Polisse, Maïwenn Le Besco’s portrait of the work and home lives of Parisien police officers in a juvenile victims unit that won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2011, suffers from intersecting with a variety of genres. Those in the Anglosphere will readily draw comparisons to The Wire and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or other procedural police television series. French audiences will notice a streak of social realism, and even moments that recall serial melodrama. This film is actually a bit more unique. Polisse is more impressionistic than The Wire, lightly covering the same themes, but in a far shorter span with structurally unattached vignettes in the place of an overarching narrative knot that never gets undone. Sexual abuse is never undone, but in Law & Order, justice is meted episodically, while justice is more poignantly unseen here. The social realism colored by vapid routine is dramatically less sensational than something like La Haine, and considerably less hammy than the eyerolls of SVU.
Named by auteuse Maïwenn’s son misspelling “police”, rendering it into the entendre “polishes”, Polisse is one of the neat occurrences of a trickle down appreciation: the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes show elite critics rated it highest (100%), rabble critics high (88%), audiences lower (82%). If the expectation was for a linear narrative, what we get is scattered. Many of the dramatic scenes are dead-ends, leading many audiences to complaints of overambition. Though the film fails to cohere to subplots and storylines easily found in The Wire, it does cohere to a rounded picture of police men and women (gender diversity in manly professions is noticably more advanced in Paris … many more Olivia Bensons), with scenes that leave unsaid the melodrama which we can simply imagine and be none the worse for wear.
The film has touches of the personal for Maïwenn (hitherto known to Anglos mostly as the big blue opera diva in The Fifth Element): the depiction of urban Paris is multicultural like her (part Kabyle, part Vietnamese, part Breton, mostly French); the focus on child abuse might bear no direct relation, but as a child actress Maïwenn was certainly thrown to the wolves (Luc Besson). The actors were all instructed to use working class Parisien accents, or as far from Corneille as one could get within L’Île-de-France. As in her previous film Le Bal des actrices, Maïwenn injects herself into her project, becoming a creative channel between reality and art, this time as the director within the film. Portraying her own immersed trailing of a child protection unit as research for this film, she becomes a photographer who falls in love with one of the characters, similar to the director’s erotic fall in “Le Bal”. Especially interesting here is how her character Melissa demonstrates sensationalism in her early photos, before being reproached for her facile depictions.
There is no individual lead in this film, emphasizing their equality as citizens, yet not civilians. They all hold in common a sincere devotion to their cause of protecting innocent children, as well a slow and insidious creep of a dark specter over their souls familiar to all cop shows, leading to depression, divorce, and rage redirected against the perps. A half dozen of the actors have worked previously with Maïwenn, giving her a closer comprehension of her play things. The three greatest focuses of emotional energy are motherly Nadine (Karin Viard), righteous Nora (Naidra Ayadi), and capricious Fred (Joey Starr). Nadine’s dynamic is propelled by her divorce, encouraged by partner and friend Iris (Marina Foïs). Her ability to placate with laughter the demons swarming her conscience washes away as the drudgery of the job and Iris’ down-talk reach their limit, launching Nadine into an incensed diatribe of blame directed at her friend. Confronted with a misogynistic Muslim man accused of sexual abuse, Nora reverts to her Algerian Arabic for a screaming chastisement of the hypocrite puritan, demanding Qur’anic exegesis to justify himself.
But one of the more memorable scenes in the film throws ice water all over the otherwise tempestuous virility of Fred, played by Joey Starr in his Ice-T turn as a soldier turned rapper turned fictional sex crime copper. When a homeless African mother pleads to give her son over to the state to spare him a dreadful upbringing living under bridges, Fred sees a bit of himself in the young boy, whose entire sense of meaning is cut to shreds as his mother rushes from the room as soon they find a place for him, launching the boy into hysteria. Fred, who is a father with limited visitation, can only comfort the boy at his worst moment. This hot and cold character is the one Maïwenn (or her character?) falls in love with. Both hailing from the Seine-Saint-Denis suburbs, Maïwenn is from a more delicate part sung about by Serge Gainsbourg, Joey Starr from one renowned for its crime (and royal crypts).
Maïwenn and co-writer Emmanuelle Bercot (also acting as a member of the unit) aimed for some piercing scenes first, and glued them together as a chronology. Some of these scenes make the movie. There’s the African boy and the Muslim man mentioned above, an infant girl repeating stories about her father touching her bottom (likely implanted by her mother), the girl giving blowjobs to get her iphone back from some young punks (“what would you do for a laptop?”), there’s the all-consuming manhunt for a dopehead mother who absconded with her baby. The film concludes with a molested boy asking if he did something to get his gym coach into trouble, which effects a profound silence in Iris after questioning him.
So long as you’re capable of watching film that doesn’t concern itself with spoon-fed structure, I would recommend Polisse. Otherwise, enjoy another helping of Dennis Franz’s ass.
Alps (Αλπεις – Alpeis) – Art 5/5 Ent 2/5 Worth 4/5
Some people like their horror with atmosphere, others like appalling butchery, or rivers of gore. Giorgos Lanthimos likes it light in weight and darkly in humor. Nobody in his previous brilliant film Dogtooth, or his latest offering Alps is tortured in any meaningfully horrific way, and nobody dies for sinister reasons. Lanthimos still has a Hitchcockian pulse coursing through his veins, and both films pose violent and psychologically disturbed sociopaths against spritely women whose connection to reality is severed by physical and mental walls. While Alps may not be hardly as funny as the absurdity in Dogtooth – a film where a family’s father locks them on a compound and elaborates a sanitary linguistic explanation for the profane things that get over the wall – it retains the sinister totalitarian airs.
Similar to Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films, the plot in Alps is a very thin apparatus where Lanthimos’ long silences and meditative shots try the patience of the 21st century audience. The film could run 45 minutes, if edited in Los Angeles. Though the plot is thin, the narrative is more robust, and requires a bit more questioning. One character (played by Aris Servetalis), the obsessive-compulsive leader of a troupe of people who act as shoddy doppelgangers for the recently deceased, in order to help the grieving process of their relatives, has a strange affinity for a cup that says “Los Angeles” on it, and American pop culture more generally. His annoying and odd obsession with the cup, and other instances color how his morbid fascination with Hollywood and perhaps the film Vertigo informs his thinking on this whole doppelganger endeavor.
The center of the story is actress Aggeliki Papoulia, also the center for Lanthimos’ previous film, Dogtooth. While a key member of the “Alps” troupe of stand-ins (so-called for a bunch of fruity reasons I don’t care about), she works by day as a nurse, receiving many of the patients brought by the leader of their gang, who works as an EMT. This is ostensibly how they find their clients. Papoulia leads a vapid and boring existence, drained of any meaning or very much feeling. Her docile and turtle-like aging father is content to waste away in a little chair mousily reading his nonsense. As she’s diving into the fictitious lives and skins of the recently deceased, it becomes her only hobby, bringing her a lacking sense of reality, albeit someone else’s. There is an extremely awkward reaction in the loved ones paying for the service, who are as unsure how to deal with this bizarre profession as they are their loss. Papoulia begins breaking the rules by getting personal, even having sex with clients, recalling that the profession of acting was traditionally associated with prostitution in some cultures. Her empty life is fulfilled by those she assumes.
Elsewhere in the Alps troupe, a suicidal gymnast/dancer (Ariane Labed) desperate to please her grouchy control freak instructor (Johnny Vekris, also in the troupe) is disciplined severely by the two totalitarian obsessive men leading the ‘business’. In common princess fashion, Labed wants to hang herself after being rejected by her dirty old man dance instructor who has a god-like grip over her, being saved at the last minute by Papoulia. Labed’s intense desire for her beauty and performance to be validated is given a hint of superficiality by her character’s desire to be permitted by the instructor to dance to empty pop music. As Papoulia is gradually swallowed by the rich and freakishly fun emotions drawn from this Hitchcockian profession, her favor wanes after crossing rigidly delineated lines of error, inciting the insanities in her troupe leader. Thereafter, Labed’s intense need for sexual redemption sees her fortunes wax in the eyes of Servetlis, and her dirty old man instructor. Soon, Labed is replacing Papoulia on certain ‘missions’.
As punishment, Servetalis gives Papoulia a supposed omen, where if a gymnastic stick turns blue, the portents are mildly bad, and red portends truly bad. He whacks the fuck out of her in the face, drawing blood, kicking her out of the ‘Alps’ troupe (a bit of Lanthimos’ absurdism for ya). The undying need to grasp on to some meaning boils Papoulia’s disorders into a right proper breakdown, first trying to seducing her turtle-looking father by assuming the life/role of her deceased mother, then she tries to get a bit freaky on the dance floor with the homely woman her pa’s been seeing, assuming the role of her father, and then she vandalizes the home of a former client out of desperation to assume the identity of their deceased daughter. It’s the most action in a very slow film, and winds everything down in a strangely unsettling conclusion.
I don’t see Alps as a letdown artistically from Dogtooth, but comedically it varies greatly in a negative way. The long takes and use of silence in Dogtooth was made more bearable by the volatile bursts of silliness that are mostly lacking in Alps until the end. The pressure valve builds steam for far too long, and would lose many audiences. The characters didn’t require too much out of the actors, and Lanthimos’ style is for an unnerving amount of stoic creepiness anyway, but Papoulia and Labed both gave emotional performances that are remarkable in different ways. Papoulia’s character in both Dogtooth and Alps is a naive explorer who suffers blunt trauma to her face, initiating the final acts. Her turns in both were enjoyable, funny, and insane, and I’d like to see more from her.
Alps is more broccoli than Cheetos, so viewers unfamiliar with European art house cinema might be totally lost with this one, whereas Dogtooth had a few things to cling on to. Lanthimos is a very capable auteur, but this wasn’t hardly the best he’ll offer us.
One of the principal measures of a film’s worth, in my estimation, is how open you are to re-watching it if not merely once, twice or thrice, ad infinitum. The loose ends, ambiguities, astonishing imagery that make watching multiple times as fresh as the first without you the audience suffering from an inept memory. While the premise behind Ruby Sparks is a feminist play on the magical reality-shaping gifts given to writers in earlier films like Stranger Than Fiction and In the Mouth of Madness, it’s my impression that Ruby put all her eggs in one basket for this film, and it seems that breakfast is all over. But still, what an interesting omelet that was!
Written by Zoe Kazan (descended from legendary director Elia Kazan), who plays the eponymous marionette of isolated writer Calvin (played by her real-life boyfriend Paul Dano, whose milkshake was drank) who accidentally conjures Ruby from the eureka of his dream life to the page and thereafter into reality. Kazan was inspired by the myth of Pygmalion, a Cypriot sculptor who falls in love with one of his own creations, and Aphrodite grants him his wish for his statue to come alive. In the spirit of George Bernard Shaw’s realist and quasi-feminist retelling of the myth, where chavette Eliza Doolittle is trained to be a proper lady by phonetics scholar Henry Higgins, Kazan’s story shows a megalomaniacal control freak who uses his typewriter to craft the ideal woman, and he continually finds himself editing the real Ruby when she no longer matches his ideal, with unintended consequences.
The amusing occurrence here, of course, is that it exposes Calvin as an inept writer of women. He’s a man who cannot reconcile the ideal with the real. Kazan unintentionally stepped headlong into the cliche of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl“, one of the few cliches the idiotic audience knows easily from the internet because of its association with hipsters, emos, and with it having been coined by someone associated with the satirical Onion paper. Ruby Sparks is, in a way, a close relative to the MPDG, because both the character of Ruby and the various MPDGs in regular fiction are the retarded constructions of idiotic writers, only Ruby’s idiotic writer is fictional (what’s your excuse Cameron Crowe?). I find the entire notion pretty silly, in how the mob can now append that title to any girl they find too hipsterish, and it seems to trace Zooey Deschanel simply because of a few choice roles, but (like Zoe Kazan) it’s mostly credited to her physical nature and demeanor.
I really hope that this film is the Waterloo of the MPDG, because Kazan’s construction is in many notable ways serving as an unconscious opposite to that business. She doesn’t help the protagonist Calvin spiritually or directly heal his wanderlust and heartache like the dream girl without agency does, but rather she serves as a cosmic punishing lesson to Calvin’s ego (and perhaps his penchant for creating MPDGs that seems to enrapture those amongst his female audience with low self-esteem) by Aphrodite taking his words literally. Ruby is a mirror onto her creator, rather than a muse, and though Calvin experiences some growth, it’s by cruel instruction rather than inspiration.
This is all to say I rather enjoyed what Kazan created here, but her ambition was a simple aphorism for women’s agency in art and life, torn from the authorship of a Henry Higgins. Her content is far outstripped by the artistry of her form in this script. Thankfully, she avoids some base comedy (though I was giggling when she was down on all fours barking like a dog in a moment we’re meant to think horrific thanks to the music), however, the film fails to speak beyond the god-complex of a male authoring women, when a low-hanging fruit gone unpicked was where Calvin’s psychological need for this woman, and his god-complex came from. As far as we know, it’s just for his next book, and the desire to have a mate. Antonio Banderas, playing Calvin’s step-father craftsman-artist, seemingly has an altogether unexplored hold over Calvin’s newly hippie mother (Annette Bening), which creates an evident crisis for him in some ways, but this is left only at marginal detail.
Calvin’s motivation for book sales and a mate seems entirely too lowly and material for the tone of the rest of the story. By the end of the film, every knot is undone, and we’re completely satisfied that Calvin has matured after his divine punishment, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. More interesting is Groundhog Day: The Next Day, or Twenty Years Later. Yeah, I’m not so sure about this all. The directorial couple behind this film was Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris, who also directed Little Miss Sunshine, another film about reality conflicting with a perverted ideal, and given a completely satisfying and endearing ending, though I think still a bit superior than that in Ruby Sparks.
The biggest disappointment in Magic Mike has to be the fact that the Calvin Harris/Rihanna song in the trailer was heard not at all in the film’s score. Out of all the over-the-hill women trying to relive their youths being tipped over a dumpster outside a White Snake concert, four juicy vodka drinks down the hatch by the time they purchase their ticket, yelling “woo-ooo, I’m so cuh-ray-see” at the theater employee geeks smiling through their braces, certainly the filmmakers knew that another selling point for the movie was that song! The biggest surprise? Aside from some dance instructor love making to the mirror and over-familiarity with the abdominal region, Magic Mike was a 100% straight movie. Even Showgirls had some sapphic tension between Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon.
Mike will wind up on Logo all the same I guess. Why is that? Is Mike a subtle gay movie, like it was shamelessly (maybe even insultingly) advertised after the marketing people realized they had a cash cow on their hands? No, it’ll be on Logo because it’s a very, very normal romantic drama, and exuberance is mistaken for irony on that channel, and by society at large sometimes. No, Magic Mike was not a big sexual event like the repressed masses – male or female – assumed it to be. Most got a few flashes of Tatum’s butt, but then were smacked with Olivia Munn’s breasts a few seconds into the movie, setting the actual tone for the movie. It had hunks in a few choreographed dance numbers that were more comedic schmaltz than seduction. Club owner Dallas’ (Matthew McConaughey in a shameless Oscar push) idea of seduction is a sober reminder that the art is made easier for amateurs by a completely sauced and nervous audience. Where the movie actually sold with the insatiably lustful audiences wasn’t, funny enough, in the non-stripping stripper scenes, but with the by-the-numbers romance brewing underneath a typically unexplored sex industry scene.
Based vaguely on lead actor Channing Tatum’s real life experience as a Florida male exotic dancer, the script written by producer and relative newcomer Reid Carolin is a fun and non-ambitious lesser cousin to both Boogie Nights and Scarface, without any of the originality and bite. If you can believe it, the one significant theme in a film about men in a sometimes humiliating business is actually … honor. Magic Mike, a very honorable man, has come not to expect honor out of his colleagues, or the women he seduces, or many of the people he meets in general. He doesn’t expect honor out of the loan officer that promised him a deal on overlooking his credit history to get some capital for a handmade furniture business (his route out of stripping). He certainly doesn’t expect honor out of the shady drug peddler working as a DJ at the club (Gabriel Iglesias). He hopes for some honor out of the club owner Dallas, but doesn’t immediately rely on it. He has high hopes for his reckless protege Adam (Alex Pettyfer), whom he met through the roofing business and introduced to the club. He has higher hopes for Adam’s sister (played by film studio royalty Cody Horn), who seems to be the only rock in a hurricane of soul-crushing dishonor.
I don’t think I can ever be a fan of Soderbergh, sadly, but the mood of the film is another major surprise. Soderbergh is a very talented director, and can control a beautifully light transition from event to event that makes for very pleasant watching. He avoids the sharp frenetic cuts of a Sergei Eisenstein, French New Wave, MTV-inspired world, and this leads to a more aesthetically soft and comfortable narrative that reminds of the Francis Ford Coppola and Hal Ashby films of the 1970s, or really the ’70s in general, where cinema was a laid-back experience, instead of the blood-curdling hypertension-inducing form we’ve built since. Not putting a quality judgment on that, just describing.
Tatum is a rising star, gaining the same sort of appeal that Brad Pitt did in the ’90s as a heart throb with great comedic ability, and good range in personality types stored in his back pocket. This may have been his debut as a serious center of gravity for a production, whereby the investment paid off. Tatum has done some meager films (Stop-Loss), some nifty ones (21 Jump Street), some terrible ones (GI Joe, The Eagle), now after Magic Mike, he’ll get more choice in his roles, and this will be interesting to see where he takes it, because like he said about The Kid in this movie: I think he’s got it, but I don’t know what it is, exactly.
The supports are not altogether impressive. Executive Daughter Cody Horn is competent in the role, but I’d have to see more of her to get a fairer assessment of this performance, because I don’t know if it was nuance and creativity at play, or her being her. McConaughey? Well, he is a slightly more McConaughey than the usual McConaughey. His loverboy with swag pigeonhole is met with a little James Woods as Roy Cohn in a satin robe that gives him more accentual creep, and just enough internal conflict to be considered by the Academy. Good luck to him, I wasn’t that deeply impressed. Alex Pettyfer played a douchebag incredibly well, and again here, not sure if that’s talent or all him.
Confusion. The Kirk Douglas film Spartacus is an exemplar of deep confusion from head to toe, reel to reel. It is an artwork of philosophical leftist agitprop, yet made into the largest commercial endeavor Hollywood had financed up til then. It is an anti-war film that repudiates the concept of hero traditional to “pagan tyranny” in Greco-Roman society, yet lionizes a messianic perfect hero and liberator with fewer complications than Achilles (that is to say: none). It purports to be a film against the evils of slavery, but says that it wouldn’t die for 2,000 years after the plot (roughly the time Spartacus was written in the 1950s, nearly a century after the American Civil War), indicating its actual expected target: bourgeois control of capital. It is a socialist text, yet leans on Christianity for moral force despite Christianity doing nothing to end the evils of slavery and classism that it rails against, and quite the contrary, Christianity justified and invigorated them to newer heights.
But what nobody can be confused about was how enormous Spartacus was in film history, and history in general. Spartacus is, at heart, a dramatic framing of an etiological myth for slave morality, where the tragic extinguishing of a rebellion against the injustice of society would dovetail nicely into the cross and church guilting society into more correct behavior (the final scene has Spartacus crucified like a Christ figure). The highly successful film plucks the heart strings of freedom and justice-minded people everywhere, anticipating later Oscar winning epics like Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. Spartacus also effected the beginning of the end for McCarthyism’s lasting impact on Hollywood through the blacklisting of Communist screenwriters, thanks to Kirk Douglas’ heroic decision to give screenwriter Dalton Trumbo his name back after working under aliases for a decade. Even John F. Kennedy crossed lines of anti-communist protestors to see the movie.
Written by Howard Fast while he was imprisoned for Contempt of Congress after refusing to name the contributors to a charity helping the families of Spanish Civil War veterans (amongst whom could be counted former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt), the original book differs heavily from the final screen product. Fast’s unfamiliarity with screenwriting caused actor-producer (and thus overlord of the film) Kirk Douglas, who had invested a large sum of his own money to secure the rights of Fast’s self-published book for adaptation (making Fast bourgeois scum too?), to bring in Dalton Trumbo, a fellow blacklistee and former Communist. After only serving on the production for the early scenes in the Libyan slave mines, director Anthony Mann either quit or was fired, not entirely sure whether he appreciated the scope. Young director Stanley Kubrick was brought in to finish the film. Kubrick would later say this was the only film of his that he did not have absolute control, and it shows.
Trumbo, though a much hailed screenwriter, had a sordid personal-political history that makes the themes of this film quite the more interesting. After authoring Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war novel that targeted heroism in all its folly, about a World War I veteran laying motionless in a hospital bed, he suddenly decided to cease publication when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, because a case for heroism fell to him much like the Mormon Church received prophesy that Blacks weren’t devils when it became socially unacceptable. Quite ironically for a blacklisted writer, when some isolationists wrote him asking for copies of the book, he reported them to the FBI. He was also a stringent opponent of anti-totalitarian Arthur Koestler, and successfully blocked a Trotskist biography of Joseph Stalin being made in Hollywood. Trumbo called Stalin one of the world’s greatest proponents for democracy. Opponents of Trumbo’s useful idiocy and his fellow travelers, he said, were to be opposed by all means at hand. It’s all the more fitting that the subject of this film is the man Karl Marx saw as the only person fit to be called a hero in antiquity (though as a classicist, Marx was still deeply appreciative of Aeschylus, Democritus, and Epicurus, amongst others, as should you be). In a way, one could view the Cold War as a philosophical battle between a civilization inspired by Spartacus, another by Cato the Younger.
The film begins with some very genius still photographs: one of a hand of a laborer; another of the bust of a classical hero’s face, crumbling. The Latin word for hand is manus, as in manumission, the act of freeing a slave. The crumbling visage is the visual accomplishment of the story’s main theme of tearing down the master morality of antiquity, replacing it with the story of the one man true to our modern nature. Most of the artistry that follows is tiddlywinks compared to the opening stills. The narrator’s opening monologue brazenly condemns Roman society and its “pagan tyranny” that had yet to be civilized by glorious Christianity (yawn). The narrator also condemns the crippling error of slavery within Roman civilization. In truth, slavery did play an enormous role in the death of the Roman Republic, because it effectively drove up unemployment for laboring proletarians and Plebeians, and made them dependent on the slave-holding class of Patricians (or Bourgeoisie, if you prefer), including the attachment of one’s self and fortune to the adventures of generals who commanded the total and long-term loyalty of their soldiers. Imagine robots taking over most of the service industry. Imagine the dispossessed hordes fanatically following the populist politicians promising them free shit, or better yet, the private mercenary organizations like Blackwater doing so.
A Thracian slave (Thrace was a semi-barbarous nation located just on the periphery of Greek culture and history, located today in modern Bulgaria), Spartacus is first seen toiling away in a quarry in Libya, where he is condemned to death for fighting back against his slave drivers. He is rescued by slave trader Lentulus Batiatus (played by Peter Ustinov, who’d win an Oscar for his role), an apathetic and apolitical scoundrel with a heart of fake gold, who brings Spartacus back with him to Capua to be trained as a gladiator by freedman Marcellus (a character that subtly anticipates R. Lee Ermey’s Drill Sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, and similarly is killed by his instructees). Visiting Batiatus’ compound, Marcus Licinius Crassus (played expertly by the legendary Laurence Olivier), future Triumvir with Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus, comes to watch some Gladiators fight it out to the death for his entertainment. Instead of killing Spartacus, the black gladiator Draba (Woody Strode) chooses to launch his trident at the rich fucks up in the galley, before getting a javelin in his back right at Crassus’ feet (the only one not to flee), who cuts him a final time.
Here we see the ultimate contrast in the film: Crassus vs. Spartacus; villain vs. hero; bourgeois scum vs. warrior for the proletariat; homosexual pagan vs. straight crypto-Christian. Soon after this, Spartacus fights back against Marcellus’ beatings, and spontaneously, the rest join him and thus begins the Third Servile War. The rest of the film is an interesting split. Interesting because of its interplay with Roman history, and the philosophical implications that follow the plot decisions of Fast and Trumbo. Spartacus’ noble decision to flee Italy, and send everyone back to their homes, as Plutarch states, was disrupted by the more rowdy element in his midst such as slave leader Crixus, who saw burning shit down and raping bitches to be more fun than simply going home in freedom. In the film, Crixus simply states legions block the paths through the Alps, and Spartacus is quick to admonish his fellow gladiators for committing captured Romans to an ironic switch of being forced into the arena, thus giving a moral advantage to the slave revolt. This uncomplex good vs. evil crap that simplifies history and politics is easily blamed on the totalitarian intellectuals writing the film, who have a lot invested in the moral clarity of their hero.
The scenes involving Spartacus that were under total command of Kirk Douglas in the film, and his character, through both the writing of the leftist authors, and Douglas’ vanity, makes him come across as the perfect Christian knight of righteous, equitable and sober spirit. The absence of anything remotely resembling a flaw in his character, placing far below the heroic Achilles or especially Odysseus this narrative intends to demonize, is ironic in its lack of Thersitism. Thersites was the loud mouth asshole who allowed Homer and epic writers to voice the contradictions of a story without fully undermining it. Achilles finally punches Thersites to death after he mocks him, but what is said is said, and the audience loves it enough to endure the insanity of the Trojan War. Philosophers in the Germanic tradition, especially Hegel and Marx, took great note of the role of Thersitism, and the role of undermining the egotistical “heroes” of the day. Thersites has no place in Spartacus, however, because it was written by totalitarian blockheads and produced by an egotistical movie star who wouldn’t himself hear any cat calls against his work.
This hagiography made Stanley Kubrick roll his eyes in sardonic disgust, but there was next to nothing he could do about it. Kubrick was given more leeway in the scenes at Rome that followed the cloak and dagger machinations by the ahistorical “Gracchus” (hinting at the crypto-commie Senators Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus who began the Roman Revolution by winning power against the Senate through land distribution to the dispossessed common people). Meanwhile, in notable contrast to the Marxian and Douglasian unblemished hero Spartacus, Olivier’s Crassus is far more complex, and closer to the morally upright but Mitt Romney-esque politically flexibile loan shark described by Plutarch. More notable is how the historic Crassus came to be the wealthiest man in antiquity (and possibly all time): he seized the estates (including slaves) of nobility condemned by conservative tyrant Sulla, and then used his troupe of slaves to purchase estates on fire at rock bottom prices. Broader meaning: it’s okay to capture slaves, but slaves cannot uncapture themselves!
The ultimate irony of antiquity is that most thoughtful philosophers condemned the concept of “might makes right”, in that victory on the battlefield meant the victor owns those that submit, but horrified Greek and Roman society saw slaves revolting, and therefore winning back their freedom, as a police/militia matter that needed to be stamped out. You lose one battle and you’re cleaning, cooking, and sucking cock for life, but you win a revolt and that just means you’ve offended the order of the household and therefore Zeus/Jupiter. But from Alexander the Great’s sack of Thebes to Crassus’ taking advantage of Rome in Sulla’s Civil War, it was more the rule than the exception, and this especially included the institution of slavery (Alexander put all surviving Thebans into slavery, as did most Greek conquerors to the conquered). Plato and Aristotle accept that there are stronger and more noble people in relation to the slobbermouths at the bottom (Aristotle going so far as to say some people are in ‘natural slavery’), but they dismiss the idea that someone is someone else’s property for having lost in combat. Furthermore, Saint Augustine (of enlightened Christianity fame) says that those who lose in combat and pressed into slavery have it done to them by the will of god, therefore the slaves should obey god. Pagan tyranny, indeed.
Nevertheless, the institution of slavery persisted, and whatever deal or compromise on the institution of slavery that might have been met in the Third Servile War was precluded by the fact Crassus had to compete with other adventurous men for honor and glory, because the control of Rome was at stake. In the film, Olivier’s Crassus explains that he wants to return Rome to its former constitution (of an aristocratic character resembling the constitution prior to the historic Gracchi, and the fictional Gracchus opposing him in the Senate). This sets him as somewhat more noble than Pompey and Caesar, both of whom Karl Marx loathed. Marx actually comes to praise Crassus as the more capable general than Pompey, who stole the glory from Crassus in the final pitched battle against Spartacus, and was thereafter an inept buffoon in opposition to Caesar, whereas Marx esteems Crassus (who suffered humiliating death and defeat against the Persians) fully capable of following through on Pompey’s empty promises of stamping out Caesar. The script by Trumbo is not unaware of a need to hold Crassus as the villain, yet a villain of superior guile to his bourgeois brethren. Without Olivier, however, there is little life to be had in this construct.
Kubrick’s role in the film is minimized from his other films, but you can especially appreciate it in a few scenes. Though much of the film follows the nature of Mann’s scenes in the Libyan quarry, Kubrick’s imprimatur can be found throughout. The framing of scenes is reminiscent of Kubrick’s filmic architecture, heavily favorable to distant shots and cleanliness and meaningful purpose for each image. When Spartacus is waiting for his turn to fight in the arena, as the out-of-sight action is heard to the solemn horror of Draba, we get a whiff of the closed intimate interior shots with explosive exteriors found in everything from 2001 to Eyes Wide Shut. A tracking shot after the slave rebels capture and set fire to the camp of Glabrus is also very Kubrickesque. Kubrick insisted on shooting the film outside Madrid, and it makes me curious if he did so to cheekishly bring the film in debt to fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s troops, who acted as the Roman soldiers (oh, the irony!). Older cinematographer Russell Metty fought the upstart director tooth and nail over the film, but Kubrick got his way, and Metty got an Oscar for following Kubrick’s orders. Indeed, the only Oscar Kubrick won.
The overall project of shedding light on the barbarous and utterly ancient nature of Roman society was most definitely not a bad one. The film had many of the rougher edges of the Stalinist intellectual authors, and the condescending Christian triumphalism of the previous spear and sandal epic Ben Hur shorn from its final product. The acting of Kirk Douglas, as far as star power goes, is pretty remarkable considering this was still very much a pre-Brando era. Olivier is doing Shakespeare and therefore doing Plutarch, and he’s doing it very well. Jean Simmons is given the role of an orderly waifish housewife ideal, and it’s not that she doesn’t perform it well, it’s that performing it well doesn’t mean a whole lot. The film is, for the most part, rip rollicking good clean fun in the classical epic genre.
One chief failure in Spartacus, however, is the hypocrisy of heroism exhibited by the writers, who essentially condemn heroism for nation or tribe (the film posits the evil Roman against the international band of slaves under their rule), or for glory, or for capital gain, and promote a flawless moral victor in whosoever triumphs for the lower class against the upper class, sans the comic relief of a Thersites. This is binary philistinism, plain and simple, and cannot be taken seriously by any person not inhabiting the 1st Century BCE. The structural and moral failures of Rome were deep and profound, and slavery was indeed the crux of the issue, but what’s apparently missing from the film Spartacus is that he wasn’t intending to free the slaves and begin a new order of the ages. The brotherhood of slaves was more the convenience and easy recruitment. If they hadn’t been cheated by the Cilician pirates promising them escape from Italy, they would have gone and “liberated” more slaves to join their merry band of brigands, until Pompey eventually stamped out the Cilician pirates, and them, one and the same.
The Roman Empire went to all corners of the world, leaving nowhere for free people to breathe freely. They “made a desolation and called it peace”. There was obvious injustice in their mere way of life. But the critique here, like I said earlier, is not about slavery, but about the inequality in men that the useful idiots penning the book and screenplay upbraid in our own society. Fast and Trumbo consider free men engaging in contractual agreements to each other’s benefit to be “slavery” as much as African-Americans subjected to the cruelty of southern cotton picking. The massive gaping hole in their history is that Spartacus, a truly noble fellow justly admired as being the most ideally free thinking and Greek-like of his age, was not turned from a higher purpose of achieving quiet freedom by legions blocking the Alps, but by the unruly nature of the anarchic system he created in his quasi-communitarian band of brigands. They wanted the sensual life of killing, fucking, burning, and destroying. Those base impulses of the common people, it appears, were also mostly shorn from the final product in this film. Film going audiences don’t want to be told that they, as the captains of democracy, are idiots who bend the state to their lowly whims, especially if they are precisely that. If things get too complicated, they hand it over to a hero, a tyrant “of the people”, like a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Lenin, or a Stalin, whose name was etched on the prize the Soviet Union gave to writer Howard Fast.
Despite the context of questioning the elitism of interbellum British nobility, this scene in The Remains of the Day might just serve as a competent repudiation of Fast’s and Trumbo’s Spartacus:
Having taken a look at my favorites lists for all-time movies, actors, and actresses, I thought it fit to not only update them for the sake of new events, but because the writing made me angry at myself. I punched myself. Then I re-did them. I might crawl through the list of all-time movies and do proper reviews for each film, eventually.
Epic films can only try in vain to become the cinematic equivalent of the epic poetry of antiquity. Looking at lists of epic films, something quickly becomes apparent: a confusion of sweeping scope for sweeping meaning. The most effective epic films can only hope to catch a little lightning and focus it within the blizzard of nonsensical events surrounding it on a southern California studio lot. Hollywood, however, is nothing if not a sandpit of vanity, and hopeless ego. So like Achilles, every studio, every director, every producer, every actor wants nothing more than fame, riches, and glory, to be talked about in the afterlife. So it’s a profound oddity that nobody has bothered to pay attention to the heroes of the very first epic.
That is to say, almost nobody. It’s my general impression that most people who write and direct films are either cokehead studio-bred empty suits, geeks with short attention spans, or insufferably boring hacks trying to spill a little Freud into pretty celluloid. Sincere and gifted auteurs have mostly grown in the intellectual climate of a post-war world where heroes were false, drama on the scale of Tolstoy was bourgeois and staid, and they preferred drama of individuals. Somewhere, we can find moderation in this. When a late draft of a script based on T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, about his times in Arabia, was given to screenwriter Robert Bolt, a man who upbraided the English and western governments for nuclear proliferation and served time in jail for protesting, he set about turning the concept of the hero on its head. He transformed it into an epic of the individual, where the hero raged not against some Agamemnon, nor betrayed ‘the Greeks’ (though we see both in the form of General Allenby, and the Brits derisively scoffing at Lawrence and his “wog” army), but against himself. He’d render into being the story of a modern Achilles, portrayed by a young Peter O’Toole who’d pattern his performance after an ephebic initiate to the carnage of war, what he was meant to be as the disowned bastard son of nobility, and yet therein his spirit would flee him as a consequence of joining the cataclysm.
Lawrence of Arabia, however great it may be, cannot pretend to hold up the lame epic genre as a modern seminal equivalent of Homer any more than any other run of the mill Cecil B. Demille horseradish epic does. It fails to speak loudly on a pivotal historic event that collected the energies of the world, or create any widely-stretching mythology from it that would help form a new culture. Its ties to reality are simply the life of one man, his time in the Arab Revolt, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which is rather minuscule on the radar of our culture. Lawrence’s influence on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas is only ephemeral, as both filmmakers would produce paper-thin heroes not fit to be Achilles’ catamite, and John Williams would use quotes from Maurice Jarre’s amazing score for Star Wars that would only make you want to watch Lawrence instead. Within a year or two, Lawrence’s artistic merits would be forever drowned out and superseded by the French New Wave‘s far broader and revolutionizing influence on American, and thus world cinema. Lawrence was, if anything, the last hurrah of the old school of filmmaking, before we permanently moved into the modern. So it’s hardly accurate to crown it with laurels as the defining epic of our culture, even in the vaguest sense.
This fictionalized Lawrence, however, is perhaps as close to the grandeur and genius of a Homeric hero as you’ll ever see in cinema, and that is fascinating. It’s fascinating not only in the dearth of comparative examples, which speaks volumes about the infantile conception of heroes in every other cinema epic, but also as an instructive time warp that shows how creepy it is that our very first characters of literature can be seen as taking a disillusioned path to modernity. Famously in the Odyssey, Achilles, who’d gladly reached the summit of arete and heroic endeavor, told Odysseus from the underworld that it’s far better to be among the living (and to beware women!), placing all his glory won by the labors of monumental rage into perspective. This theme might be recognizable to the “Lost Generation” writers who followed World War I, Lawrence’s war. In Lawrence, our hero who has defeated the Turks in impossible victories, and given his adoptive people the Arabs a glimmer of hope, quickly recognizes his feats were for naught, and he cannot reclaim his soul lost to tragic fate any more than the Turks can reclaim their Empire he helped destroy.
The film begins not in medias res, but interestingly with Lawrence’s death after the war in a motorcycle accident in England, and then his funeral, where the key characters all reflect on the prodigal whirlwind they could only help but hold in awe. The Homeric hero, much like Lawrence, was a refractory and egotistical primary cause of historic change, with the god-like fastidious airs of charismatic leadership, and not a little capricious whim. Lawrence rubs everyone in the story the wrong way, eventually, and ultimately it gets to Lawrence himself. We’re brought back to the beginning of his adventure (what would an epic be without an adventure yarn?) as a cartographer wasting away in a basement in Cairo, where he reproaches his colleague for his ignoble embrace of safety and comfort well away from the trenches of France. Summoned to speak to General Murray (played by O’Toole’s mentor and common co-star Donald Wolfit), he assesses Lawrence in reductive dismissal (“knowledge of … knowledge of”). Lawrence gets too big for his britches, and quotes Themistocles, the Greek politician who most brilliantly played the role of the trickster-rogue Odysseus, from a variant translation of Plutarch’s Life of him (“I cannot fiddle, but I can make a great state from a little city“).
The eminence grise of the British Empire’s interests in Arabia, one Mr. Dryden (the incredible Claude Rains) sees the promise in Lawrence few of the Agamemnons in service to the Army can possibly envision, and so dispatches him to the Hejaz to seek out Prince Feisal (Alec Guinness, whose mime of Arabian peoples fails him once or twice with an oddly Yiddish accent). Along the way, Lawrence impresses his Bedouin guide by differentiating himself from the domesticated Britons he typically escorts through the desert by only drinking when the guide does. After Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif, one of the few Arabs in the film, and like O’Toole in his most notable role here) shoots his guide for drinking from his well, Lawrence confuses him by not being cowed by the petty tribal skirmish, and further rebuking him for it (“barbarous and cruel“). Later, while meeting Prince Feisal, Lawrence undermines his superior officer by telling Feisal that pulling back would mean subjugation by Britain, first showing his conflicted loyalties. (“Loyal to Britain and Arabia at once, is this possible?“) No, it is not. Lawrence seeks fame and glory, and by however means you reach it, regardless of loyalty to some dishonorable Imperialist Agamemnon directing him from Cairo. But his love for Arabia, for “desolate places”, is an expression of his disillusionment with Britain, more than any affinity for the tribes of Arabia. That’s something his Arab allies soon come to realize.
Now we begin to see the Labors of Lawrence: crossing the Nefud Desert; cajoling the recalcitrant chieftain Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn playing another generic hairy / swarthy character) to join them not for gold, but “because it is his pleasure”; sacking Aqaba on the Red Sea to cut the Turk’s lines; crossing Sinai with only two kids to inform the British; terrorizing the Turks in ambushes along their rail lines; surviving capture and torture by the Turkish Bey (José Ferrer, paid infinitely more than all other actors for barely 5 minutes of screen time) in Deraa; reaching Damascus before the British Army. In the course of these events through the war, Lawrence rips apart at the seams, and Bolt and the other writers had to perform a tightrope dance because of the rigid morality of the time over the two elephants in the room: the homoerotic tendencies of Lawrence; and the sadomasochistic tendencies of Lawrence. Though censorship and decorum of the time made them sweep one under the carpet more than the other, we get both the homoeroticism and the sadomasochism in the torture scene at Deraa. As Lawrence sinks deeper into the war, so that it becomes all that he knows and was ever meant to know, like so many soldiers he is utterly drained of empathy, moral bearing, and his pain threshold becomes a demonic urge tearing at his insides.
Gay writer Noel Coward famously told O’Toole if he’d been any prettier it would have been called “Florence of Arabia”. Both themes are not elided utterly, but the former is understandably given euphemistic short shrift with Lawrence’s treatment of the two young Arabs whom he drags cross Sinai, and the emotional response to the death of one of them. They could vaguely be interpreted to be eromenoi, and thus representative of Selim Ahmed, the young Arab who lived with T.E. Lawrence and was suggested to be his lover and the “S.A.” to whom Lawrence dedicated the creepy opening poem of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The real Selim never went to war with Lawrence, and both boys’ unceremonious deaths in the film – the second coldly ignored by an increasingly dejected Lawrence – are a far cry from the funeral pyre and games for Patroclus or Hephaestion, but it nonetheless does strike a similarity to that Classical Greek interpretive motif, in reality and fiction. It’s further notable that there are no women in speaking roles in the entire film (beware Penelope!). The later adaptation A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia that began the career of Ralph Fiennes in the role of Lawrence would be far more explicit in regard to this theme.
The penultimate scene in the film is by far the most important. Not only does Claude Rains say the best quip in cinema history (“on the whole, I wish I stayed in Tunbridge Wells“), but we get to see Lawrence, who is now a long-since deceased ghoul haunting the film, be dismissed from the epic by the two Kings, Allenby being quite glad he isn’t actually a literal King, who immediately begin bickering over sovereignty. Western Imperialism rears its ugly head once again (a post-Empire epic, David Lean’s picture is progressively distant from the Korda brothers epics of old that made Victorian stories into hagiographies), and Lawrence’s disillusionment in both Britain and Arabia is vindicated. Achilles has won his great victory, and his ego has been sated, but now he’s among the dead in the underworld. In the final scene, as a lorry of boisterous heroic soldiers speeds by, Lawrence understands fully: glory is fleeting, and it is better to be alive.
Oh, the painful wasteland of nihilism! Capitalism and modern existence grind at the human soul, objectifying it, commodifying it, killing it. Meaning (meaninglessness?) can be found in any chaotic randomness, from sex to murder, whatever that narcissistic beast, the hero of postmodern vilification can seek out. Life, after all, means nothing, right? Cosmopolis may not mean anything, that’s ferdamsure, but existence? If one can’t bear it, and I’m not telling any tales out of school here, it just might be a psychological disorder, and one ought seek help for this instead of play the hero in some fruity ostentatious drama about the fall of man; if one can’t find meaning in the morass of modernity, self-destruction is only an answer if you watch too many goddamn movies (you can’t, but I’m just speaking in the parlance of the insufferably-common person). Lay down the Fight Club, son.
So Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel concerning the slowed limo trek of a financial whiz kid across Manhattan for the lowly purpose of a haircut, chooses as its hero a man who is the very quintessence of everything wrong with the world: a one percenter (those bastards! with their … money! … and giant Gordon Gekko cellphones!). He is a man who consumes and patronizes people like a guarded Medici in the Renaissance, who so drains life of meaning that he himself is now sucking on empty. With consumption running dry, he consumes himself. Something is cruelly ironic about the casting involved here: Robert Pattinson, trying to move beyond his Team Edward bloodsucking fame, plays the caricature and embodiment of a no less base consumption.
Kudos to DeLillo for taking aim at billionaire financial asset managers, hitherto long escaping the opprobrium of artists and writers, and the envy of the audience. It takes real balls, and I say originality, to call Marie Antoinette a cunt. Kudos to Cronenberg, for being blind to the impossibility of taking a novel written in a postmodern formula and adapting it to the screen with a very literal and realist formula, thereby wrenching solely the content from the source. The adaptive road from postmodern literature has a bridge out, I’m afraid. In another avenue, imagine a BBC radio broadcast attempting to explain the events in a Matthew Barney movie like Cremaster 3. No, don’t imagine it, or James Woods will say those ancient words, “See you in Pittsburgh“.
While the material is boring sophistry, and the director is a genius who’s setting a disappointing pattern, the lead actor is genuinely fun. Pattinson is eager to prove himself with a risky role, and you don’t get much riskier than a frivolous variation on Patrick Bateman. Pattinson executes the orders perfectly: he’s the borderline personality disorder hero of self-destructive excess – emotive over the collapse, cold to his complicity – a metaphor for our culture. Unfortunately for him, this backwards hero becomes something of an over-the-top comical conception.
The waft of a financial Dracula that comes through the character – eye-rolling as this metaphor may be – is affected by Pattinson’s experience in kiddie adaptations. Now that he’s into the big leagues of accepted narratives (“Rich guy bad, mankind is hopelessly doomed so fuck it”), the jump from the Mormon lady transparently thinking with her pussy to the elegantly redundant Postmodernist frothing at the mouth over McDonalds billboards isn’t that far. We’re supposed to hate this captain of finance, and revel in the schadenfreude of his demise, and maybe our society’s. I don’t. Alls I see is a poor sumbitch with severe depression.
Paul Giamatti is the angel of death for Team Edward, the backwards villain to Pattinson’s backwards hero: a frustrated employee who sees murdering the rotten motherfucker as his only way to grasp on to any meaning in this drained-out existence. Paul is Paul, you know what to expect from him, a slob’s slob, done well. K’Naan makes a brief appearance as a dead guy, but a better contribution on the soundtrack (that also includes fellow Canadian musicians: Metric). Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton have tantalizing cameos beaten to a minimum; the filmic equivalents of Lauren Bennett’s contribution to Party Rock. Mathieu Amalric is seemingly only in the film to throw a pie, and the oratory equivalent through an overextended recounting of his truth to power given. Ehhhnnnnnnnn.
But Cronenberg, my man, what happened? A History of Violence, Eastern Promises … you got real on us all of a sudden, and it worked. It worked well. But then you got cocky. You thought sticking with the real – avoiding the surreal, questionable realities – would work itself out once we departed the seedy underbelly of Viggo Mortensen’s gangster life for a delicate survey of existence. I don’t think anybody wasn’t excited to see what you’d do with that. But the final product has no life. Fittingly, you chose this project, which throws its hands up over the problems faced by modern people … miming your surrender. Don’t give in. Press pause on the game and think it over.
Franklin D. Roosevelt … fighting werewolves who give people polio … talking like a rap guy … yeah, regardless of the provenance, forget expectations, this is one of the funniest films I have ever seen.
FDR: American Badass! isn’t a witty comedy, nor does it have a cleverly subversive satire riding underneath its cartoon eagle wings. There is no attempt in this film whatsoever to play by any rule, or exert itself with any amount of rigorous decorum (except on the part of the actors, who all clearly seem to be having a GREAT time). There are a number of gags, and SNL-at-its-worst skits that only belong in the film in so far as it reminds you just how low budget and dumb this turkey is, and might I just say, is supposed to be. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a.k.a. “The Delano”) acting like Burgess Meredith as The Penguin if he grew up a pimp in Detroit with prurient preoccupations is maybe the most stupefying experience any audience can have, ever. But are these fatal problems? Fuck no.
The humor at play here – heavily imbued with the unfortunate frat bag douche boy stock bro-humor and meager sailor talk (“gotta slap a hoe”; “motherfucker” repeatedly said by FDR as if he were Hank Moody being sodomized) – is redeemed by writer/producer Ross Patterson’s innate grasp of surreal humor that is both physical and nihilistic in character, such that it glories in its own low budget, where the lack of dollars forces abstract material (and cartoon eagles, did I mention this movie has a random cartoon eagle?). I would go so far as to say that if this film were patronized by a big studio, and granted an embarrassment of riches, it wouldn’t be a quarter as funny.
Some are comparing this to the slapstick humor of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker films like Airplane!, Top Secret! (sharing the unnecessary exclamation point, even), and The Naked Gun. I’m of the opinion that this is only partially true. Those films took the essence of their project seriously, regardless of the humor within. Very few of the jokes and gags were unthinkably unpredictable, nor was there anything clinically insane about them. You could always reconcile the jokes with some referenced meaning, or a gag for gag’s sake. This is the greatest innovation with FDR:AB!, in that it combines the slapstick of those films with the Mystery Science Theater 3000 sardonic appreciation of bad movies, and a little touch of your common David Lynch dream sequence.
If I had to coin a term for this self-aware B movie type, it’d be surreal pastiche. Gladly, however, FDR: American Badass! actually follows through on the promise of ridiculousness that is intrinsic with its title, unlike that god awful slop of Musk-Ox diarrhea, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Though I’m unaware if Patterson came up with the idea after reading AL:VH or not, there is no specific line of parody where this movie spoofs that one, and Kevin Sorbo’s cameo here as a pothead Honest Abe soothes our post-traumatic stress from having been victimized by that other interpretation. Instead of any specific parodies, this is a general pastiche of B movies, such as the Ed Wood-esque mockbusters proliferating the shelves at every Blockbuster going out of business. Where the humor in Alien vs. Hunter, or Peter Rottentail is almost totally unintentional or hamfisted, in FDR:AB! not a scene goes by where the failure wasn’t fully intended.
In a way, this film is close in spirit to the absurdist work of Troma honcho Lloyd Kaufman, Tim & Eric, and the film Black Dynamite (the latter two both tied to the Adult Swim network – the foremost weathercock of experimental humor), as wry post-modern commentaries on low brow culture. Where Tim & Eric recycle the most absurd examples of failure from the garbage heap of old public access inanity in a pure Dadaist tradition, and Black Dynamite gives the blacksploitation of Dolemite and Foxxy Brown a rebirth in the endless possibility of self-referential cartoon absurdism, FDR:AB! makes a revisionism on a world-historic figure (i.e. the Pimp Bill Clinton twitter feed) and uses him as a device to try to blend in among the ranks of Asylum mockbusters, right next to Megashark vs. Giant Octopus.
A word has to be said for the actors involved here. Aside from Kevin Sorbo, whose mere mention brings laughter as an ironic pop culture reference, most of the actors involved in FDR:AB! are not, as is typical for B movies, down on their luck self-parodies, and even Sorbo is hilarious in this movie! – he should stick to comedy. You’d expect this movie to star Pauly Shore, Shannon Tweed, Fred Durst, or Jon Lovitz in the title role. Barry Bostwick, of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, turns out a nutty but hilarious performance as The Delano, a street-talking raunchy old cad who, like I said before, is rather more like the Penguin than FDR. Character actors Lin Shaye, Bruce McGill (FDR’s aide de camp, and trigger-happy pistolier), and Ray Wise (the Power of Shrim guy from Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, and Laura Palmer’s murderous dad) all seem to be at once in on the joke and able to embolden the insanity by taking the script as completely serious.
Writer/producer Patterson, rather at home in front of the camera, highlights the preposterousness as Cleavon Buford, FDR’s familiar spirit, a “Re-pube” (R) politician from Georgia who introduces him to the joys of the hot springs, and group sex on moonshine. His Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds-inspired oratory on the subject of a magic snowman, and how politicians enjoying baths together, but not in a gay way, may rival anything uttered by Cicero or Demosthenes. His role in the narrative is seemingly as nonsensical as the quick clip of the black manservant playing tricks with a pumpkin-basketball that just about any schmuck can do (if anything in the film convinced you of its truly nihilistic nature, that scene was it), save for an eerie channeling of Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday in Tombstone, as a drooling hayseed with cosmopolitan graces who reminds the viewer there’s no point to be made in any film about a free-styling President killing werewolves with a bazooka wheelchair.
I really could have done without the Axis of Werewolves split screen MadTV crap, but otherwise, jesus … I nearly died laughing.
Any film that sits with you, and builds in your mind as you replay it again and again, not out of morbidity from some shock material, but out of a pure contemplation, is something to revere. If you’re just confused by a film, either the material isn’t for you, or its abstraction retarded its point being communicated. But more than likely with a film which you revisit in your mind, you’re given enough pieces to infer meaning in the variable areas only hinted at, until the film begins explaining reality outside of itself. This is one of the highest criteria for a worthy work of art.
Set in the aftermath of World War II, The Master brings to union two stories: the plight of a lower class and lower IQ sailor, Freddie Quell (played by Joaquin Phoenix), who is stricken with post-traumatic stress, physical ailments, and a severe sex addiction wrought from childhood abuse; and a subtle reference to the founding and spread of a Scientology-esque cult through the charismatic tent-revival mien of L. Ron Hubbard-lookalike Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). While he was conjuring this story with friend and lead actor Hoffman, Paul Thomas Anderson agreed with the suggestion that the focus should move to the sailor, who commands a far more interesting drama. With his borderline personality projected against the setting of the cult’s feminine-dominated obsessive desire to control initiates’ minds and natures, Freddie’s explosive libido finds and begins to crave the offered structure, until he realizes it can neither serve nor contain him.
Anderson is unafraid of the common prospect for error incurred by many storytellers who attempt to paint portraits of conflicted and erratic personalities. These characters more often tend to define the expectation for over-the-top cliches before anything real or arresting. Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood and Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights are two exceptional people, but a morality tale and rubber cock aside, neither is rendered with corny obsolescence, and are in fact leviathans of cinema, drawn from the auteur’s keen observation of history and anecdote. To construct the two main characters in The Master, Anderson was given an easy go of things with the Dodd false Messiah archetype; to build Quell, he turned to stories imparted from Jason Robards (whom he directed in Magnolia), the life of John Steinbeck, and especially the banned John Huston documentary made for the US Army, Let There Be Light, about the “shell shocked” soldiers returning home from war with a few parts left in combat.
Similar to the proletarian humiliation by elites and sexual inadequacy coloring the eponymous character in the acclaimed Georg Büchner play Woyzeck (adapted by Werner Herzog in the ’70s with his trained Messianic gorilla Klaus Kinski in the lead role), Freddie is a damaged and compulsive brute, bouncing from one situation or one trollop to the next. Stumbling upon Dodd’s yacht (presaging Hubbard’s life at sea, finding no safe harbor for his spiritual snake oil), Freddie comes to be wrapped in Dodd’s manipulative web, being administered reductive hypnotherapy that gives him reason to unleash his demons buried deep within. Dodd cuts him down, then builds him back up again with empty encomium (“you’re the bravest boy I’ve ever met”). Dodd is like a cat playing with a mouse, but Freddie is instantly transformed with purpose and belonging, two things on which his family failed him. Freddie is hooked.
However, unable to find the proper Bacchic orgies and pussay he supposes one might find in any decent cult, Freddie begins sublimating his animalistic impulses (Dodd frequently refers to him as an “animal” in nearly pederastic admiration) as an enforcer in the name of The Cause, getting into scruffs with skeptics, naysayers, and even the police arresting Dodd for thieving from some old bat in Philadelphia. Tossed in the slammer, Freddie suffers a breakdown in which he loses his faith in The Cause, and in The Master, who attempts to administer his hypno-insulto-grip on him from the next cell over. Against the wishes of the ladies in his life, Dodd endeavors to redeem Freddie through pointless exercises meant to destroy his personality, and build him up again in the form of the Cause.
Thereafter, the feminine role in religion comes into play. Though the prophet-messiah and his enforcer are both leading men of the society, the rules and decorum are set by Dodd’s wife (played by Amy Adams), the movement is bankrolled and invigorated by lonely, bored women (such as Laura Dern and Workaholics‘ goofy naive assistant manager Jillian), and it’s to the essence defined by the trimmed hedges of domesticated nature. Adams holds a Livia-like dominatrix grip over her husband the huckster (giving him the best “hand party” in cinema history), and through him, the movement. The absurdity of the emasculated structure is highlighted by Freddie’s compulsive sexual mind, as he’s watching a boisterous gathering of the cult, and through his eyes we see all the ladies stripped of their clothes, breasts and bushes cinema-borne. His animalistic sexual drive is picked upon by Dodd’s recently married daughter, who covers her seductive tracks by claiming the brute is actually in love with her. His unruly and all-too-natural behavior makes him a misfit for the tribe in the eyes of Adams, so he’s reminded of his place.
Really, that’s all so much to take in. This is an appropriate metaphor not just for Scientology, but all religion, faith, crystals, magic healing, and new age horseshit as a whole. The implications don’t even stop at spirituality, and can be seen society-wide. The manipulative Dodd is a megalomaniacal charlatan who builds contempt for self-help gurus, and self-awareness advocates. The worthiness of submission or common sacrifice in the name of belonging or brotherhood also is questioned. Do you really want to join the Masonic lodge because you’ve led a boring life reading history books? Counted alone, the perfect performances of Adams and Hoffman make the film something to behold, but the re-imaging of the story to follow the rage of Freddie is an open invitation for Joaquin Phoenix to blow us all the fuck away by nearly one-upping Daniel Day-Lewis’ method acting, and physical dedication to the role. That’s saying nothing of a personal and real layer to Phoenix’s performance, on account of his family’s history in the Children of God cult.
I’ve said before that PT Anderson has a masterpiece in him somewhere, counter-intuitively admitting I don’t believe the phenomenal There Will Be Blood is the best he has to offer us. I didn’t feel The Master as much as TWBB, not by a long shot, but good lord is it a demonstration in genius filmmaking, making the profession looks deceptively easy. The cleanliness of picture, of narrative tension, of elite actors in their own choir of angels, and the second wonderful musical collaboration with Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood (also contributing to TWBB) leave one in awe of this picture.
Though I still think Anderson can do better, this one is an instant classic.
Few things draw my ire at the movies more than children’s films wrapped in the onerous veneer of adulthood, expressed by dark tones and dark subject matter, to trick the audience with shallow grit and empty noir to believe the ridiculous plausible. But the opposite is not in the least true: adult films that escape into the playful innocence of childhood, though at variance with originality of narrative and ambition of vision, tend to enhance a story that cajoles neither adult nor child. In Moonrise Kingdom, director Wes Anderson, a man whose movies I suffered poorly until Fantastic Mr. Fox (after Roald Dahl’s children’s novel), pulls this off in iconic style as he follows the adventures of two alienated tweens – a boy who rationalizes the world into his endeavoring as a scout, a girl who rationalizes it with French songs on her record player – both rebelling against their stultifying worlds.
Sseemingly picking up where François Truffaut left off on the beach in Les quatre cents coups, with a young alienated Jean-Pierre Léaud finding by the ocean thalassocratic freedom in the absence of his dreadful parents and schoolmasters, Anderson gives us a less strikingly emotional and literary realist take on a childhood presuming greater wisdom than the insufferable adults. But on their way to oceanic anarchy at ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ – the kids’ new name for a neglected cove on the trail of their getaway – the fire of juvenile delinquency is still evident. Left to their own devices, the 12-going-on-35 rebels without an aim, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), seize the opportunity to act like adults and explore their sexuality, just prior to their marriage, of course (officiated by imprudent scout leader Jason Schwartzman).
Among the forces of reaction marshalled against the youths’ rebellion is the entire state and social apparatus of a small town New England island community. Anderson imposes a rigid comic structure of muffled emotions shown by an ensemble cast of parents (Bill Murray; Frances McDormand), scout masters (Edward Norton; Harvey Keitel), state officials (Bruce Willis; Tilda Swinton), and other scouts engaged in the man hunt of the decade, only for sides to switch in a final dash. Everything begins in calm, stowed-away-in-soup-can blurbs, obsessively compartmentalized by Anderson, leaving each on top of the stove until they finally explode towards the end for a tomato soup medley.
This film is too fun for adults, in this era of insipid grit. Anderson does not have a poor sense of what he wants out of his vision, nor how he needs it executed. He takes particular care to achieve Ozu-like symmetry in his shots, introducing perspectives in both narrative and screen that step away from expectation for an outside-looking-in vantage of the story (Bob Balaban’s exposition of local tourist information and cartography, for instance). He integrates the experience of characters right down to observing the books, maps, and trinkets that color their sensations, and yet are minuscule objects typically unobserved in cinema. Here the painstaking detail on the little enlivens our appreciation of the those characters.
What I usually don’t like about Wes Anderson’s film is the unbearable arbitrariness and cuteness he employs to strike a home run in familiarity with the unadventurous audience. It’s present, here in Moonrise Kingdom. The kids, their little maps ‘n such. That’s what I’m talking about. But I can withstand that far easier than in Royal Tenanbaums. It’s magnified, as usual, by the ensemble cast, who are given just enough time to ham it up, and bring a gentle and eccentric personality to screen. You can’t fault the actors, you can only fault the conception of too much over the top, too quickly. Some people eat that shit up, so whatever, it’s not like it didn’t work.
‘Misfortune’ is the only word to describe Tom Hardy’s generational talent being misused yet again by the unwarranted bombast of writers. First, there was Warrior, a film whereby braindead cheesedicks can live out their martial fantasies through Tom Hardy’s herculean Mixed Martial Arts victories. Then, there was the latest Batman movie, the pompous Bane of my existence, and a film so wrapped up in its own significance, it unironically presents a statue for its hero. Now there’s this movie, the superior of the three, yet still restrained by the self-importance of the source novel’s writer, who lionized his bootlegging family with a fictional story so grand and colorfully vicious that it went under the nonsensical title “The Wettest County in the World” (as if prohibition extended through the world, or this story compares favorably to ones a few counties over).
Mercifully, the film was re-titled Lawless at a late stage in the production. The story is about the three Bondurant brothers in Virginian Appalachia, reputed by locals to be invincible (oh, for the fucking love of god), who are running a small time bootlegging business. Tom Hardy is a grunting Old West icon with a deep sense of fairness and deeper acuity for violence. An actor’s dream: a man who speaks with his eyes, he’s the second best part of the film, in both acting and composition. Jewey the Beef is pigeonholed playing the foolish and weakest younger brother, their driver. The first best part of the film is the glory of seeing him being beaten nearly to death. Middle brother Jason Clarke … whatever, nobody will remember him. Everything is going well in their operation, competition is not bitterly contested and almost controlled through a guild, and nobody in the region is serious about cracking down on booze, from the law to swearin’ ol’ grannies. The scale of violence is a great marker for the level of competition over the course of the film: from brass knuckles to shoot-outs.
Enter Guy Pearce, returning to work for overgrown man-baby and director John Hillcoat after 2005′s The Proposition. To call Pierce’s brow-less Chicagoan villain come to subjugate the hillbillies a hammy villainry would not be unfair in the least. Writer Nick Cave was both drawn to the eye-rolling penchant for violence in the novel, and required to pipe it down a bit, yet left us with a proportionate level of cliches – obsessive compulsive disorder, vague sexual disorder, general psychopathy to make the villainry easy – to roll our eyes yet again. The character is a slithering snake-like person you’re immediately instructed to hate until the expectant glorious showdown at the end between principle characters that settles all narrative problems with weaponry. That, my friends, is the marveled-at work of genius. Pearce, however, executes that roll brilliantly, and breathes life into a Dick Tracy comic-like character who’s dead on the page.
Two other sources of momentary relief from the script’s misery are rising stars Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska, both remarkable actresses. Unfortunately, neither’s character is given an honest amount of exploration. Not the one for her strange path from being a Chicago dancer and recent rape victim, nor the other for her stranger path from Baptist Christianity to the dark side of Middle Class living. Both are given as a whiff for color, rather than any larger point. Their utility as semen recepticles for the bustling Bondurant boys is their primary purpose. Chastain is given a brief moment of complexity immediately before the showdown, when she defiantly hides the shame of her rape, and then cries. Uh huh.
In explaining how they composed the film’s score, musician, writer, and screenwriter Nick Cave said they didn’t want “Americana”, and intentionally wanted a DIY feel to their outsider attempts on hillfolk music. I think it’s fair of me to say an extrapolation of this exists throughout the project, because it feels as “authentically inauthentic” as possible. A great number of those involved in front of and behind the camera are Australians, and the genesis of the story is a suburban kid’s daydreaming about the heroism of his family in a lost world of antique America. I’m not saying one culture cannot speak on another, or that an American story is poorly interpreted by forners, or that suburban kids are incapable of greatness (ehem), I just don’t like what this sordid meeting of worlds has so glibly produced. They did so with a heavily transparent need to impress by means of non-existent depth in gun fights, of which we’ve seen one million times and continue enduring either through fetishism or general laziness.
The look into Appalachian culture is as superficial as Deliverance, and a less worthy and far less revealing exploration of Prohibition as any number of films/tv series like Boardwalk Empire, The Untouchables, Road to Perdition, or Legends of the Fall. The only unique thing to be learned here is that Baptists knew how to rock, but then I’m almost 100% certain that was as sexed up for our pleasure as the transgressive violence. “Loud” history that makes the quiet past sexy for people in the age of Dubstep.
This was ultimately a film about nothing, whose ending is groan-worthy, with dead-ended intentions in the script, wholly saved by some great actors given little to work with, and Jewey the Beef being beaten to a pulp by Guy Pearce. The film’s turning point can be found in one death of a very minor character named “Cricket”, which somehow persuades the townspeople to rise up in revolt against the over-the-top bad guy.
Acknowledging just how aware I am that the overwhelming majority of people (that is to say, the people who bore me to death) don’t share my affinity for dark or offensive comedy, let me say that I would be remiss to let this opportunity pass to convince you of the benefits of laughing in death’s face. It seems to be the common perception that those of my ilk are either insensitive or downright cruel. We who laugh when some daredevil tempts a wild animal and loses a limb, or someone makes an elaborately dehumanizing joke at the expense of some other group, or more to the point: we who laugh at hate speech like the anti-Muslim film gaining notoriety in the press this week. To say we’re merely enjoying the inflicting of pain on others is wide of the point (and may the person who does not laugh at schadenfreude cast the first stone). What’s always missed is that we’re laughing at the predictability of the willfully plunged depths of human evil and ignorance.
You may have heard about a recent anti-Muslim film produced by a convicted meth cooker and check fraud using the alias “Sam Bacile” (a.k.a. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian Coptic Christian) and his American conservative Christian Islamophobe friends that’s been causing some outrage in the Middle East. Contrary to initial conjecture, the hate film “Innocence of Muslims” (see vid below) did NOT lead to the terrorist attack on our Benghazi Embassy in Libya. That was, as far as we know right now, planned well in advance. (UPDATE: the attack may not have been pre-meditated, as US Ambassador Susan Rice points out.) The film also was not financed by “100 Jews”, as its Coptic Egyptian criminal claimed to the media. If you’ve seen the production values, it is also inconceivable that it was really shot for $5M dollars. They had green screen usage below the dignity of a high school AV club production, but accordingly something you’d EXPECT to see from Wonder Showzen, or Tim & Eric, with intentional irony and mockery. The film is most widely known by its 13 minute trailer, which is 6 times as long as your average trailer, this being yet another indication of its unprofessionalism. But just watching it, you have to marvel at its glorious stupidity:
Look at that! How can one be offended by something so insane?
What this film trailer did unfortunately lead to was the provocation of far-right mongtards in Egypt to protest at the US Embassy, scaling the walls, and ripping apart the flag. This all after some professional victim of outrage scoured the internet to find obscure hate material to rally against (come look for my site, dipshit). In subsequent days, the demonstrations have morphed into other things, almost an event to be at, and antagonize Egyptian police. Soccer rioters even got involved. The demonstrations are small compared to the normal marches happening regularly, but the threat posed to embassies brings up a scare in the West, tied to what happened in Libya. As many have pointed out, reaction to the film is either but a drop in the bucket of outrage, the straw that broke the camel’s back, or even a randomly-chosen excuse. The anger could stem from American foreign policy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone attacks, rendition, support for Israel, any number of things.
The offense at the film, however, stems from the 10 Commandments, in the graven images and false idols category of blasphemy, where God would command the faithful to not worship clay models, pictures, or whatever else (film) like the pagans do. Some Muslim eschatology sees the graven image as liable to come alive and turn on you at the end of days, so Steven Spielberg will be eaten by a Velociraptor, if the shark from Jaws doesn’t get to him first. Considered a prophet of Islam, the depiction of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ was forbidden in many Muslim countries. The elaborate means by which Moustapha Akkad tried to keep from depicting Muhammad in the Anthony Quinn picture The Message, about the early Muslims, failed to keep the film from being banned throughout the Middle East even with the help of Islamic scholars. The production of Lawrence of Arabia was brought to a screeching halt in Jordan when the locals found out an actor would be reciting the Qur’an in English. The creators of South Park were sent death threats for an episode in which they depicted Muhammad in a bear costume, so that you couldn’t see him.
And that’s the normal, kind, cheeky stuff that drives some Muslims into righteous indignation. That reaction unto itself alone is worthy of vicious mockery. This reaction follows a shameful pattern, similar to the Danish cartoon controversy, where there’s not only zero tolerance for free speech, but an implicit injustice in that we don’t follow the rules of some distant obscure Imams or Mullahs. The civilizational divide has been made painfully clear through the spread of the Innocence of Muslims trailer, if not on free speech grounds, then on reaction to state-cultural relations, as many held the US government responsible for the film (indicating how they view the tools of state: to be used to crush satire), with some Islamist activists saying it was a huge Hollywood/television hit in the US. It has produced many hilarious attempts by Muslims or others to relate the hurt feelings, perhaps as some sacrilegious attack on Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or the Pope, or Abraham Lincoln.
But if the reactionary Muslims froth at the mouth over anodyne, even playful stuff, where Muhammad in a bear costume shakes them to the core, then their faith must be so insecure that their problems stem not from the West, or even the gross injustices inflicted by our war machine, but the crisis in their own psychology. That 8 of the 10 countries with the most internet searches for “sex” are all Muslim should be telling enough that this is a crisis of libido, but the issue of Arab agency, in so far as they want liberation from their dictators and monarchs in spite of us, also brings to the fore the crisis of ego. People don’t decapitate others, suicide bomb buses, or launch RPGs at embassies if their libidos and egos aren’t oppressed with feelings of inadequacy and stifled puritanical social mores, and they especially don’t get worked up over a goofy turd of a film like this:
Look at that! Look at that fucking shit! People are taking that seriously! That’s just how dumb they are!
But to look on this issue and say it’s fully the Muslim world’s fault for being such as it is, is incredibly off the mark. The aggravation of American foreign policy aside, the creators of this now infamous film intentionally aimed to lure in radical Muslims with a misleading title (Innocence), and then barrage them with “the truth”, of which nothing of the sort was found in the film. Westerners have long made hay of Muhammad taking his wife Aisha at an incredibly young prepubescent age. Though the legality of the marriage was unique, it was functionally no different than how Westerners used betrothal of sons and daughters all the time, meaning Muhammad needn’t have worried about Chris Hansen surprising him in the kitchen, at least by the universal standards of the time. But the filmmakers chose to use this as one of many other disingenuous, fruity, asinine attacks, including that he was gay (as well as his buddy, pan to buddy with a shit eatin’ grin – and by the way, only conservative religious assholes would consider that “dirt” on an enemy), that he performed some sort of holy cunnilingus on his first wife Khadija, he intentionally misrepresented the scripture of Christians and bastardized it to deceive people, performed gross slaughter upon all random tribes nearby, etc., etc. It was as if the script was penned by Sean Hannity after finding the worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle. What makes the movie so funny is that its criticism was not of Islam or Muhammad, but a wholly invented straw man that Muslims wouldn’t recognize if not for the fact he was named Muhammad.
Seriously, we as the human race – not as Muslims, or politically correct tightwad journalists, or alcoholic insult comedians, or right wing American warmongers – those of us sharing this planet all most get over our barriers, and realize just what enjoyment we’d have laughing at this pathetic film, as well as the pathetic sad proles embarrassing themselves in reaction to it. Any tragedies tied to it, perhaps a number of people will be killed in the coming days, will only highlight the absurdity even more. Imagine people dying from a stampede that had something to do with a protest against Porky Pig. People will never find common ground if there are sacred walls separating them, or certain words or concepts that must never be mentioned, lest it offend the sensibilities of some douche canoe surfing YouTube for “Islam Bad” or “Muslims Evil”. Here, try this: “The Holocaust was a hoax” – did that ruin your day? Do you actually believe it? No, because you realize it’s empty words. Empty words that can be turned around into humorous meta-level parody. “Dan Rather murdered his wife with a dildo” – am I getting to you yet? “Muhammad raped shellfish” – same thing applies, you know he didn’t, you know it’s physically impossible, so why get mad? The only person who’d get mad is someone who’s unsure. The rest of us can lovingly embrace this nonsense as the manufactured crisis of people who are worthless piles of shit.
In conclusion, if you’re already ripping off the arm rests on your couch because Muhammad appeared on screen, why go one further and become infuriated at the notion he was at one point in his life searching for a Devil-God while eating pussy? As far as I know, Muslims are proud of Muhammad’s purported sexual virility, and pussy-eatin’ delight is permitted in most varieties of Islam, again: as far as I know. It’s kind of like taking offense to your rapist wearing clothes bought at Target. Yeah, I made a rape joke, go fuck yourself (or have a street thug do it?!?).
Richard Ayoade – British comedian Richard Ayoade had his start performing in the theater club while at Cambridge with The Daily Show’s John Oliver, and saw his UK breakout role as Maurice Moss on The IT Crowd. His directorial debut film Submarine (scored by Arctic Monkeys pal Alex Turner), a coming of age story set in Wales that recalls the playful edits and narrative of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, won him the accolades of sardonically alcoholic critics comparing him to Woody Allen, but more importantly the financial attention of the big mother fucker himself (Harvey Weinstein). Next up is The Double, starring hip youngsters Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska. Ayoade will bring much glory to his small but dignified tribe, the Norwe-gerians of Ipswitch.
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani – This art-house horror junkie duo who tempt the armchair nationalism of the Langua D’Oc people bordering Italy are titanic star filmmakers of the Cutting Up Beautiful Naked Ladies Genre. Their 2009 film Amer (“bitter”) might already be a forgotten item in the dust bin of the film festival circuit, but its visually entrancing kick across the room psychopathic sensuality forged it instantly as a coda into the memory of audiences remembering its giallo referents. Their latest contribution to a collective film in segments, The ABCs of Death, awaits viewers at the Toronto International Film Festival, and illegal downloaders as soon as they see it on a lovely euro-snob website that shall remain nameless. Try something non-horror, non-Freudian though, because that’s so fucking done, okay you two?
Lena Dunham – She’s chubby. She’s a last call kind of girl. She’s a TriBeCa hipster of the worst sort. She treats cinema like her livejournal account. 25% of her celebrity comes from her cinematic persona, Jemima Kirke. But shit son, she’s pretty fucking funny and insightful, and a credit to Generation Y kids everywhere. She’s probably more accomplished than any other East Coast art school fuckwad to be sure (set the bar low on TriBeCa, not her gender). Tiny Furniture was one of those slow-going indie films that grabs a hold of you by the end, and demonstrated a genuinely fun comic and artistic mind in the making. The help of Judd Apatow brought the pep necessary to her debutante ball on HBO’s Girls, which is more important for its social implications than its artistic ones so far, but again, well worth it to witness the rise of a white hot auteur.
Claudia Llosa – Peru’s done it! They’ve produced somebody worth remembering! Llosa is an intellectual, political, and visually-centered cinéaste of the old sort, not unwelcome in the Paris or Rome of the ’60s. Madeinusa, a script about an isolated Indian town in the Andes celebrating Good Friday to Easter that she’d written long before it came to the screen, became a film that recalls the Fellini-esque perpetration of mischief through the mixing the sacred and profane with a stunning opera for the eye. Her follow-up, The Milk of Sorrow, opened up Llosa’s feminist side, her politics made not-insufferable by the fact that the movie was so fucking good, winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and gaining an Oscar nomination. She’ll fly under the radar for most, to their detriment.
Anna Melikyan – An Armenian schooled by Russian state cinema, Melikyan offers a unique vision into the endearing and experimental past of Soviet film the world fell in love with. The liveliness of her singular take on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid separates her from the rest of the dour contemplation, or soulless commercial blather that’s come to define post-Soviet Russian cinema. The narrative of Mermaid exports an idiosyncratic romantic tragedy from the Black Sea to Moscow, following her real life trail. Though she isn’t explicitly humorous, her ability to cut away from turgid structure compares favorably to slapstick hero auteur Leonid Gaidai. If you’re looking for the soul of modern Russia outside of the KGB oligarchy and gangsters, you’re in line waiting for her follow-up like the rest of us.
Vikramaditya Motwane – Though his roots in cinema are in the writing and production of Bollywood filth, in his debut as director with the film Udaan, one sees a confluence of talent, purpose, and seriousness that is rare in Indian cinema. It just goes to show that all a creative mind needs is experience in the form and a few bucks to accomplish their dreams. With the screenwriting help of the autobiographer upon whom the story was based, Motwane delivered a true classic and gem that spoke loud on the rising middle class culture of India, while the typical focus is on the megarich or the underdog proles. His next feature is a period romance based on O. Henry’s The Last Leaf. Brace yourselves.
Na Hong-jin – Them Koreans are crazy ass sunsabitches. What with their Nazi fetish bars, obsessions with serial killers. Oh, more the one than the other, jesus. Na Hong-jin is emblematic of the rise of the creep factor in East Asian cinema’s embrace of horror, but he can hardly be described as swimming with the current. His first two films, The Chaser (based on real serial killer Yoo Young-chul) and The Yellow Sea (hordes of North Korean immigrant gangsters wielding kitchen knives because Korea has no NRA) are scary, ugly, and dark as fuck. But what separates them from your schmaltzy corn starch dismemberment porn we expect from Eli Roth, et al. is that Na brings such bone-chilling casual realism to the horror and violence, such that it becomes uncomfortable to absorb. Watch out for this creep.
Sarah Polley – What is that you say? An exceptional actress ain’t half bad as a director (auteuse in Québec?!)? Get stuffed, it isn’t possible! Well, maybe it is. While many make their way up the chain of command from tea-boy (David Lean), Polley had it a bit easier as the star on the set of a few notables, like the Dawn of the Dead re-make. Her craft in front of the camera doesn’t always translate that well, and to be sure, this isn’t the next Haneke or even Breillat we’re talking about here, but she’s clearly in deft possession of a cinematic talent worth noticing. Her focus in Away from Her and Take This Waltz (a.k.a. movie where Sarah Silverman shows her bush un-sexually) seem to be elegiac condemnations of clinging and the comfort of familiarity. The latter demonstrated a double standard, where the promiscuity of a wife demands an end to a pleasant but moribund marriage. Men can’t do that in movies. Couldn’t do it in the ’50s, and it’s somehow even more despicable of them today to do that. It’s heartbreaking tragedy with the tables turned. Sexual politics gets curiouser and curiouser.
Jason Reitman – The son of the Ghost Busters guy just might be more talented than his father when it comes to helming decent film projects. I think of his dad as more brick and mortar and lunch pale, while the son is living in a jalopy in the trendy part of town to be ironic. The sharp humor in Thank You for Smoking, and the noble attempt at saying something vaguely Lost in Translation’y in Up in the Air were both memorable looks at a young filmmaker in full(er?) control of a project. His collaboration with D-grade stripper and Minnesotan spicy nacho Diablo Cody (Young Adult, Juno) were more interesting, because the writing was chock full of vim enough for Reitman’s direction to be put to more nervous use. Not needing to grind any axes or draw up unrealistically mature teenagers, Reitman could afford to learn from the experience and reproduce the vitality, without the retardation.
Edgar Wright – So then, if you haven’t seen Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, well maybe you should. What makes Wright’s work notable is that he’s capable of blending popcorn movie stuff with delightful self-reference. Shaun, Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim are all genre films unto themselves as pastiches of Zombie apocalypse, noir, and the manifested-from-thin-air Nintendo Power generation Japanaction genre (isolated to Adult Swim and G4, for the most part), respectively. Wright just might be the strongest candidate of this bunch to make a masterpiece, or he might not. Regardless, you should already know him by now.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Art 0/5 Ent 2/5 Worth 0/5
I must be missing something here. From the mere title, I expected this one to be ridiculous. Not ridiculous like I want to rip my eyes out, but zany ridiculous. The mirth and laughter incurred from preposterousness. The kind of cultural reference that would draw laughter from its mere mention. It was not anything of the sort. The purposefully nutty melding of the horror and epic genres, and ahistorical play on the superhero origins of Honest Abe might have been something interesting in the novel, I don’t know, I don’t read novels about vampires because I’m not a retarded 16 year old girl. But it clearly didn’t work out here. They failed at the mere essence of the business: there wasn’t a single laugh to be had, quite the opposite. What was effected in this film was a confusing matter of whether it had taken part in the Vampirization of history, or the Ninjification of history. Let me explain.
The Vampirization of history is the more brazen and intellectually vacant of the two, but hardly the more amusing. It’s one subset of the larger pandemic: the Infantilization of narratives (see: Christopher Nolan’s Nu-metal “serious” Batman). The Vampirization of history – seen in various Vampire flicks such as the ones that portray Judas Iscariot, or some other sinister or religious figure as their historical forebear – revisions the historical record, and to whatever end tries to explain a role vampires have long played in human history. Some of these are benign, most laughable, few aren’t clever in the least.
What AL:VH achieves is a rather unbearable revisionism, because it competently sweeps all societal wrong under the carpet, and dismisses it all as the work of Vampires. Killin’ the injuns? Vampires did it! Slavery? Vampires did it! Numerous times, we’re rushed through a background infomercial telling us about how we got here, and how vampires did it all. Each time, it’s reminiscent of the unbearably annoying rants of Turkatron, the malfunctioning robot turkey from the future who harasses the characters on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, beginning each story with “In the year of 9595″. This is the brainchild of bums yelling at you from behind a dumpster, not something even a society as low-brow as ours should entertain.
Now, to the one point of any merit in this giant turkey: is it instead more a perpetrator of the Ninjification of history, wherein heroes of the past are given martial arts super skills to defeat baddies of all sorts? Here, Abe Lincoln becomes an ax-wielding monster slayer in an antebellum version of Mortal Kombat as written by a syphilitic Mark Twain impersonator. Compare to the embellishment of Sherlock Holmes in the Robery Downey, Jr. movies, or the latest Three Mustaketeers movie (the one with sailboats that managed to sustain flight). It seems Japanomania came early to the West. There really isn’t much to this, but it’s funny as fuck in a pathetic way, and maybe the only unintentional source of laughter in this flaming turd.
One big thing … just why did they pick Benjamin Walker? Doesn’t he look more like a young Liam Neeson than a young Abe Lincoln?
Oh the story? The acting? You must be kidding. They had bad vampire people whose jaw bones extend and their skin gets pale and boils up when they’re preparing to bite. It’s all cliches swirled together incompetently. This is the bottom barrel of the vampire genre, which is fashionable in cyclical waves, and it’s movies like this that wind the cycles down. Marton Csokas was the only bit of interest as far as craft goes here. He plays minor bad guys quite well. Look at his filmography and you’ll probably get why I say that.
