All reviews originally published by The Indypendent.
Winter Soldier
Of the many military terms repeated throughout the 1972 documentary Winter Soldier, "SOP" (shorthand for standard operating procedure) proves the most unsettling. This term is used to contextualize the daily atrocities committed by American soldiers against Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War, and it's uttered by a large number of the more than 125 veterans who gathered in a hotel conference room in 1971 to offer protest in the form of testimony. Finally released on DVD this past week, the documentary of this testimony could not be more relevant, as the US military faces harsh criticism for a civilian massacre at the Iraqi village Haditha last November. While Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki calls it “a horrible crime”, Gen. Peter Chiarelli and other American officers continue a long tradition of framing this unspeakable violence as "isolated incidents" "exceptions" or "aberrations".
Yet, as the genuinely horrifying testimonies of the soldiers in Winter Soldier reveal, the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians has been a consistent, if unspoken, practice of the U.S. military. The veterans were organized mostly in response to the revelations of My Lai but their individual stories, of bodies tossed from helicopters, of women mutilated, of men skinned alive, of children burned, carry from the first day of duty to the last across a range of battalions and divisions. One soldier comments that if a given atrocity was wrong, there was the belief that a more senior officer would clearly stop it, while another explains how boot camp trained him to treat all Vietnamese as animals to be eviscerated. Another solider shamefully shows a picture of himself smiling with a propped-up dead civilian at his legs, while another tells of the shooting of children out of sheer boredom.
With each revelation of inexplicable torture or murder, the film becomes less a protest of the war and more an examination of the military mindset that allows for such crimes to continue today. Authority goes unquestioned, "don't ask, don't tell" reigns supreme, while the cost of a Vietnamese life, however innocent, appears negligible. Made by an anonymous collective of documentarians, all donating their services and equipment free, the film focuses solely on the storytelling of the veterans, who mostly relay their experiences in a matter-of-fact manner that only heightens the numbing sensation of listening to so much horror. Though it played Cannes and other major festivals around the world on initial release, the film was virtually ignored in a U.S. still involved in the war. It's now more known for a very brief appearance by John Kerry, a shame since its lessons transcend bipartisan politics. Simply put, this DVD should be mailed to every home in North America.
V for Vendetta
As a revolutionary work of political art, V for Vendetta is a great comic book movie. Adapted from an acclaimed late 80s DC comic by Alan Moore (who has distanced himself from this and all other films of his work), the film desperately wants to be embraced as both a genuinely subversive, altogether topical call-to-arms and as a blockbuster action movie experience. This inherent contradiction proves the film’s fatal flaw, but it’s also what makes this admirable failure more engaging than the average comic book adaptation.
Don’t let all the talk of controversy mislead you: this is less the story of a terrorist-hero blowing up buildings (though that’s here too) than of his mentoring a hot girl in need of political reawakening. They meet cute: the Guy Fawkes masked V (Hugo Weaving) rescues young Evey (Natalie Portman) as she’s about to be gang raped by fascist cops on curfew duty. He quickly swoops her up to a rooftop to watch his detonation of Old Vic’s, a move that seems inexplicable until we learn Evey is the daughter of activist parents abducted by the government before her eyes as a child. When V hijacks the state-controlled tv station to broadcast his revolutionary message, Evey helps him escape and they retire to his underground lair filled with banned cultural artifacts to, regretfully, fall in love.
Despite strong work by both leads, the love story angle is ridiculous, mostly because V has no actual face and Evey’s is too perfect. But in its overly theatrical vision of a dystopian future, complete with a gullible media, bioweapons, big pharma conspiracies, and massive government cover-ups, the film is playfully relevant. Just don’t listen to any Matrix dorks: as before, the Wachowski Bros (who wrote and produced this while their second-unit director took the reigns) have taken big ideas and reduced them to easily inhaled bong hits for undergrads. As with The Matrix, giving the film’s ideas serious thought will kill the buzz.
That the film halfway succeeds is a credit to the Wachowskis’ affectionate translation of the source comic’s own mainstream subversion (Moore’s hardly the lone rebel he paints himself as-I’m sorry but did I miss Chris Ware’s Batman comic?). With its deep rich colors, noir shadows, and graphic novel sheen, the look does justice to the original illustrations. The wonderfully intertextual cast helps, especially Stephen Rea as a cop who discovers the government cover-up and John Hurt as the Big Brother-ish chancellor. Somewhat unexpectedly, this is also the most LBGT friendly comic book movie ever made: Stephen Fry plays a helpful, closeted talk show host, Evey’s awakening-via-torture sequence is cross-cut with the heartrending tale of a doomed lesbian, and V and Evey share a last dance to an Antony song (!!!). As for the terrorist as hero, the film sidesteps a key issue by conveniently removing innocent people from the buildings; here, the buildings are just symbols, as V claims, thus allowing the film to land safely as entertainment.
Don’t let all the talk of controversy mislead you: this is less the story of a terrorist-hero blowing up buildings (though that’s here too) than of his mentoring a hot girl in need of political reawakening. They meet cute: the Guy Fawkes masked V (Hugo Weaving) rescues young Evey (Natalie Portman) as she’s about to be gang raped by fascist cops on curfew duty. He quickly swoops her up to a rooftop to watch his detonation of Old Vic’s, a move that seems inexplicable until we learn Evey is the daughter of activist parents abducted by the government before her eyes as a child. When V hijacks the state-controlled tv station to broadcast his revolutionary message, Evey helps him escape and they retire to his underground lair filled with banned cultural artifacts to, regretfully, fall in love.
Despite strong work by both leads, the love story angle is ridiculous, mostly because V has no actual face and Evey’s is too perfect. But in its overly theatrical vision of a dystopian future, complete with a gullible media, bioweapons, big pharma conspiracies, and massive government cover-ups, the film is playfully relevant. Just don’t listen to any Matrix dorks: as before, the Wachowski Bros (who wrote and produced this while their second-unit director took the reigns) have taken big ideas and reduced them to easily inhaled bong hits for undergrads. As with The Matrix, giving the film’s ideas serious thought will kill the buzz.
That the film halfway succeeds is a credit to the Wachowskis’ affectionate translation of the source comic’s own mainstream subversion (Moore’s hardly the lone rebel he paints himself as-I’m sorry but did I miss Chris Ware’s Batman comic?). With its deep rich colors, noir shadows, and graphic novel sheen, the look does justice to the original illustrations. The wonderfully intertextual cast helps, especially Stephen Rea as a cop who discovers the government cover-up and John Hurt as the Big Brother-ish chancellor. Somewhat unexpectedly, this is also the most LBGT friendly comic book movie ever made: Stephen Fry plays a helpful, closeted talk show host, Evey’s awakening-via-torture sequence is cross-cut with the heartrending tale of a doomed lesbian, and V and Evey share a last dance to an Antony song (!!!). As for the terrorist as hero, the film sidesteps a key issue by conveniently removing innocent people from the buildings; here, the buildings are just symbols, as V claims, thus allowing the film to land safely as entertainment.
Score
Whether the core is soft or hard, most pornographic films seem determined to remove the pure, thoroughly adulturated joy one finds in the best sexual experiences. The puritanical guilt and shame which lies unspoken beneath every porn encounter, while occassionally kinda hot, supports a paranoid theory that these films are made by neo-conservatives to corrall our base instincts. As a whole, the industry itself has proven continually successful without ever regaining the playful spirit of its 1970s heyday. Blame the decimating impact of AIDS, the conversion from film to video or even widespread plastic surgery--whatever the cause, most porn today feels hungover and listless, as if nothing could be less fun than sexual activity.
Not that porn from the past is always enjoyable. But beyond the brilliant if problematic Russ Meyer, few porn filmmakers have bothered to push their films towards artistry. In his best films (The Image, The Lickerish Quartet, The Opening of Misty Beethoven), Radley Metzger achieves a kind of playful artporn grandeur. In Metzger's world, sex becomes the common denominator that bridges any distinctions of class, race, or sexual orientation: all that matters is each character's imminent fuckability.
Score (1973) represents the apotheosis of the swinging 70s: Elvira (Claire Wilbur) and Jack (Gerald Grant) are a happy couple competing to seduce the sexually naïve Betsy (Lynn Mowry) and Eddie (Calvin Culver). Not too unusual a setup, but the trick here is that Jack wants Eddie and Elvira wants Betsy, leading to a film that offers something for everyone. After Elvira has Betty photograph her screwing local handyman Mike while the men get high, it’s time for dress-up: Jack’s the sailor, Eddie’s the cowboy, Elvira’s the nun and innocent Betsy the dominatrix. The same-sex couples split off for a long seduction sequence, brilliantly cross-cut by Metzger, where the boys get Warholian projecting fetishized images on their bodies, the women lose themselves in a mirrored tent bed, and everyone takes amyl nitrate (how quaint!).
Adapted from an off-Broadway play clearly parodying Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, the script is consistently witty, with most of the best lines going to Wilbur's Elvira. The décor is Hefner-ski-lodge all the way and the casting is flawless: Mowry might be porn’s ideal naïf. Like a cross between James Whale and Josef Von Sternberg, Metzger is a master of framing his characters to heighten both seduction and unspoken meanings. Even better, the director's devil-may-care embrace of his character's every desire never stoops to passing judgment, excepting those too square to let loose and fuck the whole room.
And it's hard not to admire a film where one character says of her husband: "I like everyone here except him because he won't take his pants off." Never less than wholly charming, Score is pure adulturated joy.
Not that porn from the past is always enjoyable. But beyond the brilliant if problematic Russ Meyer, few porn filmmakers have bothered to push their films towards artistry. In his best films (The Image, The Lickerish Quartet, The Opening of Misty Beethoven), Radley Metzger achieves a kind of playful artporn grandeur. In Metzger's world, sex becomes the common denominator that bridges any distinctions of class, race, or sexual orientation: all that matters is each character's imminent fuckability.
Score (1973) represents the apotheosis of the swinging 70s: Elvira (Claire Wilbur) and Jack (Gerald Grant) are a happy couple competing to seduce the sexually naïve Betsy (Lynn Mowry) and Eddie (Calvin Culver). Not too unusual a setup, but the trick here is that Jack wants Eddie and Elvira wants Betsy, leading to a film that offers something for everyone. After Elvira has Betty photograph her screwing local handyman Mike while the men get high, it’s time for dress-up: Jack’s the sailor, Eddie’s the cowboy, Elvira’s the nun and innocent Betsy the dominatrix. The same-sex couples split off for a long seduction sequence, brilliantly cross-cut by Metzger, where the boys get Warholian projecting fetishized images on their bodies, the women lose themselves in a mirrored tent bed, and everyone takes amyl nitrate (how quaint!).
Adapted from an off-Broadway play clearly parodying Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, the script is consistently witty, with most of the best lines going to Wilbur's Elvira. The décor is Hefner-ski-lodge all the way and the casting is flawless: Mowry might be porn’s ideal naïf. Like a cross between James Whale and Josef Von Sternberg, Metzger is a master of framing his characters to heighten both seduction and unspoken meanings. Even better, the director's devil-may-care embrace of his character's every desire never stoops to passing judgment, excepting those too square to let loose and fuck the whole room.
And it's hard not to admire a film where one character says of her husband: "I like everyone here except him because he won't take his pants off." Never less than wholly charming, Score is pure adulturated joy.
Munich
As the least Spielbergian film ever made by Steven Spielberg, Munich comes as a both a welcome surprise and a slight disappointment--an appropriately conflicted experience. Spielberg has long struggled in his "adult" movies to reflect a world more gray than black-and-white, with his more recent films showing progress towards this realization. With Munich, film's most successful director has made his most emotionally conflicted and morally complex work, reflecting an American sensibility more Robert Altman than Frank Capra. There's an understated power to this political thriller which is nonetheless undermined by the suffocating aspirations of the well-intentioned.
Munich details the aftermath of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palenstian terrorists at the 1972 Olympic Games, focusing on a group of five Mossad agents covertly assembled to hunt down each of the 11 terrorists thought to be responsible. Instead of developing each of the agent characters, Spielberg and his screenwriters Eric Roth and (in a prestige-garnering rewrite) Tony Kushner focus exclusively on their leader Avner (Eric Bana) as he wrestles with how their assignment muddles the distance between the political and the moral. The other four team members figure more as different voices arguing in Avner's head, with Carl (Ciaran Hinds) offering sympathy for the Palestinian point of view. The story alternates between these arguments and the assassinations of the terrorists, a stop and go that prevents the film from ever achieving narrative momentum.
But this lack of momentum solidifies the film's major point: the mission has no real end, as revenge begets revenge, bloodshed begets bloodshed. Spielberg suppresses his natural directorial instincts, denying the comforts of storytelling to explore the aimlessness of retribution. The assassinations are quick, brutal and generally disastrous, lacking the storyboarded grace of Spielberg's usual action scenes. At its best, as in the murder of the first target as he awaits an elevator, the film manipulates suspense to interrogate our desire for resolution instead of congratulating it; like Avner, we crave and regret the senseless death. This new use of Spielberg's technical expertise makes the film's violence feel both inexplicable and inevitable and exposes the cycle of vengeance that has helped prevent the possibility of peace between Israel and Palestine.
Yet, beyond an opening sequence where the Munich debacle abstractly unfolds on televisions across the globe, this overly literal film suffers from a lack of evocative imagery. And the scenes of political discussion reveal that this is undoubtedly a Spielberg film by telegraphing every thought in the script, as if we need all viewpoints clearly spelled out. This tendency to overstate and oversell what is already clear, as if seeking our approval, reaches its apex in a regretful sequence at the end, where Spielberg crosscuts a sex scene with the Olympic massacre (including the most ridiculous shot of any film this year). At this stage in his career, Spielberg should have the confidence to not film scenes that echo Sally Field's infamous Oscar speech: trust us Steven, we like you, we really really like you.
Munich details the aftermath of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palenstian terrorists at the 1972 Olympic Games, focusing on a group of five Mossad agents covertly assembled to hunt down each of the 11 terrorists thought to be responsible. Instead of developing each of the agent characters, Spielberg and his screenwriters Eric Roth and (in a prestige-garnering rewrite) Tony Kushner focus exclusively on their leader Avner (Eric Bana) as he wrestles with how their assignment muddles the distance between the political and the moral. The other four team members figure more as different voices arguing in Avner's head, with Carl (Ciaran Hinds) offering sympathy for the Palestinian point of view. The story alternates between these arguments and the assassinations of the terrorists, a stop and go that prevents the film from ever achieving narrative momentum.
But this lack of momentum solidifies the film's major point: the mission has no real end, as revenge begets revenge, bloodshed begets bloodshed. Spielberg suppresses his natural directorial instincts, denying the comforts of storytelling to explore the aimlessness of retribution. The assassinations are quick, brutal and generally disastrous, lacking the storyboarded grace of Spielberg's usual action scenes. At its best, as in the murder of the first target as he awaits an elevator, the film manipulates suspense to interrogate our desire for resolution instead of congratulating it; like Avner, we crave and regret the senseless death. This new use of Spielberg's technical expertise makes the film's violence feel both inexplicable and inevitable and exposes the cycle of vengeance that has helped prevent the possibility of peace between Israel and Palestine.
Yet, beyond an opening sequence where the Munich debacle abstractly unfolds on televisions across the globe, this overly literal film suffers from a lack of evocative imagery. And the scenes of political discussion reveal that this is undoubtedly a Spielberg film by telegraphing every thought in the script, as if we need all viewpoints clearly spelled out. This tendency to overstate and oversell what is already clear, as if seeking our approval, reaches its apex in a regretful sequence at the end, where Spielberg crosscuts a sex scene with the Olympic massacre (including the most ridiculous shot of any film this year). At this stage in his career, Spielberg should have the confidence to not film scenes that echo Sally Field's infamous Oscar speech: trust us Steven, we like you, we really really like you.
Offside
Like other directors of the Iranian New Wave, Jafar Panahi uses techniques associated with both documentary and neorealist traditions (location shooting, hand-held cameras, non-professional actors) to give his politically urgent films a low-key but deadly serious immediacy. In Offside, the director applies these same techniques to make another film (after 2000's The Circle) about the repression of women under Iran's Islamist regime, but this time it's a comedy. Adopting a lighter touch, Panahi nonetheless retains his harshly critical perspective, causing Offside, like many of his earlier films, to be banned in Iran.
The concept of Offside is so metaphorically tidy that it could have easily proven trite or simplistic in lesser hands: a group of rabid teenage female soccer fans disguise themselves as boys and try to sneak into a forbidden-to-women World Cup match. Thankfully, Panahi makes several key decisions that exploit this concept to its fullest, starting with shooting the film on-the-run during an actual 2006 Iran-Bahrain match (the director having deceived the authorities about his real intentions). Enhanced by the verite-style filmmaking, this collapse of fiction and reality provides the film with an edgy gravitas that grounds its dominant mode of situation comedy.
Opening his film with one poorly-disguised girl noticed by a boy who wants to help her, Panahi establishes how the rule banning women from sporting events is looked on as foolish by men and women alike, especially amongst the younger generation. Arriving at the game, each of the girls is quickly identified and taken to a holding pen outside the stadium, where they are overseen by a couple of hapless guards more interested in watching the game. The majority of the rest of the film takes place here, with the girls straining to see into the stadium while trying to convince their young guards to, if not let them go, at least tell them what's happening during the game.
Emboldening his central metaphor, Panahi wisely locks our perspective with the girls, so we share in their frustration at only catching the occasional, tantalizing glimpse of the exciting game we hear off-screen. Exasperated, the girls slyly manipulate their captors, as in a comically suspenseful scene where one girl uses a bathroom break to briefly escape her overwhelmed captor. The girls even discuss why the rule, based on an arbitrary idea of too much cursing and male flesh, seems so ridiculously outdated, especially since they watch games on TV.
Rather charmingly, it's not these discussions that influence the guards, but instead the shared passion for soccer, as demonstrated in the unbridled celebration by everyone whenever Iran scores a goal. Indeed, the force of the movie's argument comes less from its direct conversations about repression and more from the sheer excitement of the film's non-actors--these girls genuinely love soccer and their beloved Iranian team, speaking with enthusiasm about individual players and even reconstructing specific plays within their holding pen. In the end, the look on their faces when they hear a radio broadcast of Iran winning the game is worth a thousand arguments.
The concept of Offside is so metaphorically tidy that it could have easily proven trite or simplistic in lesser hands: a group of rabid teenage female soccer fans disguise themselves as boys and try to sneak into a forbidden-to-women World Cup match. Thankfully, Panahi makes several key decisions that exploit this concept to its fullest, starting with shooting the film on-the-run during an actual 2006 Iran-Bahrain match (the director having deceived the authorities about his real intentions). Enhanced by the verite-style filmmaking, this collapse of fiction and reality provides the film with an edgy gravitas that grounds its dominant mode of situation comedy.
Opening his film with one poorly-disguised girl noticed by a boy who wants to help her, Panahi establishes how the rule banning women from sporting events is looked on as foolish by men and women alike, especially amongst the younger generation. Arriving at the game, each of the girls is quickly identified and taken to a holding pen outside the stadium, where they are overseen by a couple of hapless guards more interested in watching the game. The majority of the rest of the film takes place here, with the girls straining to see into the stadium while trying to convince their young guards to, if not let them go, at least tell them what's happening during the game.
Emboldening his central metaphor, Panahi wisely locks our perspective with the girls, so we share in their frustration at only catching the occasional, tantalizing glimpse of the exciting game we hear off-screen. Exasperated, the girls slyly manipulate their captors, as in a comically suspenseful scene where one girl uses a bathroom break to briefly escape her overwhelmed captor. The girls even discuss why the rule, based on an arbitrary idea of too much cursing and male flesh, seems so ridiculously outdated, especially since they watch games on TV.
Rather charmingly, it's not these discussions that influence the guards, but instead the shared passion for soccer, as demonstrated in the unbridled celebration by everyone whenever Iran scores a goal. Indeed, the force of the movie's argument comes less from its direct conversations about repression and more from the sheer excitement of the film's non-actors--these girls genuinely love soccer and their beloved Iranian team, speaking with enthusiasm about individual players and even reconstructing specific plays within their holding pen. In the end, the look on their faces when they hear a radio broadcast of Iran winning the game is worth a thousand arguments.
An Inconvenient Truth
With a new horror film released practically every week, who would have thought that the most terrifying sequence in a film so far this year would have come from a PowerPoint presentation given by Al Gore? Illustrating the near-biblical flooding that will presumably ensue from the melting of sections of Greenland and Antarctica, Gore shows a simple overhead map of various parts of the world (including downtown Manhattan) with light blue color rushing over them, while talking of the roughly 100 million people whose lives would be lost. The once (and now probably not) future President of the United States makes it very clear that this flooding is not something that might occur hundreds of years from now, but is a current phenomenon whose outcome may happen in less than twenty years.
Though no other sequence in An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary based on Gore’s global warming lecture, has quite the same powerful impact, the film as a whole employs similar methods of informed, righteous doom to help inspire a global call to action. Structured around the lecture Gore admits to having performed over 1000 times around the world, the film is consistently clear-headed and persuasive, offering both a crucial lesson on our wanton destruction of the planet and a view of a man whose passion, humor, indignation, and intelligence has rarely been so evident. Using a mix of hard science, sophisticated charts and computer models, crisp stills and video, personal anecdotes, even (hooray!) a clip from Futurama, Gore addresses precisely how we are heating our world and building a future of more and more Katrinas. Touching briefly on the basic science needed to frame his argument, the former vice president eventually climbs aboard a crane to show just how far off the chart we’ve pushed global temperatures. It’s an unnerving gesture, coming as it does after a series of charts demonstrating how rapidly downhill the problem of global warming has accelerated in just the last five years.
What’s on display here, and is not shown by any other major public figure (save, god forbid, Bono), is a global historical perspective. Not satisfied to simply show the rising CO2 emissions of the last twenty years, Gore charts back 650,000 years to look at the changing temperature of the world as far back as we can presently measure. He’s always been unusually far-sighted for a politician, but seeing it dramatized here makes Bush’s near-sight appear all the more horrifying. Oddly, both Gore and the film only become wooden when they step out of the lecture to get personal, and the repeated foreboding shots of him looming over his Powerbook are too much. But, like any good lecture, when the film stays on topic it’s a powerfully convincing documentary.
Though no other sequence in An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary based on Gore’s global warming lecture, has quite the same powerful impact, the film as a whole employs similar methods of informed, righteous doom to help inspire a global call to action. Structured around the lecture Gore admits to having performed over 1000 times around the world, the film is consistently clear-headed and persuasive, offering both a crucial lesson on our wanton destruction of the planet and a view of a man whose passion, humor, indignation, and intelligence has rarely been so evident. Using a mix of hard science, sophisticated charts and computer models, crisp stills and video, personal anecdotes, even (hooray!) a clip from Futurama, Gore addresses precisely how we are heating our world and building a future of more and more Katrinas. Touching briefly on the basic science needed to frame his argument, the former vice president eventually climbs aboard a crane to show just how far off the chart we’ve pushed global temperatures. It’s an unnerving gesture, coming as it does after a series of charts demonstrating how rapidly downhill the problem of global warming has accelerated in just the last five years.
What’s on display here, and is not shown by any other major public figure (save, god forbid, Bono), is a global historical perspective. Not satisfied to simply show the rising CO2 emissions of the last twenty years, Gore charts back 650,000 years to look at the changing temperature of the world as far back as we can presently measure. He’s always been unusually far-sighted for a politician, but seeing it dramatized here makes Bush’s near-sight appear all the more horrifying. Oddly, both Gore and the film only become wooden when they step out of the lecture to get personal, and the repeated foreboding shots of him looming over his Powerbook are too much. But, like any good lecture, when the film stays on topic it’s a powerfully convincing documentary.
The Host
There’s a brilliant image near the start of Bong Joon-Ho’s thrillingly subversive monster movie The Host, where a group of people throw tons of food into the Han River at a mysterious creature hiding underwater. Bong positions his camera high, with his actors gathered on a shore at the very bottom of the screen and a huge, unnerving mass of water filling the rest of the frame. This shot produces typical monster movie reactions, from the gallows humor of seeing foolish people taunt a monster to the suspense-laden dread of knowing said monster is about to attack. But there’s also something else, a kind of empathetic disappointment, for we’ve already learned in the film’s opening scene that it’s precisely this kind of wanton destruction of nature that has produced the film’s amorphous squid-like terror.
A blockbuster success in its native South Korea, The Host is a rarity amongst genre exercises: an action-horror movie with a fully articulated global conscience. Mixing the expected clichés of monster moviedom with oddball humor, a genuinely touching family drama, and pointed critiques of various socio-political institutions, Bong’s film should prove an incoherent mess. It’s in fact the opposite, managing the neat trick of juggling all these approaches and more within a given sequence, scene, or as described above, a single shot.
Bong reveals this skill in the film’s aforementioned first scene, where a U.S. Army scientist demands that his Korean assistant dump numerous bottles of formaldehyde into a sewer that leads to the Han River, simply because they’re “too dusty”. It’s a quiet scene, and if its critique of clueless American destructiveness seems obvious, the tension of Bong’s symmetrical framing and creepy sound design make it genuinely unnerving. Throughout the film, the multi-layered content of a given scene is enhanced further by Bong’s near-faultless command of his craft.
As he introduces the film’s hero-family—a resourceful pre-teen abducted by the monster, her schlubby, slow-witted father, a drunken failure of an uncle, a near-miss Olympian archer aunt, and a dumb-wise grandfather—Bong keeps the tension palpable while layering almost every scene with some kind of commentary. Beyond its critiques of the U.S. military (who also oversee a supposed virus outbreak that leads to the deployment of “Agent Yellow”-ha!), the film offers protestors under attack, a willfully ignorant news media, a shady Haliburton-esque company, assorted cover-ups, and, of course, our collective abuse of nature. More pointedly, this might be the first monster movie to show protagonists also defending themselves from dire economic hardship.
Best of all is how the film does this while fleeing a squid monster and making really funny jokes about SARS and the democratization of South Korea. Most genre films with something on their minds do their action/horror/suspense thing, then take a break to offer commentary via boring dialogue scenes, essentially interrupting our cake to force-feed us brussel sprouts. The Host is a shining exception--the thrill-ride that makes you think and feel while scaring the laughs right out of you.
A blockbuster success in its native South Korea, The Host is a rarity amongst genre exercises: an action-horror movie with a fully articulated global conscience. Mixing the expected clichés of monster moviedom with oddball humor, a genuinely touching family drama, and pointed critiques of various socio-political institutions, Bong’s film should prove an incoherent mess. It’s in fact the opposite, managing the neat trick of juggling all these approaches and more within a given sequence, scene, or as described above, a single shot.
Bong reveals this skill in the film’s aforementioned first scene, where a U.S. Army scientist demands that his Korean assistant dump numerous bottles of formaldehyde into a sewer that leads to the Han River, simply because they’re “too dusty”. It’s a quiet scene, and if its critique of clueless American destructiveness seems obvious, the tension of Bong’s symmetrical framing and creepy sound design make it genuinely unnerving. Throughout the film, the multi-layered content of a given scene is enhanced further by Bong’s near-faultless command of his craft.
As he introduces the film’s hero-family—a resourceful pre-teen abducted by the monster, her schlubby, slow-witted father, a drunken failure of an uncle, a near-miss Olympian archer aunt, and a dumb-wise grandfather—Bong keeps the tension palpable while layering almost every scene with some kind of commentary. Beyond its critiques of the U.S. military (who also oversee a supposed virus outbreak that leads to the deployment of “Agent Yellow”-ha!), the film offers protestors under attack, a willfully ignorant news media, a shady Haliburton-esque company, assorted cover-ups, and, of course, our collective abuse of nature. More pointedly, this might be the first monster movie to show protagonists also defending themselves from dire economic hardship.
Best of all is how the film does this while fleeing a squid monster and making really funny jokes about SARS and the democratization of South Korea. Most genre films with something on their minds do their action/horror/suspense thing, then take a break to offer commentary via boring dialogue scenes, essentially interrupting our cake to force-feed us brussel sprouts. The Host is a shining exception--the thrill-ride that makes you think and feel while scaring the laughs right out of you.
Take Out
A modest, lean, thoroughly engrossing independent feature by
co-directors Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou, Take Out follows one day in the
life of Ming Ding (Charles Jang), a recent, illegal Chinese immigrant working
as a deliveryman for a small restaurant. The opening sequence sets up
expectations of a suspense thriller: behind on the debt he owes to those who
smuggled him into the US, Ming learns via hammer toting thugs that he has to
pay off $800 by the end of the day. Yet, the film trades the easy-out of a
ticking clock narrative for something richer and more insidious, using
rain-soaked streets, obnoxious customers, and the monotony of endless
deliveries to expose the harsh underbelly of the American dream.
Of course, this isn’t the first low-budget independent feature to address this theme, so it’s a credit to everyone involved that the film deftly avoids some obvious pitfalls and makes excellent choices about how to treat the material. First, the film was shot on location in New York City during the business hours of an actual restaurant, providing an immediacy one can’t find in a studio. Seeing the vegetables being cut, the dishes being washed, and the orders called in gives the film a strong neorealist vibe that only heightens Ming’s situation. Second, the co-directors eschew overstatement, aiming instead for an overall tone of quiet dignity that filters down through the staging of the individual scenes. The film’s careful compositions, naturalistic performances from a mix of professionals and non-professionals, and atmospheric sound design (minus the usual overbearing score), establish an even-keeled tone that’s just right for the story. Finally, as if echoing Ming’s own attitude, the film never condescends to its characters or the audience so that its portrayal of the illegal immigrant experience is powerfully reinforced by simple, economic storytelling.
If there’s a drawback to this consistency, it’s that the film is perhaps a bit too one-note and just a hair too slight in scale. It could use more of the other characters in the restaurant, most notably fellow deliveryman Young (a droll Jeng-Hua Yu) and the amusing Big Sister (non-actor Wang-Thye Lee) who takes the orders and steals every scene she’s in. Also, nearly all the people Ming delivers food to are portrayed as ungrateful, racist, and cheap, which while likely accurate for New York, comes off a bit overdone within the film. Still, these are minor quibbles for a movie this smart, effective, and concretely realized.
Of course, this isn’t the first low-budget independent feature to address this theme, so it’s a credit to everyone involved that the film deftly avoids some obvious pitfalls and makes excellent choices about how to treat the material. First, the film was shot on location in New York City during the business hours of an actual restaurant, providing an immediacy one can’t find in a studio. Seeing the vegetables being cut, the dishes being washed, and the orders called in gives the film a strong neorealist vibe that only heightens Ming’s situation. Second, the co-directors eschew overstatement, aiming instead for an overall tone of quiet dignity that filters down through the staging of the individual scenes. The film’s careful compositions, naturalistic performances from a mix of professionals and non-professionals, and atmospheric sound design (minus the usual overbearing score), establish an even-keeled tone that’s just right for the story. Finally, as if echoing Ming’s own attitude, the film never condescends to its characters or the audience so that its portrayal of the illegal immigrant experience is powerfully reinforced by simple, economic storytelling.
If there’s a drawback to this consistency, it’s that the film is perhaps a bit too one-note and just a hair too slight in scale. It could use more of the other characters in the restaurant, most notably fellow deliveryman Young (a droll Jeng-Hua Yu) and the amusing Big Sister (non-actor Wang-Thye Lee) who takes the orders and steals every scene she’s in. Also, nearly all the people Ming delivers food to are portrayed as ungrateful, racist, and cheap, which while likely accurate for New York, comes off a bit overdone within the film. Still, these are minor quibbles for a movie this smart, effective, and concretely realized.
Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
The shaky handheld camera has long been a popular shortcut tool of non-fiction films (and fiction ones not trying to appear as such) to help convey immediacy, as the increased lack of stability in the image can lend a greater sense of danger or consequence to even the most mundane, generic of scenes. But in Anders Ostergaard’s tense and fascinating documentary, Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, this danger is very real both in front of and behind the camera.
Almost entirely assembled from hand-held footage smuggled out of the country during numerous anti-government protests in the fall of 2007, the film simultaneously weaves its unforced, politically-focused urgency through both content and form, so that we’re not just fearful for the protesters, but also for those reporting this to us through the footage itself.
As the film opens, the Burmese military regime has almost completely shut out the country from communication with the outside world, controlling the flow of media from print to TV to Web. Partially in response to a sharp rise in fuel prices (in turn, affecting the price of food and much else), student and Buddhist monk-led protests against the regime begin to flourish while a group of underground journalists known as the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) take great risks to document the uprising. The DVB, who begin simply documenting people talking about the regime, soon find themselves on the front lines, secretly filming the violence perpetrated on students and monks by the military during the protests. Narrowly avoiding capture, these video journalists get their footage out to their mysterious ringleader “Joshua” in Thailand, who in turn distributes it to major media outlets.
There’s something both surreal and inspiring to see footage shown on BBC News and then seeing the same footage in the terrifying circumstances under which it was originally shot. Such sequences, as one where a hidden camera captures another reporter being shot simply for possessing a camera, restore the risk at the heart of this kind of reporting so often lost in a broadcast context. Just as crucially, the film serves as a testament to new media reporting, as the videos smuggled out become the key sources of information about the protests outside Burma. Beyond the BBC, the videos were distributed on the web via blogs across the world, providing a strong example of alternative distribution methods highlighting a country in crisis.
Constructing his film with considerable skill, Ostergaard has a deep sense for how the framing of media can shape political consciousness, and is adept enough at playing images off each other to highlight this idea (not surprisingly, the film won a documentary editing award at Sundance).
Yet, for all its media self-awareness, the film remains dedicated to showing the genuine heroism of the protestors and the DVB, as well as revealing the devastating impact of a country entirely subject to military rule. Alternately an historical document, a suspense thriller, a testament to alternative media, and a tragic political drama, this is the rare documentary that satisfies on multiple levels.
Almost entirely assembled from hand-held footage smuggled out of the country during numerous anti-government protests in the fall of 2007, the film simultaneously weaves its unforced, politically-focused urgency through both content and form, so that we’re not just fearful for the protesters, but also for those reporting this to us through the footage itself.
As the film opens, the Burmese military regime has almost completely shut out the country from communication with the outside world, controlling the flow of media from print to TV to Web. Partially in response to a sharp rise in fuel prices (in turn, affecting the price of food and much else), student and Buddhist monk-led protests against the regime begin to flourish while a group of underground journalists known as the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) take great risks to document the uprising. The DVB, who begin simply documenting people talking about the regime, soon find themselves on the front lines, secretly filming the violence perpetrated on students and monks by the military during the protests. Narrowly avoiding capture, these video journalists get their footage out to their mysterious ringleader “Joshua” in Thailand, who in turn distributes it to major media outlets.
There’s something both surreal and inspiring to see footage shown on BBC News and then seeing the same footage in the terrifying circumstances under which it was originally shot. Such sequences, as one where a hidden camera captures another reporter being shot simply for possessing a camera, restore the risk at the heart of this kind of reporting so often lost in a broadcast context. Just as crucially, the film serves as a testament to new media reporting, as the videos smuggled out become the key sources of information about the protests outside Burma. Beyond the BBC, the videos were distributed on the web via blogs across the world, providing a strong example of alternative distribution methods highlighting a country in crisis.
Constructing his film with considerable skill, Ostergaard has a deep sense for how the framing of media can shape political consciousness, and is adept enough at playing images off each other to highlight this idea (not surprisingly, the film won a documentary editing award at Sundance).
Yet, for all its media self-awareness, the film remains dedicated to showing the genuine heroism of the protestors and the DVB, as well as revealing the devastating impact of a country entirely subject to military rule. Alternately an historical document, a suspense thriller, a testament to alternative media, and a tragic political drama, this is the rare documentary that satisfies on multiple levels.
There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson’ "There Will Be Blood" could not have been released at a more opportune time. With its wicked portrayal of two men who willingly abuse God and family in pursuit of their own greedy interests, it’s the ultimate Christmas movie. And as it weaves through the characters of these men a tapestry of our darkest historical pursuits — the insatiable quest for and dependence on oil and religious fundamentalism — it becomes not just an Old West version of the Bush administration, but something far richer: a pitch-black mirror of the American soul.
To watch the slow moral ruin of the oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the small-town preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) is to witness the underbelly of our national character writ large. It’s no wonder that Anderson needs a big canvas. Adapted from part of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the film is like a classical epic Western turned so odd and troubled that it’s become estranged from its own genre. The first 20 minutes wordlessly demonstrate Plainview’s ruthless determination as he prospects for silver and then cashes in before seeking medical help for a broken leg. He moves on to oil, and we move ahead a few years to see him adopt a child whose father died in a well accident. It soon becomes clear that the boy’s face is just advertising, a way to smooth over his new father’s ruthless business practices.
The majority of the film is devoted to a subsequent battle of wills between Plainview and Eli Sunday, the preacher and faith healer of the small town of Little Boston. Having received a tip about an “ocean of oil” under the town from Eli’s twin brother Paul, Plainview sets about acquiring as much land as possible, while Eli builds his church as a form of resistance. Two sides of the same coin, the men struggle, humiliating each other in scenes that are simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. Building to a final sequence of genuinely operatic insanity, the film’s tone deftly balances the hard-scrabble with the baroque, as if we were watching Greed remade by lateperiod Sam Fuller.
Shaming his hollow, would-be epics "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia", Anderson here filters his epic scale through the oddball eccentricities of "Punch-Drunk Love," as in the weirdly appropriate fusion of Robert Elswit’s neo-classical photography with the unnerving score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. It’s a credit to the director that he doesn’t shy away from depicting Sunday’s own exploitation of the town — he’s a charlatan and the movie doesn’t hide it. If the preacher seems less monstrous than Plainview, it’s merely a matter of subtlety in Dano’s nuanced, careful performance when up against Day-Lewis’ titanic malevolence. Seeming 11 feet tall, his eyes piercing through every scene, Day-Lewis takes Plainview to the place where, like Brando’s Don Corleone, the character seems to create his own mythology. Letting down his guard in a drunken conversation with a man claiming to be his long-lost brother, Day-Lewis is so convincing that he becomes a one-man argument for misanthropy as a way of life.
To watch the slow moral ruin of the oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the small-town preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) is to witness the underbelly of our national character writ large. It’s no wonder that Anderson needs a big canvas. Adapted from part of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the film is like a classical epic Western turned so odd and troubled that it’s become estranged from its own genre. The first 20 minutes wordlessly demonstrate Plainview’s ruthless determination as he prospects for silver and then cashes in before seeking medical help for a broken leg. He moves on to oil, and we move ahead a few years to see him adopt a child whose father died in a well accident. It soon becomes clear that the boy’s face is just advertising, a way to smooth over his new father’s ruthless business practices.
The majority of the film is devoted to a subsequent battle of wills between Plainview and Eli Sunday, the preacher and faith healer of the small town of Little Boston. Having received a tip about an “ocean of oil” under the town from Eli’s twin brother Paul, Plainview sets about acquiring as much land as possible, while Eli builds his church as a form of resistance. Two sides of the same coin, the men struggle, humiliating each other in scenes that are simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. Building to a final sequence of genuinely operatic insanity, the film’s tone deftly balances the hard-scrabble with the baroque, as if we were watching Greed remade by lateperiod Sam Fuller.
Shaming his hollow, would-be epics "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia", Anderson here filters his epic scale through the oddball eccentricities of "Punch-Drunk Love," as in the weirdly appropriate fusion of Robert Elswit’s neo-classical photography with the unnerving score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. It’s a credit to the director that he doesn’t shy away from depicting Sunday’s own exploitation of the town — he’s a charlatan and the movie doesn’t hide it. If the preacher seems less monstrous than Plainview, it’s merely a matter of subtlety in Dano’s nuanced, careful performance when up against Day-Lewis’ titanic malevolence. Seeming 11 feet tall, his eyes piercing through every scene, Day-Lewis takes Plainview to the place where, like Brando’s Don Corleone, the character seems to create his own mythology. Letting down his guard in a drunken conversation with a man claiming to be his long-lost brother, Day-Lewis is so convincing that he becomes a one-man argument for misanthropy as a way of life.
