebirths of the past."
- The novelist, The Terrorizer

Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang have had their days in the sun, and yet somehow Edward Yang has been left in the shadows when it comes to appreciating Taiwan New Wave cinema, save the raves of a few critics (for an example, check out Jonathan Rosenbaum's overview). Browse Netflix and you'll find a healthy sampling of Hou and Tsai's work, but Yang (never the most prolific director – he completed seven feature-length films before his untimely death of cancer last year) is represented by a single film: Yi Yi, a family drama that is stubbornly art-house in its length (over three hours) and preoccupations (a middle-class Taiwan family comes to grips with its ordinariness).

Not as easily pigeonholed as Hou or Tsai (and certainly not as culturally specific as either of them), Yang is the most cosmopolitan of the Taiwan New Wave directors. Like Hou, he tends to gravitate between two modes: nervy evocations of Taiwan urban life (Taipei Story, Mahjong, Confucian Confusion) and grander-scaled yet intimate family epics (That Day on the Beach, A Brighter Summer's Day). What sets him apart from his compadres are French and Italian New Wave elements: plots with pinpoint symmetry, striking tableaus set amidst the easygoing flow of narrative, silences and omissions doing much of the work. While Hou lulls you into Ozu-like reveries and Tsai amps up the quirk, Yang's films are tiny depth charges, dramatic moments sneaking up on us unawares and reverberating long after the fact.

Fortunately, the SF International Asian American Film Festival included three Yang films in this year's program as a tribute to the master: the aforementioned Yi Yi as well as The Terrorizer and his masterpiece, A Brighter Summer's Day (more on that one in a separate review). The Terrorizer is a fine example of Yang in "urban alienation" mode, but it's more than that. Blending a noir set-up from Antonioni's Blow-Up with a familial crisis that wouldn't be out of place in Yi Yi, it's a bracing, playful little construction that is nonetheless deadly serious in its intent.

The film begins and ends with a gunshot. It is early morning, a shrieking police car criss-crosses Taipei, arousing the attention of random people. They all have names but are more easily identifiable by what they do: a callow young photographer, a middle-aged doctor (Li Liqun), and his novelist wife (Cora Miao). Trailing the police to a crime scene, the photographer snaps some shots of a dead gangster on the street, before espying his young Eurasian moll leap from a window and land awkwardly on the pavement.

From there we witness the fates of these principals unspool. Eager to provide for his wife, the doctor is angling for a promotion at the hospital where he works by ratting out one of his colleagues (as in all of Yang's movies, the hospital is a locus of inhumanity and incivility). The novelist wife, still mourning the loss of a stillborn child, is tempted to start an affair when an old flame returns to the scene. The photographer, smitten with his snapshots of the Eurasian girl, rents the apartment she escaped and pastes her image on the walls. The Eurasian girl, given to picking up businessmen and stealing their wallets, seeks refuge with her unforgiving mother, who locks down everything valuable in their house even as she continues to pine for the American servicemen who left their lives long ago. All of these characters are defined by some absence in their life, and their individual situations come to a boil when the Eurasian woman makes a random prank call to the novelist, pretending to be her doctor husband's mistress.

Like an Altman film or Paul Haggis's Crash, the film is an intersecting map of coincidences, chance meetings, and tragic consequences. Unlike those movies, however, The Terrorizer is less interested in histrionics than it is in the physical spaces between us, the private spaces in our heads, and what results when these spaces are yanked away. As the title suggests, each character is engaged in a form of terrorism on the other, yet we rarely see two characters in the same frame, let alone interact with one another. In this cold urban climate, revelation comes in the form of a disembodied phone call, or the faraway glimpse of a woman collapsing in the street, and our sum being is represented by the objects that surround us – the gear the photographer plays with, the white lab coat that grants the doctor husband authority even as it binds him to conformity, the books the novelist must constantly rearrange on her shelves, or the switchblade the Eurasian girl keeps hidden at her ankle.

The plot is constructed with precision, and Yang is deft at orchestrating it (if you're in the mood for some thick, juicy literary theory, check out Frederic Jameson's "Remapping Taipei" essay, which parses the urban geography of The Terrorizer to interesting effect). He also has a knack for striking compositions, such as when a pasted-together image of the Eurasian girl flaps in a morning breeze, like an illusion that cannot hold. Some might find the film chilly and distant, an exercise designed for film critics. But to take it that way is shortchanging Yang's dexterity as a director, and the core of emotion at the heart of his films. Take a memorable passage in which the Eurasian's mother, drunk and nostalgic, slips on an LP of the Platters' "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" and stares at her wayward sleeping daughter with love and accusation in her eyes, followed by a startling cut to the photographer as he watches his jealous girlfriend tearing down his photographs of the Eurasian from the walls, the Platters song soaring to a heartbroken finish and linking them all in complicity. Or the final confrontation between the doctor and his wife, in which a sedate shot of an office conference room is broken up by a flailing of arms and shouts as the husband attempts to drag her away.

All the characters in the film have their illusions of love or prosperity shattered, and each receives a comeuppance or redemption of sorts, yet rising above it all is the novelist wife (Miao does nicely understated work). Yang clearly connects the most with her life of quiet desperation, and she is the only one given the opportunity to have an epiphany (in a quiet dinner table scene that foreshadows the down-to-earth frustrations of Yang's family heroes in his later films). The most overt victim of terror, she is also the only one granted a way out, as the novel based on her experiences ironically wins critical notice. As a creator of stories and whole worlds, she is also the fulcrum point for the story's conclusion, a fever climax of murder and revenge contained within a dream, which is possibly within another dream, like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in a city setting. The climax leaves the door open for debate – did what we see just happen? Events would suggest so, and yet the final image is of the novelist wife, now shacked up with her old flame, awakening in a fit of nausea, as if horrified by the events she has imagined, and throwing up, the pregnant artist enduring birth pains. Measured in its progress, an unsettling mix of cool technique and cutting drama, The Terrorizer is concerned with the spaces we create within ourselves, and suggests that even the most fugitive connections between us are simply figments of our imagination, the novelist in our heads reaching out to fill the void.

Just Business: "American Gangster"

2007-11-09T23:25:00.000-08:00

American Gangster (2007, Dir. Ridley Scott)

Frank Lucas: The most important thing in business is honesty, integrity, hardwork... family... never forgetting where we came from.

As an original visual stylist, Ridley Scott can be provocative when he wants to be: look no further than Alien and Blade Runner (or even Black Rain) for proof. And yet there's another side to him, the sucker for history, in which the gleaming surfaces of the Caesar-era Roman Colisseum (Gladiator) or the broadside of the Santa Maria (1492: Conquest of Paradise) are meant to be reproduced with photographic fidelity. Not nearly as obsessive with story and character as he is with the teeming worlds he creates, he's often been at the mercy of his screenwriters. When they provide him with pulp or at least passable shlock, he skates by; when handed something clunky, the results can be overblown (G.I. Jane, Hannibal).

American Gangster is a change of pace for Scott -- while it allows him to indulge the history buff inside him by recreating 70s New York in all its ratty glory, it is primarily a character study of two men: Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), the local hood who made himself the most powerful criminal in the five boroughs, and Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the dogged detective who eventually brought him in. Loosely based on a fasincating Mark Jacobson piece in New York Magazine titled "The Return of Superfly," we witness Lucas' rise as a funhouse version of the American dream: using guile, entrepreneurial smarts (to get a leg up in the heroin business he bypasses the middleman and gets his product straight from the jungles of southeast Asia), canny branding (naming his product "Blue Magic" to further separate himself from competitors) and responsible practices (instead of flaunting his wealth, he opts for a conservative nouveau riche lifestyle) to get ahead. Of course it helps that he's perfectly ready to blow a rival's brains out in broad daylight on the streets of Harlem should the need arise.

Richie Roberts, on the other hand, is seemingly the one good cop in a crooked town. When he does the honest thing and turns in $1 million in unmarked bills after a drug bust, he's immediately pegged as an outsider in his own department, for how can you entrust someone with your dirty secrets when he won't even take a little somethin'-somethin' for himself? Inept in his home life, separated from his wife (Carla Guigino in a thankless, ornamental role) and son, he's given a chance at redemption when he signs up for a special task force based in Jersey that's primed to take down drug traffikers. And thus these two forces -- the sober, careful kingpin and the hangdog cop -- are destined to collide with each other, much like Al Pacino's lawman and Robert DeNiro's thief in Heat. As in the latter film, the two principals only share the screen for a pivotal few minutes, and yet forge a connection that they are unable to have in their own corrupt worlds.

Scott has invested in character dramas before, like Thelma and Louise, in which the glossy visuals threatened to overwhelm the story. Here, his bustling, hustling visual style is a good match with a flamboyant tale that stretches from Manhattan to Vietnam. On a technical level, the film is flawless, and we have no doubt that the beige interiors of Harlem diners and the subterranean heroin production plants staffed by nude women are genuine reproductions of the era. Save one overdone action scene in which a drug bust becomes a shootout that spans an entire apartment building, Scott is more interested in the accretion of plot this time around. The narrative gallops forward at a fast clip, finding enough time to introduce a panoply of minor characters, including a suitably slimy Josh Brolin as a corrupt cop who gets on Lucas and Roberts' bad side; a blustering Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Lucas' stylin' rival Nicky Barnes; and most memorably, Ruby Dee as Lucas' mama from North Carolina, as down-home sweet as you can be and wilfully oblivious of her son's wrongdoings. Indeed, the best passages in the movie involve Lucas and his family brood, many of whom become lieutenants in his business. When Lucas sits down with a young nephew who wants to join the family "business" rather than make use of his college scholarship, it's an amusing perversion of the heart-to-heart "what are you going to do with your life" chat endemic to families everywhere.

American Gangster wants to be a lot of things -- it wants to recapture the smoldering decency and period details of Sidney Lumet's Serpico, in which Pacino played a whistleblower cop, as well as the family tragedy of The Godfather. It was originally intended to be directed by Antoine Fuqua (with Benecio del Toro in Crowe's role) -- one can imagine that under Fuqua's hand, it would have had more of the juice of Training Day, in which Washington gave a volcanic performance as bad cop-gone-ambivalent. Frankly, that live-wire element is missing in this film. Denzel has reached the point in his career where he couldn't be un-charming and inelegant if he tried, but as he's matured, the sense of danger that seeped into his performances has disappeared. As Lucas he is calm, measured, affable, a Marlon Brando sneer sometimes gracing his lip, and we wait in vain for anything that suggests threat and menace lie beneath that well-tailored exterior. Crowe comes off better as he dials down his innate intensity for his role: his Roberts may burn with the fires of justice, but he keeps it under wraps, using his shambling demeanor as a defense and weapon.

For all its attention to production design and realism, American Gangster is very much a Hollywood product, and Scott freely indulges in all the tropes of the standard detective/gangster epic -- for instance, it comes as no surprise to find out that the real-life Roberts never had a troubled home life with his son, because, well, he never had a son. And any universe that imagines Denzel Washington as a dapper criminal is surely a far cry from the true Frank Lucas, who by all reports was a smart, vicious type who was somehow more naive and hick-ish than the film makes him out to be. Outstanding in its breadth and lacking in depth, the film's final confrontation between Roberts and Lucas is an encapsulation of its strengths and flaws. It's a scene laced in irony, as Lucas gives Roberts the information he needs to finger the multitudes of New York cops who are on the take, the gangster and cop united in a common goal, the gangster wanting to wipe out the competition and the cop wanting to clean house. (In a further irony, the real-life Lucas and Roberts have since become friends.) Who wouldn't be on board for a face-off like that? And yet Washington and Crowe, two actors known to sizzle when they want to, decide to play it close to the vest, and the film, much like Scott's direction, settles with tastefulness over dynamism.

Deep Freeze: "30 Days of Night"

2007-11-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

30 Days of Night (Dir. David Slade, 2007)

Sheriff Eben Oleson: Hell of a day.
The Stranger: Just you wait.

Successful horror movies dig into our unconscious and not-so-unconscious fears: abandonment, entrapment, dismemberment, loss of loved ones, all the bad stuff. Attach vampires to the above and you can add decapitation, eternal damnation, and engorged incisors to the list.

So many vampire flicks and parodies have come down the path over the years that it would take a lot to overcome most folks' built-up indifference to the genre. David Slade's 30 Days of Night, based on the three-issue comic series by Steve Niles, attempts to do so with a few tricks in its arsenal. For one, it's set in the northern Alaskan town of Barrow, a desolate place that is submerged in darkness for 30 days each year (for the record, in real life it's 67) -- the perfect feeding ground for bloodsuckers who don't mind dining in sub-zero temps. The selection of Slade, best known for the gritty Heath Ledger drug drama Hard Candy, also hinted that the film wouldn't be splatter hijinks as usual -- not much difference between self-destructive addicts and undead junkies, after all.

The first image of the film, in which a Stranger (Ben Foster) emerges at the top of a peak, the beached wreckage of a freighter behind him, is a beaut. In the valley below, the residents of Barrow prepare to pack it in for the winter, as all communications and transport routes to the town will be cut off. Keeping a watchful eye on the residents is young sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) and his deputy Billy (Manu Bennett). Through them we meet the usual motley cast of characters that you know will come into play later in the film: Beau the crotchety misanthrope (Mark Boone, Jr.), a son nursing a father with Alzheimer's (Craig Hall and Chic Littlewood), and most crucically, Eben's little brother Jake (Mark Rendall) and his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George), who gets stuck in town when she misses the last flight out. The tension builds in slight degrees as the sun sets on Barrow: cell phones are inexplicably found destroyed, sled dogs are mutilated, power outages take hold, and the mysterious deaths begin to rise. As the chill feeling of isolation grips the ever-dwindling nest of survivors, we rub our hands, ready for the sensual and emotional assault to reach the next level.

It never does. When we get our first glimpse of the vampires, led by Marlow (Danny Huston, who proves you can overact even when speaking in an unintelligible language), tearing into helpless victims with the relish of pigs in slop, you can't help but suppress a titter. Slade does what he can to keep things anchored, and slips in some snarky humor; Mark Boone, Jr. gets most of the laughs as the don't-give-a-damn survivalist -- you wouldn't want to have him over for dinner, but you sure want him around when you need to fight off hungry bloodsuckers. It isn't enough, though, as the cliches of the genre come into play -- plenty of graphic, CGI-assisted beheadings, survivors hiding out in attics and abandoned stores, internal dissension as our heroes try to decide what to do or where to go next, heartfelt connections between estranged lovers, noble sacrifices. Even the suspense of the time element (if only they can survive for 30 days...) goes nowhere, as we confusingly skip forward days and weeks at a time, with little explanation as to how our heroes got from point A to point B, or even how they survived with next to no food at point B for so long.

The lapses in narrative momentum might be more forgivable if the characters were memorable, but no such luck: Hartnett makes for a snivelly protagonist, and while George is easy on the eyes, her repartee with Hartnett doesn't get much deeper than the usual "we couldn't get along, but I guess we love each other after all" shtick. Foster puts in the most striking peformance as the Stranger, although "performance" may not be the best way to put it: twitching like there's no tomorrow, his face nearly coal-black with grime and an unkept beard, eyes bulging, every word out of his mouth a weasel's rasp, he is an instant parody, Charlie Prince from 3:10 to Yuma by way of Hammer Films.

True to the comic, 30 Days of Night comes to a bittersweet conclusion, adhering to its themes of macho sacrifice and love regained and lost. In other words, it comes down to a fistfight between Josh Hartnett and Danny Huston that ends with yet another variation of someone's head getting disconnected from his trunk. "Next time they'll take out Point Hope, Wainwright," a character intones breathlessly at one point -- not exactly the type of thought that sends shivers of dread down your usual moviewatcher's spine. As a horror movie, 30 Days of Night is certainly more sober and respectable than most of the dreck that passes as horror these days; as the latest addition to the vampire genre, it's a case of the emperor's new clothes in which the clothes this time around are heavy winter outerwear.

Japan: Nagoya, Part 2

2007-10-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

Photographic souvenirs from the Aichi Art Center in Nagoya...

For those who are unaware of the supreme awesomeness of Domo-kun, the mascot of NHK TV, check out his greatest hits.

No explanation necessary -- as far as we can make out, the master's signature adorns this one...

Japan: Nagoya

2007-10-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Contrary to the name, it's not a haunted house, and it isn't a cutesy anime in the style of Casper the Friendly Ghost -- and although Manboo is probably the most popular Internet café chain in Japan, it's not just an Internet cafe, either. Sure, you can rent out a cubby equipped with TV, computer, and beanbag, and surf to your heart's content, but the true value of the place is as a crash pad if you've missed that last train home, or if you're one of those hardy backpackers who need an ultra-cheap room for the night. Well, maybe not that cheap -- it's about 1800 yen ($17) for an eight-hour stay -- but it's certainly dark and subterranean enough for a good night's sleep, as long as you don't mind the slight lack of privacy (open-air cubicles), cigarette-scented cushions, and the lack of a decent shower. And if you find yourself unable to doze off, at least you can spend the whole night playing World of Warcraft online. Now that's full service.

Love in a Fallen City: "Lust, Caution"

2007-10-09T23:34:00.000-07:00

Lust, Caution (2007, Dir. Ang Lee)

Though it was still daylight, the hot lamp was shining full-beam over the mahjong table. Diamond rings flashed under its glare as their wearers clacked and reshuffled their tiles. The tablecloth, tied down over the table legs, stretched out into a sleek plain of blinding white. The harsh artificial light silhouetted to full advantage the generous curve of Chia-chih's bosom, and laid bare the elegant lines of her hexagonal face, its beauty somehow accentuated by the imperfectly narrow forehead, by the careless, framing wisps of hair. Her makeup was understated, except for the glossily rouged arcs of her lips. Her hair she had pinned nonchalantly back from her face, then allowed to hang down to her shoulders. Her sleeveless cheongsam of electric blue moire satin reached to the knees, its shallow, rounded collar standing only half an inch tall, in the Western style. A brooch fixed to the collar matched her diamond-studded sapphire button earrings.

-- Eileen Chang, "Lust, Caution"

Ang Lee has comfortably staked out a niche for himself as a "prestige" filmmaker, and within that niche he's involved himself with an impressive variety of genres. From his early indie days (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet) to his period pieces (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm) to his noble quest to make pulp safe for the arthouse masses (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Hulk), all his films are united by his personal style: measured, almost watery in its transparency, fluid, elegant, and very remote. It's a canny strategy -- when diving into topics that your heartland audience might find uncomfortable (gay cowboy love, spouse swapping, a pro-South Civil War drama, a subtitled action picture), it pays to hold your viewers by the hand and envelop them in the warm embrace of good taste. I find his work easy to admire and difficult to love.

After the unexpected success of Brokeback Mountain (that "gay cowboy movie"), what controversial subject could Lee utilize for a follow-up? An NC-17 film, as it turns out. Doubling back to his Chinese heritage, Lee has adapted the short story "Lust, Caution" by one of China's foremost 20th-century writers, Eileen Chang. It's easy to see the attraction to the source material -- spies and lovers in 1940s Shanghai, frank sex scenes, the sultry scent of doomed love, the epic sweep of a period piece. Covering a period of four years, the story follows Wang Chia-chih (newcomer Wei Tang), a callow young actress who gets caught up in a plot to kill Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a Japanese sympathizer who will one day become a minister in Shanghai's puppet government during World War II. Encouraged by her revolutionary theater troupe buddies to play the part of a wealthy socialite named Ma Tai Tai to get close to Mr. Yee, it's all a big game to Wang, but when true Chinese revolutionaries recruit her to infiltrate the Yee household, playacting blooms into a full-blown affair, and infatuation and divided loyalties take hold.

Talk about this film has started and ended with the sex scenes, and although they stop short of actual hardcore, there are ample displays of genitalia. Certainly Eileen Chang didn't emphasize any purple-prosed sex in her original story, but give Lee credit -- he films the sex like combat, the two participants striving for power and domination over the other, their tug-of-war pushing the narrative on. On the other end of the spectrum, Yee perfectly dramatizes the effete warfare of a mah-jongg game, as Ma Tai Tai gains access to Mr. Lee's life by playing with Mrs. Yee (a subtly devious Joan Chen) and her friends. Shooting their gaming contests with a flurry of cuts and overlapping rapid-fire dialogue, Lee exposes the raw animus underneath the small talk, where a single averted look spells guilt, complicity, secrecy. When in the midst of a game Mr. Yee reaches over for a snack in order to glimpse at a hastily scribbled telephone number, accepting an invitation to infidelity, it's a moment thrilling in its simplicity and swiftness.

Chang's original story, for all its perceptive details and psychology, is essentially a romantic plea for forgiveness. Having discovered that she was married to a Japanese collaborator in real life, she concocted "Lust, Caution" as a sort of absolution: the woman, fully recognizing the immorality of the man, nevertheless sacrifices herself for love, while the man honors the woman by being devastated by the loss. The film follows this thread faithfully, right down to a breathless climax in the most innocuous of places, a jewelry shop. When the truth is revealed, the suddenness and finality of what happens next is like a kick to the stomach.

However, Lee is less successful at wringing something truly unique out of this set-up. For all of the film's stately pacing and class-A production values (40s Shanghai never seemed quite so tangible), it takes more than half its running time to boil it down to its true essence, the contest between Lee and Chia-chih. Chang's short story was a potboiler, but it also had a swinging, casual zing to its narrative and character byplay. Lee prefers to keep things tamped down, and although he offers up a few Hitchcockian shocks (a scene in which a man takes forever to die after being stabbed numerous times echoes Torn Curtain), and throws in a few laughs as the theater troupe, clearly in over their heads, get caught up with youthful enthusiasm as they embark on their terrible project, the mood soon sinks into one of glum inevitability. When one of the sex scenes is intercut with the barking of a guard dog outside the window, the symbolism of the moment veers dangerously close to cheese. Subtract the graphic sex scenes, and you are essentially left with a lushly photographed (by the ever-trusty Rodrigo Prieto) and scored (by Alexandre Desplat) melodrama, in which Lee stacks the chips in favor of the lovers -- when given a choice between the magnetic Tony Leung and a revolutionary cadre of solemn, sexually inexperienced pretty boys (Lee-Hom Wang) and unfeeling bosses (Chung Hua Tou), is there really any choice at all? The details are there, the plot turns are there, and certainly the surface textures are there (the quotation that opens this essay is brilliantly transferred to film), but the ghost is missing from this shell.

As always, Lee elicits sensitive performances from his principals. Mr. Yee, burdened by encroaching middle age, fueled by bottomless rage, his emotions buried beneath waxen formality, could have easily descended into parody -- just imagine the part played by Jeremy Irons, who would clench his jaw and furrow his eyebrows and work hard to make you feel the very harrowing of his being. Tony Leung, the smoothest and most understated of Hong Kong actors, takes the opposite approach, letting small smiles escape like flashes of lightning, his eyes going limpid or angry for miliseconds at a time. When he finally does explode, the effect is that of a window being thrown wide open, and Leung is unflinching in presenting Lee's ugliness as well as sadness. Wei Tang does well with what is ultimately a cipher of a character -- vering crazily from dowdy would-be actress to gussied-up seductress, she is believable as a seasoned player getting caught up in the play, but less so as an ordinary plebian who seems far too straightlaced and plodding to get caught up in fanciful spy games. Still, she deserves points for her fearlessness, and saves her best for last, when she must decide between duty and love in a matter of seconds.

You might think that Lust, Caution can be dismissed based on some of the criticisms above, scoffed at as just another Oscar-baiting film with the added draw of hot sex. Yet the film sticks with you; predictable and inevitable it may be, but Lee's hothouse romanticism, and the final haunting image of an empty bed, are hard to shake. Perhaps it's due to the pull of stories like these, the thrill of illicit activity and the tragedy of lovers that are fated to part. Lee knows that films are a dream machine, and he uses his dream machines as hypnotics, easing us into an absorbed mood as gently as slipping into a steambath. It adds up to movies like this one -- easy to admire, difficult to love.

The Long Way Home: "The Darjeeling Limited"

2007-10-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Dir. Wes Anderson)

Rita: What's wrong with you?
Jack: I honestly don't know. I'll tell you the next time I see you.

Does Wes Anderson have a soul? That seems to be a major preoccupation with critics when it comes to his films. You can spot the technical eccentricities from a mile away: meticulously composed frames, eclectic soundtracks of 60s mod rock and undiscovered modern gems, precision-crafted production design that manages to be fussy and zany all at once. But even though his films are put down for being mannered larks that are too whimsical for their own good, what tends to stick to the memory are faces -- perplexed faces mostly. Taking his cue from silent cinema, Anderson likes to get up close and personal with his characters, lingering over their mute distress, their indecision, their bewilderment. It helps that he also has a stock company of actors (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Anjelika Huston, Jason Schwartzman) who know exactly how to achieve major effects with the tiniest of expressions. Many derided Anderson's last film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as too pleased with its own frippery, but the wackiness had a point to it: juxtaposed against this funhouse universe, Bill Murray's mournful Steve Zissou gained weight, a soul.

Those who aren't convinced that there's something honest and true going on behind the curtain will most likely not be convinced by The Darjeeling Limited, which nevertheless is both a recapitulation of, and a departure from, the Anderson method. Three brothers -- Francis (Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Schwartzman) meet up on the titular train, ostensibly to make a spiritual pilgrimage across India on the anniversary of their father's death. Each of them is nursing his own unspoken hurts and neuroses: Francis, his head swathed in bandages from a vague motorcycle accident, is the den mother, planning each activity out to the minute and insisting that everyone "say yes" to every experience; Peter, hogging all of the dead father's personal belongings, is about to become a father and isn't very happy about it, to the point that he hasn't told his wife he's coming out to India; Jack, still smarting from a recent breakup, is writing bitter autobiographical short stories ("The characters are all fictional," he insists) and wandering around in bare feet like Paul McCartney on Abbey Road.

All the brothers are closed off to us as well as each other -- in stark contrast to his previous films, Anderson lets them hoard their torments, and refuses to expose them as easy caricatures or cliches. As a result they come across as more whole, less stick-like. Communicating in implied threats and forced niceties, it seems highly unlikely they will reach any kind of rapprochement, and each gets pulled into their own private obsessions: Francis develops a fixation with locating a power adaptor, Peter gets addicted to Indian cough syrup and buys a poisonous snake, and when he's not playing mournful songs on his iPod, Jack is launching into an ill-advised affair with lovely steward Rita (Amara Karan), who may or may not be based on a certain Beatles song about a meter maid, but certainly fits the description.

Sounds like a typical Anderson film, right? Wealthy estranged families, deadpan absurdities, culture clash galore. Not exactly -- as if tamed by the very real landscape that the train lumbers through, The Darjeeling Express settles into a lazy rhythm, not so desperate to get to the next visual punch line or bit of whimsy. This sometimes works to the movie's detriment: the first half hour or so is composed of draggy conversations and awkward silences, with nary a hint of comedy or witty character interaction. But even here, Anderson is making a point -- the harder the brothers attempt to buy into the privileged upper-middle-class American vision of spiritual uplift, the harder they fall on their faces. The title itself is indicative; there will be no bullet-train express to fulfillment for these folks, but instead a long, strung-out ride with destination unknown.

When the brothers are thrown off the train, left wandering the countryside with their father's Louis Vitton suitcases in hand, the film slowly opens up, like a flower. Anderson doesn't supply a necessarily deep or meaningful glimpse into rural India, but like all good travelers, Francis, Peter and Jack surrender their hope, and in the process stumble towards something resembling grace. A tragedy involving a village boy materializes out of the blue, and while other filmmakers might have milked it for obvious emotion, Anderson hangs back, letting the incident and its aftermath wash over the three men, drawing them closer in a nearly wordless passage as they are accepted as guests in a local community and invited to a funeral. As we sense that the film is drawing to a close, the story pulls one more card from its sleeve -- a visit to a Christian monastery in the Himalayas, where the brothers' mother Patricia (Anjelika Huston) has retreated to live as a nun. Patricia is a benevolent monster, but a monster nonetheless, and Huston gives the most devastating performance in the film, her maternal pooh-poohing failing to conceal her utter inability to relate to her children. And yet her suggestion to "meditate a bit" leads to a tour-de-force sequence in which the old Wes Anderson makes a brief appearance: jumping to different locales and characters in one continuous movement, like passing through numerous train compartments, we see all the people in the brothers' lives, those left behind, living and wanting and wishing. Jarring and somehow right in its artificiality, the shot heralds an arrival at understanding and normalcy, and is capped off with a final mad dash to a train in which the brothers are forced to dump their metaphysical and literal baggage.

The actors are asked to navigate tricky emotional territory, with no lovable quirks to fall back on, and for the most part they do admirable jobs. It's difficult to objectively judge Wilson's performance given the recent tragedies in his life and their eerie similarities to the dire straits he's in here, but there's no doubt that he's gained gravitas over the years. His famous broken nose hidden beneath a band aid, his bandaged face reduced to lips and eyes, he rises above his standard stoned hipster poses. Brody has the more internalized role, but he gets his turn to shine in a flashback to his father's funeral in which his grief and dementia all but overwhelm the mechanic (Barbet Schroeder) entrusted with fixing his father's car. Schwartzman struggles the most within the confines of his character (ironic given that he co-wrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola), and perhaps it's fitting, as Jack is closer than the others to the typical conception of an Anderson hero -- self-conscious, willful, almost petulant.

Clocking in at a modest 91 minutes, The Darjeeling Limited tells its story with a minimum of fuss, and gets out while the getting's good. It might not be the best thing Anderson has done -- that honor still goes to Rushmore -- but none of his previous endings have the wry charm this one has, as the three brothers settle in on yet another train. Earlier, on the original Darjeeling Limited, the three have been the typical ugly Americans, bemused at an offer of lime juice, smoking in a non-smoking compartment, antagonizing the steward who came to collect their tickets, immediately heading to the lunch car for cigarettes and a beer. Now they accept the lime juice with deference, respond politely to the steward -- and immediately head to the lunch car for cigarettes and a beer. As we watch the lush Indian landscape outside the train unfold and the credits roll, we're left with the winsome thought that as much as things change us, we are irreducible at heart, and somehow we are okay with it.

Going Underground: "Eastern Promises"

2007-09-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

Eastern Promises (2007, Dir. David Cronenberg)

Sometimes, if things are closed, you just open them up.

-- Nikolai Luzhin, Eastern Promises

"Cold-blooded" might be an adjective used to describe the work of David Cronenberg, but I prefer the term "exploratory," as in exploratory surgery. He takes pleasure in dissection: carving open mundane surfaces to analyze the rot underneath, peeking beneath the veil to exult in savagery. At his strongest when he applies this approach to pulp concepts -- the gonzo snuff TV of Videodrome, the human-body-as-horror hijinks of The Fly -- he is like the disinterested coroner who nevertheless breaks into little-boy smiles now and then, as if he's remembering the time he pulled wings off insects.

Cronenberg's recent A History of Violence has been his most critically lauded film, but it also marked an impasse -- on the one hand, it was his most mainstream project to date (based on a graphic novel, no less), and yet his deliberately styled tableaus and off-kilter framing were as prevalent as ever. Here his technique butted heads against a pulp story that resisted all attempts at aesthetic uplift, leaving us with a few nifty scenes of slaughter, punctuated by acting that ranged from stiffly naturalistic (Viggo Mortenson) to hambone juicy (Ed Harris and William Hurt). Formally intriguing and ice-cold, History's ultimate point seemed to have something to do with the violence in men's souls, or something portentous like that, but what it really should have been was a down-and-dirty gangster yarn. There was plenty of viscera on the screen; what was lacking was the sweat.

Eastern Promises seems like a retread of that vision in its initial scenes: on a rainy London night, a Russian mobster stops in for a cut at the local barbershop, only to have his throat slit in excruciating detail, and a young pregnant prostitute stumbles into a drug store, blood pouring from her innards (Grand Guignol, here we come). Yet Cronenberg has something different in mind this time; after this opening salvo, he settles into a style that is more measured, more patient with setting and characters. The prostitute dies giving birth, leaving the baby and her secret journal in the care of the midwife Anna (Naomi Watts). Unable to decipher the journal, Anna ends up consulting her belligerent, old-school Russian uncle (a delightfully tetchy Jerzy Skolimowski), and when she is essentially told to let the dead lie, Anna, seized with a sense of responsibility for the infant, and burdened by the recent death of her own baby, follows a lead to the restaurant of Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Big mistake -- the affable Semyon is a major player in the Russian mob, and the prostitute belonged to his skittish son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). When Anna persists in her line of inquiry, she runs afoul of father and son, as well as their trusted chauffeur and "undertaker" Nikolai (Mortenson).

The screenplay is by Steven Knight, who mined similar territory in Dirty Pretty Things -- the innocent woman thrust into a scuzzy London underworld in which her ignorance serves as a shield, at least for a while. As we tour the Russian mobster milieu, we note points of interest: the perfect spot to dump a corpse in the Thames; the meaning of criminal tattoos and their placement on the body; the value of classic Russian motorbikes and how to fix them; a scene in which a forlorn prostitute moans a folk song from the old country juxtaposed against a passage in which Semyon regales a customer with a happy tune of his own. Aided by some solid acting (Mueller-Stahl radiates menace without racing his voice above a conversational hiss, while Cassel goes into full bonkers mode), Cronenberg lets the film breathe as the complications mount. Clearly this is his most conventional work yet, but his looser, more off-the-cuff approach is a good fit for the material. Make no mistake, it gets downright ugly at times, especially when the neurotic Kirill orders Nikolai to prove his loyalty by fucking an underage girl, and as the mobsters tighten their grip on Anna and her family, we steel ourselves for the inevitable bloodbath.

It happens, but not in the way we expect. In a subtle but definite shift of focus, Anna's role is marginalized and we find our sympathies aligned with Nikolai, the low-level gangster angling for respect, caught with what seems to be a burgeoning conscience as he finds himself attracted to the stalwart Anna. As Anna, Watts can't help but be radiant, but hers is too open and sincere a character; Cronenberg instinctively gravitates towards Mortenson's Nikolai, the diffident mobster with the ready smile and the masklike countenance, someone who obviously has secrets. The same qualities that rendered Mortenson unconvincing as a gangster gone "straight" in History of Violence -- the calculation, the sense of detachment, the smidgen of gallows humor -- serve him brilliantly here. Though his performance has plenty of wry humor to it, as when he extinguishes a cigarette on his tongue with perfect comic timing, the tragedy of his character mirrors the mood of the film. Shot in muted grays and browns, Eastern Promises is a mournful picture, and Mortenson is the most mournful one of all; privy to the bad things that men do and partaking of it himself, he is constricted by caution, resigned to doing wrong and obeying the vicious thugs who are his stepping stone to better things. Or at least it seems that way -- to give away the ending would be wrong, but suffice to say that the slow-cooking tension Cronenberg builds throughout comes to a full boil when vengeful Chechnyan assassins track down Nikolai at a bath house, setting off a struggle in which a very naked Mortenson must fend off two attackers with nothing but animal fury on his side. It's a brutal smackdown that is virtuosic in its choreography and sound design, as we feel each slash of the knife as it slams into Nikolai's skin, and clench our teeth as he stabs a would-be assassin in the eye.

It would be difficult to top a sequence like that, and Cronenberg doesn't even try; in its last twenty minutes the film decelerates like a wind-up toy running out of steam. A character revelation arrives from left field, and a climax involving Kirill, Nikolai, Anna, the baby, and the Thames River ends it all on a wistful, bittersweet note. As with just about all of Cronenberg's movies, Eastern Promises concludes in a Pyrrhic victory: the forces of order are restored, and the various promises that have been made throughout the film are all kept in a fashion, but at what cost? What is most striking about the denouement is the sense that the story is still moving, with plot threads begging to be picked up, characters missing in action or on the make. Still, the last image of Mortenson alone at a dinner table, all dressed up and no place to go, seems as final as you can get, and its sadness signals something new in Cronenberg; while it may not cohere as well as some of his other works, Eastern Promises suggests that empathy and soul may not be as far out of his grasp as we might have thought.

Horse Opera: "3:10 to Yuma"

2007-09-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

3:10 to Yuma (2007, Dir. James Mangold)

Alice Evans: Ben Wade has a gang and they're out there tonight, somewhere.

Dan Evans: If I don't go, we gotta pack up and leave. Now I'm tired, Alice. I'm tired of watching my boys go hungry. I'm tired of the way that they look at me. I'm tired of the way that you don't.

Critics didn't really know what to make of James Mangold's 1996 film Copland, aside from the fact that it was the film wherein Sly Stallone took a stab at actual "acting" [pronounced with airy English accent]. Most likely they looked at the cast list, which included Robert DeNiro, Ray Liotta and Harvey Keitel, and pegged it as a gritty film about the mean streets, and were left scratching their heads at the operatic shoot-em-up finale. Despite its glances at naturalism, Copland was essentially a Western, High Noon transplanted to the Jersey burbs, and while it didn't necessarily cohere as anything beyond a series of gestures (a drunk, self-pitying Stallone listening to Springsteen's "Stolen Car"? A bit too on-the-nose there), it had a certain gravitas to it that stuck with me after I left the theater, a sincerity in the telling.

Mangold hasn't necessarily progressed as a director since then, but he brings those same qualities to bear on the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, a true rabble-rousing Western this time, and it's now clear that Copland's spiritual predecessor wasn't High Noon but the original 1957 version of 3:10 with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. The set-up, based on the Elmore Leonard short story, is simplicity itself: charming outlaw Ben Wade (Ford in the original, Russell Crowe here) is caught by the local authorities, who plan to haul him off to state prison on the titular train, but with Wade's gang lurking nearby and ready to take out anyone who attempts to get Wade on the train, it falls on beleaguered but upright rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale) to take responsibility, and earn some much-needed cash in the process.

The original 3:10 to Yuma was a chamber piece, as Ford and Van Heflin were mainly confined to a hotel room, the bad man heckling, taunting, and attempting to seduce the good man. It didn't pretend to be anything other than a tightly-wound potboiler of a Western, and was economic in form and style. Mangold has loftier goals in mind with this remake; it's been years since we've had the pleasure of a cracking good Western (not counting idiosyncratic treasures like Dead Man and The Proposition), and he is determined to resuscitate the genre in all its parched glory. So he cracks the story open to include more painterly vistas and hectic action setpieces, including a nighttime showdown with a trio of Injuns and a running battle down train tracks, which add the illusion of breadth if not depth. The dialogue is fearless in its adherence to the laconic conventions of the genre ("I've always liked you Byron, but even bad men love their mommas") -- it's like the word "revisionism" never existed. The score by Marco Beltrami, all eerie strings and stinging electric guitars, hearkens to Ennio Morricone circa 1969, all but daring us to consider this film among the classics that revitalized the genre.

Certainly the actors are as worthy as any that have been in a Western. Even the minor roles are filled out nicely, especially Peter Fonda as a grizzled, "ain't got time to bleed" bounty hunter, and a feral Ben Foster as Charlie, Ben's ultra-loyal second-in-command. Bale's Dan Evans is the nominal hero, but Mangold stacks the deck against him: hobbled with a false leg thanks to a Civil War shooting accident, unable to protect his ranch against the rapacious landowners who want to take it over, lacking the respect or even the sympathy of his teenage son (Logan Lerman), he might as well have a "kick me" sign nailed to his back. It's up to Bale to rescue the character from complete martyrdom with his mesmerized, entranced acting style, and he does, just barely. Too bad he's pitted against Crowe's Wade, which is akin to matching up a newborn puppy against a rottweiler. Wade is a pure Hollywood creation, a gentleman scoundrel just at home killing off one of his own gang to save his own skin as he is sketching a bird in his notebook, or quoting Scripture. Like Hannibal Lector, he is only threatening when he's threatened, erupting into violence faster than a race car accelerating to 60, and yet we're asked to believe that he has the silky magnetism to reduce Evans' steadfast wife (Gretchen Mol) to a swoon with a single line about her green eyes. Crowe recognizes the absurdity of all this and luxuriates in it, yet stops just short of sending the character up -- sly, bemused, and alert with danger, he turns in his best performance in years, a welcome change from his recent "noble and agonized" roles in Cinderella Man and Gladiator.

When the film truly gets cracking during the long windup to the final showdown, Crowe and Bale strike some very tangible sparks off each other, the former tickled and faintly puzzled by the latter's hangdog rectitude. Unfortunately it takes the bulk of the film to reach that duel of the souls, and the rest of the time we have to make do with a few solid if not spectacular shootouts, the sight of a CGI horse exploding, and a storyline crowded with incidents and characters that ultimately shortchange the conflict between the two leads. Some may take issue with the logic of Evans and Wade's climactic decision; I would argue that the early hints are there, but the film lacks the focus necessary to develop those hints so that the climax of the film comes off less enigmatic and more inevitable. While Mangold knows how to handle his actors, he could use a little work in paring a story down to its essentials.

Still, there's no denying the thrill of the film's last fifteen minutes, a non-stop gun battle that culminates in a scene of wholesale slaughter at the train depot, and reconciles Evans with his son. During the chaos we recognize what we love about Westerns -- the collision of moral imperatives and straightforward action, crises of loyalty and justice boiled down to face-offs with six-shooters. The final scene's sinewy energy nearly compensates for the hour and a half of muffled plotting that got us to this point, even as Crowe deflates any pomposity with a final jaunty whistle to his trusty steed. It's clear that Mangold loves the Western, and as a genre project, everything about the new 3:10 to Yuma reeks class. In the end, though, the word "project" might be far too apt; the film is a slavish re-creation, handsome yet distant, like thunder passing by a few counties away.

Laugh Lines: Rush Hour 3, The Simpsons Movie, Superbad

2007-08-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

Rush Hour 3 (2007, Dir. Brett Ratner)

Carter: Well for your information, I'm part Chinese now. That's right, Lee. For the last three years, I have studied the ancient teachings of Buddha, earning two black belts in Wu Shu martial arts, spending every afternoon in the Hong Kong massage parlor. I'm half Chinese, baby!

Lee: If you're half Chinese, Im half black. I'm your brother and I'm fly. You down with that, Snoopy? That's dope, innit?

Carter: Sorry, Lee. You can't be black, there's a height requirement.

The Rush Hour movies are indefensible -- the epitome of cynical, packaged entertainment, they're content to throw an Asian action movie legend (Jackie Chan) and a motormouthed black comedian (Chris Tucker) together, let the two stars flounder as they attempt to "riff" off each other, and inject a few stunts to relieve the boredom generated by the "plot."

These films are the modern equivalent of the Crosby-Hope road movies, and like those old chestnuts they succeed for a simple reason: they are fully aware of their awfulness, and are good natured (rather than embarrassed) about it. We're not interested in seeing Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan play real characters in a real story -- we're interested in seeing them pull their usual moves as they struggle to sweet talk or fight their way out of outlandish situations. This time, there's a whole lot of hooey about Triad gangs, an assassination attempt, and a trail that leads to France, which gives our heroes an excuse to visit Paris and do the usual Parisian things -- indulge in some La Cage Aux Folles send-ups, hit the Eiffel Tower for a bit of high-wire martial arts action, and best of all, engage in angry banter with the typical smartass French cab driver (Yvan Attal) who eventually grows wistful at the fact that he's, well, not American: "I will never know what it feels like to kill with no reason." Like I said, awful, but funny nonetheless.

In truth, Rush Hour 3 has nothing on Rush Hour 2, which featured Zhang Zi Yi as quite possibly the cutest little assassin you'll ever meet. It's clear that the mismatched-buddy concept is getting stretched pretty thin, and in a concession to Chan's advancing age, none of the action scenes truly pop, although there is a lovely moment in which Chan sprints up a banister to hide himself within the folds of the French national flag, a move that wouldn't have been out of place in a Buster Keaton classic. Meanwhile, Tucker engages in his usual shtick as the ugly-American horndog, offending everyone in the general vicinity with his shit-eating grin. Grandmasters of cinema like Max von Sydow and Roman Polanski are wheeled in, looking faintly aghast, while the estimable Hiroyuki Sanada plays his slick villain (who of course has some old history with Jackie) totally straight, somehow emerging with his dignity intact.

But all of the above is really moot. When Chris finds himself in a "who's on first" routine with the members of a local dojo, or when Jackie and Chris are forced to fend off a bevy of pursuers by crashing in and out of moving cars, or when the duo interrupts a French cabaret act with an improvised version of Elton John's "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word," it's easy to see Rush Hour 3 for what it really is: an excuse to indulge in some debauchery with old friends, at a modest price. Whether you feel guilty in the morning is up to your own conscience.

The Simpsons Movie (2007, Dir. David Silverman)

Homer Simpson: Homer do good?
Bart Simpson: Actually, you've doomed us all. Again.

Was there any way a Simpsons movie could live up to the hype? For all the spectacular success of the television series, what we tend to remember are the high points, of which there are quite a few (take your pick). It's easy to forget that a lot of the jokes can be scattershot, and that the show has been riding the downward curve the last few seasons. Burdened with so many fine memories, we hope, want, and expect The Simpsons Movie to have all of the goodness and none of the fat.

Mission slightly accomplished. No one will feel guilty about our favorite Springfield family's first foray to the big screen, but no one can deny that it's all about fat -- pig fat, or to be more precise, pig excrement. In his latest affront to sensibilities and common sense, Homer Simpson, clueless and crude as ever, adopts a baby pig and proceeds to dump all its shit in the Springfield River, setting off an incalculable environmental disaster which leads the federal government to physically seal off Springfield from the rest of the world. Separated from his hometown, Homer and his family decide to hightail it to Alaska to escape the authorities, but soon find themselves cast in the unlikely role of saviors as they return to save Springfield...

Like Rush Hour, the point of a Simpsons story isn't the actual plot, save for a few trenchant comments on the foibles of modern American society. No, what keeps us entertained is observing how the characters' actions snowball into a rampaging avalanche of off-the-cuff slapstick, wordplay, cultural satire, and high and low comedy. This time out there are some decent zingers, including the "Spider-Pig" song (already deployed to such good effect in the trailer), a surprise public service announcement by Tom Hanks ("The U.S. Government has lost its credibility so it's borrowing some of mine"), and throwaway bits like the one in which Homer flips through the Bible during an emergency and wails, "This book doesn't have any answers!"

But as we sit through the equivalent of three TV-sized episodes strung together, fatigue sets in. The major baddie, a militant EPA advisor played by Albert Brooks, lacks the grand absurdity of the series' best villains (Sideshow Bob, where art thou?), and as the film lurches toward the inevitable action-packed climax, missteps accumulate. An episode with Homer and a drugged-out shaman goes nowhere; Marge must once again deride and endure her husband's irresponsibility (yawn); a subplot involving Bart feeling envious of the God-lovin' Smithers family plays it a little too sincere. Over the years, The Simpsons has grown victim to its own runaway success, as it and other bold series (South Park, The Family Guy) have mined its smart-alecky attitude and just-this-side-of-offensive laughs. What worlds are there left to conquer? Ergo, the film's climax, involving a nuclear bomb, a motorcycle, and a glass dome, is both overblown and lacking.

The best Simpsons episodes are neat little fillips in which the family's proclivities, as twisted as they are, impose eventual order on the chaos they create. Think of the episode in which Marge attempts to help the community by censoring the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon show, only to come to the conclusion that the best thing she can do is nothing -- what could be more American than that? In The Simpsons Movie, which saves the day is a little gumption and the love of one's family. It makes sense that such apple-pie creepiness would seep into a feature-length, multi-million dollar film, but it's still a little disappointing that that film happens to be a Simpsons film. "Sequel," pouts Maggie in the movie's final line, and as we steel ourselves for Simpsons 2, we can only hope that a bit more of the show's anarchy and twisted-lemon outlook infects the final product.

Superbad (2007, Dir. Greg Mottola)

Seth: You know when you hear girls say 'Ah man, I was so shit-faced last night, I shouldn't have fucked that guy?' We could be that mistake!

Superbad is a teen exploitation comedy in which not a single breast is glimpsed; a coming-of-age caper in which coming of age is looked on as a scary, tremulous thing; a beer party story in which obtaining the beer and drinking it achieves absolutely nothing. Above all, it is the latest entry from the new comedy factory known as Judd Apatow, who as writer, producer and director has given us Knocked Up and The 40-Year Old Virgin in recent years. Apatow's films are knuckleballs: they set us up with what seem to be standard comedic premises -- the lifelong loser accidentally gets a hot girl pregnant; two high school schlubs try to get laid before they graduate -- and instead of supplying the usual rat-tat-tat setups and punchlines, they dive deep into their nutty characters' psyches and fears, resulting in a strange brew of dread, intimacy, and charm, even as they still knock us over with outrageous bits of business. Take the moment from Knocked Up in which Paul Rudd, married with two precocious girls and a basket-case wife, confides in Seth Rogan that his life is "like an unfunny, tense version of Everybody Loves Raymond." What human being couldn't relate to that one?

Superbad follows the rules of the standard horny teen comedy caper, but instead of reveling in the tropes, it exposes the agony just underneath. Loudmouth Seth (Jonah Hill) and his reluctant pal Evan (Michael Cera) have their sights set on their dream girls to bang, but to get in the girls' good graces they must provide the booze for an underage drinking party. With their even more geeky buddy Vogell (newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse is a scream), the trio embark on an odyssey that leads them to some unusual places, and as they say, the journey is more important than the destination. Here, the journey includes run-ins with two cops (Rogan and Bill Hader) who might just be more irresponsible than the teens; a "grown-up" keg party that plays like a descent into a Munch-ian Hell, complete with gas cans crammed with booze, fights and gunshots that erupt at random, and misplaced menstrual blood; and a final conflagration in which all three principals discover the agonizing meaning of the term "coitus interruptus." Beneath this hubbub is a quieter story -- it's clear that brainy, sensitive Evan is getting sick of rude, crude Seth, and it's uncertain whether their friendship will last the night, even as the two endure humiliation after humiliation in the name of sex.

In the current post-American Pie atmosphere, it seems de rigueur for a sex farce to have plenty of smutty, nasty jokes centering around body functions, and while Superbad has its share (Avoid that menstrual blood! Beware the explosion of penis sketches!), what sticks are the character grace notes. Vogell could have easily been your standard-grade geekoid, but Mintz-Plasse plays him with an endearing mix of cluelessness and braggadocio -- he may not be nearly as cool as he thinks he is, but one can admire his cajones as he tries to be. As the cops, Rogan and Hader are two overgrown kids, dressing up to play their personal version of Grand Theft Auto even as they cajole and encourage Vogell (they know him as "McLovin" from a badly forged driver's license), the three of them all peas in a pod. Blessed with the inability to censor himself, Hill's Seth gets most of the film's best lines, but the story really belongs to Cera's Evan, who perfected the art of the stupefied silence in Arrested Development and puts it to expert use here. Smart but harried, sensible but beleaguered, Cera does what would seem to be impossible: he makes the act of trying to get laid seem like a delicate, even sweet affair. When Seth and Evan come to blows over their friendship, one gets the surprising notion that there is actually something at stake here; the two may literally hug and make up by evening's end (in a scene that gently skirts the line between camaraderie and homosexuality), but we are left with the impression that at the end of this endless summer, the two will go their separate ways, with only these nerve-wracking moments to remember.

Superbad will not be mistaken for a work of art -- cinematically, as is the case with all of Apatow's work, it's strictly middlebrow, and it takes full joy in ticking off most of the usual genre checkboxes. In this world, high school girls are comely, willing, and able, and even dweebs like Seth and Evan have their shot at happiness in the end. Yet this happiness is nothing if not wistful, as the two of them walk off in their arms of their would-be lady loves, casting farewell looks to each other at the local mall. Superbad is the first teen sex comedy in quite a while to capture that sense of passing youth, and recognize the glimmer of feeling in banality -- and if that's too highfalutin for you, take solace in the fact that the phrase "You cock-blocked McLovin!" will likely be immortalized in the American lexicon.

Cut to the Chase: "The Bourne Ultimatum"

2007-08-03T23:28:00.000-07:00

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007, Dir. Paul Greengrass)

"Will you commit to this program?"

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), ex-government assassin and taciturn survivalist, is asked this very question in a grainy flashback early on in The Bourne Ultimatum, and it just as easily could be an appeal to the audience: would we kindly commit to a film series with a hero just as indestructible as James Bond, but loaded with amnesia and moral regret over the beast he has become? More precisely, is this cipher-like Mr. Bourne compelling enough for us to follow him to the ends of the world, as he seeks to break the final locks on his clouded memory and discover what it was that drove him to take on the job of ultra-ultra-secret hitman?

The answer seems to be an unequivocal yes, based on the critical plaudits lavished on the third entry of the Bourne saga. In the current real-world climate, we dig spy thrillers that can inject just a smidgen of realism into the usual outlandish antics, and it doesn't hurt if they don't insult our intelligence outright. Thus we have The Bourne Ultimatum, a nifty piece of filmmaking that is nearly peerless in its action-reaction thriller mechanics.

Like a shark, the film survives on constant movement, one breathless chase and averted trap after another. Those who haven't seen the first two films, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy (directed by Doug Liman (who also serves as the guiding hand behind the series) and Paul Greengrass, respectively) will have to make do with some handy flashbacks, but story is truly secondary here; just think of Bourne as the wily mouse, and the big bad CIA, his former employer, as the giant cat threatening to sink its claws into him, and you're ready to sit back and have your eyeballs seared by the frenetic, handheld style that is fast becoming Greengrass's calling card. Which is not to say that Ultimatum is undisciplined or a migraine nightmare -- within the constant whooshes and bobbing movements of the camera, Greengrass manages to build choreography, rhythm, and suspense, little details popping out to ground us even in the midst of giant crowds on a train platform, or amongst the mountainous rooftops of a Moroccan city.

Happiest when our hero is in direct peril, the film's two major action sequences are adrenaline dreams. The first is a manhunt inside London's Waterloo Station wherein Bourne must rendezvous with nosy British reporter Simon Ross (a wasted Paddy Considine) and avoid the myriad closed-circuit cameras and agents on their tail. Armed with only two cell phones and a preternatural ability to sense danger, Bourne simultaneously avoids and gets the drop on his foes, and as he does so the sequence becomes a master class in geography, movement, and tension -- there must have been an army of editors working around the clock on this one, and the results are worth it. The second bravura setpiece is a footchase amongst the alleys and rooftops of Tangier in which Bourne must catch up with a CIA bagman who is on his way to rub out Nicky (Julia Stiles), his last tangible link to his days as an amnesia-free assassin. Juxtaposing pure acrobatic thrills -- Bourne pulling off his best Parkour impersonation as he leaps through windows -- with the inexorable march of the hitman closing in on his prey, it culminates in a one-on-one fistfight in a bathroom that puts a similar moment in Casino Royale to shame (ironically enough, Gary Powell is the fight choreographer for both films).

If you're an action junkie, those two sequences alone would be worth the price of admission, but it's a shame that one must consider the rest of the film. The Bourne movies have followed a strange inverse progression -- as the filmmaking has become more accomplished with each entry, the story has become less and less interesting. Doug Liman, who directed the Bourne Identity, has nothing on Greengrass as a filmmaker, and yet the first film, which also had the advantage of introducing the mystery of Bourne, had a dog-eared soulfulness about it despite the de rigeur car chases and shootouts. What tends to linger from The Bourne Identity are the character moments -- the mounting bewilderment and horror on Franka Potente's face when she witnesses Bourne making his first kill; the resignation in the mortally wounded Clive Owen's voice when he groans, "Look at what they make you give"; the pitbull ferocity in Chris Cooper's CIA operator when he confronts Bourne and throws the amnesiac's confusion right back at him. In contrast, Greengrass's Supremacy upped the ante on the action scenes, and even though the ruckus all seemed a bit too much by the finish, at least there was a semblance of emotional payoff, as a rueful Bourne came face to face with the orphaned daughter of the Russian diplomats he assassinated. With the film's final shot of Bourne emerging on the streets on New York City, back on his home turf so to speak, we seemed primed for an escalation of intrigue and emotional involvement.

Disappointingly, Ultimatum puts our hero back in the deep freeze. Damon seemed a bit too callow as a trained assassin in Identity, but he has grown into the role, and one can read hints of regret and uncertainty within his terse silences. Too bad that screenwriter Tony Gilroy has run out of actual conflict or ambiguity to fill up those silences. Limited to maybe a couple dozen lines through the entire film, Bourne as a character has never been more dour or distant, save an unconvincing little speech in which he proclaims he sees the faces of the people he killed -- in Damon's monotonic delivery, he might as well be talking about tomorrow's weather forecast. The only shot of humanity arrives in the form of Julia Stiles, and even though continuity is screwed with (the two apparently had an affair in the past which is not even hinted at in the previous movies), her guarded delivery of the line "It was difficult for me ... with you" is the one moment in the film in which emotional disclosure is even broached.

More a frazzled pinball than a human in this movie, Bourne in Ultimatum bounces from locale to locale just long enough for Greengrass to throw in a disinterested panoramic shot of the city before cutting to the next chase. Confusingly, the action begins in Europe before finally relocating to New York City, as the chronology from the preceding film gets juggled. It might have been a neat move if the filmmakers didn't regurgitate the same "get Bourne" plot from Supremacy; alas, we are exposed to yet another conspiracy within the CIA, as "bad" honcho Noah Vosen (a sly, slick David Strathairn) tries to eliminate Bourne before the "good" honcho Pamela Landy (Joan Allen, doing what she can with a character that is essentially reduced to standing around and wringing her hands) can make contact with him and discover the ultra-ultra-secret program that converted Bourne from Army officer to black ops specialist. So once again we get to see control rooms filled with video screens, shout-downs between men in ties and shirt sleeves, and dialogue that sinks to B-movie action cliches ("I need the information, and I need it yesterday!").

It is curious -- for all the sophistication and cutting-edge brio of the filmmaking, the plotting of Ultimatum rests on some awfully hoary devices (incriminating classified documents kept in a safe, a newspaper reporter and his Deep Throat source, a clue scrawled on a scrap of notepaper). Posing as a brainy spy thriller, Ultimatum has nothing on the classics of the genre (The Sandbaggers, John Le Carre's George Smiley novels), which perfected the art of the mind game, spies engaging each other through espionage, counterstrategems, and gamesmanship, tension generated through smarts as well as physical audacity. Ultimatum's single trump card is sensual assault, and by the time the action hits New York City, the center can no longer hold, the film winding down with an anticlimactic car chase that mirrors the one in Supremacy without adding anything new, and a mushy confrontation with the decrepit doctor (Albert Finney) who programmed Bourne in the first place. Suffice to say that the final revelation, when it does come, seems pale and pitifully small compared to the extravagant mayhem which preceded it. One is left with the underwhelming thought: Oh, so his past is pretty much what we expected. What with the allusions to Abu Ghraib (prisoners with hoods tied over their heads getting dunked in tanks of water), and Greengrass's status as the first man to direct a serious picture about 9-11 (United 93), one suspects that he's reaching for political significance in these closing passages, which seems a bit much given the flimsiness of the story. In Identity, Liman took an almost jocular approach; Bourne was capable of doing amazing things, but that didn't discount the possibility of the audience chuckling a bit at the craziness of his derring-do. Greengrass, on the other hand, is committed to the seriousness of it all, and you may find yourself rolling your eyes when his shakycam, so deft and expressive during the action scenes, transforms what should be a simple dialogue scene at a diner into an epileptic fit.

As Bourne escapes to freedom (and the inevitable sequel), one must ask, where do we go from here? The Bourne series has come full circle: it began with a man minus his memory adrift in the ocean, and it concludes with a shot of a man minus a personality swimming away. As an example of buffed-up action cinema, The Bourne Ultimatum fits the bill, but there's a remarkable hollowness at its core -- after three movies, the chase is over, and what a marvelous chase it has been at times, and yet can one truly say that the story has even begun? Folding back in on itself, like a snake engorged on its own tail, the series is an exercise in high style, conducted in a vacuum.

Homeland Security: "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"

2007-07-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007, Dir. David Yates)

I just feel so angry, all the time. And what if after everything I've been through, something's gone wrong inside me. What if I'm becoming bad?

-- Harry Potter

Harry Potter is an unavoidable fact of our lives, but I always enjoy talking with true Potter-heads, those who have absorbed every arcane bit of knowledge from J.K. Rowling's series, much like Harry pores over dusty old tomes at Hogwarts on a wonderfully dreary Sunday afternoon. As someone with my own obsessions (James Bond, anime, NFL 2k5), I always recognize the wavelength of a True Believer: gaga over the virtues of the thing they love, forgiving of its faults, content to enjoy and explain to others why they enjoy. I am assured by my Potter-loving friends that the Harry Potter movies are better understood and savored when one understands the motivations behind a fleeting supporting character, or the backstory that explains how Harry's prodigious father wasn't such a nice guy after all. Doting and amiable, Potter fans tell me that book five, The Order of the Phoenix, is a pivotal moment in the saga, in that Harry finally decides to do something and rebels against the dark fate that has been ordained for him -- to which I can only reply, Well good, I'm glad he's doing it ... and it only took FIVE BOOKS to reach this point ...

I must resign myself to the realization that I'm probably out of step with this Potter phenomenon anyway. My Potter friends seem united in their conviction that the fourth entry of the movie series, The Goblet of Fire, was easily the worst of the lot, while in my mind it was the best -- for all its sloppiness of construction, there was a kernel of real teen angst at the heart of it, and a restlessness which hinted at greater travails to come. Those travails come hot and heavy in the film version of The Order of the Phoenix, which just as well might have been titled Harry Gets Pissed, and for once there's no pussyfooting around when it comes to the story. Within the first fifteen minutes, Harry comes under attack by Dementors (and in case the name wasn't enough of a giveaway, we're informed that Dementors are very bad), takes a broomstick flight down the Thames, meets up with a rebel faction of sorcerers, and is threatened with expulsion from Hogwarts. Clocking in at under two and a half hours, the rest of the film is similarly jam-packed, the Harry Potter experience distilled and intensified -- more ghoulish apparitions, more hushed whisperings of conspiracy and murky motivations within sealed-off rooms, and a wizard-on-wizard smackdown that will send the kiddies home screeching with joy.

All flipness aside, The Order of the Phoenix has much to recommend it. As ever, the production design and special effects are impeccable, detailed enough to exude wonder and just fake enough to avoid being labored. The juxtaposition of the magic world and the real world generates some lyrical moments, as when Harry and his sorcerer pals take to the night skies of London on their broomsticks and peel past the houses of Parliament -- at moments like these, the Potter series stakes its claim to being the offspring of other English fantasies such as Peter Pan and Mary Poppins, where the commonplace and the fantastic collide. As with other entries in the Potter series, a good part of the fun is spotting the latest esteemed English actor slumming it in a walk-on guest role (hint -- two of Kenneth Branagh's squeezes show up). The standout this time is Imelda Staunton, who is alarmingly giddy as the matronly Dolores Umbridge, a guest lecturer under orders by the Ministry of Magic (bureaucratic and short-sighted, natch) to put free-thinking Hogwarts Headmaster Dumbledore in his place, and ensure that any signs of liberal thinking within the academy are swiftly quashed. Deliciously officious, Staunton reminds us why we have a soft spot for stories about school academies -- it's the never-ending struggle between childlike mischief and po-faced adult strictures.

Unfortunately, Umbridge's appearance just means more misery for poor Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), who is still smarting from his near-fatal encounter with the dread wizard Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) at the climax of his previous adventure. Naturally, no one at the Ministry or the Academy, save the ever-trusty Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), actually believe that Harry actually encountered his archenemy, and thus, he must be muzzled -- any resemblance to any current real-world government is purely coincidental...

If Goblet of Fire really belonged to Emma Watson, whose impatient outbursts barely concealed the yearning, anxious young woman underneath, then Order of the Phoenix belongs to Radcliffe's Harry. [An aside: it's sad to note that Watson's acting seems to have worsened between films.] Snapping at his bullying school tormenters, going head-to-head with the venal Umbridge, and eventually forming his own army of schoolmates as they ready for the coming war with Voldemort, this is a Harry who is prickly and proactive, or at least as much as he's allowed to be in a family film (his outbursts are noted, but their consequences are never lingered over). When the action is focused on him and the school year at Hogwarts, Order of the Phoenix whizzes along at an agreeable rhythm, with plenty of fun grace notes: the unusual spectacle of batty Gary Oldman playing a wise, paternal figure; macabre methods for dealing with recalcitrant students (how about getting your hand carved up?); a CGI giant that is simultaneously comical and ominous; and a school examination that gives way to a riotous explosion of fireworks and teen rebellion.

The Potter universe seems to function best when it comes to these episodic little flourishes; it falters when it comes to an actual throughline for the plot, which this time hinges on an important piece of information about Harry's future which is (gasp!) hidden in a secret location. All but ignored for most of the film, the quest for this information leads to yet another showdown between wizard and wizard, the loss of another friend, another glimpse of Harry's destiny, and then ... whoops, school year is over, so until next time ...

Depressingly, much of what actually happens in Order of the Phoenix reeks of deja vu -- once again Harry is disbelieved, once again there is a showdown with Voldemort in which Harry is bailed out by an adult, once again the story ends on an inconclusive note. Scripted like a Saturday morning cartoon serial writ large, the Potter series holds true to the idea of leaving the audience wanting more, while forgetting to throw that same audience a juicy narrative bone. Director David Yates knows how to keep things moving, and it's clear he has an affection for this universe, but the dollops of personality that Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell heaped on the The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire are in scant evidence here. There are a few gestures towards emotional resonance, including Harry's first kiss with Katie Leung's forgettable Cho Yang (a moment that is as chaste as an after-school special but still generated plenty of oohs and ahs from the young audience I saw the film with), and the implication that Harry is poised on the knife-edge between good and bad, but there's nothing about Radcliffe as an actor that suggests an inner Darth Vader raring to break out.

Perhaps this review comes off as sour grapes -- all Potter fans who line up to see The Order of the Phoenix will most likely go home satisfied, and isn't that what really counts? It all comes back to J.K. Rowling, and the books that started the craze in the first place. It's no wonder that Harry Potter has captured the hearts of millions; his world is just idiosyncratic yet comfortable enough to nestle into our imaginations. Yet that same fussiness that Rowling has applied to her characters and settings threatens to throttle the life out of her plots, which grow unwieldy with secrets, unexplained prophecies and none-too-thrilling twists and turns. Yates does what he can with The Order of the Phoenix, and he deserves some sort of medal for compressing Rowling's rogue narrative into something relatively streamlined. With any luck, he'll keep the pacing up with the next installment of the series, which he is slated to direct, and find a little bit more time for some authentic angst.

Shock Therapy: "Sicko"

2007-07-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

Sicko (2007, Dir. Michael Moore)

"You're not slipping through the cracks. They made the crack and are sweeping you toward it."

-- Health insurance claims adjuster, Sicko

Yes, believe it or not, Michael Moore is a sensitive soul. You wouldn't know it from the likes of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911, in which the Michigan filmmaker perfected the art of the in-your-face, look-at-me documentary, barely pausing for breath as he linked war, pestilence, and the erosion of everything good about the U.S.A. to the government, corporations, gun manufacturers, oil companies, and just about every other nightmare on the paranoid liberal hit list. Strident and snarky, his documentaries refuse to be ignored, but they also opened themselves up for easy dissection by the ultra-conservatives, who took glee in poking holes in his facts and his sanctimonious crusader persona. When Moore took the mike at the Oscars and bellowed against a "fictitious war" created by a "fictitious president," one could have seen the disaster coming from a mile away -- he was in danger of becoming a parody of himself.

And yet, for all his bluster and self-righteousness, Moore is perceptive enough to know when enough is enough -- how else to explain Sicko, his expose on the American health system, in which the rotund, baseball-capped filmmaker refuses to even show himself on screen for the first 40 minutes? When he finally does reveal himself, it is a kinder, gentler Moore that we see, quietly bemused by the follies of health care, sorrowful for an America that is yet to be ("Shouldn't we be better than this?"). Sure he isn't above a little showmanship -- like when he announces that he "anonymously" paid for the health costs of his harshest Internet critic -- but for those who have had enough of his Barnum act, Sicko shows a Michael Moore who is more willing to let the message take the spotlight -- and the result is his most devastating film yet.

And the message is clear: the United States is screwed when it comes to health care. Beginning coyly with a few horror stories (a man without health insurance gets two of his fingers chopped off in a sawing accident, and learns at the hospital that he only has enough money to reattach one), Moore quickly adds that "this film is not about them"; it is about the millions who do have health insurance, and still can't get aid when they need it. The litany of wrongdoing is exhaustive and exhausting, and Moore captures a chunky cross-section of it -- everything from a taped Richard Nixon conversation in which the president opens the Pandora's box of privatized health care to pharmaceutical companies who use their influence in Washington to gain hefty contracts, claims adjusters who are under orders to deny care whenever possible, and elderly patients literally getting dumped on the street in front of a homeless shelter because the hospital refused to take responsibility for them. In the end, it all boils down to money: the insurance company, like any good corporation, wants to make it, and patients will be forced to pay through the nose when they spend it.

It's sobering stuff, and Moore knows it -- he lets the interviewees tell their own stories, which are devastating without need of embellishment. A husband dies because a health insurance company doesn't approve of an experimental drug that might save him. A baby girl dies because the hospital isn't covered in the mother's insurance plan. A woman is charged for an ambulance ride to the emergency room because the ride wasn't "pre-approved" (never mind that she was unconscious at the time). Most affecting of all are the stories of volunteer workers who pitched in at the World Trade Center in the wake of 9/11, and have been refused proper health care for their ailments because they were not "official" rescue workers.

Moore also knows when to get slightly whimsical -- in response to these tales of woe, Moore pays visits to Canada, England, and France, all of which have successful universal health care programs. This leads to some incredulous, amusing scenes in which Moore, playing up the "it can't possibly be better than it is in America" shtick, picks the minds of doctors, patients, and expats alike. And he is shocked, shocked to discover that a doctor in Britain can actually own a comfortable home and two cars despite being shackled by an oppressive socialist medical system, or that every citizen in France is entitled to a nanny when a child is born, free of charge, or that American expats in Paris feel a bit guilty about all the quality care they receive as a matter of course while their families back in the States toil all their lives for inadequate coverage.

During the course of his investigations, Moore lobs a few sobering statistics at us, but the point of Sicko isn't the numbers (no doubt they've already been sliced and diced by the critics), but the unease that we all feel about being helpless at the whims of the U.S. health system. Less a documentarian than a rabblerouser, Moore's movie succeeds admirably as incendiary entertainment, especially when he pulls the stunt of taking the New York rescue workers on an unauthorized trip to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, appealing to the military to let the beleaguered workers make use of the much-touted medical facilities ("We don't want any treatment better than what the evildoers are getting!"). And even this has a startling payoff, as Moore leads the rescue workers into Cuba proper, where they purchase medicine at a fraction of the cost they would be charged in America, and receive much-needed care at a Cuban hospital. It's a moment rich in irony -- the Cubans, the supposed enemies of democracy and freedom, still provide more humane care to Americans than the Americans would get at home -- and even though Moore harps on it a bit too bluntly, as far as rabblerousing goes, it's a doozy.

"Whatever happened to all that lovely hippie shit?" Pete Townshend once wrote in a song, and Sicko closes with a sequence that should warm the cockles of idealists everywhere -- the New York rescue workers, having been treated and feeling good for the first time in years, pay a visit to a local Cuban fire department, where they are greeted like heroes. (Sure it was probably all staged and preplanned, but you'd have to be a mighty Scrooge not to be affected by the moment.) As the men and women embrace, national boundaries broken down, compassion and goodwill toward fellow humans carrying the day, Moore dares to suggest that the America he believes in is an America that is capable of such benevolence and generosity, where one is willing to sacrifice for one's neighbor, with such a sentiment informing our health care, our government policies, our daily lives. For all his calculation and showmanship, it's somewhat endearing to realize that Moore honestly seems to believe in this stuff, and that for all its statistics and tales of woe, Sicko is really all about how people should be nice to each other.

System Crash: "Live Free or Die Hard"

2007-07-03T22:03:00.000-07:00

Live Free or Die Hard (2007, Dir. Len Wiseman)

"You're a Timex watch in a digital world."

-- Thomas Gabriel

"Yippie-kay-yay, mother--" [gunshot]

-- Det. John McClane

The two quotations above spell out Live Free or Die Hard's intent, its raison d'etre. On the one hand, it aims to be a canny update of the original Die Hard concept (with its glorification of the working-class, smartass hero) to a modern, more genteel era of mass terrorism and technogeeks. And on a more commerce-oriented level, it's a PG-13 film, all the better to draw in the wholesome kiddies who deserve carnage without the F-bombs (or as renegade film critic Vern would put it, "Live Free or Die -- Well, Let's Not Die Too Hard, There Are Children Present").

Nearly two decades ago, the original Die Hard was an apotheosis for the action genre -- acknowledging the gleeful, cartoon-like zest of Schwarzenegger and Stallone flicks, and applying the template to a protagonist a little more in line with what a normal American schmo would be like (the balding, wisecracking, almost doughy Bruce Willis), the film was a perfect capper to the Reagan years. As our beleaguered, anything-but-heroic hero John McClane contended with inept or venal institutions (the police, the government, the media) against heavily-accented Eurotrash baddies (led by the irreplaceable Alan Rickman), it was clear that what was at stake wasn't a safe full of cash in a high-tech Japanese corporate building, or even McClane's relationship with his estranged wife (who happily takes back his family name by movie's end), but the respectability of maverick American man-child heroes everywhere. It wasn't enough that Bruce saved the day and struck a blow for men in wife-beater undershirts and bare feet -- he also had to pick glass out of his feet while sobbing that he loved his wife. That curious mix of self-pity (for what is the flip side of being a macho, macho man but claiming to be misunderstood?) and self-deprecating mayhem, along with John McTiernan's take-no-prisoners direction, makes Die Hard a monument to '80s excess, and all the more classic because of it.

Nearly twenty years down the road, you won't find a mainstream Hollywood actioner that can afford to be so vicious, so blatant in its stereotyping, so vibrant in its fascism -- and thus we get a PG-13 Die Hard flick. Setting aside the ludicrous concept of a Die Hard movie that isn't quite so, um, hard, the latest edition of the John McClane story is a reasonable facsimile of the Die Hard template, at least initially. This time the villainy is on a national scale as baddie Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) and his lovely kung-fu assistant Mai (Maggie Q) paralyze computer networks across the country as part of a convoluted scheme that ultimately leads to -- you guessed it -- a gigantic robbery. In their way is McClane, who gets pulled into the affair when he's called in to apprehend computer hacker genius Matt Farrell (Justin Long of the hipper-than-thou Apple commercials), and soon finds himself in his standard poses: holding off nasty henchmen with automatic weapons, trading barbs with his archenemy over the phone, getting pounded into a bloody mess, and generally persevering through guts, sewer-rat tactics, and plain luck.

Director Len Wiseman, best known for the Matrix aesthetics of his Underworld films, approaches this film and its star almost reverently -- despite the gunmetal color palette, the hand-held cameras are steadier, the editing less flashy -- and the initial 45 minutes are deftly paced, as the crisis escalates to a fever pitch. The first act climaxes with one of those classic McClane self-rants as Willis takes himself to task for the madness he is about to unleash, and then does the only sensible thing: driving a police car right into the grille of an attacking helicopter.

Live Free or Die Hard is set to soar at this stage; sadly, it backtracks into noisier, less effective stunts, less wiseacre badinage, and lots of flipping back and forth between locations (in the span of two days, Willis and Long run back and forth across five states). Die Hard functions best when McClane is like a trapped animal, having to fight off evildoers within confined spaces, but here he is a superman who comes and goes as he pleases, flying helicopters (this from the man who hated air travel in the first film), dispatching opponents with Schwarzenegger-like efficiency, and maintaining a cool-cucumber countenance throughout. At times flashes of the old, obnoxious, this-ain't-easy McClane shine through in Willis' modulated performance, but there is little else to convince us that this is the same man who jumped off the roof of a building tied to a fire hose. It doesn't help that Mark Bomback's script doesn't allow him to cut loose, or have anyone to bounce off of; it's more interested in plot logistics and endless scenes of people typing feverishly at computer terminals.

You would expect McClane to butt heads with incompetent higher authorities and beat them at their overly-smug game, but we now live in an era in which authority is meant to be respected, and thus the FBI agents (led by Cliff Curtis in this film) are presented as undermanned but supercompetent -- I'm sure it's a nice tribute to the feds, but it sure ain't that fun, or interesting. You know it's a lost cause when most of the obnoxious humor comes in the form of an extended cameo by Kevin Smith, King of the Hip Blabbermouths, as a computer hacker who still lives in his mom's basement (how original).

As the film proceeds, its generic plotting and tropes become more evident: of course it must get personal for McClane, as his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) falls into Gabriel's clutches (wasn't there a Steven Seagal movie about this?), and of course McClane becomes mismatched buddies with the computer geek he's protecting (to his credit, Long manages to do something with his character despite the hoary conceit). You would hope that the bad guys would give Die Hard a shot in the arm, and Maggie Q does a good job slinking around in black combat fatigues and kicking our hero's ass for a bit ("Enough of this kung-fu shit," he says wearily at one point). Olyphant, however, is a total loss, peevish when he should be silky, dyspeptic when he should be glowering. The climax, which involves a fighter jet, some highway overpasses, and a 18-wheeler, is as artificial (boo, CGI!) and bloated as it can get, and a far cry from the DIY heroics of McClane's salad days.

By the time it ends, with the old war horse McClane nursing his fresh wounds and getting carted off to the hospital one more time, one must ask the question: Is a Timex watch needed in a digital world? The answer is a resounding yes -- but not in a film as formula-bound as this one, in which the thrills are as impersonal and mechanical as the computer-controlled ride at your local amusement park.

Limit on All the Numbers: "Ocean's 13"

2007-06-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

Ocean's 13 (2007, Dir. Steven Soderbergh)

Willie Bank: This town might have changed, but not me. I know people highly invested in my survival, and they are people who really know how to hurt in ways you can't even imagine.

Danny Ocean: Well, I know all the guys that you'd hire to come after me, and they like me better than you.

-- Ocean's 13

You might think that the exchange above is an appetizer, a portent of things to come: a battle of wits and brawn between real estate magnate and all-around scumball Willie Bank (Al Pacino) and our slick operator with the heart of gold, Danny Ocean (George Clooney). That the exchange comes at the climax of the film and is meant as the final word says all you need to know about the third installment in Steven Soderbergh's unexpected trilogy of caper movies: any hint of menace or danger is shrugged off with a smart-aleck line. Ocean's 13 is a thriller without the sweat, a souffle without an ounce of fat or sugar.

Which is not to say that it's surprising that these movies have proven to be popular. Heist flicks have a long and storied history, and the original thinking behind Soderbergh's update of the Rat Pack pseudo-classic from the 60s was unassailable: take the only American actor today capable of channeling the cool-cat calm of the old-style Hollywood stars (Clooney), surround him with a gaggle of young upstarts (Matt Damon, Casey Affleck), veteran hambones (Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner), and respected character actors (Andy Garcia, Don Cheadle), throw in Brad Pitt for good measure, and stir it all into a frothy, if not necessarily heady, brew.

For all its complicated jiggering and plot feints, Ocean's 11 coasted by on Clooney's charm, even as he was saddled with the charmless Julia Roberts as his would-be girlfriend; while the film had fun with the boys-will-be-boys shenanigans of the central heist, making the crux of the story a tug-of-war between Clooney and Garcia for Roberts' heart tended to sully the mix. The less said about Ocean's 12, with its French New Wave poses and over-reflexivity (Julia Roberts' character pretends to be Julia Roberts the actress, how cute!), the better.

Ocean's 13 gets off to a promising start: Danny Ocean is back to his knight-errant ways, as his mentor and pal Reuben (Gould) is swindled out of his life savings and a prime piece of real estate by Pacino's Bank, and left in the hospital with a coma. Vowing to get even, Ocean calls in his trusty right-hand man Rusty Ryan (Pitt) and reunites with his team on his home turf of Vegas, where Bank is scheduled to reap the fruits of his illicit labors with a garish new casino titled The Bank, appropriately enough. The Ocean gang's assignment: force the casino to go belly-up on its opening night. No ladies to moon over this time -- when Pitt asks where Roberts is, Clooney pointedly declares, "It's not their fight." That line, reinforcing the boys-have-more-fun mantra that propelled the best parts of Ocean's 11, suggests that we'll have a similarly fun outing this time around.

And it's fun for a little while, as Ocean and his boys pull together all the cons that will derail The Bank: everything from loaded dice to one of the underground drills that helped build the Chunnel between England and France, all the better to short-circuit The Bank's ultra-advanced AI security system and simulate an earthquake at the appropriate moment. Along the way, we get a host of guest stars -- Eddie Izzard as a hacker genius, Ellen Barkin as Bank's overbearing and undersexed assistant, David Paymer as a hotel reviewer who is about to have the worst stay in the history of casino stays, and Vincent Cassel as a French jewel thief (because you can't have a heist movie without a French jewel thief). We're also treated to unusual sights such as Matt Damon donning a fake nose and seducing Barkin with the help of a pheronome mist; Casey Affleck in a Zapata mustache inciting Mexican sweatshop workers to strike (a complication that is resolved with a simple payout of $36,000, by far the smallest amount of cash paid for anything in this film), Don Cheadle in an Evel Knievel costime, and Clooney tearing up at the sight of Oprah Winfrey helping out some disadvantaged kids on television (a seemingly throwaway moment that leads to the movie's funniest bit).

Overstuffed? It most certainly is that, and Soderbergh, ever the cinephiliac, throws in references to at least a dozen other movies (a 20-second scene with Damon in London exists just so Soderbergh can throw in some shaky-cam action cribbed straight from Damon's Jason Bourne flicks). It all shoots forward agreeably enough, with Soderbergh coating scenes with every day-glo color in the book (the red lighting doesn't do Clooney and Pacino any favors) and indulging in split screens and other editing tricks just because, well, he can. All this flash doesn't disguise the hole at the heart of the narrative, though. The best caper movies work on two levels: they involve us in the caper artists' complicity, and then they make us sweat along with them as they carry out the heist. Rififi, the granddaddy of them all, is the blueprint: with nothing more exotic than carpentry tools and a can of shaving cream, we are let in on the thieves' plan every step of the way, bite our fingernails with them as they carry out their heist, and then nibble some more in the aftermath, when every little thing that could possibly go wrong threatens to ensnare them.

In marked contrast, Ocean's 13 is as grand and unapproachable as a magician's trick: We see expensive pieces manuevered into place, and are meant to gasp in awe at how it all comes together, but it's not half as fun as knowing what the trick is beforehand and wondering if these guys can actually pull it off. And forget about the aftermath; once the heist is over, our heroes are free and clear, without a single threat of retaliation, or a sidewise glance over their shoulders.

Maybe Ocean's 13 is just a souffle, and shouldn't be looked upon as more than a confection, but it does seem pretty leaden for something that's supposed to be light on its feet. The plot is so busy slotting characters into their roles that no one is given room to manuever. Even Clooney and Pitt seem utterly detached: their major role in the affair seems to be sitting around in swank pads and discussing pros and cons. It's one thing to be too cool for school, but it's quite another to be an expensive silk suit sipping iced tea by a poolside and exchanging vaguely cutesy-cryptic dialogue:

Rusty Ryan: Relationships can be so...
Danny Ocean: Sure.
Rusty Ryan: But they're also...
Danny Ocean: That's right.

Stranded on the sidelines, Clooney looks peaked here, like Sinatra after a three-day bender, while Pitt is left spouting meta-commentary about Clooney the star's love life ("When are you going to settle down, get married?"). The others don't fare much better: it's good to see Barkin onscreen again, but she's treated cruelly by the script, just another overbearing bitch that needs to be taken down a few pegs; after a promising introduction Pacino is left to simmer and stew; Bernie Mac is reduced to a three-minute vaudeville number with a rigged casino game; and the other members of Ocean's crew bicker their way into the woodwork. Only Andy Garcia, reprising his role as Terry Benedict, the slimy patsy from the first two Ocean movies, seems to be having any fun.

Ocean's 13 knows exactly what it wants to be -- what it doesn't realize is that it's possible to have a fast, funny caper that also gets high on the fumes of danger. Preferring to do the ring-a-ding-ding rather than ratchet up the stakes, mistaking designer suits for class and busy-ness for wit, it's a monument to safe cinema and reduced expectations, a contraption that favors mechanics over style.

Baby Buggies, Butchered Beatles

2007-06-07T19:18:00.000-07:00

[Originally posted to the Camberwell Carrot blog]

Songwriting's a funny thing. And no, I'm not going to get all confessional and twee on you. I'll let my bandmates Tim, Jason and Ping write about their own creative processes as the spirit moves them. For me, it usually starts with a line or phrase ("Jacky with a Y"), something that suggests something else, and you follow along as best you can, like driving a car at night with malfunctioning headlights, and you think you're doing all right even as the cliff looms.

And then sometimes you get a little dash of inspiration, maybe a riff or a chord -- make that a simple chord, because those are the only ones I can play. So I had this line in my head for a long time -- "Baby buggy, built like a tank" -- and it festered there for quite a while. And then finally one night, looking through my guitar chord encyclopedia, there it was, a D6 chord, and before you can say Paul and John, the opening chords for "Two of Us" were being strummed on my guitar, and just to make the allusion complete, the first words out of my mouth were "Cry, baby, cry." From there I took a few endless hours of playing a tinny demo on loop, scratching lyrics and chord changes in and out, until I had something of my own. Maybe it coheres, maybe it doesn't, depending on whether you want it to or not.

So then you coddle your little creation, style your demo, get a few positive comments from friends who aren't going to say anything negative anyway, and all proud of yourself, you bring "Baby Buggy" to the party when you get together with your band to record music. And the band promptly takes what you've got and blasts off in a new direction. Not different, just a branch-off, as you leave the smooth artificial highway of simple strums and drum machines and barrel down the dusty back roads of fuzzy guitar, keyboard interjections, and snappy snare beats. It isn't a glamorous ride, it's not tidy, in fact it's downright shaggy-dog. But it's real.

That's just the story behind one of the songs we put together at our Shasta sessions. More to follow.

Music and Lyrics: "Once"

2007-06-02T22:09:00.000-07:00

Once (2006, Dir. John Carney)

Once, Once
I knew how to look for you
Once, Once
But that was before
Once, Once
I would have laid down and died for you
Once, Once
But not any more

-- Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, "Once"

They don't make musicals like they used to. For some, that might be a good thing -- in our increasingly prosaic world, the idea that someone would break into song and dance at the slightest provocation seems unreal, overly fantastic, outside the realm of possibility (never mind that classic musicals remain one of Hollywood's best and only expressions of unfettered imagination, without all that "reality" stuff getting in the way). And thus musicals have become more hidebound over recent years, working ever more strenuously to couch their flights of fancy in "realistic" terms. Just look at Chicago: You see, they're not really singing and dancing, it's all in their heads!

The arrival of Once suggests that we've reached a new low in the prosi-fication of musicals -- the songs are real songs, because this is a story about real musicians! Shot in Dublin over a period of 17 days and directed by John Carney, former member of the band The Frames, the film is decidedly un-musical -- filmed on gritty digital video, it has no big dance numbers, no glitzy stars, no big finale. Not even romance -- at least, not the kind of romance you'd expect in a musical (more on this in a bit). Yet Once can't be dismissed as a ramshackle musical-wannabe because it captures something no musical has captured in quite a while: a generosity of spirit, a warmth and sincerity in the telling.

The title Once suggests the preamble of a fairy tale ("Once upon a time...), and like a fairy tale, the film is simple in the setup: Guy meets girl, guy and girl make beautiful music. In this case, the guy (Glen Hansard, lead singer of the Frames) is a busker on the streets of Dublin, making coin with covers of Van Morrison songs by night and working in his dad's vacuum cleaner shop by day. The girl (Czech musician Marketa Irglova) is an immigrant who hops from job to job as a cleaning lady, and she happens to need her vacuum repaired. Impressed by his original songs, the girl tries getting friendly with the guy; still smarting from a recent breakup with a girl who's gone on to the "big time" in London, the guy is initially reticent. When the two of them find themselves in a music shop, and the girl proves to be an accomplished singer and piano player, they collaborate on a song on the spur of the moment...

It sounds like something from A Star Is Born, but the scene in which Hansard and Irglova play together for the first time is anything but precious, and succeeds as a set piece because it captures the honest joy of performance, the way musical ideas and noodlings sometimes coalesce into something whole, like magic. Those going into Once expecting a "boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love" story may be disappointed by the narrative thrust of the film, in which Hansard and Irglova certainly grow close, but are halted just short of love due to other commitments (Irglova cares for her mother and young daughter while waiting for her estranged husband to come to Dublin, Hansard wants to give it another go with his old flame) -- the true romance taking place in this film is the romance of music.

Thus the story of Once is shaped not by the story of two people falling for each other, but two kindred spirits getting together to make an album. As musicians, Hansard and Irglova are perfect sparring partners -- he's impassioned and full of bluster, she's reflective yet heartfelt. The music they make tends to shade towards the Hallmark side of the dial ("Take this sinking ship and point it home, we've still got time"), but in the context of the film, it's the perfect dramatic counterpoint to the understated goings-on -- like all good musicals, we learn more about these people from what they sing than from what they say. Hansard and Irglova also play off each other well as actors; he has a hangdog charm (one thinks of Hugh Laurie with a shaggy Celtic upbringing), and she is an intriguing mix of ballsiness (the way she tosses off the word "fuck" as if it's just another word is a delight) and vulnerability.

Once is very matter-of-fact yet lively about its characters' milieu -- Irglova's home is an overcrowded tenament building where neighbors pop in without warning to watch TV, but it retains a certain charm, while Hansard divides his time between the cold streets and his instrument-infested room at his dad's house, living the life of a kid who hasn't grown up. During the course of the movie we tour the Emerald Isle's sparkling coast, attend an intimate get-together with folk singers, and are given a tutorial on how to bargain for recording studio space. As Hansard and Irglova gather a band and record an album over a whirlwind weekend, the "production numbers" accumulate: Hansard composing a tune to accompany home videos of his lost love, the act reclaiming MTV-style sentiment as something more personal; the initial recording session, which begins with apprehension and reaches joyful release; a late-night piano ballad that finally redcues Irglova to tears; and most memorably, Irglova walking the Dublin streets at night, walkman in hand, singing improvised lyrics to an instrumental, the camera following her all the way from the drugstore to her home in a movement that is simple yet as liberating as any choreographed setpiece.

Once the album is finished, the film should likewise be finished as well, but loose ends need to be wrapped up, our soul-mate musicians resigned to going their separate ways, and even these moments are presented blarney-free -- still, there is something unsatisfying about Hansard and Irglova's parting, mainly because their past loves remain specters, talked about but never felt, and thus their rationales for leaving each other seem undernourished. Or perhaps we've been suckered by old-fashioned musicals into thinking that relationships must be escalated in time for the climax. Surely two people who make such beautiful music should be partners in some fashion ...

Despite the lack of an ending that measures up to the merry music-making that precedes it, Once has the good grace to leave us on a winsome note -- Irglova happily pounding away on a new piano, life in sunny Dublin going on outside her window. I'll wager that Once won't inaugurate a new golden age of musicals, but hopefully it'll serve as a worthy reminder that modesty and charm go a long way these prosaic days.

The Spy Who Lived Twice: James Bond Weekend (Part 1)

2007-05-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

Bless the Castro Theatre -- for old codgers like me (read: people born before 1980), the theater is a treaure trove of golden oldies, forgotten classics, and themed programming. Sure you can probably see many of the films that play there on TV or in pristine DVD prints, but there's something about seeing something on that old-fashioned screen, the ornate palatial walls reminding us that the movie-going experience was like attending mass. It also helps when you're attending a James Bond film festival.

I make no secret about my love of all things Bond, and a mini-festival afforded me the opportunity to catch four films, classics all. In viewing them (in some cases, seeing them on the big screen for the first time), I'm reminded of how elastic Bond is as a cinematic and cultural phenomenon, and I'm also intrigued by how established notions about each of the actors who have played 007 and their movies don't necessarily relate to the actual films themselves. As I took a trip down memory lane, I also found that old critical faculty kicking in, and discovered new things to savor and ruminate over.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977, Dir. Lewis Gilbert)

When you're going downhill on skis at forty miles an hour and someone's trying to put a bullet in your back, you don't always have time to remember a face ... In our business, Anya, people get killed. We both know that. So did he. The answer to the question is yes. I did kill him.

-- James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me

Anticipation for this movie was high, as the special guest of the festival was Richard Kiel, who played the infamous henchman "Jaws" in this film. Now sadly confined to a wheelchair, he could nevertheless make a crack about his condition: "Sorry to be here like this, but I fell out of an airplane without a parachute." In the brief Q&A preceding the film, he noted that he attempted to inject a bit of personality into his heavy (impatience and frustration at Bond always escaping his clutches, little grace notes like brushing off his suit after getting ejected from a moving train). He also mentioned that two different endings were filmed for the character -- one in which he was eaten by a shark, another where he eats the shark and swims away to safety, ready to battle another day (another day coming in the inferior follow-up to this film, Moonraker (1979) -- talk about jumping the shark). When a preview audience went berserk at seeing Jaws survive, his immediate future (and enduring legacy) was secured.

Primed after that introduction, watching The Spy Who Loved Me was a joyous experience. The movie holds a special place in my heart since it was the first Bond film I saw in the cinema, and time has been kind to it. Still as slick, gargantuan, and visionary (yes, visionary) as when it came out, it still stands as a high-water mark in the series, and an apotheosis: no Bond film since has matched its scale and easy jet-setter elegance (although some have tried).

The Spy Who Loved Me marked a pivotal moment in the Bond saga -- with co-producer Harry Saltzman leaving the fold after nine movies, godfather producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli had to go it alone, and he spared no expense, even though the previous entry, The Man with the Golden Gun, had underperformed at the box office. Broccoli responded to the challenge of making Bond relevant again by fashioning the first self-aware Bond epic -- while previous films acknowledged Bond's place in the popular culture with a knowing wink, this was the first Bond movie to borrow wholesale from previous entries, a "greatest hits" cornucopia if you will (the basic plot is lifted pretty much intact from You Only Live Twice). That the film succeeds as well as it does is a testament to the energy and craft of the production team (and lest you think a "greatest hits" package should be an easy thing to enjoy, I refer you to Die Another Day).

Oh, it's indulgent all right, in the way most Bond movies are indulgent. We globe-hop from Austria to Egypt to Sardinia because we can and not because of any rigorous plot logic, and the dastardly plan by villain Karl Stromberg (a phlegmatic Kurt Jurgens) to set off World War III in order to jump-start a new kingdom beneath the sea is the sort of rule-the-world daffiness the series can't get away with now in the wake of Austin Powers. And that's not even mentioning the various Bond mots that induce simultaneous laughs and winces: "When one is in Egypt, one should delve deeply into its treasures"; "Let me try and enlarge your vocabulary"; "Such a handsome craft -- such lovely lines." Watching the movie is a warm reminder of a more innocent time, in which such shenanigans could be looked upon as high style.

The reason the film still works is because it actually attains the high style it aspires to. The crackerjack opening sequence, replete with the famous "ski off a cliff and open a Union Jack parachute" showstopper continues to thrill, especially now that we know such a feat would be produced today with CGI and not agonized over with a real stuntman. The travelogue views of Egypt and the Italian coast are captured with aplomb by the great Jean Renoir (descendant of Claude Renoir), and production designer Ken Adam was never more expressive with his stainless steel sets, juxtaposing mammoth lairs (the interior of the tanker that swallows up hapless Allied submarines ranks as one of the best villain bases of the series) with sexy curvilinear hideouts (dig the escape sub that looks like the olive in a martini glass). And then there's the theme song, "Nobody Does It Better," by Carly Simon; sweetly soaring and romantic, it has the assurance of a hit Broadway tune, and it pins the mood of the movie exactly -- you're going to get a little bit of danger, a little bit of romance,a little bit of comedy, and everyone's going to have fun.

Roger Moore gets a bum rap from many a 007 aficionado, but not from me -- sure he's a far cry from the Ian Fleming character, but in his own distinctive way, he has left his stamp on the series, for no one can go into a Bond movie anymore without expecting smirking wit and debonair savoir faire (just see how people reacted when the anything-but-suave Daniel Craig was announced for the role). Conventional wisdom says that Roger was a fatuous jokester who reduced the role to a parody, but in The Spy Who Loved Me he pulls off a difficult balancing act. For every raised eyebrow and self-satisfied pun he tosses off, there is a counterbalancing moment that actually suggests three dimensions. Take the unfussy, perfectly judged scene in which his counterpart, Russian agent Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach is no actress, but her va-va-voom factor is up there with the best of the Bond girls) starts reciting the facts of his background. The moment she mentions his late wife, Bond's face clouds over and he cuts her off brusquely -- certainly not the "we're only in it for the fun" Roger Moore stereotype. Or take a later confrontation with Anya in which Bond admits that he was probably the man who killed her lover in the pre-credits ski chase: no tricks, no camera cuts to hide any actorly weaknesses here, only Moore playing the scene completely straight, and achieving a dramatic effect that someone like Pierce Brosnan could only dream of. Or savor his execution of Stromberg at the film's climax, as he coldly fires two superfluous bullets into the fallen man -- James Bond the assassin, through and through. His unruffled likeability his secret weapon, Moore is never more interesting than when he slips into seriousness, the transition as smooth as a shift of gears in his Lotus Esprit sports car.

It's a good thing he's in top form here, because the film does get a bit noisy and overproduced by the climax (an affliction common to the Bond films). Still, a sense of grand fun permeates the proceedings, and the gadgets this time out have a kid-in-the-toy-store glee to them, especially that Lotus Esprit, which turns into a sub bristling with rockets, smokescreens, and mines. Crucially, The Spy Who Loved Me never forgets that the best Bond movies have a core seriousness even at their most outlandish. Death is always waiting around the corner in the form of Kiel's Jaws, who features in some grisly executions (he likes sinking his steel teeth into his victims' necks Dracula-style). While Moore's face-offs with Kiel don't have the rough-and-tumble choreography we associate with today's buffed-up action heroes, they do have more wit to them (be careful around lamps or you might get short-circuited), and Moore's looks of alarm humanize his Bond -- sure he's smooth as silk, but he gets just as worried as the rest of us would be when confronted by a seven-foot-tall assassin with steel dentures. Likewise, the film's climax aboard the enemy tanker is a riot of choreogaphed mayhem, but it's stage-managed with brisk clarity by Lewis Gilbert, who has been better than any other Bond director at capturing the spectacle of armies duking it out within a confined space.

It all ends -- as Bond films usually do -- with the comforting sight of Bond bedded down with his latest conquest, surprised by his higher-ups, getting off a final zinger ("Just keeping the British end up, sir"), the theme song ushering us out on a high. "Nobody does it better," Carly Simon croons, and the film lives up to that boast. Formulaic as it most certainly is, The Spy Who Loved Me luxuriates in the Bond-ness of it all, content to wallow in the standard tropes and present it all with a cheeky smile and pop-art polish. We will probably never see its like again.

Ground Zero: 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival (Part 7)

2007-05-06T21:49:00.000-07:00

The Other Half (2006, Dir. Ling Yiang)

"Half of life is fucking up, the other half is dealing with it."

-- Henry Rollins

On the face of it, this is an oddity of a film -- a modest indie feature set in Sichuan province, using a cast of unknowns (mostly friends and relatives of the director-producer team of Ling Yiang and Peng Shan), shot on consumer-grade DV, graced with some of the most primitive foley effects you can imagine, a film that puts the "low" in "low budget". But the history and fact of its existence might be the even greater story here, and a sign of what the future might hold for indie filmmaking in China.

The story is reminiscent of the "cinema verite" projects of Zhang Jiake (Platform, Unknown Pleasures) -- it's a long, almost clinical look at small lives in a small town. Zeng Xiaofei (played by, er, Zeng Xiaofei) is a young, average woman (although everyone she meets notes her facial similarity to Zhang Ziyi) who ends up taking a job as a stenographer for a law office that appears to be run in what remains of a barnhouse. There we're exposed to a multitude of stories from clients who come in, seeking legal counsel. As you would expect, their stories are nutty and whimsical, and are lifted from real-life cases: husbands who bite off the ears of their wives; wives who steal their husbands' clothes; a PR flak who wants to sue her company because her liver's been destroyed by all the late-night drinking binges she's been forced to take her clients on; a woman who isn't allowed to divorce an army officer.

Outside the office, life unspools slowly in Xiaofei's little town, although there are alarming signs that things are going to pot. The pretty woman who runs the wedding shop down the street from Xiaofei is murdered (we don't see the act, we only see the boarded-up shop in the aftermath, followed by its transition into a seedy mahjong parlor). state-sanctioned news broadcasts assuring the citizenry that the local chemical plant is "completely safe" ring hollow. Xiaofei's mother parades prospective grooms before her, including a local boss who insists on whipping out his laptop and explaining his business on their first date. In the meantime, Xiaofei's heart belongs only to Deng Gang (Deng Gang), a ne'er-do-well with gambling issues and a fear of long-term commitment -- or might he be involved with the recent spate of murders in town? Things get complicated when Xiaofei's long-missing father shows up and the chemical plant experiences an explosion that throws everything into disarray.

Most of the film is composed of long and medium shots of the characters and their surroundings, and in the process we see a bombed-out town: rainy flyovers and intersections, cracked streets, tawdry little dance halls and restaurants. Despite the limited budget, Ying wrings out some striking compositions, including a final shot down the length of a bridge that haunts in its matter-of-factness. Primitivist in the telling (the acting and overall look won't win any awards), the movie is a bit overlong with repeated episodes, and we're kept at a remove from our heroine's troubles and fears. In that sense, the film is kin to Zhang Jiake -- we observe these people like bugs under a glass, but we also sense a certain understanding and sympathy for their plights, as distant as they may seem. And the glancing criticisms of urban decay and the government's role in said decay are surprisingly strong, too.

And that's where the true import of the film lies; in the Q&A with the film's producer and director, it came out that since the film was never intended for standard theatrical distribution, it never had to pass through the usual censors that screen films in China, and went straight to the DVD (and bootleg DVD) circuit, where it apparently has made the rounds all over the country. That type of artistic freedom might have seemed impossible only a few years ago, but with the explosion of multimedia in China, the fact that The Other Half, with its unsparing look at disintegrating town life, is making festival rounds (just before it arrived in SF, it was at a Korean film festival) in an uncensored format bodes well for filmmakers who want to take on more experimental, hard-hitting stories without fear of reprisal. In a developing industry that's already experiencing the prestige picture/indie movie bifurcation that's happened in America (compare Curse of the Golden Flower to this film), something like The Other Half, flaws and all, is a depth charge, a small but essential step forward.

Time and Tide: San Francisco International Film Festival (Part 6)

2007-05-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

The Old Garden (2006, Dir. Im Sang-Soo)

"Life is long, history is longer."

-- Oh Hyung-Woo, The Old Garden

One of the reasons modern Korean cinema is so popular, in my humble opinion, is that it rides a fine line between drama and melodrama. If nothing else, there's passion in there, even when things go over the top. At their best they remind me of classic Hollywood films, using popular formulas for unusual ends (like the monster-horror film The Host, where the true horror isn't the monster but the American military-industrial complex). In introducing The Old Garden, presenter Roger Garcia put forth the notion that the film hearkens back to the "integrity of mid-90s Korean cinema." Armed with that supposition, and knowing that this film concerned the infamous Gwangju massacre and its aftermath, I was expecting a full-on tear-fest, an emotional wringer.

There's certainly some of that going on in The Old Garden, but it's a much different movie than that, and is ultimately more interesting because of it. The bare-bones story is pretty conventional -- former activist Oh Hyung-Woo (Ji Jin-Hee), finally released from prison after 16 years and 8 months, returns to a modern Korean society more fascinated with designer suits and organic food than the democratic ideals that he and his comrades risked their lives for two decades earlier. In passages that wouldn't be out of place in a Hemingway novel, he takes a long solitary trek out to the countryside, where he once sought refuge from the police years before, and idled away his forced "vacation" in the cabin of teacher and painter Han Yoon-Hee (Yum Jung-Ah). Yoon-Hee is now dead, and as Hyung-Woo reminisces about the brief tryst he had with her, he discovers that Yoon-Hee had a daughter who might be his...

Charged stuff, and we're not shielded from the violence of olden days (the Kwangju massacre is represented with a simple, affecting scene of bloody body bags filling a gymnasium), or the disillusion of a political movement fading from public consciousness (in the present day, Hyung-Woo's former comrades are either dead, mentally and emotionally scarred, or nouveau yuppies happy to cash in on the new Korea). But mostly the movie is a duet between Yoon-Hee and Hyung-Woo, even though the two of them are separated for over half the film. In marked contrast to your typical Korean drama, the relationship between the two of them is quiet, unforced, even jokey at times. He may be an activist but he's still a mischievous kid at heart; she's a cynic who doesn't necessarily agree with these intellectual socialist workers but she's still susceptible to love and loneliness. There's little hand-wringing going on, in fact they both seem almost pragmatic about their relationship, but it still leads to a farewell during a rainy night that is as moving as any farewell I've seen in the cinema recently.

Director Im (who also helmed A Good Lawyer's Wife) was in attendance, and in the Q&A afterwards he mentioned that he wanted to give the film a certain lightness that you wouldn't expect in a film with this subject matter, and he wanted to draw out unusual, career-best performances from its popular leads. Mission accomplished. Yum in particular brings a lot of shades to her character -- she can be tetchy and inflexible, and she isn't the perfect parent to her daughter, but we're with her every step of the way in her story, which actually is the true story of this movie -- a lone woman negotiating the political currents, withstanding the loss of friends and lovers through the years as she waits for her man even as she's dying of cancer. Compare that to other Korean films about Gwangju like Peppermint Candy, in which the event is a traumatic trigger that rips lives to shreds -- this one is more about receding waves of time, in which waiting for a man (and all he represents) becomes like a wait for a ghost, or for a figment of a past that might have only been there for a second.

It all comes together with a reunion of father and daughter in the winter streets of Seoul, and even then we don't get sentimentality, just a bemused meeting of two strangers. The past may be fabrication, as Yoon-Hee demonstrates with a final painting in which a handsome portrait of Hyung-Woo as a youth sits side-by-side with a realistic portrait of a chemotherapy-ravaged Yoon-Hee, but the acts of imagination and longing conquer all. Not so much about resignation as it is about acceptance, The Old Garden is a delicate reverie with a slight smirk; "We've all become asswipes!" one of the characters snarls at one point, and this may be true, and yet this fact is acknowledged and forgiven.

We Are Family: 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival (Part 5)

2007-05-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

Singapore Dreaming (2006, Dir. Yen Yen Woo, Colin Goh)

"We wanted to present Singapore family life today -- which is quite screwed-up and dysfunctional."

-- Yen Yen Woo

I must give kudos to my friends at the Yahoo IN Film Group -- if I didn't score an extra ticket from them, I would have missed what turned out to be my favorite film from this year's festival. The synopsis for this film in the festival program gave me the impression that this was one of those cutesy, cross-generational family dramas in which all complications are wrapped up neatly and resolved by the end. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The directors Yen Yenn Woo and Colin Goh were at my screening, and in their introduction to this film, they mentioned that they believe it mirrors the current state of family life in Singapore. Uncle Loh is a loan collector with dreams of hitting it big and moving into the latest modern housing, even as he tramps around his home in tanktop and briefs, cutting out potential winning lottery numbers from the newspaper. His ever-tolerant wife puts on her best smile and makes herbal tea for everyone, while his two children, daughter Mei and son Seng, vie for his approval. Mei is obsessed with money and must put up with a demeaning job working for a real estate magnate even as a baby is on the way, while her hapless husband CK, fresh from the army and with no idea of how to live a working man's life, makes a go of it trying to sell insurance to his old high school classmates. Seng is back from the States, having graduated from a technical college in Idaho no one has heard of, and trying to hide the fact from the family and his steadfast girlfriend Irene that he's really a slacker who has no chance of living up to the family's belief that he's the prodigal son.

For the first half-hour or so we settle in with this family and all its internecine jealousies and resentments, and enjoy the lightly sardonic proceedings. Then the ticking bomb explodes: Loh wins the lottery, and receives two million dollars, setting off a mad grab by his brood for whatever money they can get their hands on. Things only get uglier from there when one of the main characters dies and the funeral sets off all the brewing tensions within the family.

In form and plot, the film resembles one of Ang Lee's early projects, and the finale is very Ang-ish, as an elder member of the family effectively has the last word (think of the ends of Wedding Banquet and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman), but in tone and presentation, this has more in common with the work of Taiwanese director Edward Yang, who takes a hatchet to middle-class society and exposes the festering hurts underneath in his social comedies (A Confucian Confusion, Mahjong). Rowdy and sometimes vulgar, Singapore Dreaming touches on many of the foibles of modern Singapore (and modern Asia in general) -- the endearing crassness of the nouveau riche as they seek out the latest status-symbol credit cards, SUVs, and domiciles, the sterility of modern office life, the snobbery that goes on between the middle class and their Southeast Asian maids, social lies compounded upon exaggerations all in the name of saving face.

In the process we get a dizzying glimpse of Singapore culture with its mongrel mix of Chinese and English dialects, and the tensions between ethnicities and classes (CK endures an incongruously funny conversation with a mainland China party girl), not to mention the tackiness of certain funeral rituals -- you'll never look at house models the same way ever again. No punches are pulled, and you'll probably squirm in your seat as you see some of these family arguments and confrontations unfold; it's like having front-row tickets to your least favorite family dust-ups. Directors Woo and Goh said that they constructed the plot based on an amalgamation of stories they received from local Singaporeans on the topic of "materialism," but it's amazing how seamless it all is. All the characters are despicable and/or pathetic in some way, but it's to the film's credit that you end up feeling for all of them -- well, all except maybe one who shall remain nameless, but rest assured that everyone receives a just desert at the end, after a fashion.

In character dramas such as this, much depends on the acting, and there's no weak links in the cast. Richard Low, who's apparently known as a stage actor, is great as patriarch Loh, and I was also taken with Yeo Yann Yann (Mei), who resembles a young Sylvia Chang -- her breakdown from bossy wife to distraught moneygrubber might be the most affecting storyline in the movie.

As far as I know, this one hasn't been picked up for distribution in the U.S. yet, but I can't imagine it'll be too long before it happens -- if there's any country out there that can get into the whole "dysfunctional family" thing, it's us. And you have to like any film that has a director like Goh, who had some very useful advice for anyone who finds him or herself in the middle of an ugly spat: "If you're about to argue, go out and eat. After a good meal, the argument just doesn't seem important any more."

Stranger Than Fiction: 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival (Part 4)

2007-04-29T21:01:00.000-07:00

How Is Your Fish Today? (2006, Dir. Xiaolu Guo)

"I think it must be nice because that's how I imagine it."

-- Tourist interviewed on train to Mohe

What do you do when you set out to make a documentary about a town that has a lot of romantic lore associated with it, and find out that the town isn't really all that? That's what confronted the director of this movie, and How Is Your Fish Today? is her response.

The town in question is Mohe, the northernmost village in China and supposedly the best place in the country to catch the Northern Lights. The film starts with random interviews of passengers on the train to Mohe, and their thoughts on traveling to this near-sacred location. And then fiction enters the fray -- we are introduced to Rao Hui, a struggling soap opera screenwriter in Beijing who is trying to jump-start his career with something, anything fresh. Spending aimless days at home with his goldfish "Belle du Jour" (he's a sucker for European New Wave), he hits on the story of a young escaped murderer named Lin Hao, and his protracted journey to Mohe. And so it goes for the rest of the film -- straight documentary material about Mohe juxtaposed with the story of Lin Hao, much of it told with voice-over narration and saturated still photographs, like Chris Marker's film La Jetee (the original inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys).

Unfortunately, I missed the screening that included a Q&A with Guo Xiaolu, the film's director; I would have liked to have asked her what the principal thrust of the narrative is. The fictionalized story of Lin Hao takes some interesting detours, including an interlude in a basement hostel in Wuhan where he meets a chatty salesman, and a tryst with a woman who offers him shelter in Beijing, but soon this plot within the plot is divorced from motive and motivation. The character of the screenwriter Rao Hui receives a bit more development -- it's clear he's tired of the city life and looks to the stories of Mohe, and Lin Hao, as some sort of enactment of his vicarious dreams. Still, all this feels like padding, a feint to draw our attention away from the flimsiness of the central documentary.

But the funny thing is that the best aspect of the film is the straight documentary footage of Mohe. It isn't anyone's idea of a postcard village, and yet the daily routines there have an undeniable charm -- the social gatherings at the local church, the easy banter between a husband and wife as he devours fish at the dinner table and she just watches, the radiant glow of a stove at night (the only "Northern Lights" the director witnessed, apparently), the catching of fish in a frozen lake. In the end, Rao Hui is somber, his illusions about this magical place shattered, as he literally abandons his character Lin Hao in the snowy wilds: "All that remains is this naked icy landscape. But I needed to come here to see that there's nothing to see. Now I feel peaceful." Maybe his comment is commentary on the jaded urbanite's need to believe in the healing powers of nature and good old-fashioned rural living, and all those other cliches, but even though the film is artfully shot on DV and deserves points for its unusual approach, it still strikes me as the plaint of a director who is disappointed that her film subject wasn't all that.

This Woman's Work: 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival (Part 3)

2007-04-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

A Few Days Later... (2006, Dir. Niki Karimi)

This is my lifetime's work.

-- Female author, A Few Days Later...

It's been about a decade since Abbas Kiarostami put Iran cinema on the world map with his "earthquake" trilogy and A Taste of Cherry, and it's interesting to see how much things have changed and stayed the same with this film, which stars and is directed by Niki Karimi, who was an assistant director to Kiarostami on some of his later projects. It starts off as a Kiarostami film might -- a car driving on a lonely mountain road at night. In the car is Shahrzad (Karimi), who receives a cryptic message from a man on her phone, and then without further explanation, it is the next morning, and we follow Shahrzad to her job as a modern-day graphic designer in Tehran. Her first assignment of the day is to design the cover for a famous female author's collected writings; even though we never see the author again, her plea for Shahrzad to do a good job, as the book is her "lifetime's work," are a hint to the direction this film will take.

Shahrzad's own work is never done, it turns out. At first she seems confident, self-possessed, secure, but as the film proceeds we come to understand her problems, as she's burdened by a mix of old-world and new-world concerns: a sick father who needs her attention, a handicapped son who is about to get kicked out of a day care center because he's too "old," an estranged husband (the mysterious voice on the answering machine) who is desperate for a reconciliation, a male boss and picky clients who doesn't appreciate her efforts, builders who are taking way too long to renovate her home, an annoying neighbor who keeps parking in her space with his SUV...

This is a feminine, and feminist movie -- men are mostly absent, and the ones who are present tend to be bossy, annoying, or ailing. But even as Shahrzad tries her best to forget her everyday pressures with the help of a photographer girlfriend, it's clear that the perpetual frown on her face is her response to being forced to make her way in a patriarchal society. While cars in Kiarostami films symbolize freedom, connection with others, and the bridging of gaps, here they're just brief respites, as the only times Shahrzad can even try to relax are when she's making the long lonely commute home from work, or when she's driving with her girlfriend to the sounds of the latest Iranian pop song...and even then she remains somber, exhausted, her misery only slightly alleviated.

So a feel-good movie this ain't, but it's no weepie, either -- it's just a bracing, cool, rueful look at women's lot in the modern world, and well done. Very well photographed, too: this is a modern Tehran we haven't seen in many movies, a collision of lighted superhighways at night and dusty mountain roads, high-tech marketing billboards and run-down hospital buildings. But it all starts and ends with Karimi, who turns out to be quite an actress for a director -- her character's range of expression is limited, but within that range we read uncertainty, rage, resignation, despair. The movie ends with a close-up on her stunned face, a storm on the way, and it suggests that what we've seen is just a prelude; the real story will happen when she decides how she confronts her predicaments. It's a nice analogue for Iranian cinema, and its unknown roads ahead as the country continues to modernize.

Family Man: 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival (Part 2)

2007-04-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

Colossal Youth (2006, Dir. Pedro Costa)

"When they give us white rooms, we'll stop seeing these things."

-- Ventura, Colossal Youth

Sometimes I find that the more I get into a film, the less notes I take while I'm watching it -- I'm just caught up in the experience. And then there's a film like Colossal Youth, which is mundo colossal in its runtime (over two and a half hours), and I find I have pages and pages of scribbles that desperately try to make sense of what was onscreen. I saw this one in the early afternoon, and good thing too, because we probably wouldn't have made it through otherwise. "Endurance test" might not be the right phrase, but it's close.

This is apparently the third in a trilogy of movies that take place in a run-down housing district in Lisbon, where society's unwanted and refugees from Cape Verde hang out. All the "actors" are real people, and their stories are real, but this isn't a documentary -- it's more like a collection of random scenes from their daily lives as the world around them changes. Mostly the focus is on an older man named Ventura who ambles back and forth between the tenements and the new, clean, sterile projects the residents are being moved into. Ventura plays "father" to the motley crew who populate the slum, and nearly every scene is organized the same way: Ventura pops in on an old friend, the friend updates Ventura on his or her life with a lengthy monologue that somehow walks the line between naturalistic conversation and stagey soliloquy, further pleasantries are exchanged, and at a seemingly arbitrary point, the scene ends.

Sometimes the scenes take on a theatrical intensity -- a striking nighttime tableau at the film's beginning sees Ventura's wife leaving him, and the camera lingers on the enraged woman, holding up a kitchen knife to fend off the unseen Ventura, her complaints about his unsuitability as a man reverberating like a litany. Other memorable bits involve Vanda, a woman who's recovering from drug addiction and trying to raise her daughter Bete, and a younger worker who's forever composing/reciting a love letter to his estranged wife that morphs with each recitation.

I'm tempted to say this might make more sense if you've seen the first two films, but somehow I doubt it. The intensity level stays about the same throughout (that is, pretty meditative and not much more), and what little plot there is comes from the movement of the slum's residents to the new homes, but there seem to be some tricks in time going on here -- one scene Ventura has a bandage on his head from an unexplained injury, and that next appears to take place some time before or after. I will say, though, that the mood of the film sticks with you -- the cinematography has a casual artiness to it, contrasting the closed-off spaces of the new apartments (there's much ado about doors swinging closed) with the more homey, open-air squalor of the old digs, and director Pedro Costa has much respect and empathy for his subjects. I can see this film being best experienced piece by piece, over a period of several days, each individual scene given enough space to sink in.

I saw this movie at the Sundance Kabuki, and in a weird little bit of synchronicity, I could hear construction crews sawing and hammering away in the next theater while this film unfolded -- for a long time I thought the noises were coming from the movie itself. It seems fitting, since this is a film about lives in construction, or demolition, a workbook kind of story.

The Art of Alchemy: 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival (Part 1)

2007-04-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

The tone was set as I stood in line for my first viewing of the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival at the Museum of Modern Art: A middle-aged couple standing behind me were grumbling about the design of the interior of the museum, which was, in the words of the man, a "fucking shoebox." Later I would find out that the man was an architect, and as I filed into the theater, noticing the grizzled, onery oldsters in the crowd, I mused once again about how you can tell what the subject of a film will be, based on the audience.

I've always been ambivalent about film festivals, and the ambivalence comes through loud and clear when it comes to the SF International Film Festival. It's an indispensible event for anyone who loves film, even in this media-savvy age where movies can be downloaded at a drop of a hat -- at its best, it's like a friend tapping you on the shoulder and whispering, Hey have you heard about this film?

On the other hand, there's always a whiff of self-congratulation about festivals like these, that those faces in the crowd are people who "wouldn't be caught dead" watching a film at the local cineplex. It's the same feeling one gets when a snooty waiter at the local high-class restaurant looks you up and down when you enter: Are you worthy of this feast? Surely you recognize quality when you see it ...

In the end, movies are a personal communion -- sure we might laugh and cheer and get caught up with the audience reactions, but it's only the recollection of the event, the post-mortem over a beer at the local beer or a sudden memory of the film days or months later, that seals our opinions of it. So setting aside the accoutrements, the hype, and the black-tie element to the festival, what's left are the films.

Murch (2006, Dir. Edie & David Ichioka)

"Every film we make is a foreign language we need to learn."

-- Walter Murch

It was fitting that I kicked off my participation in this year's festival with this documentary, as it reminds us that the Bay Area was the locus for some pretty amazing films in the '70s that basically changed mainstream cinema as we know it.

The film is a simple sit-down conversation with editor Walter Murch, the man responsible for cutting and pasting Francis Ford Coppola's classics, and more recently, Anthony Minghella's films. Shot by former assistant Edie Ichioka, with cutesy little editing flourishes (jittery cuts between thoughts, ambient noise for when he's referencing certain sound effects like a helicopter or an overhead train, floating heads of directors and producers sitting on his shoulder), it's basically a master seminar on editing (and indeed, most of it seems to come from Murch's editing seminars, the material of which can also be found in his book In the Blink of an Eye). His personality is a bit on the dry side, but he's articulate and insightful about the process, which is a mix of steady calculation (among his many metaphors is the film as a body which "accepts or rejects" what you're doing to it), alchemy (layering random musical layers for the infamous "horse head" scene in The Godfather), and pure serendipity (the accidental superimposition of Hungarian folk chants and Bach's Goldberg variations for the finale of The English Patient).

In addition to the basic editing principles (cutting to visuals before shaping the sound, finding the film's internal rhythm, the inertia of motion carrying over from cut to cut, what it means when an actor blinks), Murch gets the point across that editing is less about chopping visual images together than it is about shaping the entire film experience, facilitating, translating. Sound is how Murch came to editing -- he had a childhood fascination with tape recorders, and it merged with his subsequent editing career. Even though he's from the older generation, he's well up on today's computer-aided editing methods and approves of them -- in the Q&A after the film he said that it's easier than ever to have everyone involved in the editing of a film because of today's tools. When asked about the frenzied editing in today's action films he had a very specific answer: no more than 14 setups for each minute of an action scene. He also notes the influence of commercials and short-attention span TV on today's feature films (for that reason, he doesn't have broadcast TV at home). Finally, he had some good advice for those aspiring filmmakers and artists in the audience, lifted from Leonard Bernstein: "The only two things you need for a project are a plan, and not quite enough time."

The film Murch is just a brief survey of his methods, but in its breadth it's very entertaining, and I recommend it for anyone who has any interest in the art of editing, and as a glimpse into cinema history. You certainly won't watch Willem Dafoe's thumbs getting cut off in The English Patient or the opening firestorm of Apocalypse Now in the same way ever again.

The Beautiful Ones: 2007 SF Asian-American Film Festival (Part 4)

2007-03-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

It's Only Talk (2005, Dir. Ryuichi Hiroki)

"There is no trace of chic in Kamata."

-- Shinobu Terashima

One of my favorite films from the 2005 SF International Film Festival was Vibrator (2003) by Ryuichi Hiroki. His only previous claim to fame was as a director of "pink" movies, and the scenario of Vibrator has a whiff of that genre (lonely woman spends a few days on the road with a hot young truck driver, indulging in plenty of sex), but the film turned that genre (and the genre of the road movie) inside out: the young woman wasn't a vacuous sex object but a psychically damaged, flesh-and-blood creature, fully aware that her antics were merely a brief respite from her troubled life. Unhurried and humane, Vibrator can be seen as the descendant of the films of Mikio Naruse, in which women are front, center, unadorned, empathetic, luminous.

Lo and behold, it's 2007, and Hiroki's It's Only Talk is one of my favorite films from this year's festival. A gentler film than Vibrator, it nevertheless continues down the same road, and it's an even stronger effort. Hiroki's movies aren't plot-driven -- a lot happens, and people change, but he's not one for the standard A-to-B curve of a drama. He prefers to follow the rhythms of his female protagonists -- in this case, Yuko (Shinobu Terashima, who also starred in Vibrator), a woman very much on the fringe of Japanese society. In her mid-thirties, struggling with manic depression, unable to hold a job or anything resembling stability, she decides to move to Kamata, a dull little town outside Tokyo, a place where there is "no trace of chic." Like town, like resident -- while both appear to be flat, underneath their placid exteriors is oodles of quirkiness. Soon Yuko is building a website extolling the town's virtues: a playground made completely of tires (including a towering tire Godzilla), a house bursting with moss on its walls, a ferris wheel that leads to a surprising panoramic view. She whiles away her days with similarly offbeat men: Honmu, an old college classmate who's now a local politician with problems "getting it up"; Noboru, a manic-depressive yakuza member who longs for the days of his youth; Mr. K, a kindly old man who pleasures her with a vibrator in public places.

At first Yuko seems perfectly self-possessed, content to hang out with her odd buddies and shrug off their advances, but then the order of things is upset when her flashy country cousin Shoichi (Etsushi Toyokawa) reenters the picture. An old high school flame (she lost her virginity to him), he's a bit gauche in his Hawaiian shirts and vintage convertible, and for the past six years, he's languished within a loveless marriage. We soon learn that in those six years, Yuko was hospitalized for her illness, and has never quite recovered. She's still given to embellishing on the truth of her background; she claims her boyfriend died in the Tokyo gas attacks, that her parents died in an earthquake. When Shoichi walks out on his wife and crashes at Yuko's place, the stage is set for some bonding and soul-searching.

Aha, you think; these two will heal each other, and this will lead to a sweet, moving conclusion -- maybe they'll even get together. Well, yes and no. Hiroki isn't interested in the easy way out -- he prefers the journey to the destination. As Yuko and Shoichi grow closer (there are some outstanding vignettes here, including a funny episode at a horse track and a karaoke scene that trumps a similar moment in Lost in Translation), the movie is lighter than air ... and then it crashes down when Yuko is hit with a particularly nasty bout of depression. Steadfast and honorable, Shoichi stays with her and slowly nurses her back to sanity, and it is these small scenes (the cooking of dinner, the buying of medicine, the washing of clothes) in which the soul of It's Only Talk resides. As the title suggests, Yuko's natterings are a front, a clever means to hide the confusion within, and it is only in silence -- the breaking of morning sun through the blinds, a smile of thanks -- that true communication lies. When a rehabilitated Yuko and Shoichi acquire two goldfish and name them Laurel and Hardy, it's a reflection of the film's theme: a mismatched duo who somehow complete each other. It all builds to a memorable kiss, and an ending that can only be called bittersweet, as each character receives an unexpected but fitting sendoff.

Hiroki is a simple filmmaker: there are no fancy camera tricks or editing on display, just a light touch and an attentiveness to details and his actors. Terashima and Toyokawa have great chemistry, but the film really belongs to Terashima. A well-known stage actor, she seems to have created her own character type in Japanese film: the knowing yet damaged outsider. She's pretty but not cute; grounded but not stilted; expressive but naturalistic. One moment she seems as young as a teenager, and the next as mature as a middle-aged woman, and her elasticity is perfect for a role like this, in which Yuko is trapped in a neverland between adulthood and adolescence.

The final shot in the movie is Yuko in isolation, sitting in her favorite public bathhouse -- in previous visits she had refused to remove her towel because she claimed she was covered in tattoos (another fib, we suspect), but now is she naked, submerged in water, only her face and shoulders visible, tears working their way down her face. "Everyone has gone away," she sighs. Are her tears those of resignation or catharsis? We're not sure, and I don't think Hiroki is, either. Both a return to innocence and an acknowledgment that things always change, It's Only Talk drips with humanity -- a paean to the random connections we make with ourselves and others, a wry confession that life is always in progress.

Boys Will Be Boys: 2007 SF Asian-American Film Festival (Part 3)

2007-03-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

Dragon Boys (2006, Dir. Jerry Ciccoritti)

Andrea Jiang: You’re out there on the front line, stamping out the yellow peril. These guys threaten how you see yourself, so you’re out there like a Samurai warrior, taking them on one by one. You know, you could say something if you really wanted to. This is our lives we're talking about.

Tommy Jiang: Samurai are Japanese.

---

The longest film in this year's festival wasn't even a film -- it was actually a four-hour Canadian miniseries (three hours plus commercials) that aired on CBC TV a few months ago. Transplanted directly from the tube to the big screen, Dragon Boys aims to be a sprawling saga of cops, criminals, and civilians, with Chinese actors unapologetically taking center stage. Director Jerry Ciccoritti, who was in attendance, assured the crowd before the film started, "It's long, but I promise you it goes by fast."

Fortunately, he wasn't lying. At three hours, you might shift in your seat a few times, but Ciccoritti, a veteran TV director, knows how to keep things moving. Like any good work of serial fiction, a lot of the fun comes from following the multiple storylines and characters as they criss-cross and collide with each other. Things start off with an immediate bang as Chinese thugs raid a Caucasian gangster's home and proceed to slice off his face with a meat cleaver (mercifully offscreen). Investigating the crime is detective Tommy Jiang (Byron Mann), your typical distracted family man and dogged cop, and he soon finds himself involved in a power struggle between two Chinatown crime lords -- top dog Willie "the Duck" Lok (Eric Tsang, basically reprising his baddie role from Infernal Affairs) and young upstart Simon Au (Lawrence Chou), also known as "Movie Star" (you know you're in Chinese crimeland when characters have names like Movie Star, Fox Boy, and Fat Ass, and new criminal recruits are dismissed as "eggrolls").

Soon innocents are pulled into the fracas: Jason (Simon Wong), the disgruntled teenage son of upstanding restaurant owners Henry and Mae Wa (real-life couple Tzi and Christina Ma) falls in with Movie Star's crew when they save him from racial harrassment by the local high school bullies. Before you can say "pear-shaped" an initiation robbery leads to an unexpected murder, and Jason is on the lam. Meanwhile, cutesy Cambodian immigrant Chavy (Steph Song) arrives in Vancouver, expecting to work as a model, but she discovers that she's actually been drafted to work at the local massage parlor/brothel run by Willie the Duck's estranged wife Belinda (Jean Yoon).

There's your scorecard -- now add some peripheral henchmen, assorted assassination attempts and games of one-upmanship, and enough tangled plotlines to fuel a few seasons' worth of drama, and play ball. Dragon Boys is unapologetic genre entertainment, replete with no-nonsense TV rhythms and the usual signposts of a tough gangland thriller: sleek Mercedes sedans, belligerent cell phone calls, wiseguy conferences that deteriorate into "mine is bigger than yours" face-offs, people's skulls getting battered by shiny briefcases and clubs, bloody clothes in garbage bags, glittering nightclubs and hookers, hands submerged in boiling cooking oil.

But apart from a few f-bombs and a scene or two of pummeling, there's little here that will confuse this with The Sopranos, because Ciccoritti is a relatively genteel director, more interested in plot movement than character. This is a good thing, because Ian Weir's script tends to lean towards what I call the James L. Brooks school of character development: Take an established stereotype, throw in a reversal to give the illusion of three-dimensionality, run with it. For example, Jiang may be a good cop, but he's a "whitewashed" soul with the trophy blond ex-wife who sees right through him (see the quotation at the top). Chavy begins her story as the wide-eyed innocent, but by the end she's been hardened by fate into your standard tough broad (her mangled delivery of the line "wiggle your ass" is a highlight). Henry Wa is a solid citizen, but when his son's life is threatened he gives in to his submerged violent impulses. Belinda Lok is a cold, unfeeling madam, but she has a soft spot for her hired help and the women under her wing. And so on and so forth.

It's up to the actors to flesh out these stick figures, and fortunately Ciccoritti has assembled a decent cast. The veteran actors (Tzi Ma, Eric Tsang, and Jean Yoon) give especially notable performances, while the youngsters (Steph Song, Simon Wong) acquit themselves well. Projected on the big screen, the production is modest but classy, with a nocturnal sheen, and the plot tumbles along agreeably, but ultimately it slows down to a somewhat anticlimactic battle of wits between Byron Mann's Detective Jiang and Lawrence Chou's Movie Star. It's an interesting exercise, watching these two actors and their different approaches: Chou snarls, purrs, and coasts by on oily charm, and while it isn't necessarily acting, he fares better than Mann, who overplays the earnest cop bit when the script contrives to back him into a corner -- he's an agreeable lead, but not very convincing at desperation.

Some might find this film to be an unflattering portrait of the Chinese community, what with the usual stereotypes (gangsters, restaurant owners, whores) in evidence. Ciccoritti addressed the issue in the post-film Q&A, musing that characters shouldn't be judged by their socio-economic status, but how compelling they are as characters. Not a bad reply, although his case would be served better if the characters actually did have three dimensions, a la The Sopranos.
But the Chinese in the film definitely have it over their white counterparts, who are either portrayed as skeptical critics ("Every time two Chinese guys get together, white people think they’re a gang") or comically inept henchmen.

Dragon Boys has been hailed as a kind of breakthrough, in that we have a predominantly Chinese cast headlining a major network miniseries (a sequel is already in the works), and perhaps there's something to that, as modest as that achievement may be. It doesn't offer anything startling in terms of story, and its insights into the Asian condition are more like sidelong glances, but at least those Asian faces are very much in the spotlight, and there's a hint of sadness in the ending: Jiang, his mission seemingly accomplished but at great personal cost, stares at a sunset on the beach, looking west but actually looking to the East, at the China that he can't leave behind, no matter how much he might want to.

Summer of Love: 2007 SF Asian American Film Festival (Part 2)

2007-03-17T23:28:00.000-07:00

Summer Palace (2006, Dir. Lou Ye)

I knew when I first met you that we were standing on the same side of the world.

-- Yu Hong, Summer Palace

It's difficult for me to be objective about this film, because I lived it, in a sense; in 1994 I traveled to Beijing and taught English at the People's University of China for a year. Five years after Tiananmen Square, you could still sense the aftereffects in the air -- students wary and shy as they approached foreign teachers to talk about life in the West (and dream a little more); the slow infiltration of McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts; the undercover cops patrolling Tiananmen at all hours; the way the city seemed to be awakening from a deep sleep and opening itself up to possibilities again. I've been to Beijing a few times since that memorable year, and today it's an urban juggernaut strutting its way forward ... but I can still remember the guarded hope of those times.

Summer Palace is a chronicle of those times, and the times before then. It's amazing that the film was even made; even though it's fiction, it's probably the most direct look at the events of June 4, 1989 to come out of China so far, and it also goes further with sexuality than any previous mainstream Chinese film. Naturally this got the movie a grand premiere at Cannes, pissing off the Chinese government (the Chinese-French co-production hit the festival circuit before the official censors had a chance to eye it) and resulting in a five-year ban from making films in China for its director, Lou Ye.

Getting past all the political background and intrigue, this film isn't really about politics, or at least it's about politics as much as the Unbearable Lightness of Being is about Communist rule in Prague. Lou follows a different tack from his Chinese New Wave contemporaries (what is it now, the sixth generation?) in that his influences are mainly European -- his first film Suzhou River (probably still his best work) was a meta-modern update of Hitchcock's Vertigo, and his second Purple Butterfly (with Zhang Ziyi as a reluctant rebel during the 1930s in Japan-occupied Shanghai) wasn't so much a historical tale as a claustrophobic, lushly photographed study in l'amour fou. His movies are drenched in atmosphere above all else -- not everything everyone does makes complete sense, but the mood sticks with you.

Summer Palace (the title refers to the old Imperial Summer Palace in the northwest corner of Beijing, and a scenic lake that serves as the meeting place for the two central lovers) works with a broader palette, although the clear influence here is Milan Kundera. The film opens in a Chinese border town near Korea, in 1987: Yu Hong (Hao Lei) has been accepted to Beiqing University, and she celebrates with her loyal best friend, losing her virginity in the process (boy and girl are fully clothed, but it's a startling scene). Flash forward to 1988: Yu Hong is at university, and it is as if that opening sex scene was a preamble, an opening of the floodgates, because now she is flush with sexual experimentation. Pals with fresh-faced Ti Li (Hu Lingling), she spends her time sleeping and falling in and out of love with the idealistic, brooding Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), when she's not sharing him with Ti Li. A typical sampling of dialogue:

Yu Hong: I want us to break up.
Zhou Wei: Why?
Yu Hong: Because I can't leave you.

Yes, very European, and not least because Yu Hong is given to long ruminations about relationships and existence that often end with thoughts such as "I can only call it love." Skirting close to parody, it works because Lou captures the aching innocence and sincerity of it all with his usual artful visual style (see the top photo). His montages recreate the rhythms of life at a Chinese university circa 1989: students swapping imported cigarettes in cramped dorm rooms, walking down halls arm in arm, shuttling soccer balls across dusty fields, holding chaste dances at the local bar, studying at night under the fluorescent classroom lights. Objectivity fails me here, as these scenes were a major shot of nostalgia for me, but Lou certainly has an eye for the details.

In the meantime, the university has been caught in the throes of the democracy movement -- bull sessions in empty classrooms, group excursions to Tiananmen on the back of a pickup truck, shared songs and hopes and laughter. Politics are touched on, but this film is more poetic than political -- Lou's message seems to be that the tide of sexual freedom and existential musings spilled over into the political arena like an onrushing wave, the Chinese Summer of Love. Even as Yu Hong and Zhou Wei get bacchanalian (including a full frontal nude shot of both of them), the feeling of anything-goes, of things spiraling out of control, is building.

At the halfway point of the film, June 4 rolls in, and although the events are elliptical (we see news footage of what takes place at the square, and bear witness to some violent incidents close to the campus), they are fraught with panic and confusion. Just as Yu Hong's first sex scene was like an entry into the bohemian university life, so Tiananmen slams the door on the antics. Disllusioned, Li Ti and her boyfriend Gu Ruo (Zhang Xianmin) retreat to Berlin, and soon Zhou Wei joins them. Yu Hong quits school and returns home, only to later relocate to Wuhan, in central China.

From this point on, the story gets diffuse and sketchy as we skip forward, a few years each time. Yu Hong toils for a government bureau, having lost all purpose in life, content to bed a variety of ill-suited partners (the sex scenes become more graphic and more forlorn in the movie's latter half). Zhou Wei seems to enjoy life in Berlin, but he longs for home, and the chance to see Yu Hong again, even as Li Ti becomes ever more mentally unbalanced and possessive of him. All the principals seem irreparably wounded, although it's never clear what exactly drove the wedge between them. It all crashes to an end with a final rendezvous between Yu Hong and Zhou Wei in 2001 at the oceanside resort town of Beidaihe (another twist of nostalgia for me -- as captured faithfully in the film, the seaside has an austere loneliness to it).

So what's Summer Palace all about, finally? Difficult to say -- the second half doesn't have much connection to the first, and character motivations vanish in the haze. This is a problem carried over from Lou's previous films -- his characters (particularly his female characters) are less flesh-and-blood people than an assemblage of emotions and ideas. Filled to the brim with self-awareness ("You gave your blood readily in war. Peace came, and you could barely take a single step") and stranded in isolation, they're pretty to look at, and impossible to figure out. In Purple Butterfly, the camera huddles close to Zhang Ziyi, admiring her but not necessarily diving beneath the skin. The same thing happens with Yu Hong here (although Hao Lei's fearless performance nearly overcomes this distance).

Maybe distance and dissonance is the point; the drug-like high of pre-Tiananmen idealism evaporates like smoke, giving way to the dragging, meaningless days that dog our mopey heroes to the end. But if Summer Palace is meant to be an existential take on how love and life are impacted by earth-shaking events, Lou hasn't taken enough care to give us the connective tissue that shows the why and the how. The adventurous subject matter, acting, and the impressionistic visual style make the film worth watching, and Lou has the "unbearable lightness" part down cold -- now he just needs to fill out his beings.

Stormy Weather: 2007 San Francisco Asian American Film Festival (Part 1)

2007-03-17T18:40:00.000-07:00

"Yellow is a difficult color to wear."

It was the first Saturday of the 25th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and I heard these words from the couple standing behind me in line. They were noting the shirts that the festival volunteers were wearing, speaking in aesthetic terms, but as soon as I heard those words, I thought: And there's a perfect way to start this essay ...

Twenty-five years after it was first launched, the SFIAFF indeed shows how difficult the color yellow is -- but in a positive sense. Like a den mother taking in wayward orphans, the festival takes in every kind of film (narrative, documentary, long, short, irreverent, deadly serious) from every country out there, suggesting that being "yellow" means, well, being a citizen of the world, which means that it can mean just about anything. And just when you're ready to categorize the whole thing as some kind of triumph for boundary-free indie spirit, it then throws in a few marquee projects with big-name stars to give everyone the idea that Asian American cinema may be the Next Big Thing (this year's biggie was Dark Matter with Meryl Streep, which I didn't have the chance to see, but if the Variety review is any indication, it suggests that Asian American narrative cinema is as problematic as ever).

So in short, the festival is and has always been a mound of conflicting impulses, as every good film festival should be, and as I settled in for this year's batch of films (mostly narrative -- I still remain a sucker for good fiction), I was eager to see if yellow cinema was pursuing interesting new directions. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed.

In Between Days (2006, Dir. So Yong Kim)

yesterday i got so scared
i shivered like a child
yesterday away from you
it froze me deep inside
come back come back
don't walk away
come back come back
come back today
come back come back
why can't you see?
come back come back
come back to me

-- "In Between Days," The Cure

One of the pleasures of festivals like this is seeing work that won't soon (if ever) hit the distribution circuit. Case in point is this film by So Yong Kim, who up to now has focused on art installations and short experimental films (see Indiewire for a good interview with the director). Even though the movie won a jury prize at Sundance and has made the festival rounds, it probably won't be coming to an art house cinema near you anytime soon.

Shot over 24 days on digital video and loosely based on Kim's experiences as a displaced immigrant in LA, In Between Days is a forlorn little movie. The story is minimalist (some would say plot-less): 15-year old Aimie (first-time actor Jiseon Kim) has relocated with her mother to a cinderblock apartment complex in Toronto. During the day, she plays hooky with Tran (Taegu Andy Kang), a fellow Korean immigrant and would-be tough guy who has a knit cap forever planted on his head, Eric Cartman-style. At night, the two of them hit local parties, break into cars, and make halting, darting conversation with each other -- the painfully real, fumbling conversation of teens who know that they want something, but don't know exactly what they want. As their relationship takes two steps back with every one step forward, the little things -- an expensive bracelet as a gift, a stolen graduation photo, a homemade tattoo that scars horribly -- gain totemic significance. Interspersed with this larger story are random shots of a blurry, bleak Toronto winterscape, with Aimie reciting what appears to be a letter. We eventually learn that these are messages to her father, who ran out on the family long ago. When she says "I think you'll really like it here" in the most disconsolate voice imaginable, the misery is palpable.

So the film isn't a barrel of laughs, and it doesn't build to the usual explosive climax (emotional or otherwise), but it bears watching. The movie belongs to Jiseon Kim (amazingly, this is her first big-screen performance), and she's completely natural and believable as Aimie. Not your typical airbrushed teen beauty, she's a bit heavy, with a shy, sullen face, and the unforgiving camera often catches her in looming close-ups, searching for signs of disclosure and weakness. It's to her credit that she can bring out the drama and delicacy of her character's adolescence under such close scrutiny. I found the cinematography striking -- it captures the full-on January bleakness of Toronto, and it makes the most of natural lighting and everyday settings (a snow-covered field, a bus stop hidden behind a pane of glass, a cramped, dim apartment).

Overall, the film is very much in tune with the painful realities of growing up, minus the soap opera dramatics, which is its strength and its weakness. Grabbing hold of a particular place and time rather than relying on plot movement, what little there is of the story peters out after the first hour, and everything ends on an ambiguous note that suggests that relationships may be fleeting -- or just constantly in flux. So brittle it feels like it might melt like a snowflake in your hand, you could call In Between Days nothing more than a pure mood piece, but as such it has loads of texture, and deserves to be watched on a dark, dreary night, when even the thought of loneliness seems somehow attractive. Even though the Cure tune quoted above isn't referenced directly in the movie, both share the same plaintive, simple edge, and the sense of a life in limbo.

Down the Rabbit Hole: "Inland Empire"

2007-02-09T23:47:00.000-08:00

Inland Empire (2007, Dir. David Lynch)

Wake up and find out what the hell yesterday was about. I'm not too keen on tommorow, and today's slipping by.

-- Nikki Grace, Inland Empire

David Lynch -- what to do with him? A free-spirited artist, he ironically does his best work when he's forced to operate under certain strictures (the "TV pilot plus extra footage" genesis of Mulholland Dr., the Twin Peaks TV series). And now he's back with his most experimental, confounding feature-length project yet, Inland Empire. Shot on low-grade DV and three hours long, resistant to any form of straight formal interpretation, Inland Empire is the giant outpouring of Lynch's id, but while that id in the past might have contained some pretty ugly, revolting stuff (just check out Lost Highway or Wild at Heart), here we find him in a more meditative (dare we say transcendental?) mode.

Referring to a certain location in southern California (but obviously referencing the darker, more free-form parts of our heads), Inland Empire has something old, something new, something borrowed, and something Blue Velvet from Lynch's previous work. A lot of the faces are familiar (Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, Diane Ladd, Grace Zabriskie), and the tropes are comfy enough ("a woman in trouble"), and yet the feel is different. Almost Kubrickian in its coolness (a lot of The Shining is channeled in those wide pans of empty hallways, and there's a quote straight from 2001 in which a character sees herself a few minutes in the future), Lynch has taken the free-associative conclusion of Mulholland Dr. and cracked the approach wide open with this one. More moody than nightmarish, Inland Empire favors the journey over any destinations; it doesn't follow any sort of logic or rhythm, but some of the eddies and currents are seductive enough to get lost in for a while.

There's no point to a plot synopsis, although tendrils of narrative creep in every so often. Laura Dern plays an aging actress named Nikki Grace (an amusing conflation of porn-star first name and spiritually-aware last name) who is called in to do a Douglas Sirk-like melodrama called On High in Blue Tomorrows, starring opposite young hotshot actor Devon Birk (Justin Theroux). When an ominous Eastern European neighbor from next door (Zabriskie) shows up on her doorstep to warn her about the production, Nikki is bewildered -- and then she learns that the film is a remake of a Polish film, 4/7, that was never completed because the lead actors were murdered. In another double parallel, the lead actress in the Polish production was cheating on her husband, much like everyone suspects Grace will cheat on her husband with Devon, which also mirrors the storyline of the film, in which Grace plays Susan Blue, cheating on her husband with Devon's Billy Side...

But wait, there's more: an unidentified woman watches a strange sit-com with tears in her eyes. The sit-com, performed by three actors (including Naomi Watts and Laura Harring) in full rabbit costume, can only be described as a deadpan bunny Waiting for Godot. And then there's those inexplicable scenes in Poland, which seem to be taking place about forty years ago, involving a dead woman and her spirit. And we haven't even mentioned the film set that morphs into the trailer-trash home of Susan Blue (or is it Nikki in another life?), or the distraught woman with a screwdriver sticking out of her belly (Julia Ormond), or the mysterious portals (or rabbit-holes, as Nikki is a gawky Alice in Wonderland) to other dimensions that are labelled "AXXN" (code for "action," as in a film take?), or the nameless monster that has Nikki's face...

Does it hold together? Not in any conventional sense, not even in the sense that it is all of a piece, even if some of those pieces dangle like hacked-up limbs (the rabbit sit-com, for example, was inspired by short films Lynch created for his website). Unlike his previous movies, there is no single setpiece one can point to like the audition scene in Mulholland Dr., Robert Blake calling himself in Lost Highway, or Dennis Hopper's assault of Isabella Rosselini in Blue Velvet. (A moment with strippers bopping to "Do the Locomotion" comes close, but Lynch cuts away quickly, as if not wanting to go down that road). Instead, the film is content to drift by in fragments, some relatively close to rational, others seemingly there purely for effect or mood. Any interpretations one can make with this material are inevitably colored by how much one has been Lynch-ed in the past. (You could argue, for example, that Nikki is an older version of Naomi Watts' Diane from Mulholland Dr., making one last desperate bid for stardom.) Lynch's feelings about Hollywood in general are as clear as ever, as evidenced by the scene in which Nikki (or is it Susan?) is stabbed in the gut and left to expire on the Hollywood Walk of Fame -- and then the scene is itself revealed to be a scene in the movie, which itself might be a scene from another movie, a never-ending, inescapable funhouse, with characters and personas doubled and tripled.

A hall of mirrors, or smoke and mirrors? Your mileage will vary, as it often does when someone tells you about their innermost obsessions. The segments in Poland, while burnished to a tawdry grandeur, didn't do much for me, and seemed utterly disconnected in form and tone from the rest of the film. On the other hand, when Nikki (Susan?) takes on the persona of trailer trash and huddles up with a bespectacled interrogator in the back room of a club to give a hilarious confessional, we get a welcome dose of Lynch's cornball deadpan humor: "When the police came and asked what happened, I told them, 'He's reaping what he's been sowing, that's what.' They said, 'Fucker been sowing some pretty heavy shit.'" Or there's Harry Dean Stanton as a film studio go-fer, bringing the house down with a simple request to borrow some money.

Lynch's switch to down-and-dirty DV for this film isn't a completely successful experiment -- few directors these days shoot as strikingly and beautifully on 35mm as he does. But he bravely dives straight to the ugliness of the digital medium, with unflattering close-ups of the characters and moments of apprehension where the empty hallways and darkened spaces are accentuated by fuzzed-out, overexposed textures (it's clear that Japanese New Wave horror films owe a huge debt to Lynch: the rumbling sound design, the crazy jump cuts where monstrous faces and terror muscle in). Likewise, Dern bravely lets the camera leer at her -- filmed in those gritty lens, her features seem positively gargoylish throughout. She's no spring chicken, but her guilelessness (the prime requirement for a Lynch heroine) shines through. It's difficult to say if she gives a virtuoso performance, given the vagaries of the personae she plays; on the other hand, she provides the film's only glimmer of a center, lingering on even as subplots and surreal visions fly off like sparks.

For all its nonsensical meanderings, the film arrives at a climax within a movie theater (the ultimate funhouse) that is unnerving and ultimately cathartic. Suffice it to say that the crying woman finally stops crying, and those rabbits finally meet their Godot. By the time Nikki finds herself back in her cavernous mansion in the Los Angeles hills, watching in delight as a group of dancers lip-synch to Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" during the end credits like an outtake from Fame, Laura Harring blowing a kiss to the audience, you might get the idea that this is Lynch's idea of a joke. (Compare the final line of this film, "Sweet," to the final line of Mulholland Dr. ("Silencio").) More accurately, it's his idea of a cosmic lark, where these astringent narratives can be forsaken in favor of a kiss at the end -- we know we've been on a head trip, but the heart sneaks up on us.

State of Grace: "The Painted Veil"

2007-01-31T10:19:00.000-08:00

The Painted Veil (2006, Dir. John Curran)

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,–behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.

-- Shelley

Although they are resolutely non-cinematic, something about M. Somerset Maugham's books has gained a foothold in film -- everyone from Greta Garbo to Bill Murray has taken a crack at translating his brittle novels to the big screen. Perhaps they appeal because there is next to no surface in his writings: it's all about the emotions and spiritual yearnings concealed underneath, which leaves filmmakers free to embellish the proceedings with their own visual polish.

Certainly visual polish is the first thing that springs to mind when it comes to this version of A Painted Veil (the first was made with Garbo back in 1934) -- one look at the poster for the film, and it's clear that this is meant to be sumptuous. (Indeed, the film's cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh has an unfussy glow to it.) But getting past those surfaces, how does the story fare? When the original novel was published in 1925, the idea of a naive, self-interested Englishwoman discovering herself through helping the benighted cholera-afflicted natives of a backwater Chinese province might have seemed romantic, after a fashion. Today, it seems so imperialistic. How do the novel's sentiments translate to our current milieu?

The answer: Quite well, with a bit of rejiggering. The bones of the plot remain the same: Walter Fane (Ed Norton), an earnest and unexciting young doctor, takes on bored, aging high-society girl Kitty (Naomi Watts) as his wife, and when the two relocate to Shanghai, Kitty's wandering eye comes to rest on handsome expatriate Charlie Townshend (Liev Schreiber, struggling valiantly with an English accent). When Walter discovers her infidelity, he decides to punish her (and himself) by blackmailing her into accompanying him on a risky assignment to the remote village of Mei-tan-fu, treating cholera victims. The spoiled, frustrated Kitty (her name is no accident) is anything but pleased at this turn of events, but as the couple settle in at the village and she begins to aid in the relief efforts, a gradual but inevitable movement towards responsibility and grace begins.

A few changes have been made to the novel's thrust to enable it to play to today's audiences. Ultimately, the novel was a father-daughter story, as Kitty must prove herself worthy of her father, and vice versa -- a curious thread, since her father is absent for the most of the proceedings. The film shifts the emphasis and ups the romance quotient with Ed Norton; while Walter in the novel is more of a plot prop than a character, Norton's Walter is given the space to breathe. He may be pigheaded and cold, but he also has the capacity for understanding and even passion, and his altruistic energy helps mitigate some of the "civilized folks condescending to help the natives" vibe of the novel. Also on hand to balance the cultural books is the great Anthony Wong as the local colonel who must politically navigate the villagers' suspicions, local warlords, and the British aid workers.

So we have a more politically correct, more overtly romantic version of an austere Maugham tale -- and somehow it works, and the reason it works is Naomi Watts. In the hands of a less accomplished actress, Kitty's inevitable march to redemption would have come off like a point-A-to-point-B progression. But Watts surprises us by surprising herself: refusing to give in to grand moments of realization and tearful epiphanies, her performance is a slow, telling accretion of details, from petulant silences to little bits of jeering fun at her husband's expense, to a willingness to open up and experience the world, loathing giving way to understanding and then helping. Her Kitty is a woman running out of options, and her dawning realization of this fact paradoxically opens up the world to her. In the end, it's less about Kitty and Walter mending their marriage as it is about Kitty finding something within herself, and when Watts meets Schreiber again at the end of the film, the moment has a crystalline clarity to it -- we realize how far Kitty has come, and Watts communicates the bloom of that moment (significantly taking place in a flower shop) perfectly. She also enjoys good chemistry with her co-stars Toby Jones (sympathetic and charming as a dissolute English resident of Mei-tan-fu) and Dame Diana Rigg (understated but compelling as the mother superior of the local French mission). Director John Curran avoids pomposity at nearly every turn -- always the key trick when it comes to "prestige" films like this -- and he also benefits from a memorable score by Alexandre Desplat (with an assist by Chinese pianist Lang Lang).

The film isn't perfect; although it moves confidently for most of its running time, the climax seems rushed, unprepared for, which dilutes some of the impact of the final scene. Still, The Painted Veil stands as a worthy addition to the Maugham film canon, and it navigates the minefields of being an "intimate epic" quite well. It helps when you have someone like Watts to give the concept of grace the spark of life.

Holiday Trifecta: "Letters From Iwo Jima," "Notes on a Scandal," "The Good Shepherd"

2006-12-30T21:29:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's because it's that time of year when we celebrate giving and empathy for those less fortunate; maybe it's because such sincerity demands an ironic, clear-eyed counterbalance of tragedy and misery; or maybe it's just because it's the stretch run of Oscar season. But for whatever reason, the holidays have become home to grim dramas with statuette aspirations. For every Happy Feet or Charlotte's Web there's a solemn parable about lives wasted and lost, or a "human" story in which humans are picked at and exposed, like scabs.

So with my parents and brother in town for the holidays, we did what any family unit would -- hit the local cineplexes for what promised to be the latest round of dolor and (fingers crossed) intelligent storytelling, something to make us feel good about feeling bad. Did we receive what was promised? Read on.

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006, Dir. Clint Eastwood)

For our homeland. Until the very last man. Our duty is to stop the enemy right here. Do not expect to return home alive.

-- General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, Letters From Iwo Jima

The moment Clint Eastwood chomped on a cigar, indiscriminately dispatched his first baddie, and pocketed his first fistful of dollars in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, he pioneered a new kind of anti-hero: disdainful of convention, self-interested, and yet inextricably linked to society-at-large. His Man With No Name may have been inspired by Toshiro Mifune's Sanjuro from Kurosawa's Yojimbo, but while Sanjuro was a rueful free spirit, bah-humbugging any attempt to bring him into the fold, Eastwood's heroes are often tied to the law -- they may use it for their own ends (bounty dollars for criminals), they may perptuate the system even as they grow sick of its inadequacies (Dirty Harry and The Gauntlet), or they may talk themselves into imparting the law where it dare not show its face (Unforgiven) -- but justice of a sort is always served.

Eastwood's recent films as a director have further mined these depths. Unforgiven wanted to have its cake and eat it, too (Bill Munny is a truly irredeemable character, but isn't he a badass at the end?) -- ditto for Mystic River, which concludes with a vigilante act that is indefensible and unpunished, and Million Dollar Baby, which posits euthenasia as the last refuge of the Hemingway-esque tough guy. Some see subversive commentary on the Eastwood anti-hero in these works, while others might see the emperor dressed in new clothes.

So here comes Letters From Iwo Jima to further muddy the evidence -- in a bold move, avowed Republican Eastwood has made a film about the enemy! Based on the events of those fateful weeks on Iwo Jima back in 1945, the film follows the Japanese forces under the command of General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) as they carry out their last-ditch stand against the Americans. Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis's screenplay is resolutely old-fashioned in its approach, focusing on several characters in this desperate outfit: the weary Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a mild-mannered baker who isn't as gung-ho about sacrificing himself as his superiors would like him to be, the by-the-book Shimizu (Ryo Kase), an upright soldier who doesn't question orders but isn't as impervious as one might expect, the genial Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an equestrian legend who is more "Americanized" than the rest, and Lt. Ido (Shido Nakamura), the inflexible diehard who is all too willing to throw the lives of his soldiers away, as well as his own. Presiding over them all is General Kuribayashi, who is depicted as the classic Eastwood hero: assigned to Iwo Jima because he has displeased the wrong higher-ups (one can imagine Dirty Harry getting demoted to beat cop in the inner city), gifted with the common touch (he relates to his men better than their former superiors), an outside-the-box thinker (knowing American tactics, he orders his men into Iwo Jima's mountains for their last defensive), doggedly heroic, fighting a lost cause.

That last point is important, because there is no justice in Letters From Iwo Jima -- not everyone dies, but not everyone who deserves to live does. And yet, the soldiers all pull together in the end, and this could be read not as a departure from the typical Eastwood moral code, but its ultimate fulfillment -- previously his heroes were distinguished by their individuality, their demand to be outside the system even as they defended it, but here they defend the system to the death. Are we meant to see their deaths as proof that one must buck the system to survive? Harry Callahan could always throw away his badge after executing a serial killer, but nothing awaits the loyal soldier Kuribayashi but a cold grave.

Even if these quandaries aren't answered -- certainly Eastwood doesn't linger on them -- it's easy to appreciate Iwo Jima as a well-made war film. As he's gotten older, Eastwood's rhythms have slowed to an almost funereal pace; it's almost impossible for him to film something now and not have it come out elegaic. Fortunately with this film, he's found the perfect marriage of subject and style. Leaving the heavy lifting with second-unit director Michael Owens (who puts together some well-shot war scenes based on the bleached-out Saving Private Ryan template), Eastwood concentrates on the individual episodes: the heartfelt conversations between men in the tunnels, the harrowing scenes of mass suicide, the hastily-scribbled goodbyes to loved ones, the interludes in the midst of the storm. A flashback in which Shimizu reminisces about an incident in which he was ordered, and failed, to shoot an innocent family dog has a fine brevity and weight to it, while the execution of one of the characters by American GIs is as tense as anything Eastwood has ever shot.

The film isn't especially subtle in the telling. When an American soldier is captured and the Japanese soldiers come to realize that Americans are "people too," it comes off a bit pat, and when a gun given as a gift to Kuribayashi by the U.S. Army from the time he spent in America in the thirties comes into play at the end, you might as well be reading about symbolism in Screenplay 101. Still, the Japanese actors all do sterling jobs, and the humanism on display is inescapable. Best of all is Watanabe's Kuribayashi. Even as he fits the bill as a tough, indefatigable military man, there is something sly, almost winsome, in his manner, as if he is fully aware that there is a certain madness to men like himself. That layer of extra awareness is something new in the Eastwood ouevre; if the lone hero's final destination is death, at least a bit of humanity peeps through when confronting that destination with a wry, self-deprecating smile.

Notes on a Scandal (2006, Dir. Richard Eyre)

When I was young I had such a vision of myself. I dreamt I'd be someone to be reckoned with, you know, in the world. But one learns one's scale. I've such a dread of ending my days alone. Recently, I've allowed myself to think that I may not be. Am I wrong?

-- Barbara Covett, Notes on a Scandal

Nothing seethes like a good claustrophobic British drama, and this film, based on the Zoe Heller book, is like a two-hour sneer. Patrick Marber (Closer) wrote the screenplay for this one, and like the Mike Nichols adaptation of Closer a few years back, following the characters' progress in this film is like watching bugs under the microscope, wriggling away in the final moments before they're squashed.

The movie begins with a cavalcade of information and comment: we are listening to Barbara Covett (Dame Judi Dench), a veteran teacher at a boys' academy who has quite plainly given up on her charges, and her colleagues who teach them. Her opening monologue is a marvel of stinging wit, as she punctures the facade of everyone within eyeshot ("Here come the local pubescent prowls. The future plumbers, shop assistants, and probably terrorists too"). She is master of all she surveys, and we're ready to follow the film through her authoritative eyes -- and then it all goes to hell when the new art teacher Sheba (Cate Blanchett) shows up.

Just vague enough to be desireable, twisting stray strands of hair in her fingers, eager to please her new colleagues and carrying the whiff of her younger, rebellious, flower-power days about her, Sheba is as tasty a morsel in Barbara's eyes as can be imagined. Even as Barbara becomes abashed and solicitous with her newfound friend, entertaining visions of days forever spent with Sheba at the cafe, or eating supper with Sheba's rumpled husband Richard (Bill Nighy) and their mentally handicapped son, reality intrudes. Yes, it turns out Sheba has a thing for younger men -- the 15-year-olds, to be exact. As an ongoing tryst with one of her students threatens to derail her career, it provides Barbara Covett (that last name says it all) with an opening to be indispensible. As Barbara tells us, all but rubbing her hands with glee: "With stealth, I might secure the prize long-term, forever in my debt. I could gain everything by doing nothing. "

For its first half or so, Notes on a Scandal fits agreeably within the hallowed tradition of nasty English social comedies. As you would expect, Dench and Blanchett are nearly flawless, and their interactions are a constant push-pull of dominance and submission -- Barbara has the upper hand most of the time, but there is something willful and devious about the way Sheba can manipulate the older woman's infatuation, as well. Buoyed by Dench's acerbic jabs and making mincemeat out of the supporting cast (woe be to Bill Nighy and the emasculated teachers at the Academy who are merely pawns in the game), the film pops along at an agreeable, wicked clip. When Sheba's wrongdoings are finally exposed, however, everything curdles up: we have drawn-out shouting matches that are supposed to pass for (gulp) real drama, the characters' actions lose credibility (would Sheba really move in with Barbara?), and with a late revelation Barbara becomes less of a frustrated, complicated woman and more of a, well, monster. Notes on a Scandal is never less than involving throughout, and to the end we're propelled by the "what's going to happen next?" suspense of the narrative, but it adds up to a chilly exercise in inevitability -- good for a shock to the system, but less substantial than it thinks it is.

The Good Shepherd (2006, Dir. Robert DeNiro)

You know what I tell people when they ask why I don't use the word "the" when I talk about CIA? Do you put a "the" in front of God?

-- Richard Hayes, The Good Shepherd

Bobby DeNiro directing an epic about the skullduggery-laced history of the CIA? To people who had resigned themselves to seeing DeNiro in such fare as Meet the Fockers, this must have sounded like a blast of fresh air. Count me among them, and I went into this one looking forward to a well-acted, literate, bracing account of our country's secret service, something that would satisfy the heart as well as the head. When the first images of the film wash over us -- a pinched Matt Damon as CIA officer Edward Wilson holding cryptic conversations with operatives and managing the Cuban missile crisis even as a mysterious reel of film shows up on his doorstep -- we're primed to see a good mystery unfold, tendrils of plot and conspiracy ready to unwind over the next few hours.

Alas, not meant to be. Unquestionably ambitious, with its heart in the right place, The Good Shepherd never reaches liftoff. Its scope is immense and mirrors The Godfather in its hero's progress -- beginning with the ascension of Wilson to Yale's Skull and Bones society in the 30s, the film follows him as he is recruited to the fledgling OSS (the future CIA) and manuevers his way to the top chain of command, and stands back and watches as he sacrifices loved ones, honor, and morality to ensure the safety of the family, er, I mean U.S. government ...

And therein lies the rub -- in outline and development, The Good Shepherd bears uncomfortable resemblance to other, better films, and it can't differentiate itself. It's all competently shot, but the various espionage ploys and blackmails remain murky throughout, with none of the zip of a modern-day spy thriller (amen, Jason Bourne) and none of the dazzling braininess of the old-school spy dramas (hello, John le Carre). The script tries to make up for the lack of involving spyjinks with touches out of Mafia potboilers -- at several points Wilson meets up with his counterpart from the KGB in public spaces, their bodyguards at the ready, like mob bosses fighting over their turf. The climax to the movie also features multiple assassinations, clinically executed Michael Corleone-style.

You would figure that with a subject like the CIA, it would be easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material, and that seems to be what's happened here: both overstuffed and undernourished, the film races through events and personal crises like nobody's business. Individual moments rise above the murk every so often -- the interrogation of a Soviet defector who may or may not be a double agent has some bite, and when a character gets thrown out of an airplane without a parachute, the assassination has a shocking suddeness to it. But what's lacking is a sense of order or dynamics -- when everything is given the same emphasis and pace as everything else, there's little to hold onto.

You would assume that with a renowned actor in the director's chair, at least the characters would have some life, but no one has been given anything to play. Overcrowded with bit and walk-on parts, the film leaves the audience playing the spot-the-actor game: Hey, there's Alec Baldwin as a chain-smoking FBI man! There's William Hurt contributing two lines as a sinister senator! There's Joe Pecsi showing up for three minutes as a Cuban crime lord! Marvel at Billy Crudup's not-of-this-commonwealth accent as he plays an upper-crust Brit operative! Blink and you'll miss Timothy Hutton as Wilson's suicidal father! Even De Niro deems it necessary to enter the fray in a cameo as a duplicitous general, but apart from complaining about a gamy leg and trying to channel Marlon Brando, his "star turn" accomplishes nothing that anyone out of Central Casting couldn't have done just as well. Most damaging of all is Damon's peformance -- when deployed correctly, his blank, callow features and man-child voice suggest reticence, uncertainty, and even desperation. You would think playing a character who has to compromise and then forsake his conscience entirely would be right up his alley, but both the script and Damon under-deliver. His countenance frozen into statuelike immobility, Damon's Wilson is merely another ping-pong ball at the plot's beck and call (it doesn't help that the makeup artists were apparently on vacation, and he looks almost exactly the same in 1961 as he did in 1935 -- and with an adult son, no less!). "The true story of the CIA through the eyes of a man who never existed," this film's poster trumpets, and sadly, Wilson is an empty shell of a character who doesn't exist, either.

Even in this gargantuan mess, two performances stand out. Michael Gambon brings intelligence and impish wit to his role of Dr. Fredericks, Wilson's Yale tutor and initial instructor in the ways of spycraft -- one aches to see him in one of those old-fashioned spy yarns. And then there's Angelina Jolie, who plays the free-wheeling Southern belle that Wilson weds. Physically, Jolie and Damon are a complete mismatch (perhaps an intentional move on the filmmakers' part) and Jolie doesn't get to do much besides pout and pine for her estranged, remote husband, but somehow she manages to come across as a force of nature. Damon may be a man-child, but she is most certainly a woman.

It's a shame that The Good Shepherd isn't anywhere near as incisive or gripping as it wants to be -- in the current political climate, there's no doubt a great movie waiting to be made about how America got to where it is now, and how choices in the past determined the tragedies of the present. Unfortunately, this film isn't it.

Geographic Distress: "Babel"

2006-12-03T21:08:00.000-08:00

Babel (2006, Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu)

Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
-- Genesis 11:7-8

We're often looking for the Next Big Thing, and that Next Big Thing has an extra kick if it comes from outside our hermetically sealed universes. In the cannibalistic film industry, this holds doubly true -- for all the reliance on tested formulas and rehashes of the latest hit novel/comic/TV show, Hollywood often lets its guard slip just long enough to allow a true innovator, auteur or garden-variety acclaimed filmmaker from abroad into its grasp. Think Hitchcock. Think Wilder. Think Ang Lee. In the best-case scenario, this cross-cultural pollination results in a heady mix of familiarility and originality; in the worst, it reeks of pandering and opportunism.

Which brings us to the interesting case of Alejandro González Iñárritu -- interesting because even though he hails from Mexico and thus could be labeled "international," his style of filmmaking seems ready-made for American arthouse acceptance. His breakthrough film, Amores Perros, played like an Altman movie shot through (or up?) with Tarantino sensationalism, and his first American film, 21 Grams, was a logical extension of that aesthetic. It's easy to see why the film cognoscenti (and big-name stars like Sean Penn) flock to him -- he tackles the Big Ideas (human loneliness, the randomness of tragedy) with a driving intensity that approximates integrity, he provides his actors with opportunities to chew the scenery, and he throws in some postmodern shufflings of time and narrative to stay hip. A litany of tragic accidents, mournful gazes, and dizzying jumps between now, then, and the future, his films are undeniably bracing, but jaw-clenchingly grim (the only humor to be found is of the unintentional kind, as in Are we really supposed to believe Sean Penn as a tortured math professor?). For those of us who haven't lost our masochistic Puritan streaks, Iñárritu's work allows us to feel ennobled by our collective misery, and it doesn't hurt if we get to see Sean Penn and Naomi Watts make out while we're at it.

Iñárritu's new film Babel is the latest chapter in his life-is-a-shambles view of the world, and yet it is something more, as well. The narrative trickery has been cut to a minimum: the storytelling gets topsy-tervy at a few points, but this time the whiplash is mainly of the geographic variety, as we are ping-ponged from Morocco to Japan to southern California and Mexico. The plot, written by Iñárritu's collaborator Guillermo Arriaga and based on an idea by the director, follows the fortunes (mostly disastrous) of a selection of people whose lives are tenuously connected by an accidental shooting. At the outset, the mischievous sons of a Moroccan goat herder (Said Tarchani and Boubker Ait El Caid) get hold of their father's rifle, and in a competition for bragging rights, they take pot shots at a passing tourist bus in the mountains. One of the bullets pierces Susan (Cate Blanchett), the disaffected wife of Richard (Brad Pitt), and while the two of them are stranded in an isolated village, the seconds ticking away on Susan's life, their Mexican nanny Amelia (Adriana Barraza, never less than convincing) faces her own conundrum -- stay with Richard and Susan's kids (Elle Fanning and Nathan Gamble) as Richard requested, or hightail it to Mexico for a day to witness the all-important marriage of her son? Meanwhile, in Japan, deaf-mute high school girl Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), frustrated with her isolation from the world and her recently widowed father (Kôji Yakusho of Shall We Dance? fame), craves contact and a little bit of lovin', and isn't above resorting to extreme measures. Shake and stir all the above, throw in further devilish coincidences, connections, and happenstances, and you can already imagine the arthouse denizens salivating: How international! How bold! How challenging!

With a title like Babel, the theme of misunderstanding would seem to be the lynchpin of the movie (or as James Brown puts it: "talkin' loud and saying nothing"). Richard finds himself helpless at communicating not just with the locals but with the unsympathetic tourists on the bus who just want to get the hell out and leave him there; an international relations snafu sees the U.S. State Department treat Susan's shooting as a "terrorist attack" (a potential jibe at all-about-us American paranoia that is never followed up on); and Chieko's thirst for sex or something even more intimate, and her inability to express that desire, lead her to flash strangers in restaurants, or in the film's most arresting sequence, make a pass at an earnest young cop by baring her entire body to him. However, Babel is less about what we don't understand about each other than it is about how we're all interconnected by the whims of ill fortune. Murphy's Law isn't just an abiding principle in this universe -- it is the entire universe. When Amelia decides to drag Richard and Susan's kids with her to Mexico for the day, is there any doubt that the enterprise will end badly? Likewise, as the local police net tightens around the two Moroccan boys, you can be sure that there will be another tragic death or two involved. In Babel, the object isn't escape so much as survival.

Say this for Iñárritu -- his instincts as a filmmaker are peerless. Visually, Babel is a stunner, and cinematographer Rodrigo Pietro wrings arresting images from the beauty and squalor.The film's first major transition, from the parched desert of Morocco to the cozy suburban living room of Richard and Susan's family, is a startling moment -- with a simple cut between scenes, we are flung between geographic and cultural divides, and the juxtaposition is breathtaking. With the globe-spanning locales and sprawling narrative, Iñárritu knows he's being ambitious, and he luxuriates in that fact. Whereas a typical American film working with this concept would settle for a few picture-postcard shots and a dash of ethnic music on the soundtrack, Iñárritu immerses us in each of the film's wildly disparate environments. Having seen my share of Middle Eastern films over the years, it's impressive how Iñárritu manages to mirror their textures, rhythms, and tone in the Moroccan passages. Likewise, his dead-on evocations of Tokyo night life are balanced by a winsome naturalism that is the calling card of Asian New Wave cinema (think Wong Kar Wai, if Wong had a soul as well as a heart and a brain). And when he hits his home turf of Mexico for a wedding party that is by turns wistful, boisterous, chaotic, romantic, and ever so slightly sinister, it's clear that we're in the presence of a major talent.

But for all his elasticity as a filmmaker, Iñárritu doesn't allow his characters to breathe outside the calamities he has arranged for them -- ironic, given the notable actors like Blanchett who have all but begged to be in his films. Less flesh-and-blood beings than pinballs, the people in Babel take a back seat to plot, for the most part. Pitt, armed with facial wrinkles and salt-and-pepper hair, gets to squirm and bellow and express concern, and that's about all we know about him. Likewise, Blanchett's character can be summed up within her first few seconds of screentime, as she disastefully tosses away a glass of Coke served up by the locals (“You don’t know what kind of water is in there!”). And then there's Amelia's wild nephew Santiago (the estimable Gael García Bernal), who is a caricature of the Mexican hombre: he packs a pistol, drives around drunk, antagonizes and flees the U.S. border patrol, and eventually abandons Amelia and her charges in the California desert. His only function in the movie appears to be screwing up her life.

Babel works itself up to a fine pitch -- it can't avoid it, with all the escalating crises on hand. And yet, when all is resolved, one can't help feeling let down by the muffled conclusions to each of its storylines. Richard and Susan's tale, which is ostensibly the most critical from a life-and-death perspective, sputters when it should tighten up, and we are meant to feel moral outrage at Amelia's plight (those damn immigration police!), but like the U.S. State Department and the "terrorist act," the political commentary is left dangling without a punchline. Still, two performances rise above the murk. Given an essentially unbelievable character (no one in their right mind would do the things she does and expect to get off scot-free), Barraza somehow manages to maintain her dignity and our sympathy as Amelia. Even as the script contrives to place her in the squirmiest situation possible, her cries for help in the middle of the desert, with her red wedding clothes in tatters and her makeup running down her face, are indelible.

Then there is Kikuchi as Chieko: happily, the story is much kinder to her, and it is in the Tokyo segments that Babel really soars. In notable opposition to the movie's other passages, no lives are at stake, nobody's fate is dangling at the whim of an angry god, and yet by simply following the rhythms of Chieko's daily life, her run-ins with would-be lovers, night clubs, and playground swings, Iñárritu documents a yearning for connection that has an urgency and poignancy that the other storylines, with their sturm and drang, can barely muster. Whether she's flipping her skirt at a gawking passerby, grooving soundlessly to an Earth, Wind and Fire remix, giving a school official the middle finger, or breaking down as she throws her naked body into the arms of her father, Kikuchi is unstoppable; her spontaneity is the spark that provides the film with its only whiff of true mystery. Fittingly enough, Babel ends with her and her father standing alone yet together on the balcony of her apartment building at night, the camera pulling back to reveal the manifold twinkling lights of Tokyo, thousands of inhabitants in their own private worlds. For all its beautiful desolation, the sight is a comforting one, for it suggests that if Iñárritu can get past his stifling obsessions with tragedy and human folly, he'll graduate from international arthouse darling to pretty damn devastating director.

ReMix: "The Departed"

2006-11-30T23:22:00.000-08:00

The Departed (2006, Dir. Martin Scorcese)

"I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me."
-- Jack Nicholson, The Departed

So says Jack, and so one can say of Martin Scorcese. His career has run the gamut, from taxi drivers who roam the mean streets to kings of comedy who stumble about after hours and goodfellas who hang out with casino wiseguys. And let's not forget the unexpected star turns by Christ and the Dalai Lama. Through it all one thing has remained constant: a Scorcese picture will grab you round the neck and wring you until you are dry. Just as Quentin Tarantino has become a bit of a self-parody with his grindhouse expertise, Scorcese is the caricature of the restless auteur, waxing rhapsodic about the greatness of cinema history with every frame he shoots, never missing a chance to pull out a fancy camera move or ratchet up a climactic moment until it screams with operatic intensity. Blame it on his Italian-American Catholic upbringing if you must, but of the baby boomer generation of directors he broke in with (Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola), Scorcese is the one with the hustle and relentlessness of a boxer, and audiences have been happy to be pummeled, Jake LaMotta-like, into submission.

Forever cycling between the mainstream prestige picture (Gangs of New York, The Aviator), the gangster epic (Goodfellas and Casino), and the low-down remake or update (The Color of Money, Cape Fear), Scorcese has spun the wheel yet again and come up with a canny mix: a remake of a critically acclaimed Hong Kong pulp thriller, Infernal Affairs. At once a regurgitation and a return, it's a chance for him to indulge in some down-and-dirty genre dealings (as he himself ruefully notes, it's the first film he's directed that "has a plot"), while falling back on the gangster milieu that secured fame for him in the past. Not surprisingly, critics everywhere are heralding this one as a "return to form."

The remade plot, which is remarkably faithful to the original, is an ingenious cat-and-mouse setup with two rats as the main players: Billy Costigan (Leonardo Dicaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). Costigan is the good cop with the troubled family background who volunteers to get kicked out of the force and infiltrate the inner circle of Irish crime lord Frank Costello (Nicholson), while Sullivan is a Costello stooge who has worked his way up into the police department's Internal Affairs division. Both men become aware of the other's existence, and in fine potboiler style, the two of them race against time to expose the other first.

While Infernal Affairs rates highly with many critics as the best example of post-1997 Hong Kong cinema, I'm mostly unmoved by the film -- it's a chilly exercise that cuddles up to plot dexterity at the expense of emotional involvement, although it has a neat didn't-see-that-coming sting to its conclusion. Some of that chilliness infects The Departed despite Scorcese's efforts to froth things up with back story. The first 40 minutes or so of the film flows by in a workmanlike rush, as Scorcese, working with the redoubtable editor Thelma Schoonmaker, fills us in on one plot detail after another. It's never less than watchable, but one gets the sense that Scorcese is on autopilot; he's at his best when he's building up to crescendoes, the showman mounting his rat-tat-tat set pieces rather than the rigorous helmer making the slow build.

But once the rat hunt (and those set pieces) kick in, the film takes off, and at its best it offers pleasures that Infernal Affairs never even thought to shoot for. A rendezvous at a movie theater becomes a nail-biting foot chase that ends with a shocking, accidental assassination. A strategy meeting between police departments becomes a Mamet-esque flurry of barbs and power jockeying. An innocuous conversation at a diner turns to ribald tangents involving nuns. Forsaking his usual turf of Italian criminals, Scorcese evokes a pungent, humorous vision of the Irish gangster life (this movie could be a continuation of Gangs of New York: one can see the Irish immigrants of that picture eventually hightailing it over to the Southie side of Boston). Here, family and community seep into everything, and the plot's machinations seem to spring from that fact -- everyone is simultaneously on the make and on the outside, and an upstanding cop might consort freely with his drug dealer cousin while the big crime boss might take an interest in a low-life in hopes of making something legit out of him. The very idea that someone's allegiences can be identifiable seems a joke, inflating the rat hunt, with its bewildering assortment of traced cell phone calls, smudgy surveillance footage, and insinuating accusations between cops and baddies, into a near-parodic chasing of tails and identities.

But lest you think there's something deep going on here, rest assured that Scorcese is back on his hallowed ground of wiseguys and smart-alecky cops, where banter becomes a profane game of one-upmanship, and the ultimate insult is to compare a guy to a certain part of the female anatomy. The number-one offender in this regard is Mark Wahlberg's hilarious Sergeant Dignam, one of only two men on the force who knows Costigan's secret. Wahlberg is the film's version of a firecracker, appearing on the scene just long enough to blow up in everyone's faces and leave a trail of pungent smoke behind. "Who the fuck are you?" an uppity police tech snaps at him, and Dignam spits right back, "I'm the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy." Taking what could have been a one-note part and pumping it with hell-with-you charm, he's a clear standout, stealing scenes even from the hammy Alec Baldwin (who knows a thing or two about firecrackers from Glengarry Glen Ross, and seems to have teleported in from that movie).

While Scorcese has filled his cast with savvy character actors, including Martin Sheen as the weary, wary Captain Queenan (the only other man on the force who knows Costigan’s secret) and Roy Winstone as the hangdog French, Costello’s second-in-command, it’s DeCaprio who owns the movie, remarkably enough. In Infernal Affairs, the undercover cop was played by Tony Leung, and ordinarily a Leung-DeCaprio acting showdown would be no contest, yet Leung was hamstrung by his role and turned in a flat performance, while DeCaprio breathes anxiety and humanity into his character. He's built his career on playing confident tricksters (Titanic, Aviator, Blood Diamond), but sweaty desperation becomes him. Not completely convincing as a grown man, he’s expert at playing men-children, and Costigan makes one doozy of a man-child: burning with the need to prove himself, callow enough to believe in justice and jaded enough to know that happy endings are not guaranteed, his eyes betraying his paranoia even as he radiates braggadocio.

If there’s one disappointment among the cast, it’s Damon as Sullivan. William Monahan’s script does him no favors; as played by Andy Lau in the original Infernal Affairs, the mob mole in the police force is a comic-tragic figure, seduced by the prospect of doing good as much as any good man has been seduced by the lure of doing bad, but in The Departed he’s a black-hat bad guy, and Damon does little to suggest any inner life or turmoil that goes against that grain -- doubly surprising since he’s proven adept at playing duplicitous anti-heroes (Good Will Hunting, The Talented Mr. Ripley). He’s even saddled with a dicey subplot in which he becomes involved with psychologist Madolyn (Vera Farminga, who gets to show a bit more pluck than the vacuous Kelly Chan in the original) while Madolyn is tending to what ails DeCaprio’s Costigan -- a love triangle that is a bit too convenient, and never played out convincingly.

And Jack Nicholson? Ah, Jack. As you would expect, Jack is mostly Jack, although he softpedals his usual grinning malevolence at the start of the film. But as Costello ostensibly descends into “crazy mode” as the story wears on (talk about convenient), Jack falls back on his sheer Jack-ness, snorting coke and hookers’ breasts in a scene drenched in the blood-red hues of a Hugh Hefner bedchamber, and that’s when he’s not playing around with a severed hand, or showing off a dildo to Damon while watching a porn movie. Like Jack, Scorcese just can't resist leaving well enough alone: while the first two hours of The Departed are bracing and lean, the film flounders in the final act, as one bloody climax follows another, with a concluding murder that comes without windup or payoff, and all but butchers the original movie’s more psychologically complex denouement. And then there’s that howler of a final shot: a rat crawling on a window ledge, with Boston City Hall in the distance! The Departed may grab its share of awards for Scorcese, and there’s much to admire in its construction, but can someone remind him that every film need not devolve into bad opera?

"Slight" of Hand: "The Prestige"

2006-11-29T23:03:00.000-08:00

The Prestige (2006, Dir. Christopher Nolan)

Are you watching closely?

So intones the redoubtable Michael Caine as the first shot of Christopher Nolan's The Prestige is unveiled: a collection of magician hats piled high in a woodsy setting that wouldn't be out of place in a fairy tale. We know this film has something to do with magic, and Caine's opening question is a challenge, the initial gambit of a game. But if you're expecting magic that is equivalent to a fairy tale, something light-spirited, breathtaking and fun, know this: it ain't this movie.

Even as he's indulged himself with remakes (Insomnia) and reboots (Batman Begins), Nolan's focus has never wavered: he is endlessly fascinated with narratives that twist and turn upon themselves, and protagonists swamped by the chill of their own obsessions. Whether you find this kind of puzzle-film intriguing or simply cold and mechanical might be a matter of taste, but it's certainly a welcome intellectual break from the hamfisted blockbuster.

The Prestige, adapted from Christopher Priest's novel by Nolan and his brother Jonathan (who also came up with the story for Memento), doubles the fun (or perhaps more accurately, doubles the frost) by supplying not one but two obsessive, steel-hearted protagonists (and possibly more -- but that would be giving away the trick). The film's first ten minutes speed by in bewilderment; like Nolan's classic Memento, much of what happens makes sense in retrospect. We witness a Houdini-like magic trick which goes awry, resulting in the apparent drowning death of magician Angier (Hugh Jackman). On trial for his murder is the glowering Borden (Christian Bale), a former colleague and current rival, with Cutter (Caine), the mechanic behind Angier's tricks and guardian of all that is secret in magic, in attendance. And for our edification, Cutter explains the three parts of a trick: the pledge (setting up the situation), the turn (the performance of the trick -- the lady vanishes), and the prestige (the return to normalcy -- the lady reappears).

Ah, we think: a mystery. We all love a good mystery. But while The Prestige methodically works its way towards the resolution of Angier's death, we are also driven into the past, layer upon layer. In prison awaiting execution, Borden reads a diary that Angier has left behind, a diary that purports to reveal the secret behind Angier's ultimate trick, the "disappearing man," and even as this narrative takes us to the hills of Colorado, and Angier's fateful meeting with the father of electricity, Nikola Tesla (played by a sly David Bowie as a starman fallen to earth), we are taken back even further, as Angier himself reads a diary detailing Borden's attempts to refine his own "disappearing man" trick, a narrative that delves into the genesis of the two magicians' rivalry, involving the death of a woman (underused Piper Perabo) and an escalating conflict that sees both men striving for complete triumph over the other, professionally and personally. Does this leapfrogging between past, further past, and present have a point? Not really, unless you take Cutter's dictum of the prestige to heart: to return to normalcy, one must first be transfixed by misdirection, of the truth hidden in plain view. And as you would expect in a film about magicians, there are numerous tricks, some obvious, some well hidden, and one doozy involving Tesla and a contraption that seemingly comes from left field (although there will always be a few in the audience who will take pride in saying, "I saw that coming from a mile away," perpetual atheists in the cathedral of cinematic disbelief).

Despite sumptuous photography by Wally Pfister and a sonorous score by David Julyan, this is no tasteful period drama, nor is it an airy fable about the science of magic. Too genre-fied to be an, ahem, prestige picture, and too polished to pass as a raw indie product, The Prestige wants to indulge in the big-time vibe that stars like Bale and Jackman provide, and yet it also wants to get down and dirty with its magicians' messed-up minds, as well as blow away any preconceptions about how "fun" magic is. Early on we get a taste of what real magic is all about, as Cutter demonstrates one of the simplest tricks in the book: making a dove "vanish" by smashing it dead within a steel cage that more resembles a medieval torture device. In their private duel, Angier and Borden physicalize the principle that applies to just about any artistic endeavor -- for every production of art, there comes a pound of flesh. In a trick intentionally gone awry, Angier blows away two of Borden's fingers; in return, Borden sabotages one of Angier's tricks, resulting in a crushed leg and a permanent limp.

Poking fun at his Broadway image, Jackman plays the showman-savvy Angier to the hilt; the nominal protagonist at the outset, his obsession soon swells to mythic proportions, and he has a swell time queening it up. On the other hand, Bale lends a Cockney gravity to his quieter role as the somewhat awkward, more naturally gifted impressario, and his scenes with his estranged wife (Rebecca Hall) and daughter (Samantha Mahurin) have a mournful pulse. Thanks to his underplaying, the rivalry between the two men doesn't descend to "boys will be boys" camp, despite an unworthy plot strand that sends a duplicitous mistress (Scarlett Johansson, miscast) into both men's beds -- one can believe, if only for a few moments at a time, that something is at stake here besides the cleverness of the narrative, and its loving glances at the steampunk genre.

For a while Nolan keeps the plates juggling magnificently, but by the end of the movie he means to leave us with a sour taste in our mouths. I won't give away the movie's final image, which is a counterpoint to the innocent tableau that opens the film; when we realize what we're looking at with a sense of mounting unease, Caine smugly proclaims in voice-over: Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it because you're not really looking. You don't really want to know the secret...You want to be fooled. Would that were true, but when all becomes clear at the end, the net effect is less one of amazement than one of grim acknowledgment -- so that particular trick worked, after all. With the collapse of the film's central mysteries, we're only left with one message, again courtesy of Caine: Obsession is a young man's game. If there was any doubt.

Intriguing yet chilly, anything but fun -- it's easy to claim that by the end of The Prestige you're left with nothing but a puzzle box with a few chipped edges, along with some extra ambiguities meant to be debated over late-night drinks. Yet somehow the sadness that seems to shroud the film like that wintry Colorado mist sticks around. The misdirections and sleights of hand Nolan employ are mere window dressing that can't hide the fact that behind every dazzling bit of legerdemain is a dove crushed in a steel trap.