The Musicgoer: Hercules and Love Affair's Hercules and Love Affair

HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR
Hercules and Love Affair
(Mute)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

On the self-titled debut disc from the dance-music collective Hercules and Love Affair, DJ Andrew Butler’s yearning to return to the dark, glittery glory days of New York’s turn-of-the-’70s gay disco scene is nearly palpable—it’s there, woven into every sinuous bassline, every tautly layered trumpet solo, every hypnotic, metronomic keyboard riff. And whenever Antony Hegarty (from Antony and the Johnsons) steps behind the mic, you can feel the tips of Butler’s fingers miraculously making contact, however briefly, with the ecstasy of the past. Few musical experiences this year can compare to hearing Hegarty’s spinetingingly androgynous voice deliver a song like “Blind”—he captures the thrill of being transported high above your surroundings by a piece of music, but also the melancholy realization that you’ll only fall back to earth once the song is over. It’s like hearing Little Jimmy Scott reborn as a disco diva.

Despite some pacing problems in its middle third, Hercules and Love Affair is yet another triumph from the DFA record label, which continues to produce some of the most emotionally complicated dance music ever made. It’s Now, Voyager dance music: it’s music that can’t help but ask for the moon, even though it already has the stars.

Define "Hoedown"

They arrived in theatres on the same weekend, and seem destined to be alphabetized side by side on video-store shelves forevermore: they’re Wanted and Wall•E, which I took in at back-to-back matinees on Saturday afternoon. Thankfully, I saw Wall•E second, so I didn’t have to go home with the sour taste of Wanted in my mouth. Would I sound like too much of a moral scold if I said that Wall•E symbolizes every good impulse in Hollywood filmmaking, and Wanted every corrupt one? Or would I just sound like someone who can properly evaluate the evidence of his own eyeballs?

I have to admit, I was resistant to Wall•E when I saw the trailer. The voiceover narration seemed too precious, the character design of Wall•E too aggressively adorable—as though the Pixar team had used some state-of-the-art algorithm to determine precisely which eyeball circumference would push Wall•E's Keane-painting cuteness to the absolute maximum. And I was a sourfaced naysayer on the last couple of Pixar features: Cars, with its unappealing character design and hand-me-down plot; and Ratatouille, which had an astonishing look but (to my mind) a thematically muddled script and some poorly thought-through human characters. (I’m surprised more reviewers didn’t give Brad Bird a harder time for the way he conceived the character of Anton Ego, which revives every lazy, popular cliché of the critic as a joyless misanthrope who’d much rather hate things than love them.)

But Wall•E was written and directed by Andrew Stanton, who has always struck me as the true unsung genius of Pixar—he also directed Finding Nemo and co-directed the hugely underrated A Bug’s Life, both of which strike me as, along with Wall•E, Pixar’s finest achievements, solidly told stories whose affection for underdogs and humble characters seems genuinely heartfelt. If there’s such a thing as a signature, touchstone Stanton image, it’s of his overmatched main character openly quaking in fear when confronted with a much larger antagonist.

And Wall•E, the dutiful robot who continues to convert Earth’s trash into cubes and arrange it in stacks higher than the Empire State Building, is Stanton’s most appealing hero yet. It’s a little unclear whether he’s developed his quirky personality—his affection for unusual bits of detritus, which he uses to decorate his surprisingly cozy lair—as a result simply of being in operation for 700 years, or if that personality was part of his original programming, but I love the way he’s been able to preserve his childlike wonder in a world whose previous inhabitants have left it in such a sorry shape. With his utilitarian design, and those big, sappy eyes that make it impossible for him to hide his emotions—yes, the eyes finally won me over!—Wall•E is the opposite of cool.

Wanted, on the other hand, is a movie that can’t stop trying to impress you with how cool it is. A lot of these CGI-enhanced “whoa-isn’t-this-awesome” action movies cropped up in the wake of The Matrix, and what always amazes me about them is how their notion of what’s incredibly cool is always incredibly lame: sludgy metal bands, people leaping through windows in slow-motion, an adolescent attitude toward women that’s comfortable with leering at them but terrified of touching them. There’s a scene in Wanted where the hero, played by James McAvoy, smashes someone in the face with a computer keyboard—some of the keys fly into the air and momentarily spell “FUCK YOU” before crashing to the ground. (The second “U” is formed by one of the victim’s molars.) It may be the most childish, moronic screenwriting notion I’ve seen in a movie all year, but in the film, it’s the moment when the hero finally becomes a man.

Wanted spends a lot of time, actually, obsessing over what makes a man: McAvoy is constantly exhorting himself to “grow a pair,” to “nut up” and “stop being a pussy.” Again, I hate to sound like a moralistic prick, but my God, what a sickening view of manhood this movie presents: McAvoy “becomes a man” by joining a secret society of assassins and becoming a stone cold killing machine.

The movie has a bizarre cosmology—McAvoy’s assignments (and those of his fellow assassins) are encoded into the cloth woven by a gigantic medieval apparatus called, and I am not making this up, The Loom of Fate. The idea is that the Loom always knows best—if you kill the people it tells you to, you’ll prevent the deaths of thousands more. A more responsible movie could portray the assassins’ work as the grim business it is without betraying its comic-book tone, but Wanted depicts killing people as a fun, sexy lark. I can think of few movie moments more grotesque than the smirk McAvoy exchanges with Jolie as they pull off a particularly acrobatic hit—I can’t fathom how Jolie reconciles her humanitarian real-life work with her willingness to appear in a movie as misanthropic as Wanted.

I don’t use the word “misanthropic” lightly, either: McAvoy’s final monologue is an expression of naked contempt for “average” people... really, for precisely the kind of person who would go to Wanted and hope for a good time. “I used to be ordinary and pathetic,” McAvoy says. “Like you.” He then describes his new life as an elite killer, and concludes the film by taking his eye away from the scope on his sniper's rifle, turning to us and asking, “What the fuck did you ever do?”

But to be honest, the film has tipped its hand much earlier with its treatment of McAvoy’s boss Janice at the soul-killing office where he works before Angelina Jolie whisks him away. The character is an overweight woman whom McAvoy sarcastically introduces as “my anorexic boss,” and who’s seldom seen without a jelly donut in her hand or a piece of birthday cake in her mouth. She’s a petty tyrant, and when McAvoy finally snaps and quits his job, he dresses her down in front of the entire office, telling her that everybody hates her... which is a shame, because if she were just a bit nicer, everyone would feel sorry for her instead. Hatred or pity: these are the only emotions that Wanted can imagine feeling towards an overweight woman. Our final image of Janice is a freeze-frame of her in her car, mouth wide open as she secretly scarfs down yet another donut.

Compare that to the scenes in Wall•E aboard the spaceship Axiom, which is populated by Earth’s pampered refugee humans, now reduced to morbidly obese lumps in hoverchairs so comfortable that they’ve forgotten how to walk... or even to look up from their video screens. (How they even reproduce anymore is one of the film’s unanswered questions.)

It’s an acid commentary on the greedy, lazy North American lifestyle, but Stanton isn’t content to give even these overfed babies some extra dimensions: amidst the havoc Wall•E inadvertently wreaks aboard the Axiom, a couple of humans get knocked off their chairs. As if waking from a dream, they blink and stare in wonder at the universe they’ve always ignored outside their window and to revel in the unfamiliar feel of human contact. Similarly, up in the helm, the ship’s captain has been roused from his stupor and spends hours at the videoscreen, drinking in information about the wonderful place Earth used to be and all the things human beings used to do there... when they could actually move around. (My favourite line from the film: “Define ‘hoedown.’”)

Wall•E views humans as naïve, destructive, self-indulgent, and easily misguided, but ultimately worth preserving. (No race that created Hello, Dolly! can be all bad, right?) Wanted wouldn’t lose any sleep if someone put a bullet through all our brains.

Shake Hands With Todd Rohal

As regular readers of this blog are getting tired of being reminded, I'm a big fan of Todd Rohal's low-budget comedy The Guatemalan Handshake. The film is getting its first theatrical showing at Metro Cinema here in Edmonton next weekend, and so I used that fact as an excuse to score an interview with Rohal for SEE Magazine, the alt-weekly whose film section I edit.

Here's that interview. If you haven't been persuaded by my two previous posts to check out The Guatemalan Handshake, hopefully this will do the trick.

***

Of the six low-budget indie features screening this week as part of Metro Cinema’s “Generation DIY” series, Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake is very much the odd film out.

Where movies like LOL and Quiet City aim for artless naturalism, Handshake aims for stylized humour. Where the alienating Frownland was shot on 16mm and blown up to a grainy-looking 35mm print, Handshake is bathed in warm oranges and browns—sunset hues straight out of a Terrence Malick movie.

And where a lot of these so-called “mumblecore” movies feel like the work of young directors and actors still finding their voices and groping for greater meaning, The Guatemalan Handshake feels like the work of a filmmaker who knows exactly what effects he’s going for—a deadpan blend of comedy and poignancy that may leave some viewers uncertain of how to react, but which achieves many moments of surprising, undeniable beauty.

Oh yeah—the plot. Well, that’s a hard one. The Guatemalan Handshake begins with the unexplained disappearance of a hapless young man named Donald Turnupseed (musician Will Oldham)—one moment he’s driving his bright orange electric car down the Pennsylvania highway, and the next he’s wandered out of the frame, never to return. The rest of the film is an Altmanesque ensemble piece about the family and friends Donald has left behind, including his father (who’s trying to figure out how to get into the locked shed in his backyard), his ex-girlfriend (who’s busy preparing for that weekend’s demolition derby), and a little girl named Turkeylegs (who seems to be the only person in the world who misses him).

Part Napoleon Dynamite, part George Washington, it’s a melancholy, humane comedy set in one of the few remaining corners of the U.S.A. that hasn’t yet been colonized by technology—a place of roller rinks, amusement park rides, and demolition derbies, where telephone booths still exist and cordless phones apparently have yet to be invented. It’s a great place to wander around in for an hour and a half.

Todd Rohal talked to me earlier this week from his home in Brooklyn.

Q: This movie feels so different from the usual kind of Sundance-approved pictures that most people think of when they hear the phrase “independent film.” What’s your background, and where did your sensibility form?

Todd Rohal: Well, I couldn’t afford the bigger film schools, so I went to film school at a small university in Ohio. It was very experimental-based. I thought I’d go there for a couple of years and transfer to NYU or something, but once I got there, it was really invigorating. We had a lot of freedom. For me to see that if you have a vision for something you wanted to make that doesn’t have a giant, obvious chance of returning its money, the only way to do it is to do it yourself. So you’d see other students not finishing their projects because no one was pushing them, and others who were really digging into projects that weren’t for giant audiences but for very specific people. That was very exciting to me.

Q: Is The Guatemalan Handshake the kind of movie you always wanted to make, or were you surprised at all to find yourself making something this odd?

TR: In some ways I am! You know, it’s already so hard to get a movie made, to write a script and get it filmed and get it into a festival. There are so many things against you, why make it even more difficult for yourself? I get a little frustrated with myself that way, but I also get frustrated with the kind of audiences and critics who keep calling for new things but then whenever anyone pops their head up with something different, they chop it off. I felt like the new kid who shows up at school with weird clothes and who gets made fun of. But really, that should be encouraged! Even if your clothes are mismatched, there’s something in that spirit that really needs encouragement. It’s so easy to knock down the retarded kid, you know?

Q: This was your first feature, and you were working with a lot of nonprofessionals. Did you feel confident on the set? Did you feel like you were in control of the movie’s tone?

TR: Well, I had made four short films before this one, so I felt fairly confident as a director. But at the same time, I was so worried about not being prepared—we really had no backup plans if something went wrong. So I feel such a sense of accomplishment with this movie—I think we pulled off some pretty impossible stuff. We had no money, and to get so many of the images just right, just the way I’d imagined them, was such a cool feeling. You sit at your desk for so long thinking of these images, and then they’re all there thanks to this amazing crew—the sun’s just right, the sound is exactly how you had it in your head and everything.

Q: The script definitely has the feel of something you tailored to the talents of certain actors.

TR: In some cases, yeah. And a lot of the people we cast were from the town we shot in, so it was we’d pick the town, and that would then provide the pool of actors we’d choose from. Not even actors—a lot of the cast were people who’d never acted before but who had good faces. I really wanted audiences to have no idea of who these people are, like in a foreign film, so they’d have no idea of where the story would go.

Q: The only person I’d ever seen before was Will Oldham, who disappears, like, 10 minutes into the story.

TR: Yeah, and then we went and played the lead in that movie Old Joy, which sort of stole the thunder from our movie. [Laughs.]

Q: I’m curious: when exactly is the movie supposed to be taking place? Is it, like 1979? Or is it the present day, except that nobody’s bought anything new since the ’80s?

TR: That’s amazing that you said that, because that was exactly our concept: it’s the present day but no one has bought anything since, like, 1984. Everyone just got budget-conscious at some point in the past and everything froze at a certain year. It’s like what’s cool about Cuba—all the cars are out of date.

Q: Speaking of cars, the movie ends with a demolition derby, and on the Guatemalan Handshake DVD, one of the bonus features is a short film about demolition derbies. What is it about demolition derbies that appeals to you so much?

TR: I don’t know. It’s the only sport I really like going to and that can hold my attention. It’s a really Midwestern activity. It’s so populist and yet it seems like such a rich person’s sport. And the only movies that had ever been made about it are, like, Pitstop or some Roger Corman picture, so it seemed like it was about time someone made another movie in that world.

Q: What is the ideal reaction you’d like to get from people who see this movie? Is it enough for them to say, “It made me laugh,” or is there a deeper reaction you’re hoping for?

TR: Yeah. I feel it’s really connection when people pick up on the sadness of it, and how it’s about loss. I think all these characters have a sense of humour about the situations they’re in—I think that’s a great personality trait, when you can be going through hard times and still have a sense of humour about it. That was my big goal with the movie—to translate this feeling of joy and sadness and commiseration to the screen. And I really wanted to have the happiest depressing ending possible, to have this headlong collision of feelings, where the little girl, Turkeylegs, is having the first adult realization of her life. And none of this is explicit, but I hoped it would come through anyway.

Q: Do negative reactions to the film sting you? I’m thinking of something like The Onion’s review, which found it too precious and whimsical for their tastes, which seems like an odd response to me.

TR: Yeah, I can’t wrap my head around it either. It’s the most depressing thing, when you feel like people are coming in with some other baggage. I know that ever since Juno came out, the word “quirky” suddenly started appearing in every single review. You’re kind of at the mercy of the other films that are released at the same times as yours—before you know it, a critic winds up taking out their anger over Juno winning the Academy Award on me, you know? It’s hard when a movie like this one, with no studio or anything behind it, gets a bad rap because of Juno—and people won’t cut it some slack even though I made it three years before. It really burns; I put everything I had into it, and to have it dismissed because I don’t have the backing of a studio to make me look “legitimate.” That’s, like, every filmmaker’s nightmare right there.

Q: At the same time, it seems like you’ve done okay for yourself. You’ve got this really beautiful DVD from Benten Films, and for a low-budget movie from an unknown regional director, it’s achieved a certain profile. It’s no Juno, obviously, but are you surprised it’s gotten this much attention? Or are you surprised it hasn’t gotten more?

TR: Well, I think every director, no matter what level they’re at, always feels their movie isn’t achieving at the level it should. The ones who get their movie distributed feel like the box office should have been better; the ones who get picked up by a bigger company feel they should have been released to more cities. I guess I’m happy that people are able to see it, but it’s really hard to tell who’s actually watching it.

Q: Are you working on anything new?

TR: Yeah, I’ve written a movie about my time in the Boy Scouts. It’s based on this one incident where these scoutmasters faked the death of one of the other scoutmasters as a First Aid test, and the script is about how that incident kind of affected all of us in our lives. I’m hoping to put together a really good, weird cast. I think it’s going to happen; we’ve met some good people, and hopefully it won’t be as much of a struggle as the first one.

Raining Katz In Blogs

I'm now one step further along in my mumblecore education now that I've finished watching Two Films by Aaron Katz, a double DVD from the excellent people at Benten Films showcasing the work of a filmmaker who's sort of the Eric Rohmer of the American Apparel set.

Quiet City is the story of two strangers, a guy and a girl, who meet by chance at a train station, spend the next 24 hours together, and gradually fall in love. Basically, it’s the mumblecore version of Before Sunrise—the two actors are scruffier-looking, they don’t have sex, and instead of wandering around Vienna, the biggest adventure they get into is when the guy goes off to pick up a hat from the friend who borrowed it, like, forever ago.

But who needs action-packed drama, right? Erin Fisher and Cris Lankenau, the two leads, perform their mating dance with a tentativeness that’s quite touching in this day and age, and Katz films the nighttime cityscape with a loving eye—even on digital video, the deep-orange sunset over Brooklyn is a glorious sight to behold. Like the improvised song Fisher and Lankenau noodle play on the keyboard in his bedroom, Quiet City has a cheerful awkwardness that puts a smile on your face.

Onto the second DVD! At 65 minutes, Dance Party, USA feels more like a well-wrought short story than a fully formed feature like Quiet City, but in the mumblecore world, modesty of ambition is a virtue. And Dance Party, USA is arguably the most mature and sophisticated of all the mumblecore films I've seen in its view of human relationships, despite the youth of its characters.

The bulk of the film takes place during a Fourth of July party in Portland, Oregon. Gus (Cole Pennsinger), who’s sort of a more morally conflicted version of Telly, the amoral sexual predator in Larry Clark’s Kids, strikes up a conversation with the pretty, apathetic Jessica (Anna Kavan), during which he makes a shameful confession that simultaneously humanizes him and makes him seem even more of a monster. How will Jessica respond? Well, her reaction is surprising and elliptical in its motivations, but Katz’ decision to end the film on such an inconclusive note is part of what makes Dance Party, USA linger in the memory as long as it does.

Looking Forward To Thursday, Looking Backward To Summer

No "Hidden Gems" CBC radio segment this week, folks—but don't despair! Starting next Thursday, I'll be starting a brand-new 10-part weekly series in which I'll revisit 10 key summer movie seasons of the past: the hits, the flops, the trends, and the hidden gems that the public unfairly ignored in their rush to check out the latest James Cameron epic.

So check in with me next Thursday for the first installment, when I'll be traveling back in time to 1983: the summer of WarGames, Octopussy, Staying Alive, and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn.

In the meantime, you can get in the mood by listening to this recent episode of Movie Geeks United, which devoted three whopping hours to a discussion of the summer of ’83. John Badham, Dee Wallace, and Tom Holland all put in appearances. Basically, they completely outclass me, but I'll try my best to pack as much infotainment into my five minutes as they did into their 180.

Is This Double Entendre Intentional?

Watch Thunderheist's video for "Jerk It" and decide for yourself! (And see if you become as obsessed with it as I have!)


thunderheist - jerk it from thatgo on Vimeo.

The Musicgoer: Girl Talk's Feed the Animals

GIRL TALK
Feed the Animals
(Illegal Art)
*** (out of 5)

“Play Your Part (Pt. 1),” the opening track on mashup DJ Gregg Gillis’ new CD Feed the Animals, is assembled from pieces of 23 individual songs. We begin with the drumbeat from Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman,” the bassline and organ riff from The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’,” and the rap from UGK’s “International Player’s Anthem”—and before the song is over four minutes later, we’ll hear Ludacris, Sinéad O’Connor, Jay-Z, Rage Against the Machine, Huey Lewis, and Twisted Sister joining in the fun. The song, like the rest of Feed the Animals, is complex, funny, ingenious... and ultimately a little exhausting.

Gillis does this stuff about as well as anybody... but is it art, avant-garde music criticism, or just the ultimate wedding-reception mixtape? The album is probably most interesting as an act of provocation against copyright-hogging record companies—is it only a matter of time before Gillis gets sued back into the Stone Age?—but it’s a provocation without content, as suggested by the purposely generic song titles (“Like This,” “Hands in the Air,” “Here’s the Thing,” “Don’t Stop”).

Gillis may very well be a genius, but Feel the Animals still winds up feeling like much, much less than the sum of its parts.

Moviegoer Diary: My Blueberry Nights, How to Get Ahead in Advertising

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS

Plot in a Nutshell
A young woman, freshly dumped by her lover, heals her heartbreak by embarking on a road trip across America, taking waitressing jobs along the way and sending postcards back to the New York café owner who pines for her.

Thoughts
From the reviews that greeted the first English-language feature from Wong Kar Wai when it opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (and, later, when it briefly played theatres in North America), it seemed as though Wong was turning inexorably into Wim Wenders.

Wenders had followed up his greatest arthouse success, Wings of Desire, with the ambitious but somewhat impenetrable (to put it generously) science-fiction epic Until the End of the World, and Wong had done much the same thing by making 2046 right after In the Mood for Love. And now, with My Blueberry Nights, Wong had gone in search of America—and, like Wenders, seemed to have gotten hopelessly lost along the way. Would this be the first in a long line of films like The End of Violence, Million Dollar Hotel, and Don’t Come Knocking—slow-moving, stylized dramas, beautifully photographed, stuffed with well-known actors playing roles they’re desperately ill-suited for, each one more irrelevant than the one that came before it?

Well, now that I’ve actually seen My Blueberry Nights, I see that my impression was incorrect. Wong Kar Wai isn’t turning into Wim Wenders; he’s turning into Alan Rudolph. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing—I love Alan Rudolph movies, even the ones that most people think are terrible, like Trixie and Equinox. (Breakfast of Champions, on the other hand... well, let’s just pretend that one didn’t happen, okay?) I love Rudolph’s unabashed appreciation of beautiful actors, the woozy rhythms of his dialogue, the way his sense of human behaviour seems derived entirely from the covers of jazz LPs from the 1950s.

And that’s what I like about My Blueberry Nights: the way it creates a lush, stylized space to lose yourself in for 90 minutes, full of fetishistically photographed bars and diners, swollen-lipped brunette beauties, and men weighed down by inconsolable heartache—a world where love only makes people feel ten times worse than they did before... and twenty times worse when their romance ends.

I’m not surprised the Cannes audiences didn’t go for this movie: at Cannes, I imagine, everyone is looking for the next masterpiece, and an eye-roller of a film like My Blueberry Nights is just asking to get pummeled. You sure don’t have to look very hard to find flaws in this movie: Natalie Portman is not exactly convincing as a cynical, hard-bitten poker player, and Rachel Weisz’s performance as a Memphis cop’s sultry ex-wife is... well... kind of catastrophic. (Watching her try to play a drunk scene with a Southern accent is like watching an outfielder drop a fly ball and then run into the wall.)

But watched now, more than a year later, with low expectations under the right circumstances, it’s much easier to linger on the elements of the film that do satisfy: to smile at the way the security camera in Jude Law’s diner films everything not in black and white but in lush colours worthy of Christopher Doyle; to appreciate David Strathairn’s poetic performance as Weisz’s alcoholic ex-husband; to linger over Wong’s voluptuous images of vanilla ice cream melting over blueberry pies, or the shot of Norah Jones, the film’s star, asleep on the counter of Law’s diner, a few flecks of dried blood on her nostrils and a smear of ice cream at the corner of her mouth.

And you know what? Jones isn’t bad in this thing. Sure, she’s no professional, but the film doesn’t really require the services of a Liv Ullmann—just someone with an exotic face who looks good in those waitress uniforms and those 1940s-style polka-dot dresses with high heels.

Then again, I think Norah Jones’ CDs are actually pretty pleasant to listen to, so my aesthetic judgments are obviously not to be trusted.

RATING: 3.5/5


HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING

Plot in a Nutshell
Bruce Robinson’s 1989 satire about a conscience-stricken advertising executive whose personality is gradually taken over by the talking boil he’s grown on his neck.

Thoughts
I picked up this one in a used-DVD bin at my local video hut, and I’m not sure if they pulled a fast one on me. The packaging says the film is part of the Criterion Collection, but the disc itself appears to be a bare-bones MGM release of the film, with the Criterion logo conspicuously absent from the menu or the start of the film.

Wow—what a fascinating way to start talking about this film, eh? But the truth is, I was actually disappointed to realize that I had pretty much exactly the same reaction to this movie that I did 20 years ago, the first time I watched it. So either my critical acumen has not advanced one jot in two decades, or How to Get Ahead in Advertising is simply one of those movies that permits only one reaction from its audience.

I’m going to guess the latter is the case. Bruce Robinson’s screenplay isn’t so much a script as it is a loosely connected series of rants. And God knows Richard E. Grant delivers them brilliantly (especially the one that ends the film, which he begins on horseback, and then leaps from his saddle before it’s even half over and starts running across the meadow, as if the horse just wasn’t moving fast enough for him). But the film is just a little bit too much in love with the sound of its own voice—How to Get Ahead in Advertising belongs to a strain of British comedy that I’ve never warmed up to, the kind that wears its schoolboy cleverness on its sleeve, the kind that consists of abuse and arguments instead of conversation, the kind that’s more about the voice of the writer than the personalities of its characters, the kind that has nothing more on its mind that finding new ways to say the world sucks and people are stupid.

That said, I’ve got to give Robinson points for coming up with a simple but resonant premise and following it through, right to its logical conclusion. I couldn’t help but think of the scattershot satire of War, Inc. as I watched this movie, and be struck by how much John Cusack’s script suffer by comparison—especially when it comes to its wussy ending. How to Get Ahead in Advertising doesn’t back down on its own ferocity, and more power to it for that.

Plus, I love the scene where Rachel Ward (playing Grant’s wife), who has begun to suspect that her husband and the boil on his neck have somehow switched places, sneaks up to him while he’s sleeping, puts one end of a vacuum cleaner tube up to his neck, and starts speaking into the other end. For some reason, she doesn’t call her husband by name, and instead just keeps anxiously whispering, “Boil! Boil! Boil!” That bit still cracks me up.

God, I don’t think I’ve seen Rachel Ward in a movie since After Dark, My Sweet in 1990. According to the IMDb, she’s been trying her hand at directing lately, and her first feature, Beautiful Kate, is supposed to come out later this year. It’s a small movie, though, so it's probably going to need a lot of advertising.

RATING: 3/5

Moviegoer Diary: Eight Men Out, Inferno

EIGHT MEN OUT

Plot in a Nutshell
John Sayles’ 1988 film about the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series.

Thoughts
I see that Eliot Asinof, who wrote the book that John Sayles based his screenplay on, died earlier this month. I’ve never read any of his writing, but his obituary in the New York Times reveals a remarkable fellow: a World War II vet who dabbled in nonfiction as well as fiction (his last book, Final Judgment, about a campus protest that breaks out when George W. Bush is named commencement speaker, will apparently come out later this year), who dabbled in TV and film writing until he was blacklisted in the ’50s (according to the Times obit, he signed a petition outside Yankee Stadium urging the team to hire more black players), who counted Yehudi Menuhin and Joe DiMaggio among his friends and who was once married to Marlon Brando’s sister.

It was fun revisiting Eight Men Out, which has always been one of my favourite John Sayles movies. (It’s probably second only to the movie he made after this one, City of Hope.) As Sayles wryly notes on the DVD commentary, Eight Men Out was one of the last films made by Orion Pictures, that late, lamented forerunner of today’s “classics divisions.” “Our movie didn’t put Orion out of business,” Sayles says, “but we didn’t help matters either.”

Not that Eight Men Out was a lavish project. Indeed, Sayles’ commentary provides an excellent primer on how to make a good-looking period picture on a shoestring—including valuable tips on how to fill a baseball stadium with only 75 extras.

I would have first seen Eight Men Out when I was 19, right at the crest of my first wave of movie madness, and I was going to movies as much as a student as a fan. I remember being unusually impressed by the scriptwriting of Eight Men Out, especially the long opening sequence in which Sayles not only introduces us to all the players on the White Sox, as well as a host of sportswriters, gamblers, and White Sox front-office guys, but also establishes the financial realities of being a ballplayer in that era, and gets the fixing-the-Series plot in motion too. I’m still impressed by the skill, the fluidity, and the economy of this sequence, to be honest—it gives the lie to the frequent criticism that Sayles isn’t a “cinematic” director.

It was also a pleasure to revisit John Mahoney’s performance as White Sox manager Kid Gleason, a decent, honest, thoroughly admirable guy who nevertheless didn’t quite have a forceful enough personality to inspire his players to follow his example. The scene where Gleason takes the stand at the players’ trial is an absolutely beautiful bit of acting on Mahoney’s part—you feel the love he has for these players, the way his disappointment in their actions is tempered by his understanding of what drove them to it, and his humble embarrassment at his own honesty. So simple, so eloquent.

I think this was also the first time I noticed the peculiar credit “written for the screen,” a hifalutin phrase that replaces the mundane “written by” and usually seems to get bestowed upon writer/director auteurs who’ve adapted their screenplay from a well-known book.

But as to who insisted upon this credit, I’m not sure: was it something the WGA came up with to make adaptations sound fancier, or did the novelists insist upon it as a way of emphasizing that those characters existed on the page first, between hardcovers, and that “writing for the screen” is as evanescent a practice as writing on water?

RATING: 4/5


INFERNO

Plot in a Nutshell
Dario Argento’s 1980 horror movie, a loose sequel to Suspiria, about various people falling prey to an obscure cabal of witches and killers in Rome in New York.

Thoughts
I couldn’t help but think of Jim Emerson’s excellent recent blog post about whether having a coherent story is as important to a movie as people think it is as I watched Inferno, a movie that manages to be thoroughly entertaining despite a story that becomes more and more incoherent as it goes along.

Inferno is a movie that consists almost entirely of setpieces—over and over again, we watch as a character wanders slowly into a mysterious, shadowy space, the tension building right alongside our annoyance with Keith Emerson’s bombastic score, until they’re abruptly dispatched by an unseen killer. The script keeps introducing new characters, only to kill them off just a scene or two later—it’s a wonderfully disorienting effect. It’s as if the film is some kind of roach motel for fictional characters—anyone unfortunate enough to be lured inside dies soon after. At a certain point, it becomes unclear whether these deaths are the result of a psycho killer or occult forces. At least one of them appears to be the result simply of spectacular clumsiness: a middle-aged woman discovers a corpse and drops the candle she’s holding, thereby setting some curtains on fire; as she tries to put out the flames, she accidentally pulls the curtains down over her head, and while she’s blindly thrashing about, she trips, falls through a skylight, and plummets several stories to her death. It's how you'd expect Martin Short to die in a horror movie.

That’s not the movie’s most ridiculous scene: not even Argento’s mastery of the camera can sell the scene where a woman is clawed to death by a gang of cats. (You keep hoping Argento will pull the camera back a few feet and show you the stagehands tossing the cats at her head, undoubtedly in complete violation of SPCA guidelines.)

That said, the first two-thirds of Inferno contain lots of genuine scares—the bit early on where a drowned corpse sudden pops into the frame really made me jump—and even late into the film’s loony final act, there’s a great sequence where a minor character (played by Sacha Pitoëff, from Last Year at Marienbad!) meets his maker when he hobbles out to the riverbank... in order to drown a bag full of cats! During a total eclipse!

I really didn’t care that nothing in Inferno made any sense... although I probably would have liked it a little bit more if it had at least made an effort to clarify just a little what was supposed to be going on. It’s a difficult balance that a movie like this has to strike—if the director’s not careful, the flow of dreamlike images loses its hypnotic spell, and the viewer suddenly wakes up, like a patient in the middle of an operation, panicking and demanding answers.

David Lynch is better at locking viewers into a dream state than just about any other director who’s ever lived, and at its best, Inferno proceeds according to a subconscious, Lynchian logic. My favourite moment in the film is a bizarre exchange between the film’s hero, Mark (Leigh McCloskey) and two odd people he’s met in the elevator of his sister’s apartment: a cheerful nurse and her patient, a mute, elderly man in a wheelchair. The dialogue is straight out of Twin Peaks:

OLD MAN: [stares intently and silently at Mark, who fidgets uncomfortably]
NURSE: He’d like to speak to you. He does that whenever he has something to say. His name is Professor Arnold. He’s been quite ill for many years.
OLD MAN: [silently fingers the leather folder under Mark’s arm]
NURSE: And you? What do you do?
MARK: (nervous) Oh, I’m a student. Musicology.
NURSE: Oh, wonderful! A professor! Toxicology! We know two other young men who—
MARK: No, no, no, not toxicology. Musicology. It’s got nothing to do with medicine.
NURSE: (cheerfully) What is it, then?
MARK: [Baffled pause.] The study of music.
NURSE: Oh yes—your sister’s involved in rather strange work too.
MARK: Strange? No, she writes poetry.
NURSE: Oh, yes! A pastime especially suited for women. [The elevator doors open.] Goodbye!

Sometime in the next few days I’ll be watching Mother of Tears, the 2008 film that brought this trilogy to a belated conclusion. I hear that it’s much more artlessly brutal than its predecessors, and even Argento fans seem to regard it as a disappointment. But I’m keeping my hopes up; if it gives me a couple of well-staged murders and even one dialogue exchange as daffy as that one, I think I’ll be more than satisfied.



RATING: 3.5/5

Khan, Baby, Khan

Look at that boy riding alongside his father as they travel on horseback across the 12th-century Mongolian steppes. To most of us, he would appear to be nothing more than a nine-year-old kid named Temudjin—but if you were a wise old man, one of those wizened, ancient seers who can be found in every clump of yurts, no matter how small, you would recognize him for what he really is: the future Genghis Khan, ruthless warrior, uniter of tribes, and the man destined to rape and pillage his way across most of Asia, spreading his seed so widely that some believe nearly 1 in 200 men are descended from him.

Mongol covers the first stage of Temudjin’s life, from his boyhood to the 1206 victory that established him as the unquestioned ruler of the united Mongol tribes. Along the way, director Sergei Bodrov proves himself a firm believer in the “man of destiny” theory of history: Temudjin never seems to do anything that hasn’t been foretold by a prophecy or that we haven’t seen him solemnly vow to do years earlier. (This is one of those movies where everything happens three times: the characters announce they’re going to do something, they do it, and then they announce that they’ve done it.) As a result, everything Temudjin does during his rise to power—from slaughtering his enemies to betraying his blood brother Jamukha—comes across as the result not of ruthless ambition but as the inevitable fulfillment of the role fate has decreed for him.

Bodrov’s portrait of Temudjin is at once contrarian yet conventional: instead of the rapacious empire-builder, we see Temudjin first as a helpless boy, orphaned when his father is poisoned by his enemies, and then as a warm-hearted family man, romping in the fields with his son and tastefully making love with his wife Borte, the firelight silhouetting them against the wall of their tent. Well... I suppose that’s one approach to this story—albeit one that removes a lot of what makes Genghis Khan such a fascinatingly alien historical figure.

Do you know who is fascinating, though? Tadanobu Asano, the Japanese star who plays the adult Temudjin, and who has appeared in such a stunningly diverse series of roles over the last 10 years that I’m embarrassed to admit I never associated them with the same actor until now. You mean the guy who played the shy librarian in Last Life in the Universe is the same guy who starred as the Joker-mouthed sadist Kakihara in Ichi the Killer? And had major roles in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumière and Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi in the same year? He’s like a Japanese Viggo Mortensen or a Japanese Christian Bale, but with a serene, almost feminine quality somewhere in the mix. Supposedly, Mongol is only the first installment of a planned Genghis Khan trilogy, and perhaps later films will allow Asano to show off his more bloodthirsty Ichi-like side.

There are some brutal, bloody battle scenes in Mongol, but in a strange way, they make the film seem less realistic. Swords don’t just strike their opponents’ bodies in this movie; every hit produces thick, red gouts of slow-motion CGI blood. It’s the same effect that Takeshi Kitano used in Zatoichi, where it gave the swordfights a certain heightened, mythic quality; here, combined with the Saving Private Ryan skip-frame photography, it merely seems vulgar and anachronistic. (The most ridiculous moment comes when Temudjin somehow throws a nearly log-sized spear through an opponent’s chest, impaling him on a tree a few feet behind him. When did Genghis Khan get as strong as Hellboy?)

There’s no denying Mongol looks great—the production values are impeccable, and if you like watching people ride horses across a widescreen sunset, are you in for a treat! It was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s the kind of square, ponderous, every-dollar-is-up-there-on-the-screen epic that I imagine appeals to the same Oscar voters who gave Best Picture to movies like Braveheart and Gladiator.

When it comes to conquering the world, Hollywood has far surpassed Genghis Khan: even as far away as Kazakhstan, they’ve learned to obey its laws.

Moviegoer Diary: LOL, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

LOL

Plot in a Nutshell
Joe Swanberg’s quintessential “mumblecore” movie about three twentysomething men who seem more at ease communicating via cellphone and e-mail than through face-to-face conversations.

Thoughts
I was at the movies a couple of months ago and was surprised to see a trailer for Baghead, the upcoming indie horror movie that’s also partly a spoof of the so-called “mumblecore” movement. I was surprised for a couple of reasons: one, the trailer was playing at the downtown cineplex rather than the arthouse cinema, which seemed to suggest that Baghead would be getting an unexpectedly high-profile release for a low-budget indie; and two, not a single mumblecore movie has ever played Edmonton, which means that Edmonton audiences would be seeing a parody of the genre before they’d ever been exposed to the genre itself.

Well, Baghead has yet to appear, but in the meantime, Metro Cinema (our local cinematheque) has announced a week-long festival featuring many of the key mumblecore films: LOL, Frownland, Four Eyed Monsters, Quiet City, The Guatemalan Handshake, and more. And as the film editor of the local alt-weekly, I’ve started boning up on the genre, starting with the DVD of LOL, which Andrew Grant at Benten Films was kind enough to send me.

LOL is such a small, unassuming movie, made with such modesty of means, that it’s hard to imagine it at the forefront of an entire film movement. And I have to admit, the cheap-looking digital photography and the improvised performances by the mostly non-professional cast made LOL a hard movie for me to warm up to at first—we’ve all seen indie movies about “ordinary,” “inarticulate” young people before, but it kind of takes you aback to see genuine inarticulateness onscreen. There’s no “found poetry” in the dialogue here, no random moments of spontaneous wit or humour—just long, rambling conversations peppered by awkward half-jokes and nervous laughter. The very title LOL is kind of a put-on—there’s not a single laugh-out-loud moment in the entire thing.

And yet, for all of the film’s unpolished visuals and intentionally charisma-free acting, I think Swanberg is onto something. As I watched LOL, I couldn’t help but think that I’d never seen another movie do a better job of capturing the way twentysomething people dress and relate to each other and have sex and make art. These are unmistakably the people who read the newspaper I edit—a large segment of our readership, anyway—and I’d never seen their world captured before in such an effortless, matter-of-fact, deglamourized way. And sure, Swanberg’s big theme, that technology is isolating us instead of bringing us closer, is a little trite, but I certainly recognized myself in the character he plays, a guy who can’t stop tapping away on his laptop, even when he’s watching TV. (In one scene, he and a friend sit on a couch IMing each other on their laptops about his girlfriend, who’s sitting on the floor right in front of them watching TV.)

It’s an intriguing movie, but its anti-dramatic aesthetic seems like a promising starting point for future exploration more than a satisfying end in itself. Stay tuned over the next week or so to see how I react to the other films in the series!

RATING: 3.5/5


HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE

Plot in a Nutshell
Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s celebrated 1991 documentary about the various agonies Francis Ford Coppola experienced while making Apocalypse Now.

Thoughts
I just finished writing a friend an e-mail in which I mentioned I’d just watched this movie, and said how it made me fall in love with Francis Ford Coppola all over again—in his prime, the man was an ideal combination of visionary artist and unabashed huckster, and I observed that I wished I had a little more of both sides of Coppola’s personality inside me, the visionary as well as the huckster. There’s a great scene in the movie where John Milius (who wrote the original screenplay for Apocalypse Now, which Coppola wound up departing from in several key ways) describes being sent to talk to Coppola several months into the shoot, soon after Martin Sheen’s near-fatal heart attack almost shut the picture down for good. Milius says he went into the meeting thinking he would be the voice of reason, urging Coppola to scale back his grandiose dreams and finish the damn picture already. “I came out an hour and a half later,” Milius says, “and he had convinced me that this was the first film that would win a Nobel Prize.”

Apocalypse Now exists at the other end of the filmmaking spectrum from LOL, and I’m not sure which director is more inspiring: Coppola, with his megalomaniacal ambitions, his willingness to pour millions of his own dollars into realizing his vision, his ability to stand up at a Cannes press conference and solemnly state that his film isn’t about Vietnam, it is Vietnam; or Swanberg, who’s proven that you don’t need money, trained actors, a script, a large crew, or even film in your camera to make a movie that thousands of people will still be interested in watching.

Does Swanberg sweat over the endings of his movies the way we see Coppola agonizing over the final sequence of Apocalypse Now? Coppola is so overwhelmed by the task he’s set for himself, of summing up the entire Vietnam War, that he’s half-tempted to “accidentally” step off a high platform while filming, and paralyzing himself in such a way that he will no longer be obligated to finish the movie. I imagine Swanberg’s biggest worry on LOL was keeping an eye on the battery on his camera to make sure it didn’t run low.

The irony is that Swanberg, in a way, is the culmination of the prediction Coppola makes at the very end of Hearts of Darkness, in which he says that his great hope is that video technology will place the ability to make movies in the hands of people who ordinarily wouldn’t think of expressing themselves that way—that “some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the next Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s camcorder.”

Swanberg is neither fat, nor female, nor the next Mozart... nor, I suspect, is LOL quite the kind of film Coppola was hoping for from the camcorder generation of directors. I love the fact that a movie like LOL can not only get made, but gain a foothold in the cinematic marketplace as well. But I mean no disrespect to Swanberg when I say that I’m hungrier to see one more movie in the tradition of Apocalypse Now than a dozen indies modeling themselves after LOL.

[Bizarre Fact I Couldn't Fit Anywhere Else Into This Post: Hearts of Darkness co-director Fax Bahr also wrote the screenplays for two Pauly Shore movies—Son in Law and In the Army Now—as well as the lowbrow Jamie Kennedy farce Malibu's Most Wanted.]

RATING: 4.5/5

The Musicgoer: The Ting Tings' We Started Nothing

THE TING TINGS
We Started Nothing
(Columbia)
**** (out of 5)

We Started Nothing contains nothing more than 10 bouncy dance-pop songs, and on that level, it’s a pretty trivial record. But songs like “That’s Not My Name,” which is so joyous, so irresistibly catchy, with such a perfect balance of spontaneity and craftsmanship—well, these kinds of songs are one of the reasons why anybody ever gets interested in music in the first place, and they are not at all easy to create. If Katie White and Jules De Martino (the two Salford musicians who make up The Ting Tings) had settled for nothing more than that taunting schoolyard-chant melody and the simple, steady backbeat, they’d have only had a fun retread of Toni Basil’s “Mickey.” No, what makes the song indelible is the achingly beautiful countermelody—when White sings, “Are you calling me darling?/Are you calling me bird?” you can’t believe a song that once sounded so snotty could turn into something so lovely.

And “Impacilla Carpisung,” “We Started Nothing,” and the iPod-approved “Shut Up and Let Me Go” are nearly as delightful. Call them trivial pleasures if you like, but I say pleasure is never trivial.

Waiting For Bluffman

About a year and a half ago, I decided I was officially sick of ensemble improv movies. And I think the nail in the coffin for me was 2006’s For Your Consideration, the woefully limp Hollywood satire directed by Christopher Guest, the man whose Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show spawned a wave of pale imitators: Ham and Cheese, Blackballed, The Delicate Art of Parking, The Big Tease, The Foot Fist Way, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, The Life and Times of Guy Terrifico. What had once seemed loose and unpredictable now seemed merely sloppy, the plots about large groups of eccentric losers competing against each other in some esoteric sport, hobby, or music genre as rigid and formulaic as any scripted comedy. Enough, I thought. I hadn’t seen a decent improv movie in years, and I wasn’t really interested in looking for one.

But as a very bad amateur poker player and a compulsive watcher of televised poker tournaments, I decided to break my embargo and give Zak Penn’s The Grand a whirl now that it's out on DVD. And while I can’t claim that this all-star spoof of the world of professional poker players rejuvenates the improv movie or does anything even remotely innovative with the genre, it’s certainly amusing enough to be worth a rental, and to make me wonder why critics reacted to it with such hostility. Maybe they felt even more burned by For Your Consideration than I did, or maybe they just haven’t watched enough poker on TV to appreciate The Grand’s sly jabs at those shows’ overheated player profiles and rampant product placement. I mean, the plot revolves around the annual $10,000,000 tournament of NAIPL, the North American Indoor Poker League. Come on! “The Indoor Poker League”? That’s funny!

Penn focuses on seven players in particular: Jack Faro (Woody Harrelson), the booze- and drug-addicted ne’er-do-well grandson of the casino’s late owner; Harold Melvin (Chris Parnell), an Asperger’s case who recites the Mentat oath from Dune before every game; Andy Andrews (Richard Kind), a Wisconsin naïf who accidentally qualified for the tournament while searching the internet for a place to buy antique fireplace pokers; Deuce Fairbanks (Dennis Farina), an old-school gambler who thinks Vegas started going to hell when they started letting people wearing culottes into the casinos; The German (Werner Herzog), a psychopath who checks into the hotel with several cages of rabbits and guinea pigs, explaining that he doesn’t feel alive unless he kills a living creature every single day; and Lainie and Larry Schwartzman (Cheryl Hines and David Cross), twin siblings whose father (Gabe Kaplan) has ruthlessly pitted them against each other ever since infancy.

Maybe it was low expectations, but I laughed pretty consistently through the first half of The Grand. There are plenty of gags here—especially the montage of Cross obnoxiously taunting his fellow players, a cameo by Michael McKean as a developer whose latest mega-hotel consists of one room that will cost $1,000,000 a night, and a bit by Judy Greer as Kind’s wife, who looks around the ribbon store she runs and confesses to the camera that she occasionally dreams of lighting up a blowtorch and burning the whole damn place down. Poker fans will also chuckle at the way Kind’s character cluelessly insists on referring to Doyle Brunson as “Tex.” Seriously: these bits are as good as anything in Best in Show.

Where The Grand fails to equal its predecessor is its second half, when the tournament takes over. Penn and his cast aren’t able to find a way to make the action at the tables as funny as the stuff leading up to it, and Michael Karnow’s character—a moronic announcer clearly modeled on Fred Willard in Best in Show—is a giant dud.

Unlike the $10,000,000 tournament in The Grand, improv movies tend to play for pretty low stakes—a few mild chuckles and some amusing character interactions and we comedy fans tend to go home happy. Sure, Zak Penn probably was hoping he’d get a little luckier with his camera than he did in The Grand, but a director can’t always rely on luck. As The German would say, “Luck is a crutch anyway.”

On The Air: The Moviegoer on After Hours

On this week's "Hidden Gems" segment for CBC Radio's Edmonton Am, I take a wild cab ride to mid-1980s Soho, where I discuss Henry Miller with a sexy girl, smoke a little pot, touch a woman's beehive, nearly fall prey to Mohawk Night at the local punk club, listen to some Peggy Lee, and pick up a couple of plaster-of-Paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights. Which is great, because there were papers flying all around my room because I had nothing to hold them down with!!!

That's right: Martin Scorsese's After Hours is the topic of discussion... just click here to give it a listen.

I didn't have time to mention the controversy over the questionable origins of Joseph Minion's script, but here's a good outline of the details. It makes for fascinating reading (and listening)—I was totally unaware the controversy even existed until reading this post. I think Minion brings a lot of his own sensibility and invention to the After Hours script, but if I were Joe Frank, I'd have demanded some compensation too.

The Musicgoer: Emmylou Harris' All I Intended to Be

EMMYLOU HARRIS
All I Intended to Be
(Nonesuch)
*** (out of 5)

With that crown of white-blonde hair that Emmylou Harris developed about a decade ago, she looks more ethereal than ever—less a country and western singer than an Asian apparition out of The Bride With White Hair. Her voice only heightens the resemblance; on her new CD, it rings out as clearly and cleanly, and with as much heart-stabbing power as ever. What other singer could make the chorus of “Hold On” (which simply repeats the title phrase three times) so moving, just in the way her voice leaps, like a yodeler, from one chord to the next? And on the tracks where she sings with Kate and Anna McGarrigle” it’s like a Mt. Olympus summit meeting of great folk voices.

Harris’ songwriting is not as magical, however, and All I Intended to Be is bogged down by filler like “Gold” and “Not Enough,” which pale in comparison to Merle Haggard’s eloquently mournful “Kern River” or even Billy Joe Shaver’s rueful “Old Five and Dimers Like Me.” A voice like Harris’ deserves the best songs in the world; it sounds cruel, but it might be that her own songs just aren’t good enough for her.

The Musicgoer: Aimee Mann's @#%&*! Smilers

I didn't do a "Musicgoer" entry last Monday, so to make up for my dereliction of duty, here's a bonus CD review for you today. Don't say I never gave you anything!

AIMEE MANN
@#%&*! Smilers
(Superego)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

“I turned stranger into starman in the Sunday New York Times/Like Anne Sexton and her star rats, working backwards ’til it rhymes.” So goes “Stranger Into Starman,” one of the more enigmatic songs on Aimee Mann’s eccentrically titled new CD @#%&*! Smilers. The Sexton reference is telling: Mann’s music shares Sexton’s melancholy turn of mind, even as her lyrics indulge in complicated rhyme schemes that echo Sexton’s fascination with palindromes but whose compulsive cleverness often prevents them from achieving the emotional depth of Sexton’s verse.

That said, @#%&*! Smilers is Mann’s strongest collection of songs since 2000’s Bachelor No. 2: “Little Tornado” and “31 Today” are two of the best evocations of lives drifting nowhere that Mann has recorded yet. But that’s kind of a backhanded compliment, isn’t it? Even with the addition of some tasteful horns and electronics to her acoustic sound, @#%&*! Smilers sees Mann mining some very familiar thematic territory—even her chord progressions seem to be on autopilot. If she doesn’t challenge herself more, her fans might well leave her for more innovative artists—and they might do it sooner rather than later. To phrase it in the form of a palindrome, “Won’t lovers revolt now?”

Moviegoer Diary: Inside, The Strangers, Savage Grace

INSIDE

Plot in a Nutshell
A very pregnant woman is menaced by a seemingly unstoppable psycho-bitch home invader in this unusually intense 2007 French thriller by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury.

Thoughts
Sorry again for this blog’s sporadic posting schedule of late; I was preoccupied first by my trip to visit my family in Ontario, and then by the necessity of getting back on top of everything at work. Plus, I was so traumatized by watching Inside (or À L’Intérieur to those of you reading this in Marseilles) that I could barely cross the room for fear Béatrice Dalle would be around the next corner waiting to stab my in the belly with a gigantic pair of scissors.

I don’t know why she’d attack me, though; it’s the pregnant Alysson Paradis (Johnny Depp’s sister-in-law!) who she’s really interested in. Except I can’t get those scenes from the movie out of my mind, because ever since I was little, I had an irrational hangup about my belly button—I shuddered even to think of sticking my finger into it or having it violated in any way. I know, I know, very Freudian. So when a movie like Inside comes along, in which Dalle sticks the tip of scissors into a sleeping pregnant woman’s navel and starts snipping... and that’s just within the first half hour... my God, that’s really hitting a helpless moviegoer below the belt. (Well, I guess your belly button is actually above your belt, but you know what I mean. What do you want from me? I’m too rattled to come up with a metaphor that makes sense.)

And that’s just the beginning of the mayhem that directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury had in store for me in Inside. Seldom have I seen a film that’s at once so well-made on a technical level (the shot-on-digital cinematography by Laurent Barès makes superb use of the hazy half-darkness of lamplit living rooms and hallways) and yet also so remorselessly effective in its depiction of graphic violence. Please: I beg of you, if you are at all sensitive to the sight of blood or onscreen violence, or if you are pregnant or ever intend to get pregnant, this movie will send you scurrying off to the comparatively light-hearted, escapist thrills of Rosemary’s Baby. But if you think you’re made of tougher stuff, Inside is a great movie to pit yourself against. Myself, I watched the whole thing pop-eyed with shock and alarmed the people in the apartment next door by whimpering, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh no, no, no, no! Oh my God!” throughout the final five minutes. Your reaction may differ; perhaps you’ll settle for merely stuffing your fist in your mouth and sobbing.

Scott Tobias, reviewing Inside at the Toronto Film Festival for The Onion, took exception to the film, acknowledging its effectiveness but still calling it “sleazy” and “unconscionable”—Bustillo and Maury’s CGI shots of Paradis’ fetus getting knocked around inside her womb he found particularly gratuitous—but it seems to me that a certain amount of tastelessness is kind of a key ingredient in most good horror movies. True, showing a pregnant woman in this kind of extreme jeopardy is still a cinematic taboo, but it takes a ruthless movie like Inside to remind you of the extent to which this taboo is ingrained in your moviegoing mind. Indeed, the film ends in a tableau that’s hugely satisfying as a chilling, disturbing horror image, but which is also troubling on a moviegoing level because of the way it blithely, even cruelly, violates the unwritten rules by which directors are expected to treat pregnant characters.

I’m also unwilling to dismiss Inside as exploitative sleaze simply because the two lead performances are so strong. Paradis is scarily convincing as the pregnant victim, frantically fighting off this inexplicable threat to her child with every improvised weapon she can lay her hands on—her emergence, near the end of the film, as a pregnant, blood-soaked avenger wielding a jerry-rigged javelin, deserves to become an iconic horror moment. And Dalle is, quite simply, a force of nature as the mysterious invader, with that wide, sensuous-madwoman face of hers, those hooded eyes, that avid mouth. Is she as much of a psycho in real life as she seems in Betty Blue and Trouble Every Day? I suspect she’s just a sensational actress. But I’m still not letting her get within 100 yards of my belly button. Hey, when it comes to some things, you just can't be too careful.

RATING: 4.5/5



THE STRANGERS

Plot in a Nutshell
Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman spend the night in a remote cabin, where they are menaced by a trio of masked killers.

Thoughts
Phew. Next to Inside, The Strangers is kids’ stuff. Writer/director Bryan Bertino gets off to a good start, setting an effective low-key mood and establishing an unusually complicated relationship between its two lead characters. (Tyler rejected Speedman’s marriage proposal earlier that night, which means they’re now stuck awkwardly in a cabin that Speedman, expecting her to say yes, had earlier filled with candles and rose petals.) And as The Orphanage proved earlier this year, there ain’t nothing scarier than a silent killer with a canvas bag over his head.

In principle, I like the way Bertino has tried to create a stripped-down, back-to-basics thriller—nothing but suspense, shocks, and scary setpieces, in which the killers seem all the more terrifying because their motives are never explained. And I was with The Strangers for the first 40 minutes or so—especially the moment where Liv Tyler drinks a glass of water at the kitchen sink, not noticing that one of the killers has quietly materialized out of the darkness in the distance behind her—and Bertino has a great ear for picking precisely which scratchy old folk or alt-country LP will sound especially eerie playing on the cabin’ record player while Tyler tries to figure out what’s making those strange noises down the hall.

But somewhere around the film’s halfway point, I started to tune out. The killers’ lack of motivation started to become a liability instead of an asset—annoyingly illogical instead of frighteningly irrational. Why did they spend so much time making eerie noises and moving around household objects instead of attacking the couple right away? Why knock on the door at all when they can just as easily break inside? Why wait for as long as they do to launch their first attack? Why destroy Tyler’s cellphone to cut her off from outside contact but allow Speedman to drive away and then come back?

Because it’s scarier that way, I guess. But scarier in a way that doesn’t make any sense in any context except as an elaborate, mechanical show staged for some invisible movie cameras. Inside may be over-the-top, but at least there’s a consistent throughline to Dalle’s behaviour—as well as a really satisfying third-act reveal that puts her actions into a shocking new context. Everything that happens in The Strangers, meanwhile, feels arbitrary—it’s like a gruesome, inverted version of Home Alone, with the home here being used as a weapon against its residents instead of the outside invaders.

The killers remain unnamed within the film, but they’re referred to in the credits as “The Man in the Mask,” “Dollface,” and “Pin-Up Girl”—cheeky nicknames that make me worried Bertino is cynically hoping they’ll catch on as cult heroes among the horror crowd. The ending certainly suggests he’s planning a sequel, but maybe he's waiting to see if the collectible figurines sell well first.

RATING: 2.5/5



SAVAGE GRACE

Plot in a Nutshell
Director Tom Kalin’s true-crime story about the murder of society wife Barbara Baekeland at the hands of her son, as well as her incredibly dysfunctional marriage to Brooks Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune.

Thoughts
As portrayed by Julianne Moore, Barbara Baekeland may be an even more terrifying woman than Béatrice Dalle in Inside. At least Dalle is motivated by maternal desires (however uncontrolled), while Barbara Baekeland seems to be conducting an experiment to see just how badly she can fuck her poor son Tony up. When he’s a boy, she invites him to read a passage from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine to a French-speaking guest, and when he’s a young man, she seduces him in the living room of their London flat. (In between those traumatic events, Tony’s parents divorce, his father steals his girlfriend, and he climbs naked into bed with his mother and her lover—neither of whom apparently even considers asking him to leave.)

It takes a special directorial talent to make this story dull, but with Savage Grace, Tom Kalin proves himself more than up to the task. It’s never clear what point he’s trying to make with this material—the characterizations are too opaque for it to work as a character study, and the tone is too muted to register as social satire. Julianne Moore gives an interesting, if hard-to-read, performance as this elegant monster, but it’s not enough to make me think that I’d rather have read a juicy Vanity Fair article about this murder instead.

RATING: 2/5

The Mercenary Position

John Cusack has been doing a lot of press to promote War, Inc., a satire about the modern Halliburton era of corporatized warfare. That’s understandable—he has an unusual stake in the movie’s success, seeing as how he co-wrote (along with Bulworth screenwriter Jeremy Pikser and novelist Mark Leyner), co-produced, co-financed, and stars in it as professional killer-for-hire Brand Hauser. The dead-eyed Hauser is sleepwalking through life, dulling the painful memories of the people he’s murdered by downing shotglass after shotglass of the most lethal hot sauce brands he can find. But in his interviews, Cusack burns with justifiable anger over the way the United States has cynically allowed large regions of the globe to become playgrounds for greedy corporations. Here he is, for instance, talking about the film’s supposedly “offensive” humour in a web-only interview with Vanity Fair:

“I think the idea was to make [the film] offensive,” he says. “I think what’s happening is offensive. The types of vertical integration that are going on are obscene: these companies that are making money off the bombing of a place and the reconstruction.... Rumsfeld was hosting a ski tournament for soldiers who had lost a limb and he was also sitting on the board of a company that was making the prosthetic limbs. There’s nothing we could do in the movie that has a fraction of the real obscenities of the war profiteers and the mercenaries and these so-called free marketeers who basically set up a fast protectionist’s racket.”

And even though everything Cusack says makes sense, that still doesn’t alter the fact that the scene from War, Inc. that he’s talking about—in which we see a chorus line of female amputees on artificial legs rehearsing a Rockettes-style number for an upcoming pro-American TV extravaganza—isn’t funny in the slightest. Maybe some sick humour could be squozen from this concept—perhaps as a sight gag glimpsed, Airplane!-style, in the background of a dialogue scene— but director Joshua Seftel’s camera sits on the image so leadenly, and for such a protracted length of time, that he squanders whatever comic shock value it might have otherwise had.

Cusack says one of War, Inc.’s inspirations was Dr. Strangelove, and like Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War masterpiece, it’s populated by a gallery of very broadly drawn supporting characters. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—satire is often all about comic exaggeration—but Seftel unerringly finds a way to make all of them as strident and unpleasant as possible. Hilary Duff plays Yonica Babyyeah, a Central Asian pop-singing nymphet so sulky and spoiled that she makes Hilary Duff seem like a regular down-to-earth teenager by comparison. Ben Kingsley is allowed to use a ridiculous American accent as Walken, Hauser’s former boss. Dan Aykroyd’s amusing cameo as the Cheney-esque head of the Halliburton-esque Tamerlane corporation is undermined by the decision to have him perform most of his scenes on the toilet. But worst of all is the ordinarily delightful Joan Cusack—John’s sister and frequent co-star—whose performance as Hauser’s Tamerlane liaison is a succession of shrieks and screeches, many of them delivered right into Seftel’s fisheye lens.

John Cusack’s instinct to provide viewers some relief from all the hamminess surrounding him by underplaying his role is probably correct, but in practice, he comes across alternately as smug, sour, or just plain bored—rousing himself only for a couple of action scenes in which Hauser disarms half a dozen bad guys with his bare hands. But the thick-bodied Cusack is never remotely convincing as a kung fu killing machine (the brief glimpse Seftel gives us of Steven Seagal on a TV screen is unintentionally apt), and the decision to give Hauser a tragic backstory (murdered wife, missing child) is a sentimental miscalculation for a satire conceived, as Cusack likes to proclaim to interviewers, in the take-no-prisoners punk-rock spirit of bands like The Clash.

For someone so fired up with righteous indignation, Cusack looks morose and miserable in almost every scene of this film. As a result, War, Inc. becomes a curious artifact: it’s a vanity project whose star doesn’t seem to even want to be in it.