The Iceman Cometh

January in Edmonton: the month when the icy winds slicing down Jasper Avenue are so unrelenting that I sometimes think I won't even be able to complete my four-block morning walk to work without collapsing in the street.

Probably not the time of year when Edmonton radio listeners want to think about watching a documentary about Antarctica, but hopefully my "Hidden Gems" DVD segment for the CBC this morning persuaded a few people to let Werner Herzog's incandescent Encounters at the End of the World warm up their imaginations. Click here to listen!

Uninvited Co-Conspirators

The thought sometimes occurs to me that maybe the people who make horror movies have watched too many horror movies. They all seem to get their idea of what’s spooky solely from watching each other’s films. And those films all look alike, they sound alike, they have the same predictable editing rhythms, and they’re populated by the same assortment of grinning demons, grim-faced soul-catchers, and creepy little kids. There have been so many pale little ghost children lurking around the corners of these movies or standing with unnatural stillness at the ends of long, half-lit corridors or crawling out of TV sets or popping out of closets or reaching in through unlocked windows that sometimes the last three decades of horror cinema can seem like one long, unsuccessful attempt to recreate the moment when those incredibly creepy twin girls in their party dresses showed up in The Shining and gave everyone in the theatre nightmares for the next 15 years.

There are three spooky little children in The Uninvited as well; they’re not particularly scary, but their mere presence keeps you guessing as to just what kind of horror movie you’re actually watching. Is it a supernatural thriller about a young teen (Emily Browning) whose ability to see ghosts helps her solve a decades-old murder mystery? Is it a psychological thriller, in which Browning, who’s spent nearly a year in a psych ward following the violent death of her mother, is merely imagining all the danger around her? (And if it’s real, will she be able to convince anybody she hasn’t gone crazy again?) Or is it an old-school Hand That Rocks the Cradle-style domestic thriller in which Browning is the only person who’s figured out that her father’s sexy new wife (Elizabeth Banks), a SMILF if ever I've seen one, is actually a serial killer?

The answer turns out to be none of the above — and I guess I have to give the film some credit for fooling me as to what the final twist would turn out to be. Then again, I feel like I should dock it just as many points for the way, in hindsight, none of the characters’ behaviour makes any sense at all. Elizabeth Banks, especially, is a victim of the same syndrome that afflicted Cary Grant in Suspicion. This is a spoiler, I guess, but I think most moviegoers will figure out pretty early on that her character is probably not the villain she appears to be — but in order to keep things “ambiguous,” she still has to make so many sinister facial expressions and deliver her lines with such an undercurrent of menace that she seems insane anyway.

Elizabeth Banks and David Strathairn (who plays Browning’s novelist father) are certainly slumming for a paycheque, but they do what they can to give their plot-function characters some added dimensions. The late character actor Don Davis turns up very briefly in one scene — he’s only got one line, but seeing him alive onscreen is in a way more startling and magical than any of the cheap ghost effects elsewhere in the movie. And in the ridiculous role of one of Browning’s fellow inmates on the psych ward, a hulking young actress named Heather Doerksen looks disconcertingly like Revolutionary Road’s Michael Shannon disguised in a housecoat and a long, greasy blonde wig.

Moviegoer Diary: Lisztomania, Zabriskie Point

LISZTOMANIA

Plot In A Nutshell
Ken Russell’s delirious 1975 biopic starring Roger Daltrey as 19th-century pianist and composer Franz Liszt.

Thoughts
Oscar season is the perfect time to watch a movie like Lisztomania, which has such utter disregard for the qualities of taste and propriety that the Academy demands from its historical biopics. (Even that ridiculous rock-musical title comes off as a provocation.) This is perhaps the most childish, vulgar, obvious, demented film ever made about a significant artist, and it doesn’t contain a single dull moment. Or a single good performance — but that probably didn’t bother Ken Russell, so long as the action onscreen had been whipped into a sufficient frenzy.

Lisztomania’s, shall we say, less-than-factually-accurate approach to musical biography reminded me in a lot of ways of a much less intellectual version of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There in the way that both Russell and Haynes regard fantasy and fable as a much more useful way of capturing the essence of their subjects than a more scrupulous, linear presentation of their lives would be. Russell establishes his playful tone early on in Lisztomania in a party scene where every guest is a famous writer or composer: Rossini won’t stop stuffing food into his mouth; a sickly Chopin clings pathetically to the leg of George Sand (who speaks in a deep, dubbed-in male baritone); and Richard Wagner, wearing a sailor suit with “NIETZSCHE” inscribed on the cap, makes an anti-Semitic slur to Felix Mendelssohn.

The film’s depiction of Wagner is really something else — I can’t think of a more hilariously irresponsible bit of onscreen character assassination. As played by a madly grinning Paul Nicholas, Wagner is variously depicted as a vampire, a werewolf, and Dr. Frankenstein. In one scene, he drugs Liszt’s wine, sprouts fangs, chomps down on his neck, and literally feasts on his blood. In the film’s final few minutes, Wagner has been transformed into a gigantic Frankenstein monster with a Hitler mustache, lurching down the streets of Berlin and shooting Jews with his electric guitar-shaped machine gun, only to be blown up by Liszt, who has flown down from heaven in a spaceship shaped like an immense pipe organ — I think it was somewhere in there that I decided the movie had truly lost its mind.

But then I remembered that actually it had lost its mind almost an hour earlier during the famous musical dream sequence when Liszt meets Russia’s Princess Carolyn and sprouts a 12-foot-long penis. I had heard about this scene in many places, and yet I never quite believed it was true until I saw it with my own eyes. Yes, at one point five dancing girls straddle the penis and do synchronized kicks. Yes, they attach harnesses to it and drag Liszt around the floor. And yes, the scene ends with Princess Carolyn inserting the penis into a guillotine and chopping it off. I have no idea what this scene is meant to symbolize.

Ken Russell doesn’t seem like a very fashionable director anymore — a glance at his IMDb page reveals that he hasn’t stopped working, but as far as I can tell, the last film he directed to get significant distribution in North America was 1991’s Whore, starring Theresa Russell. Which is too bad, because just about every biopic from last year would probably have been improved tenfold if Russell had directed it instead. Wouldn’t you rather have seen Russell direct W. instead of Oliver Stone? Wouldn’t the Ken Russell version of The Other Boleyn Girl have made much more memorable use of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson? And what about a marquee reading Ken Russell’s Milk? The mind boggles.

RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *

ZABRISKIE POINT

Plot In A Nutshell
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 drama, set against the backdrop of student unrest on college campuses in southern California, about a pair of young anti-establishment types (Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin) who have a brief but passionate encounter in the Arizona desert.

Thoughts
I first heard of Zabriskie Point when I was maybe 11 or 12 and I nagged my grandfather into buying me a copy of Harry and Michael Medved’s book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, which I had spotted in a bookstore and whose premise instantly captivated me. The book is actually an interesting artifact; it was written before the Medveds had ever heard of Ed Wood and before they started concentrating mainly on schlocky sci-fi and horror from the 1950s and ’60s. There were a few cheapie genre titles among their chosen 50 — movies like The Horror of Party Beach, Eegah!, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians — but they also included oddities like the 1937 biopic Parnell with Clark Gable, or the Ronald Reagan/Shirley Temple melodrama That Hagen Girl, titles which never come up anymore in any discussion of legendary bad movies.

The Medveds also included three unexpected argument-starter titles in the book — movies by respected international directors that enjoyed (unjustly, in their opinion) a certain amount of critical cachet. Besides Zabriskie Point, Last Year at Marienbad also made their list, as did Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The Fifty Worst Films of All Time may have been the first book of film criticism I ever owned, and it had enough of an impact on me that I avoided Sam Peckinpah for decades. Only in the last couple of years have I realized that he’s actually one of my favourite directors, and Alfredo Garcia is probably my favourite of his movies.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t listen to Michael Medved, I guess — but you probably knew that already. My point is, it took me all these years to finally get around to tracking down Zabriskie Point, lured to it mainly by accounts I’d read of the famous (and intriguingly stupid-sounding) “everything blows up in slow motion” ending, but also hoping the Alfredo Garcia effect would be repeated.

That didn’t quite happen — Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin are the most beautiful young revolutionaries in movie history, but the magic disappears whenever they open their mouths to speak. (If you watch the movie with a friend, you can have fun trying to figure out which lines were written by Sam Shepard.) Still, Zabriskie Point is not the most dialogue-heavy film ever made, and there are long stretches where Antonioni builds a powerful mood of alienation simply by expertly chosen shots of the fascinatingly ugly urban landscape, with garish signs and advertisements taking up every square inch of available space. When the action shifts to Zabriskie Point, a vast, blasted-out gypsum desert in Death Valley, the featureless, uncolonized landscape ought to come as a relief, but it’s as bleak and unwelcoming as the corrupt city.

It’s kind of a brilliant move on Antonioni’s part to stage Frechette and Halprin’s sexual dalliance in the sand of Zabriskie Point instead of one of those lush green meadows most counterculture movie lovers usually frequent. The two of them strip and caress each other, and they might as well be on the moon; the image is Elvira Madigan by way of Cormac McCarthy. As the scene progresses, it slides into fantasy as dozens of other young seminude couples appear around them, cavorting in the dust. It’s a nice concept, but the sexy young extras Antonioni recruited from Joseph Chaikin’s Living Theatre are way too self-conscious in front of the camera — watching them pose and make “dramatic” expressions at each other brought back all-too-vivid memories of every pretentious “physical theatre” piece I’ve ever endured as a local theatre critic.

I’m shuddering just thinking of it. How about we clear our minds by watching a desert mansion blow up over and over again?



Classic art movie or greatest Mythbusters episode of all time? You make the call!

RATING: 3.5/5

The Musicgoer: Phosphorescent's To Willie

PHOSPHORESCENT
To Willie
(Dead Oceans)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

The title and cover art for this new album from Georgia-born, Brooklyn-based alt-country artist Matthew Houck (who records under the nom de disque Phosphorescent) invoke the classic 1977 album To Lefty From Willie, in which Willie Nelson paid tribute to honkytonk legend Lefty Frizzell. That album was a gesture of respect from a chart-topping star, a tip of the hat directed toward a performer whose name had sadly lapsed into obscurity. Now, even 30 years later, Willie Nelson is hardly a name that needs to be reintroduced to the record-buying public — but To Willie is still an excellent reminder of the down-to-earth humanity of Nelson’s music and his ability to evoke a world of regretful heartache in just a few well-chosen phrases.

Houck’s album recognizes that heartache is never singular in Nelson’s world: the plural noun in the title of “Heartaches of a Fool” is no accident. In Nelson’s songs, when you break up with the person you love, you don’t just feel lonely; you’re “Permanently Lonely.” Even in a semi-comic song like “The Last Thing I Needed (First Thing This Morning),” Nelson springs a depressing surprise on you in the second verse, when he reveals that his girlfriend didn’t just leave him; she left him a few days before Christmas.

I don’t know if someone will be recording a Phosphorescent tribute LP 30 years from now — although 2007’s Pride is a damn good album — but I can certainly imagine having a bad day in 2039, pouring myself a drink, and using the sounds of To Willie to console myself in my misery.

Liam Neeson Declares War On Albania

If Bryan Mills, the hero of Taken, ever met Jack Bauer from 24 — it’s not impossible; they both live in L.A. — they’d find they have a lot in common. They’re both rough-and-tumble government agents who don’t play by the rules, who’d much rather be in the field, punching out henchmen, than taking orders from some suit behind a desk. They don’t think twice about torturing bad guys to get the information they need to save innocent lives. And somehow they’ve both managed to raise bubbleheaded teenage daughters named Kim who can’t cross the street without getting kidnapped.

In Taken, the kidnappers are a well-organized group of Albanians who spot pretty, young female travelers at the Paris airport, follow them to their hotel, abduct them, get them addicted to drugs, and then either turn them into prostitutes or auction them off to rich, swarthy businessmen to be deflowered. (Kim is played by Maggie Grace, who at 25 is clearly a decade older than her character is supposed to be. I assume this is the filmmakers’ way to make their premise seem a little less sleazy, but making an adult actress like Grace behave like a squealing teen has the unintended side effect of making Kim seem even stupider.)

Anyhow, I’m sure you don’t need me to draw you a road map to figure out how this story plays out: after learning that the corrupt Paris police force won’t be helping him retrieve his daughter — and with the clock ticking down the hours before she’s smuggled into another country, never to be found again — Mills (Liam Neeson, in a rare action role) does the job all by himself. Only when the bodies start piling up do the Albanians realize that they’ve fucked with the wrong Irishman.

Now, there are two possible reactions to a movie like Taken. You can choose to repudiate it as a shamelessly manipulative, xenophobic, button-pushing piece of rubbish... or you can admire it, perhaps a bit begrudgingly, as a ruthlessly efficient, cleanly made revenge picture. Myself, I’m leaning slightly in the second direction. This is yet another film from the Luc Besson movie factory, and it has the slick production values, the sleek storytelling (the movie is barely 90 minutes long), the interestingly textured European backdrops, and the crisply choreographed action scenes that characterize pretty much everything Besson puts his name to. Taken was written by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, his collaborator on the ludicrously entertaining Transporter franchise, but they’ve smartly tailored the fights in this movie to Neeson’s persona. Instead of the balletic, outrageously choreographed battles they devised for Jason Statham, Taken is all about no-fuss brutality: Neeson’s favourite approach is to batter his opponent senseless with his fists, then empty his gun into his head.

You’ve also got to give Besson and Kamen points for cunningly establishing Neeson as a divorced dad who’s clearly the better man, but who can’t complete with his ex-wife’s rich new husband (played by Xander Berkeley, one of Kiefer Sutherland’s dickish, deskbound bosses from 24). It’s the Die Hard principle at work: any woman who decides to “trade up” from a husband in law enforcement will require him to defeat an international group of criminals within two weeks of the divorce papers going through.

Dances With Torontonians

“Will someone please tell me how to say ‘tree’ in Ojibway?” asks Anishnabe painter Jolene Peltier, beckoning to the skies. She’s expressing herself with mock frustration, but her mock frustration disguises a genuine frustration with her inability to connect with her own cultural heritage. She asked her grandmother to teach her the language, but the lessons weren’t very productive and to this day she knows about as much Ojibway as I do. She has earned a certain amount of acclaim for her paintings of aboriginal leaders, but when her latest subject, a elder and community organizer played by Lorne Cardinal, presents her with an eagle feather, she’s devastated to realize, after driving out to a field and lighting some sweetgrass, that she has no idea what the “correct” way to pray with it might be.

Jolene, played winningly by Melanie McLaren, is one of the two main characters in Shane Belcourt’s lovely, surprisingly accomplished no-budget indie Tkaronto (named after the discarded Mohawk word for Toronto). The other is Ray Morin (Duane Murray), a Métis graphic novelist who’s come to The Big Smoke to pitch a series to some TV executives — but also to get a little distance from his pregnant wife and sort out his thoughts about becoming a father. Jolene’s life is a little more together than Ray’s is, but they feel the same awkwardness and self-doubt when it comes to owning their aboriginal identity. They are also both married to white partners, and so they have a lot of pent-up thoughts about being aboriginal that spill out of them their first night together in a Before Sunrise-length all-night conversation. An affair is out of the question, but it’s clear they’re drawn to each other.

The themes of Tkaronto may sound familiar, even rote, but there’s something very fresh in the way Belcourt filters them through the self-deprecating attitude of his young, artistic-minded characters. Sure, there’s not a lot of subtext in Tkaronto — it’s a movie about two people struggling to find their cultural identity who spend every scene talking about their struggle to find their cultural identity — but you completely believe that these two people would express themselves in exactly this way, that there are thousands of Canadians out there who are wrestling with precisely the same issues, and their struggle to attach themselves to something bigger than themselves, and just to get their lives on track, is genuinely involving. (The dialogue feels semi-improvised, and editor Jordan O’Connor takes an oblique, almost Nicolas Roegian approach to cutting the scenes that also keeps the film from seeming too straightforward and didactic.)

I could have done without Ray’s Ally McBeal fantasy sequences, and O’Connor’s overbearing score. And the scenes where Ray takes his script meetings (which strongly reminded me of the audition scenes in Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle) feel too broad — maybe I’m betraying my naïveté here, but surely even the most clueless white TV executive in Canada wouldn’t be as brazenly insulting as the idiots Ray encounters here. (That said, there’s a very funny, pointed moment early on where one of Ray’s producing partners tries to calculate whether Ray’s Métis status is enough to qualify their show’s creative team as “30 per cent Canadian aboriginal.”)

I assume Belcourt has tried to get a lot of projects off the ground and has endured a lot of meetings even more frustrating and unproductive than Ray has. Hopefully Tkaronto makes it easier for him to get some cash in the future; like everybody involved in this little gem of a movie, he’s obviously a talent to watch.

Black And White And Dread All Over

As a child, I recall seeing old Popeye cartoons on TV and being oddly disturbed by the sight of an animated movie in black-and-white. Why did I find that imagery so disturbing? I think it might have had something to do with the way it called such stark attention to the fact that these were drawings that were moving but which were still not quite alive — as if their creator had cruelly deprived them and their surroundings of some essential natural characteristic. What a nightmare world they seemed to inhabit!

Black-and-white animation apparently gives the producers of the film Fear(s) of the Dark the same sensation of crawling unease: they’ve commissioned short, creepy cartoons from six different directors, and in none of them is there a drop of colour to be found. That said, there’s a surprising amount of visual variety from segment to segment: an artist known only as “Blutch” uses an ever-shifting cross-hatched style that looks like charcoal sketches come to life; Marie Caillou prefers a monochromatic palette so faded that it almost appears to be in shades of blue; and the interstitial segments by Pierre di Sciullo arrange abstract geometric shapes into op-art patterns reminiscent of those optical illusions that trick you into seeing wavy patterns where there are only stationary zebra stripes.

Fear(s) of the Dark's most famous contributor — or at least the only one whose work I was previously familiar with — is the brilliant American illustrator and graphic novelist Charles Burns, author most notably of Black Hole. Burns’ segment brings his signature style (all inky blacks, underlit faces, and twisted psychosexual imagery) to life in a manner reminiscent of the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis — the characters talk and move around, but they remain trapped in two dimensions, moving back and forth across the frame instead of deeper into it. It’s an entrancing effect, perhaps precisely because of its visual limitations.

As for the story, it explores familiar Burns territory —youth, sex, and bizarre diseases and infestations. The late Guillaume Dépardieu provides the voice of Eric, a shy entomologist who loses his virginity to Laura, a vivacious university classmate who... well, let’s just say she may not belong to the species she appears to belong to. Burns never quite spells out exactly what happens to Laura, but we get enough, er, pregnant suggestions to piece it together. (More fantasy filmmakers should take their cue from Burns, actually — Black Hole never explicitly explained its premise either, and was all the more haunting because of it.) It’s a minor effort from Burns, but as his first experimental foray into animation, perhaps it will lead to more ambitious projects down the road.

The most visually inventive segment is arguably the one that concludes the film: it’s about a man who finds refuge from a blinding snowstorm within a remote mansion, and director Richard McGuire devises all sorts of clever shots of the man walking up and down darkened staircases and into pitch-black rooms, his gas lamp providing only a small circle of illumination just a few feet around him.

Lorenzo Mattotti contributes an evocative childhood anecdote about his dead father, a rash of killings in his village, and a friend who seems to know a suspicious amount of information about monsters; my only reservation is the way the entire story is told through voiceover narration, which reduces the visuals to mere illustration. Marie Caillou’s piece is a puzzler about a Japanese schoolgirl who has a traumatic encounter with a samurai’s ghost... or is that sinister doctor with a hypodermic needle forcing her to dream the whole thing? I can’t decide if the ending is artfully abrupt, or if it needs another scene. I did like Blutch’s wordless fable, about a man roaming the countryside and randomly killing people with his four bloodthirsty hounds, especially its crypto-ironic make-of-it-what-you-will ending.

But none of those segments offers anything truly startling, either thematically or visually. And with a running time of barely more than 70 minutes (lengthy opening and closing credits pad it out to feature length) and too many segments lacking strong endings, Fear(s) of the Dark amounts to much less than the sum of its parts. Popeye still gives me bad dreams occasionally; I only saw it yesterday, but I’ll be surprised if Fear(s) has the same effect.

Tearing Me Apart

Oh, Tommy Wiseau... your name may mean "bird" in French, but your film The Room is a turkey. But at least it's a spectacularly entertaining turkey — so entertaining, in fact, that it's acquired a fast-growing cult of admirers drawn helplessly to its one-of-a-kind combination of chintzy sets and non sequitur dialogue, its drunken-blackout approach to plotting, its characters' inexplicable fondness for tossing around footballs, and of course, to the woozy central performance by Wiseau as a self-sacrificing loverman brought low by his two-timing fiancée.

The Room is the subject of my "Hidden Gem" DVD segment this week on CBC Radio — and while no five-minute radio segment could ever do it justice, I gave it my best shot. Click and listen!

Moviegoer Diary: The Foot Fist Way, Hardcore

THE FOOT FIST WAY

Plot In A Nutshell
Jody Hill’s 2006 comedy about antisocial taekwondo instructor Fred Simmons (Danny McBride), whose life goes into a tailspin when he separates from his wife.

Thoughts
The “comedy of social awkwardness” subgenre reaches new levels of viewer discomfort in this cult oddity, the film that got Danny McBride noticed by the casting directors for Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder. McBride gives a thoroughly committed performance as this pathetic petty dictator — is there any comedian working today more willing to wear hideously unfashionable clothes than Danny McBride? — and the milieu of Simmons’ strip-mall “dojo” feels so authentic and lived-in that you can practically smell the sweat emanating from the floor mats.

But ugh — there’s no getting away from the despicable, unlikable, just plain ugly character at the centre of this movie, a character not even the filmmakers seem to have much affection for. Will Ferrell’s production company picked up the film for distribution, and you can see where Simmons — an immature, petulant, noticeably tubby man clinging to a career in a marginal sport — would have reminded Ferrell of a lot of the characters he’s played in his own films. But where Ferrell projects an infectious, childlike zeal that gets you rooting for even his most narcissistic characters, Simmons’ self-delusion is just small and mean. When Ferrell and John C. Reilly beat up a gang of kids in Step Brothers, the humour comes from the cartoonishness of the staging and the film’s awareness that they’re on the same emotional level as the kids they’re attacking. When McBride beats up a 12-year-old student in The Foot Fist Way (he’s just found out the kid’s father having an affair with his wife), it’s just kind of appalling — especially since he does it in front of a full classroom and nobody tries to stop him.*

[*Yes, I realize many would dispute the premise that Step Brothers is funny, but let's just keep moving, okay?]

Maybe the problem with The Foot Fist Way is its naturalistic style — it’s not a mockumentary, but it has the semi-improvised, semi-documentary feel of so many post-Christopher Guest comedies. The style situates the story in the real world, but Simmons’ behaviour is so extreme, and makes it so improbable that he would have any students at all, that I wonder if it might have played better if it had been shot more in the brightly coloured, slightly artificial mould of something like The House Bunny or Legally Blonde. And maybe if they had a director who didn’t introduce Simmons’ wife with a shot of her ass stuffed into a shiny Spandex aerobics outfit — truly one of the most misogynist introductions I’ve ever seen an actress get.

RATING: 2/5

* * * * *

HARDCORE

Plot In A Nutshell
Paul Schrader’s sleazy 1979 drama about a Calvinist factory owner (George C. Scott) from Grand Rapids, Michigan who must descend into the world of pornography and prostitution when his teenaged daughter disappears during a church-sponsored road trip and turns up in an X-rated movie.

Thoughts
Paul Schrader is such a vivid presence as an interviewee or a participant in DVD commentary tracks — that fey, Droopy Dawg voice of his is instantly recognizable — that I was surprised to realize how few of his directorial efforts I’ve actually seen. Just Mishima, Auto Focus, and The Comfort of Strangers, and I think that’s about it. So I’m no expert in Schrader’s oeuvre, but Hardcore, with its constant push-pull between the dull religious world and the repulsive world of fleshy desire (epitomized by the use of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's mournful "Helpless" on the soundtrack while the camera pans across a display case of dildos and buttplugs), feels in a way like the ultimate Schrader film.

Judged by the standards of realism, it’s fairly preposterous — especially when George C. Scott dons a wig, a fake mustache, and a tie-dyed t-shirt to impersonate a porn producer auditioning actors in his motel room — and yet within its own fictional universe, there’s something absolutely riveting about it. Scott’s descent into the depraved subculture of the sex industry — starting with some tentative ventures into X-rated bookstores, strip clubs, peepshows, and massage parlours (where every interaction, even simple human conversation, requires him to pull out his wallet), then venturing deeper and deeper into S&M dungeons and snuff films — feels like a descent Schrader wants to take with him. “Turn it off! Turn it off!” Scott famously shouts when the detective he’s hired (Peter Boyle) shows him the 8mm film (Slave to Love, it’s called) in which two blond studs have sex with his daughter, but Schrader knows Scott can’t help but want to see more, to gain more knowledge about his daughter’s whereabouts.

It feels at times as though Schrader isn’t quite in control of the film’s tone — the scenes featuring Leonard Gaines as porn mogul Bill Ramada, in particular, are an unexpected source of comic relief. (“I make pictures of quality!” Ramada tells his assistant. “I make custard! Do you understand what I mean? I make custard!”) You can even see Ed Begley Jr. in one scene, playing an actor in Ramada’s latest picture, and if the idea of Ed Begley Jr. as a porn star doesn’t make you laugh... well, you’re beyond help, that’s all I can say.

The first 15 minutes or so feel like Schrader is still finding his way into the film. He doesn’t give us much information at all about Scott’s daughter (played by a dark-eyed young actress named Ilah Davis, who apparently never made another movie), save for a cryptic scene where her more sexually experienced girlfriend explains the rules of a makeout game called “chicken” to her. Schrader also lingers over an odd scene where a design consultant shows Scott the prototype for a department store floor display for the furniture his factory produces. Scott keeps saying the blue logo on the wall is too “overpowering” — is Schrader going for some kind of irony here, that a man who finds this neutral shade of blue disturbing will soon be wearing shades and impersonating a porn producer? If he is, the ironic point is, well, less than overpowering.

But the film gains focus in its second half, when Scott hooks up with a stripper and sometime porn actress (Season Hubley) who gives him his first solid lead on his daughter’s whereabouts. There’s a scene where Scott explains to her the principles of Calvinism — especially the theory that some people have been chosen by God to be saved and some people to be condemned — where you intuit the cruel outcome of Schrader’s story. While Hubley secretly comes to believe that Scott will rescue her from her life as a sex worker and perhaps even adopt her as a “replacement daughter,” we know that as soon as he finds his real child he will abandon Hubley to perdition.

Yikes, that’s a grim note to end on. Maybe it would be better to call attention to some of Hardcore’s more amusing details about the sex industry — like the giant Star Wars poster visible on the side of a building outside Scott’s hotel room, followed up a little while later by a scene at a strip club where two women can be seen doing a topless re-enactment of the climactic lightsabre duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi... or the totally awesome sequence where Scott chases this punk kid from room to room in an S&M brothel — not by using the doors, but literally by busting through the paper-thin walls.

And finally, what would a discussion of Hardcore be without mentioning George C. Scott’s encounter with Big Dick Blaque?



RATING: 4/5

The Musicgoer: A.C. Newman's Get Guilty

A.C. NEWMAN
Get Guilty
(Last Gang)
**** (out of 5)

“There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve,” the opening track to the new disc from power-pop wizard and sometime New Pornographer, is perhaps the closest anyone has come to transplanting the Charlie Kaufman sensibility to music. It’s cheekily aware of itself as a created object — “There are maybe ten or twelve things I could teach you / After that, well, you’re on your own / That wasn’t the opening line, it was the tenth or the twelfth / Make of that what you will” — but the image of an ex-girlfriend crying as her head rests on a record shelf has the stabbing emotional immediacy of those flashbacks from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s a song written by a man too busy honing his lyrics to notice the colour of the eyes of the girl he’s living with.

The rest of the lyrics on the disc are much more opaque than “Ten Or Twelve” —as Newman sings on “Submarines of Stockholm,” he’s twisted his words into “shapes that only make sense when you squint” — but they’re saved by Newman’s peerless ear for hooky melodies, from the jaunty chorus of “Yo-ho!” on “The Heartbreak Rides” to the majestic swells of “Young Atlantis,” rising and falling like the ocean waves. Talk about Guilty pleasure!

I've Finally Met Mr. Wright

This piece is only tangentially related to the world of film — it's an interview I did for SEE Magazine with playwright/TV scribe Craig Wright as a preview for a local Edmonton production of his play Grace — but Wright had so many interesting things to say that I thought some of you might enjoy reading it anyway, even if you'll never see the play he's talking about. Plus, maybe the fanboys out there will be interested in his comments about the upcoming movie version of The Flash, whose screenplay Wright worked on. The rest of you, don't worry: I'll be getting back to the movie stuff tout de suite.

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At the end of my interview with playwright Craig Wright, I can’t resist asking him about The Flash, the big-screen adaptation of the DC comic book whose script he worked on, along with The Dark Knight's David S. Goyer. It certainly seems like an anomaly in his list of credits, which include such plays as The Pavilion, Orange Flower Water, and Recent Tragic Events and episodes of the TV shows Six Feet Under and Brothers and Sisters — dramas about unhappy marriages, infidelity, and complicated family relationships among aging Generation X-ers, without a single caped hero or insane supervillain anywhere in sight.

Wright admits he’s not an aficionado of superheroes — unless you count Jesus, whose exploits Wright became very familiar with during his years as a divinity student at St. John’s University in Minneapolis — but says that wasn’t what drew him to The Flash. “I’ve always been interested in time,” he says. “And the thing about The Flash as a hero is that because his superpower is speed, it throws him into a very complicated relationship with time. As we all know, E = MC squared, and time is linked to speed, so the faster we go, the slower time seems. So that throws someone like The Flash into a disjuncture with the people closest to him, and if he tries to live as a human being in the meantime, that makes things very difficult for him. That’s what interested me in the story.”

Wright’s no longer involved with the project, he says — these blockbuster film projects routinely go through screenwriter after screenwriter — so who knows how much of Wright’s concept will survive when the film hits the screen in 2010, but for now, he’s actually got me interested in The Flash.

And come to think of it, the characters in his play Grace, which opens this week at Edmonton's Shadow Theatre, have an unusual relationship with time as well: the violent first scene, in which a would-be hotel magnate named Steve shoots his wife and then himself, even takes place in reverse, with the dialogue going backwards and dead characters coming back to life and popping back up on their feet. They have a strange relationship to space as well: the play takes place simultaneously in two identical Florida condominiums that are represented onstage by a single set. In other words, we see what’s happening in the two rooms at the very same time — imagine one scene being laid atop the other, like two transparent sheets of plastic on an overhead projector.

But Grace has more on its mind than theatrical gimmicks: it’s really a play about faith, and four people whose belief in God is tested in various ways. At the centre of the play are Steve and Sara, a Christian couple who have come to Florida to start up what Steve predicts will be the next big thing in the hospitality industry: a nationwide chain of Christian hotels. But as the financing for the project falls apart, Sara finds herself drawn to Sam, the occupant of the neighbouring condo, who has lost his wife in a gruesome car accident. And lurking on the periphery of the story is Karl, an exterminator bearing horrible emotional scars from World War II, and whose rejection of God serves as a powerful rebuke to Steve’s blithe belief that the Almighty is always up there looking out for him.

I spoke to Wright last week over the phone from his home in Los Angeles as he prepared breakfast before heading off to the set of Dirty Sexy Money, the nighttime TV soap he created and runs for ABC.

Q: You’ve been heavily involved in writing for TV over the last six or seven years, but you’ve also kept a hand in the theatre world. How does your time break down, percentage-wise?

Craig Wright: I guess it’s probably about 60/40 — 60 television and 40 plays, with movies getting the additional 10 per cent over 100. [Laughs.]

Q: Was that always your goal, to move into television? Or were you sort of recruited at some point?

CW: I was recruited, I’d say. I mean, I was always interested in TV, but I was never dying to break into it either. But then my theatre agent asked if I wanted her to send a play of mine to some agents in Hollywood, and I got a call one day from this agent saying they thought I might be right for Six Feet Under and asking if I wanted to meet Alan Ball. And I was working in Minnesota at the time, working at a church as an assistant minister. Now, the offer didn’t come out of left field — I had authorized my agent to send the scripts out, after all — but I certainly wasn’t about to go out to L.A. looking for work either.

Q: You studied very seriously to become a minister and presumably have spent a lot of time thinking about the Bible and your relationship to the Creator. And between that period of your life and the writing of Grace, you spent several years in godless Hollywood. Have your ideas about God changed during that time?

CW: Well, not much. I don’t agree with this notion of “godless Hollywood.” That’s not really the way the world is, as far as I’m concerned — and that’s really what the play’s about. Whenever you concoct these dichotomies... I mean, you could say that God isn’t in culture, that culture represents all the worst forms of human endeavour and that God resides over there in religion, apart from culture. But I think that’s an inaccurate dichotomy. Religion itself is just as culturally proscribed as any Hollywood movie. The activity of the divine is always delivered, so to speak, from within a cultural context — whether it’s the context of religion, or Hollywood, or science. You can’t get to the divine without culture. You can’t have an experience of the divine without accessing it within a cultural context. So my views about God haven’t really changed. But I will say that my willingness to experiment boldly with theatrical convention increased the longer I stayed in Hollywood. The more writing I did in Hollywood, where I had to deliver naturalism, the more experimental my writing for the theatre became.

Q: And that’s certainly the case with Grace, where you have the action taking place in two locations at once. How early in the writing did that idea come to you? Was it a solution to a staging problem, or was it all bound up with the themes you wanted to explore?

CW: I always tell young writers that as you get older, you don’t get better at getting ideas, but you get better at knowing when they’re bad. As I began thinking about this play, I think it took me about 13 seconds to realize that alternating between two rooms would rapidly become a tiresome binary rhythm. So I thought, “Well, let’s put everybody in the same room” — and lo and behold, things got really, really interesting, because now Sara could be talking to her husband about the guy next door and the guy could be sitting on the sofa right there between them. It became a very vivid metaphor for this idea that we’re really not separated at all. There are no secrets; we’re all in the same room, theologically speaking. It’s all cause and effect, and no walls can stop it from happening.

Q: It’s such a tricky convention to explain to someone who hasn’t seen the play. Was it a challenge to find an elegant way to establish this convention for the audience right at the top of the play?

CW: I think people are very confused at the beginning of the play, but if they look back and remember, I think they were probably very confused when they were born. You know, life is confusing. I’ve written plays that start other ways — at the start of The Pavilion, I explain everything to the audience. But I think Grace is about a different experience of life, a confusing experience of life — Steve, who’s at the heart of the play, finds life absolutely baffling, so I think it’s good to start the play that way.

Q: The play is very sharp about a certain kind of American religious entrepreneurialism, where faith in God is all bound up with a kind of boundless capitalistic optimism. He’s not a phony. He’s very sincere.

CW: I love that phrase you used, “religious entrepreneurialism.” Another way of talking about it is “manifest destiny.” How can I put this? If it weren’t sincere, it wouldn’t have worked so well for so long, you know? It isn’t until chance fucks you over and suddenly you get a few bad rolls of the dice that you begin to question your reasoning.

Q: There are so many great details to the character: the way he says “Dog!” instead of “God!” when he wants to swear, the way he has a sales pitch ready to refute any possible argument against the existence of God. It feels like there had to be some real-life models that went into writing Steve.

CW: Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I just made it all up. Now, I was a born-again Christian for quite a while, and did spend a lot of time with people who had their pitch and who could just launch right into it. By the way, I find Steve’s argument kind of interesting — you think he’s going to start from a place of judgment, but in fact he starts from a place of pretty deep theological reasoning. He says there’s nothing in the world that could have made the world, which is like something from the ninth century, like something from St. Anselm. His argument is actually pretty good! And he’s also pretty accurate about Sam’s emotional state, when he says, “You’re mad. You’re mad at God.” Like most of us, he’s absolutely right about everybody else and absolutely wrong about himself. H. Richard Niebuhr had a great quote that I like to think about a lot: he said, “Most people are right about what they affirm and wrong about what they deny.”

Q: Are you at all conscious when you write about the attitude your audience, which is probably going to be pretty secular, is going to come in with when it comes to an overtly religious character?

CW: I’d say yes and no. I’m not oblivious to the habits of the theatre audience. But I still pretty much write what interests me. That said, I’m not that different from the average left-leaning theatregoer. I will say that if there’s anything that offends me, it’s the sophomoric dismissal of religious people — and I mean that in both ways. I don’t like it when religious people sophomorically dismiss culture, and I don’t like it when secular people sophomorically dismiss religion. It always amazes me: you can be with people who are so intelligent... I have a friend in Hollywood, and I mentioned Catholicism to him and he said, “Oh, aren’t those the people who worship Mary?” The idea that this person with a college degree, who’s very, very intelligent, that this could be his bumper-sticker understanding of the Catholic faith... We all have the worst possible stereotypes of other people’s religion, we have no information, and we have no interest in getting it. It seems so apparent to me, given the state of the world, that every elementary school student should be given a little primer in Islam. I mean, don’t you want to understand the rest of the world?

Q: Grace has a lot of religious themes running around it, and there’s more than one scene where the characters debate their faith with each other, but I don’t think it seems didactic. Did that take some doing in the writing of it? Is there a trick you’ve found to keeping those scenes from bogging down and making them dramatic rather than thematic?

CW: Well, I’d never write a scene just to make a point like that. But the people in my plays have ideas. And the things they’re doing to each other, the way they’re treating each other, are because of the ideas in their head. In Grace, it’s their ideas about God that bring them into conflict. In The Pavilion, it’s their ideas about time. In Recent Tragic Events, my play about 9/11, it’s their ideas about America and free will. I’m always aware of my characters having ideas, but I don’t write to explicate the idea. So I don’t create a scene to make a point; if anything, I find myself gradually making better points because it makes a better scene.

Q: Do you think a chain of religious-themed hotels is a good idea? Would you have invested in this project?

CW: I think it’s a tremendous idea! I wonder why nobody’s started it yet! I mean, if you were on the road with your hard-working family, and you have a certain set of values, and you knew there was a hotel where there wasn’t going to be a bar with a bunch of drunks or hookers wandering around the lobby, and you knew there would be a chapel on site... I think it’s an amazing idea! Of course, inevitably, those hotels would wind up having just as much drinking and just as many hookers as the normal hotels. But business-wise, it’s a fabulous idea. I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened.

Moviegoer Diary: Le Doulos, Get Crazy

LE DOULOS

Plot In A Nutshell
Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1962 crime film about newly paroled thief Faugel (Serge Reggiani) whose plans for a fresh robbery may be jeopardized by his friend Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a police informant.

Thoughts
This was one of two Criterion editions of Jean-Pierre Melville films that I got for Christmas — I should be watching the other, Le Deuxième Souffle, before long — and it was a very welcome present indeed, although there’s nothing less Christmassy than the sight of Jean-Paul Belmondo in a trenchcoat, walking the long path to his country house through the torrential rain, not realizing that doom awaits him at the end of his journey.

The commentaries, essays, and interviews that accompany the DVD do such a thorough job of analyzing the film and how its fatalistic tale of loyalty undone by women and bad luck fits into Melville’s oeuvre that I’m not left with much to talk about that wouldn’t smack of plagiarism. But I will say that not enough of the commenters pay tribute to Paul Misraki’s jazzy score, which lends the film an indefinable air of cool — a sense of looseness and improvisation within what turns out to be a tightly plotted screenplay. I love the way, late in the film, that Melville uses the sound of a lone jazz pianist noodling around on the keys in the corner of a bar to accompany a long expository speech from Belmondo. The speech contains several surprising reversals of everything we thought we knew about the characters, but the piano music seems to be telling us, “Calm down. Relax. It’s no big thing.”

I love the bars in Melville’s films — my favourite is still that club in Le Cercle Rouge with the floor show and all the mirrors, but I would still love to hang out in the nightclub in Le Doulos where a pretty girl has apparently been paid to dress up in a top hat and tights and walk on top of the bar all night. The bartender even has to wait for her to pass so that he can give his customers their drinks — I bet those two employees are always bickering with each other.

My imagination was also captured by the news in Ginette Vincendeau’s audio commentary that Melville used to live on the sets of his films — that he would literally instruct the crew to build him an office and bedroom right there in the studio, and that apparently whenever you see a room with a spiral staircase in one of his films, odds are that the stairs lead up to Melville’s room. Can this really be true? I wonder if this is a secret fantasy of many directors, who love the fictional worlds they create so much that they can’t bring themselves to leave at the end of the night. It can’t have been a very fulfilling fantasy — wouldn’t the lack of a ceiling, the cords, the lights, the bustle of the crew, the missing walls, all have spoiled the illusion?

RATING: 4.5/5


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GET CRAZY

Plot In A Nutshell
Rock ’n’ Roll High School director Allan Arkush’s 1983 comedy about various musicians, fans, and hangers-on converging the legendary Saturn Theater for their raucous annual all-star New Year’s Eve concert.

Thoughts
This is yet another film I decided to track down after reading about it on the blog Mr. Peel's Sardine Liqueur, which is an indispensable source of reviews of forgotten films from the ’70s and ’80s. And once again, Mr. Peel did not steer me wrong: this is a sloppy, uneven, but absolutely joyous comedy that put me in a great mood for the entire day. Does anybody make these kinds of ensemble throw-everything-at-the-wall, party-atmosphere comedies anymore? Where are the Car Washes, the Caddyshacks of today? I suppose even The Cannonball Run is part of this tradition, but I remember going to see The Cannonball Run with my friends when I was 12 and thinking it was hilarious.

I’m sure Get Crazy holds up a lot better than The Cannonball Run, though: instead of Burt Reynolds chewing gum and merely going through the motions of being funny, Get Crazy is packed with insane bits like Malcolm McDowell (as a coke-Hoovering amalgam of Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, and Roger Daltrey named “Reggie Wanker”) stuffing so many naked groupies into his dressing room that it looks like Groucho Marx’s stateroom from A Night at the Opera; or Lee Ving, from the punk band Fear, playing a nearly feral singer named “Piggy” who inspires fan after fan to jump from the balcony into the crowd below. (When Piggy arrives at the theatre, he immediately starts banging his head against a nearby brick wall; instead of signing his name to the contract for the night’s performance, he smashes his bloody forehead onto the paper.)

The lineup for the Saturn’s New Year’s show is wonderfully eclectic: there are also performances by bluesman King Blues (Bill Henderson), a gigantic all-girl New Wave/punk band in the vein of X-Ray Spex called Nada, a flower-power hippie collective whose leader knows it’s New Year’s but thinks it’s still 1968, and a reclusive Dylanesque folk-rock legend named Auden (played hilariously by none other than Lou Reed). Auden comes out of hiding to play the gig, and spends the whole movie riding around in a taxi, composing an endless song based on the random images he sees through the window. As the concert proceeds, these musicians and their various fans all wind up crammed into the same narrow space, an inclusive vision of music fandom that seems impossible nowadays.

A lot of the gags in Get Crazy are loud and dumb, like the surreal Airplane!-style sight gags, or the slapstick punishment routinely meted out to the greedy son of the Saturn’s good-hearted owner. (Then again, I laughed out loud at the scene where King Blues attends the funeral of his old singing partner. There are about two dozen mourners present, and just about all of them are blind — you can see them wandering around aimlessly in the background as King leaves the cemetery, bumping into trees and falling into open graves.)

In any case, Arkush never lingers on any one gag for long, and the film has a good-natured, propulsive energy that keeps you on its side — you don’t get the feeling Arkush was counting on any particular gag to be a gigantic laugh. It feels more like he’s got so much going on in this movie that he can’t wait to hurry on to the next bit of business: “How about a scene where a pretty girl is taking a bubble bath and a scuba diver rises up out of the tub? Okay, how about if Reggie Wanker accidentally takes some LSD and imagines his penis is talking to him? And what if he decides to make it his band’s new manager?”

I’m sure working in the music business is nowhere near as much fun as Get Crazy makes it appear to be, but for its 90-minute running time, it makes you consider looking for a job as a stage manager at a concert hall, or even a lowly roadie. Or better: working as an assistant on a movie like this one. It sure looks like everybody had a great time. The girls are all pretty, and maybe Lou Reed would have taken song requests between takes.



RATING: 4/5

Cartoon Brew

As live-action films become more and more like cartoons — full of superhero heroics, True Romance-style teen melodrama, or slapstick situations that even Wile E. Coyote would find extreme — animated films are taking their inspiration more and more from real life.

At least, that’s the conclusion I reached after watching Best of the Ottawa Animation Festival 2008, a 70-minute compendium of notable short films from the largest animation showcase in North America. Rather than tell an invented fictional story, nearly all of these nine shorts incorporate documentary elements of some kind — found footage, audio interviews, personal anecdotes or stories from friends — which the filmmaker then improvises upon, if you can call the painstaking process of creating an animated film “improvisational.” The aesthetic here has more in common with Waltz With Bashir than Wall•E, and the best entries point the way toward a fruitful new direction for the animation genre.

Take Canadian directors Mike Maryniuk and Matt Rankin’s “Cattle Call,” for instance; it’s an explosive three-minute “pixilated documentary” about cattle auctioneers in which the images (some of it live auction footage shot by the filmmakers) zoom across the screen at the same relentless, superhuman speed as the syllables fly from the auctioneers’ mouths. It’s like Norman McLaren’s “Neighbours” on crystal meth... and wearing a cowboy hat.



Or “The Mixy Tapes,” a difficult-to-summarize exercise in high-speed deconstruction in which filmmaker David Seitz and musician Mike Wray can be heard on the soundtrack arguing heatedly over what approach they want the film to take — i.e., the very film we’re watching. David Seitz is keen on incorporating a grotesque, id-like infant named “Tumbles” into the mix, but Wray hates the idea; the result is that Tumbles is simultaneously part of the film and edited out of it, like Schrödinger’s cat. (Hey, I told you this one was hard to summarize.)



In “A Letter to Colleen,” co-director Andy London reads a letter he’s written to a girl he knew when he was a teenager; in it, he describes the disturbing events of his drug- and alcohol-fueled 18th birthday party. Meanwhile, we see those events recreated via grainy white-on-black rotoscope animation that makes the images seem both unreal and hyper-real — especially the recurring image of Colleen’s face, which retains the same blissed-out smile whether she’s shaving her head or vomiting onto the floor.

“It’s Always the Same Story” is a slight but charming teenaged anecdote, directed by Joris Clerté and Anne Morin, in which a Frenchman recalls sneaking off to see the steamy X-rated film Emmanuelle with a friend... only to have his father take him to see the exact same film the very next day to teach him about “the facts of life.” Less successful is Kara Nasdor-Jones’ “I Slept With Cookie Monster,” a woman’s account of her marriage to (and eventual escape from) a violent husband; the animation is uninspired and at only three minutes, it’s like a précis for a much longer, more dramatic film.

My favourites in the collection are the final two. Run Wrake’s breathless "The Control Master" uses ’50s and ’60s-era clip art, magazine ads, and snippets from comic books to tell a surreal, wordless story of a villain who grows into a giant, wrecks a city, then shrinks himself and nearly escapes on a butterfly before the hero and heroine finally capture him.

As for Dennis Tupicoff’s brilliant “Chainsaw” (which, sadly, I could not find a clip from online), it begins as an instructional film about chainsaw safety, morphs into an obituary for a renowned prize bull, then again into a biography of the renowned bullfighter Dominguin. But at its heart, it’s the story of a tragic love triangle between three people who on one level are an Australian lumberjack, his wife, and her lover, but who on another level are also Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and Dominguin. The connections holding the film together make very little sense on a literal level, but on the level of dream logic, “Chainsaw” feels perfectly straightforward — right up until the shocking ending, a horrifying yet poetic image no live action film could pull off anywhere near as deftly.

The Plural Of "Chad" Is "Chad"

With the Age of Dubya about to end and the Epoch of Obama about to open, it's nice time to remember just how George W. Bush got the keys to the White House in the first place. And the breezy HBO movie Recount is as good a place as any to begin: it's the topic of my "Hidden Gems" DVD segment this week for CBC Radio. You know me: I never miss an opportunity to send a little love Laura Dern's way.

The Musicgoer: Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan's Sunday at Devil Dirt

ISOBEL CAMPBELL & MARK LANEGAN
Sunday at Devil Dirt
(V2)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

No one who’s ever heard “Some Velvet Morning” can ever forget it — not just the veiled sexual threat to “open up your gate” or the cryptic references to some woman named Phaedra, but the bourbon-and-honey interplay between Lee Hazlewood’s low growl and Nancy Sinatra’s ethereal whisper. Many have tried to duplicate that chemistry, but few have come as close to succeeding as Isobel Campbell (formerly of Belle & Sebastian) and Mark Lanegan (formerly of Screaming Trees).

Sunday at Devil Dirt, their followup to 2006’s Mercury Prize contender Ballad of the Broken Seas, features Lanegan much more prominently than Campbell (even though she wrote most of the songs), but he more than commands the spotlight, especially on “The Raven,” a sort of erotic rewrite of the Poe poem. And while the pastiches of traditional ballads and Delta blues are occasionally mannered, they’re balanced out by folk-pop songs like “Trouble” (which sounds like Cat Stevens without being the Cat Stevens song “Trouble”) and “Fight Fire With Fire,” one of five unusually strong bonus tracks. And check out this oddly evocative video!

Oh, Mickey, You're So Fine

There was probably no awards-season film I was more eager to see this year than Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler — but as someone who knows almost nothing about professional wrestling, there was also no film I felt less qualified to write about. And so I made a point of watching it with my SEE colleague James Hamilton, who watched WWF matches on TV all through the ’80s, and who, as a talented Edmonton actor and playwright, also brought to his viewing of the film an acute appreciation of Mickey Rourke’s performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a onetime wrestling star now aging, broke, living in a trailer, working a shitty minimum-wage job, and picking up some extra cash doing small-time wrestling matches on the weekends.

After the film was over and we had wiped the tears from our eyes (but in a manly way!), we sat down to share our thoughts about the film. Here’s our conversation.

Paul: Now, I have never watched professional wrestling, I’ve never had any interest in it, even when I was younger. Whereas you...

James: Whereas I was the guy with the poster on his bedroom wall.

Paul: Who was the poster of?

James: My all-time favourite was Jake “The Snake” Roberts. Which is funny, because I know Jake’s real life story kind of resembles The Ram’s in The Wrestler.

Paul: I was going to ask you if Rourke’s character seemed modelled on a specific wrestler. Did you see any parallels in the film to actual figures from the wrestling world?

James: Absolutely. There’s so many guys who were so big in the ’80s — Jake The Snake, Koko B. Ware, guys like that — who would sell out arenas but wound up doing small-circuit wrestling, just hoping WWF agent would see them and go, “You know, it’s time to give The Snake another try.” And poor Jake — he was so addicted to painkillers and alcohol... He had children and a couple of ex-wives who didn’t want anything to do with him, and the only family he really had was that wrestling audience.

Paul: There was a piece in Slate recently by Mick Foley, who gave the film a lot of praise for capturing the milieu so accurately.

James: The guy in the film — the one who fights Rourke in that really hardcore match with the staplegun and the barbed wire — I can see as being based on Mick Foley. Foley was never a guy who’d go off the top rope or wrap his thigh around the other guy’s neck and do a backflip — he was about the barbed wire match and the flaming two-by-four. He might have had bad knees and a bad back, but fuck it — he could still take a staple in the face. I could see how he’d be impressed by this movie, for sure.

Paul: The movie certainly has a lived-in quality. It seems to know this world inside and out. Some of the best scenes take place backstage at these two-bit wrestling matches, with the guys just hanging out before the show, hashing out the choreography for the various fights.

James: And there’s a great echo of that in the scene where he dances with his estranged daughter and in the abandoned ballroom and she says, a little surprised, “You’re a great dancer.” Well, of course he is. He’s been dancing his entire life.

Paul: We have to talk about Mickey Rourke’s performance, which genuinely is incredible. I think that scene with his daughter was what really epitomized his work in this film for me — that moment when he pretty much begs her to forgive him and let him back into her life. It’s so pure, so direct, so vulnerable, so free of any kind of actorly artifice — just these simple words coming out of his ruined face. There’s something unfaked about this performance. People are talking about this movie as Rourke’s comeback vehicle, although arguably you could say that it was really Sin City that brought Rourke back into people’s consciousness. He was playing the same sort of character in that movie too — this violent guy with a terrifying, brutish appearance that belied a soft heart — but where Sin City was all flash and artifice, The Wrestler has a lot less “style” but a lot more heart.

James: I’ve always loved Mickey Rourke. It’s interesting to me how, after becoming a star in Diner and Angel Heart and movies like that, he showed no interest in becoming a big screen pretty-boy. He all but retired from movies to take up boxing- after a couple years of that, he was almost unrecognizable. By the end of that ‘career’ it was an impossibility for him to come back to play the leading man anymore. This is supposed to be his big comeback, but I don’t know what kinds of roles he can even play now.

Paul: That’s exactly the question I had. Where does he go from here? He’s lined up a couple of paycheque jobs in the Iron Man sequel and in this action movie, The Expendables, with Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham, but with that face of his and all that baggage that he brings to a part, it’s almost like he needs any role he takes on now to be tailored specifically to his persona. Were there any other moments in Rourke’s performance that you particularly responded to as an actor?

James: What really, really affected me was how he tries so hard to separate Randy The Ram from Robin the Safeway worker — the guy with the joe job as opposed to the guy on the top rope. And the thing is, eventually you’re going to get recognized. It’s inevitable. That really hit home for me.

Paul: You’ve had that very job, right?

James: Absolutely — I’ve worked in the deli, I’ve worked in the rotisserie kitchen, making chickens, and as I’m giving someone a breast meal, they’ll recognize me from some show I was in, and I’ll go, “No, that wasn’t me. I’m the guy who works in the kitchen.”

Paul: The movie seems very much in touch with all the details of work. I love that section of the film where you follow Randy as he prepares for a match coming up on the weekend — he doesn’t just have to hit the gym; he’s gotta go to the tanning salon, he’s gotta go to the hairdresser.... And one of the film’s great achievements is that it takes this setting that could easily seem so ridiculous, and while there’s a lot of humour in there, there aren’t any cheap shots. It refuses to look down on that world or the guys who work in it.

James: Or, more importantly, the fans. It doesn’t look down on them for a second. They’re Randy’s family. He gave up everything else for them. That was a huge thing for me — it doesn’t portray them as drooling idiots looking for blood.

Paul: The fans are really decent to him.

James: Absolutely. They see the art in what he does and they love him for it!

Paul: And in his speech to the crowd before that final match, he acknowledges that love. And then you get the match itself, which sets up a really nice irony in that even though it’s a fake fight, Randy really could die at any moment.

James: What I loved about it is that Marisa Tomei’s character, Pam, the stripper who Rourke courts throughout the film, is there, but she can’t bring herself to watch it and leaves. Everyone is there to see it but her.

Paul: Most of the ink about this movie has been devoted to Mickey Rourke, but it’s important to note that Marisa Tomei is terrific as well. It’s very much a parallel story — she’s a stripper, another somewhat disreputable, very physical profession that’s absolutely unforgiving to you as you age. And while she’s not quite in the desperate straits that Randy is in, she is getting older and you have to think it’s only a matter of time before that happens. Now, maybe the film hits those similarities a little heavily, but she’s still completely convincing in the role, both emotionally and physically.

James: It probably wouldn’t be quite as powerful or affecting, but the movie could just as easily have been told from her character’s perspective. The scene that really won me over — for both actors, actually — was the scene where they go to the dollar store to look for a present for Randy’s daughter, where Pam tries to talk him into buying her this cool peacoat, but he keeps getting drawn to the shiny blouse with the monogrammed “S” on it.

Paul: I love the scene just a little bit later at the bar, where Ratt’s “Round and Round” starts playing on the jukebox, and Randy, completely without irony, says how they don’t make great songs like that anymore. And how ’80s metal used to be so great “until that Cobain pussy came along and ruined everything.” Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen JCVD, the upcoming movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme playing himself, but it’s also about a symbol of ’80s machismo who’s also dealing with an aging body, a broken family, and a faded career. What’s going on here, do you think?

James: We’re watching our idols get older and become less bulletproof and more human. And that really affects us! Look at Hulk Hogan — at his peak, he was a 250-pound man, 6’7”, golden locks down to his shoulder blades. Now his pecs are sagging, his hair starts back here... Hogan isn’t the same guy anymore.

Paul: But does Hogan have the self-awareness that it would take to take a long, hard look in the mirror and make a movie like this, or like JCVD? Is he just too successful? I mean, he’s still on network TV.

James: I think you’re right. Life is still just too good for him. But there’s only a handful of guys who came up in the ’80s and for whom that’s still true. You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand. So many of the others put all their eggs in one basket, that basket being Vince McMahon and the WWF, and now they’re fucked. They’ve got nothing.

Paul: Rourke really does seem believably down on his luck. But you also believe that he would have had the charisma to be a huge star in his heyday. But Aronofsky and his production designers do an outstanding job of getting all the surrounding details right too. That “Randy The Ram” Nintendo game is absolutely perfect, the VHS “Best of Randy The Ram” tapes that he’s still selling at the memorabilia shows. And that strip club where Tomei’s character works seems exactly at the right level of “classiness.”

James: When those kids tell her they don’t want her to give them a lapdance, they want the blonde with the gold chain around her waist — that pretty much says it all. So heartbreaking!

Paul: It’s a movie that’s unusually conscious of its characters’ finances. Randy can’t even get into his shitty trailer until he does that gig and gets his little envelope of money. He can’t get more hours at his supermarket job because he can’t work weekends — that’s when he wrestles!

James: As an actor, I know what that’s like. I’ve had to turn jobs down because I couldn’t work weekends either — I’ve had to rehearse or do a play or whatever. It happens.

Paul: And like acting, it’s a job that probably isn’t all that financially remunerative. Is there anything else we should say about the film before we wrap this up?

James: I can’t think of anything — except to say I enjoyed it thoroughly. What about you?

Paul: Oh, I loved it too. I’m also excited by the way that it takes a filmmaking style that has pretty much been the domain of arthouse directors like the Dardenne brothers — no music, very in-the-moment, the camera kind of relentlessly following the characters around, practically sitting on their shoulder as they move through their world — and applies it to material that’s maybe not exactly mainstream, but which stands a chance of doing pretty good business.

James: Oh, without a doubt. I think this is going to get a really wide audience.

Paul: Wider than Rosetta got, that’s for sure.

Everybody Wong/Cheung Tonight

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could go back into time?” asks Maggie Cheung in the closing minutes of Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, a re-edited, re-tinkered-with version of his dreamlike 1994 martial arts epic Ashes of Time. None of the characters in the film can go back into the past, but they spend many long hours brooding over it — over lovers they abandoned, brothers who died at the hands of bandits, painful memories of romantic disappointment, to the point where some of them are even willing to drink a glass of “magical wine” that it’s said allows you to forget your past entirely.

All this is valuable time that they could probably more fruitfully spend honing their swordsmanship, but then we would be deprived of the sight of just about every iconic Hong Kong movie star of the period — Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, both Tony Leungs — sighing in raptures of longing, their faces photographed at the height of their glamour by Wong’s longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle, whose eye lingers on clouds of desert sand, ripples distorting the mirrorlike surfaces of various ponds, the dusk sky as seen through an opening in a tent, and once in a while a gout of blood spewing from a swordsman’s gut. Doyle does for Wong in this film what Ennio Morricone did for Sergio Leone in his classic spaghetti westerns: add a sensory element that lifts the story elements into the realm of myth.

It’s a good thing that Ashes of Time Redux doesn’t rely solely on its storytelling too — I would be lying if I said I followed even half of what happens in this movie. It’s about a man, Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), who lives alone in the desert, occasionally taking work as a swordsman-for-hire and occasionally farming out the work to others. Over the course of the year, he’s visited by various clients, including a blind swordsman, an old friend, a penniless girl looking for vengeance, and, most memorably, Murong Yin and Murong Yang, a brother and sister who separately hire Ouyang to do jobs at cross-purposes from one another and who turn out to be the same person. All of their stories turn out to be interconnected, but please don’t ask me to draw you a diagram.

But as in most Wong Kar-Wai movies, plot is secondary to mood and visuals, and Ashes of Time Redux offers one unforgettable, dreamlike image after another. (You won’t believe how much mileage Wong and Doyle get out of the light shining through the birdcage hanging in the centre of Ouyang’s shack.) This is a movie that seems to have been created in one long, unending fit of rapture. There are swordfights, and they’re choreographed by Sammo Hung, but they’re filmed so elliptically and obliquely that anyone looking for another Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will be sorely disappointed (although Ashes of Time’s mixture of fighting and romantic longing was undoubtedly a huge influence). The real “action” here is the visual splendour contained in the shots of Carina Lau sitting on a horse, or a candlestick falling, falling, falling, down to the floor.

Would it be wonderful to go back into time? With Ashes of Time Redux, Wong Kar-Wai has, and he’s returned with something close to a masterpiece.

Blintzkrieg!

1941: a forest in Belorussia. The Nazis have cut a bloody swath through the local villages, decimating the Jewish population. But a handful of survivors have escaped into the woods and regrouped, with the resourceful, ruthless Bielski brothers — Tuvya, Zus, Asael, and little Aron — emerging as the de facto leaders. When a large group of Jews decides to leave a nearby ghetto and take their chances with the Bielski partisans in the forest, Tuvya greets them astride a white horse. Handsome, charismatic, capable — looking, as a matter of fact, exactly like Daniel Craig — Tuvya delivers a rousing speech, informing them that every one of them will be trained to use weapons, that the women will fight alongside the men, and that this encampment is “the one place in all of Belorussia where a Jew can be free!”

As Tuvya rides off, a boy turns to the woman next to him and asks, stunned, “He is... a Jew?”

The boy’s confusion can be forgiven: rare is the World War II movie in which Jews get to play any role other than suffering victims. But the true story behind Defiance provides a refreshing corrective: the Bielskis and their comrades were... well, there’s no other way to put it: one tough bunch of Jews. They’re hard-drinking, quick to brawl, handy with a weapon, and eager to get their revenge on the Germans who killed so many of their friends and family. These guys are kicking ass, taking names, and observing the Sabbath.

Defiance was directed by Edward Zwick, whose previous films include The Last Samurai, Glory, The Siege, and Blood Diamond: his specialty is taking unusual, knotty historical events or flashpoint contemporary issues, often involving some kind of culture clash, and finding a way to turn them into familiar Hollywood product with great parts for movie stars. It’s a strange thing: Zwick keeps looking outside Hollywood for inspiration — to history books, to foreign countries, to the days’ headlines — and yet the films he winds up making never seem to be taking place in the real world.

There’s always an inescapable movieness about Zwick’s films, Defiance included — the music that keeps swelling underneath the big speeches, the story beats that always fall into a classic three-act structure, the constant emphasis on uplift, the way the people in the foreground are always just a little too pretty and the people in the background never stop looking like extras. (In a big scene where the Jews cross a river by gathering their belts and lashing them together, you can't help but look at that bundle of belts and imagine the production designer carefully picking them all out and making sure there weren't too many of the same colour.) It’s history as model screenplay.

Of course, one of the virtues of a model screenplay is that the story gallops along at a steady enough clip to keep you from ever getting bored by it. The central situation in Defiance is so engrossing — how would you keep a few hundred people alive through a Polish winter while being hunted by Nazis? — that you almost don’t mind the familiar, unadventurous approach Zwick has taken to dramatizing it. When it comes to these kinds of historical dramas, it seems that Hollywood convention may be even harder to defy than the Nazis.

Moviegoer Diary: Lakeview Terrace, Reprise

LAKEVIEW TERRACE

Plot In A Nutshell
Neil LaBute’s 2008 thriller about an interracial couple (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) that moves into a suburban L.A. neighbourhood, only to get systematically harassed by the African-American cop (Samuel L. Jackson) who lives next door.

Thoughts
I watched this one a week ago, but since I usually do these “Moviegoer Diary” entries in pairs, I didn’t write about it until now, when I had another random movie to go with it. And now it hardly seems worth the trouble — Neil LaBute seems to feel he’s making a sly, provocative statement about race relations in contemporary America, but the film was more interesting to me as a throwback to the “Blank From Hell” thrillers of the late ’80s and early ’90s, especially pictures like Pacific Heights, Single White Female, and Consenting Adults, all of which shared a similar obsession with prime real estate.

Samuel L. Jackson is always magnetic, whether he’s watching his neighbours from an upstairs window while drinking a tall glass of ice water or cutting down the trees they’ve just planted along the fence while wearing these goggles that give him a terrific crazy-eyed look. But the character never quite seems entirely plausible, especially not after the monologue about his dead wife that’s apparently intended to “explain” him. And the stuff with the fire that’s slowly advancing on the main characters’ neighbourhood is one of those terrible, obvious symbols that, if you’re a screenwriter, is nearly impossible to resist once the idea pops into your head.

If I were assembling a Chuck Workman-style montage about the films of 2008 for the Oscar ceremony, I’d definitely cut from the moment in Doubt where Meryl Streep looks up at the lightbulb that’s just blown out over her head to the bit in Lakeview Terrace where Jackson looks up at the anti-burglar floodlights that have just turned on.

RATING: 2/5

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REPRISE

Plot In A Nutshell
Likeable drama from Norwegian director Joachim Trier about the friendship between two young men, Phillip and Erik, both of whom aspire toward literary greatness.

Thoughts
I have a few friends in the literary world, and I’ve never seen a movie capture that milieu better than Reprise. The mere fact that it takes Phillip and Erik’s literary aspirations seriously and not evidence of some youthful, pretentious phase that they need to grow out of seems like a triumph. But I love the observational eye Trier brings to smaller moments as well: Erik’s tongue-tied encounter with an author he’s idolized all his life (which reminded me uncomfortably of my own disastrous teenage encounter with Harlan Ellison), or the pride Erik takes when a carton arrives, full of copies of his just-published debut novel, and the way he deliberates over precisely where in his bookshelf he’s going to file it.

A lot of the reviews I’d read emphasized Trier’s playful approach to storytelling — the film is full of flashbacks and flash-forwards and is bookended by some hilarious dream sequences. (Actually, that’s not quite right — they’ve got a light touch that makes them more like daydream sequences.) Those descriptions led me to expect a visual style along the lines of Run Lola Run, but the style is pre-MTV, and more in the vein of Jules and Jim. (There’s even an omniscient narrator and a few splashes of Georges Delerue on the soundtrack.) I love the way Trier films the conversations between Phillip, a fragile, depressive, Richie Tenenbaum-like figure, and his girlfriend Kari — he’ll cut back and forth between a moment in the past and one in the present in a way that prevents us from ever quite seeing the two lovers actually saying the lines we’re hearing. Instead we get glimpses of the kinds of things we tend to remember about our conversations with the girls we’re in love with — an image of her shoulder, or some cheap piece of jewelry on her wrist. A dreamy effect.

It certainly helps matters that Viktoria Winge, the actress who plays Kari, is exactly my type — a shaggy, dark-haired cutie with elfin, Björk-like features and a Ramones t-shirt. There’s a lot of New Order and Joy Division in the movie too, and a wonderful scene where Phillip, Erik, and their friends drop in at a dull house party and kick it into high gear by turning off the awful neo-soul CD playing on the stereo, plugging in an MP3 player, and blasting Le Tigre at top volume. The writing life ain’t all about labouring over the typewriter, you know.

RATING: 4/5

A Four-Legged Time Bomb!

After a holiday hiatus, I'm back at work with my Thursday-morning "Hidden Gems" DVD picks for CBC Radio, and I'm ushering in 2009 with the Criterion edition of Samuel Fuller's once-controversial, still-pretty-damn-shocking White Dog. Click here to listen. Watch out, Kristy McNichol! That dog's a killer!

You Can't Make A Home Invasion Without Breaking A Few Eggs: Funny Games x2

Metro Cinema, which is a terrific cinematheque operating here in Edmonton, is presenting a full retrospective of the films of German provocateur Michael Haneke this spring. In conjunction with this event, Bill Beard (a film teacher at the University of Alberta who has written, among other things, excellent scholarly studies of the films of Clint Eastwood and David Cronenberg) has commissioned essays on the various titles in the series, which he will be compiling into a publication that Metro will be making available at the box office.

I was tremendously flattered that Bill asked me to contribute to the anthology, although I had some trepidation about the films he assigned me, the original German version of Funny Games as well as its recent American remake. (I lobbied for The Seventh Continent, but Beard had dibs on that one himself.) I had only hazy memories of the original, and the American version was not exactly one of my favourite films of 2008. Rewatching the two movies didn't exactly change my opinion, but I did find writing my essay to be a surprisingly enjoyable experience. I don't get to write at this length at my day job at SEE Magazine, and it was fun to write an essay whose function was to introduce a film to an audience, to appreciate it rather than assess it. Here's how it turned out — see what you think of it. At the very least, you can see that academia didn't exactly suffer a great loss when I went into the mainstream.

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In a video interview included in the DVD for his original 1997 version of Funny Games, Michael Haneke claims that his film was inspired by newspaper accounts he had read of violent crimes being committed by young people from the German middle class. Since the perpetrators came from good, financially prosperous families, the crimes could not be blamed on any of the social factors — broken families, financial deprivation, drugs — that often drive young people growing up in poverty into committing violently antisocial acts. Haneke says he found the phenomenon troubling, and channeled that unease into the script for Funny Games.

It’s an odd statement to make — partly because it sounds more like he’s describing his 1992 film Benny’s Video (about an alienated German teenager so numbed from hours of watching violent videos that he brings a girl to his bedroom and kills her), and partly because Funny Games seems completely uninterested in providing sociological motives of any kind for the actions of Paul and Peter, the two young men who spend pretty much the entire film humiliating, torturing, and finally killing a mild-mannered family in their summer cottage.

Indeed, Haneke deliberately includes a scene where Paul laughs off Georg, the father’s, attempts to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing — first Paul spins a story about Peter’s troubled home life, then claims they’re both drug addicts who kill nice families to support their habit. Paul is doing more than merely lying here — he’s making fun of the very idea that their behaviour could have an explanation, that it could arise from anything other than an irrational urge to cause pain and misery. (Viewers may be reminded of a similar running gag from The Dark Knight, in which The Joker tells a different, contradictory story every time someone asks him how he acquired his grotesque facial scars. It’s almost as if Paul, Peter, and The Joker have no past — or at least, their actions are so purely irrational, so beyond any simple psychoanalysis, that looking for an explanation for their actions would be a wild goose chase.)

That said, Haneke provides enough clues to suggest that Paul and Peter come from the same privileged social background as Georg, Anna, and their son Schorschi. Their hair is neatly cut. They wear tennis whites, clean sneakers, and deck shoes. Paul appreciates Georg’s expensive golf clubs and, as we find out in the film’s final sequence, he also knows how to handle a sailboat. In the early scenes, they conduct themselves with such politeness that it’s almost obnoxious — always making sure to refer to Georg as “sir” and claiming to take offence at even the smallest breach of etiquette. Indeed, when we first meet them, nothing about their appearance seems out of place within this upscale community of weekend yachters and golfers. That’s how they gain admittance so effortlessly into Georg and Anna’s home — Peter only has to appear at the back door politely asking to borrow some eggs and Anna lets him right in.

Haneke’s ambiguous characterization of Paul and Peter is one of Funny Games’ shrewdest touches. Right up until the end of the film, it is impossible to figure out what they’re up to, how they choose their targets, or even what their relationship is to each other. Why, for instance, do they go through the whole charade of borrowing eggs, and then “accidentally” smashing them? Does it amuse them to annoy their victims in this way? Do they take pleasure in seeing how far they can prevail on their politeness? Are they perhaps hoping to provoke their victims into doing something rude — is it only when their sense of propriety is offended that they feel justified in going on the attack?

More questions arise. Are Paul and Peter’s little spats — as when Peter angrily tells Paul to stop making fun of his weight and calling him “Tubby” — for real or just another put-on? Why do Paul and Peter leave the house after killing Schorschi, only to come back an hour or so later to torment Georg and Anna some more? Just to toy with them? In Paul and Peter’s minds, do Georg and Anna “deserve” their fate? Is there anything they could have done differently to have convinced Paul and Peter to leave them alone?

Funny Games has been compared to Cape Fear, the 1962 thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson in which Robert Mitchum played an ex-con who attacks Gregory Peck’s middle-class family — but in that film, Mitchum’s attacks were “justified” by the fact that Peck was the lawyer who had originally put him away, using some trumped-up evidence to do so. Funny Games may be more aligned with Martin Scorsese’s 1991 Cape Fear remake, which toyed with the idea that the con (this time played by Robert De Niro) had arrived almost as punishment for the father’s “sins” against his family (adultery, moral hypocrisy, and so on). The family in Funny Games gets a minimal amount of characterization, but they’re introduced driving to their cottage in their SUV, playing some kind of “guess-the-composer” game with their collection of classical music CDs. They seem like a loving, cultured family — but is there something about their life of comfortable complacency (living in their beautiful, white homes, ordering so much meat they can’t possibly eat it all themselves), something about their carefree conviction that nothing bad could ever befall them, that Haneke finds so offensive that he can’t resist vandalizing it? (The ultra-abrasive John Zorn music that Haneke plays over the opening credits, full of chattering vocal gibberish and an eardrum-piercing saxophone solo, drowning out the Handel CD they’re listening to, is the audio equivalent of someone angrily scribbling over a poster in the subway with a black Magic Marker.) Are Paul and Peter like malevolent spirits, summoned up like Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s sweaty Max Cady, to give them a dose of reality?

And as the film progresses, it starts to look like Paul and Peter may not even be technically “human” in the way that Georg, Anna, and Schorschi are — they’ve shown up at Georg and Anna’s cottage to torture and kill them purely because that’s the function Michael Haneke has created them to carry out. Paul is even conscious of the fact that he’s in a movie, and occasionally even talks to the audience. (Curiously, Peter doesn’t seem to have been granted this level of consciousness — at one point, Paul addresses the camera while Peter sits beside him on the couch, snacking, apparently unaware of the fourth wall being shattered right in front of him.)

Contrary to many people’s memory of the film, Haneke breaks the fourth wall only a handful of times — I counted only five (okay, possibly six):

(1) During the scene where Anna goes looking for the body of the family dog while Paul coyly gives her directions, Paul turns to the camera and gives the audience a smug wink. (In the 2007 American version, Paul merely satisfies himself with a smirky smile.)

(2) When Paul puts a pillowcase over Schorschi’s head and bets Georg and Anna that their entire family will be dead in 12 hours, he turns to the camera to ask the audience if we think they’ll survive, sardonically remarking, “You’re probably on their side, aren’t you?”

(3) Later on in the night, when Paul explains to Anna the rules of the game he calls “The Loving Wife,” he once again starts talking to the audience, telling us how he’s only giving us what we want: “a story with plausible plot development.” (Curiously, the American version omits one of the funnier jokes from the 1997 original, when the killers remark, “Besides, we’re not up to feature length yet.” The fact that the actor delivers the line at the 91-minute mark — when the film has technically achieved feature length — doesn’t diminish its humour.)

(4) In the film’s most outrageous moment, Anna grabs a hunting rifle from a coffee table and blows a bullet right into Peter’s stomach — whereupon Paul picks up a remote control and literally rewinds the movie to a point a few seconds before Anna got the gun so that this time he can snatch it away from her before she even gets a chance to shoot it. This moment probably makes more sense on home video than in a theatre — I’ve never understood how Paul is able to rewind a movie like a VHS tape when it’s actually being projected from a booth on celluloid.

(5) In the final scene, Paul shows up at the back door of a cottage owned by friends of Georg and Anna’s, asking to borrow a few eggs — presumably intending to start the whole kill-and-torture process over again with a new family. As the wife heads off to the kitchen, Paul stares into the camera, whereupon the image freezes and the closing credits play while Paul’s image continues to look ominously at us. Can he see us? Will he be coming for us one of these days as well?

(6) I’d also make the case that the playing of that cacophonous John Zorn music over the opening credits counts as a meta moment as well. It’s the film’s only instance of non-diegetic music, and it gets the film off to a deliberately disorienting start. Later in the film, Haneke uses the song almost as Paul’s theme music — when Paul corners the runaway Schorschi in the upper floor of a neighbour’s empty house, he plays the Zorn CD on the stereo as scary “mood music” for the final stages of their chase — sort of like Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs playing “Stuck in the Middle With You” before he tortures the cop. (This is another moment of the film whose logic bothers me. Was Paul carrying around that John Zorn CD in his shorts all night long, just waiting for the proper spooky occasion to play it? Or did he just spot it in the CD collection of the house’s owners? I don’t know... they didn’t seem like Zorn fans.)

One of the most striking aspects of Funny Games is the way Haneke incorporates these flagrantly artificial moments into a film that otherwise places such a high premium on naturalism, from the completely deglamourized, makeup-free performances by Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe (whose characters’ agony, both physical and emotional, is never less than utterly convincing) and scenes like the grueling, unbroken 10-minute-long shot in which Anna, in her underwear, her legs bound and her arms tied behind her back, slowly gets to her feet, frees herself, and then helps her injured husband stand up and limp downstairs.

Haneke films that entire, excruciating scene from a clinical remove, like a scientist coolly observing his subjects from behind a pane of one-way glass. But there’s a paradox here: Haneke is definitely carrying out an experiment in Funny Games, but Georg and Anna aren’t its subjects — we are. We’re the ones, in Haneke’s view, who deliberately seek out violent entertainment, who understand the rules that Hollywood movies play by in order to manipulate our responses to onscreen violence and even sometimes get us to approve of murder; and he’s the scientist who wants to see how we’ll react when those expectations are deliberately upended.

Haneke peppers the film with details that seem to be setting up Paul and Peter’s defeat, but none of them pay off. The friends of Georg and Anna whom Anna invites over for dinner just before Peter comes by to borrow the eggs? They never show up. That knife that Haneke shows us falling onto the floor of the boat? The one the killers don’t know about? Sorry — just a red herring. That pregnant line of dialogue about Peter not being able to swim? Nope — he never falls overboard. Georg, Anna, and little Schorschi all die, one by one, in the most casual, anti-dramatic, meaningless ways possible.

Subverting audience expectations is something all good horror and suspense directors learn to do — both genres thrive on misdirecting audiences, leading them to expect one plot development and then walloping them with another. If the writer and director do their job well, audiences might even laugh with delight at how cleverly they’ve been fooled.

But in Funny Games, Haneke seems determined to make you feel guilty for deriving any enjoyment whatsoever from the events onscreen. He’ll deliberately shape his narrative to provoke a certain response from his audience, and then condescendingly scold them for having that response. (“You’re probably on their side, aren’t you?”) It’s hard to think of a more perverse movie — Funny Games is a movie created to condemn the kind of people who would go see a movie like Funny Games.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, “the kind of people who would go see the kind of movie that Funny Games only appears to be, judging from the poster.” Because here in Edmonton, the original German version of Funny Games was not seen by the consumers of violent mainstream entertainment; instead, it played to a tiny handful of art-film connoisseurs at Metro Cinema. Haneke himself seems aware of that fact — and frustrated that the very mainstream moviegoers who most “needed” to see a paradigm-smashing movie like Funny Games are precisely the ones most resistant to watching anything with subtitles.

And so, in 2007, Haneke somehow convinced Warner Independent Pictures to finance a remake of Funny Games, this time in English. And unlike poor George Sluizer (whose English-language remake of his own Dutch thriller The Vanishing removed the original’s terrifying, bleak final scene and substituted a notorious Hollywoodized “happy” ending), Haneke insisted on restaging his original film nearly shot-for-shot.

Haneke’s fidelity to the original Funny Games seems to reinforce the notion that the film is less a living, breathing artistic creation than a controlled experiment that requires every element to be duplicated precisely in order to achieve the desired effect. It’s kind of fascinating to see how many of even the smallest, most inconsequential-seeming details show up in both films: the shot of the family dog making a nuisance of itself, sticking its head in the refrigerator as the mother (this time simply named Ann) unpacks the groceries; the televised auto race that plays moronically in the background after Paul and Peter leave the house and Ann tries to free herself from her bonds; the absurdly large sweater that Ann puts on before climbing out the kitchen window to look for help.

But there are a few subtle differences that creep into the American film as well, through some mysterious confluence of the new actors’ physical appearances and their fleeting, in-the-moment acting choices. This is all very subjective, but to my mind, Peter comes off as a much more cretinous, loathsome figure in the American version than in the German, where he merely seems clumsy and hapless — Brady Corbet, who plays the role in the remake, grins a lot more often, almost as if he enjoys being subservient to Paul. Also, and maybe this is just my imagination, but in the remake, I get the feeling Haneke deliberately plays up the father’s impotence, his humiliating inability to fight back these intruders on account of his smashed kneecap — perhaps a further attempt to subvert and frustrate the expectations of the American audience?

Or are they the expectations of audiences all around the world? Has the entire globe been colonized by American movie conventions? And if so, perhaps it’s incumbent upon Haneke to keep remaking Funny Games over and over again, in Spanish, Japanese, Swedish, Hindustani, Italian, Tamil — subjecting one upstanding family after another to game after identical game of “The Loving Wife.” Maybe that’s why Peter and Paul don’t die at the end of Funny Games: they know they have lots more work ahead of them.

Roman Scandals

Who is Roman Polanski? If you’re European, you would identify him as the Polish-born writer and director who survived the Holocaust and went on to create such classic films as Repulsion, Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist. But if you’re American, you know him first and foremost as the pervert who fled the country to avoid going to jail for raping a 13-year-old girl, and who still can’t re-enter the country — not even to accept an Academy Award — without being immediately arrested.

But watch Marina Zenovich’s fascinating documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, and you’ll realize that the American impression of Polanski’s notorious 1978 skirmish with the U.S. legal system is almost completely incorrect. Okay, he did win the Oscar for The Pianist, but the rest of it? Considerable less than inaccurate.

“Polanski is not a pedophile,” Zenovich says over the phone from Los Angeles. “The D.A.’s office looked for other examples of this kind of behaviour and they couldn’t find anything. Did he like young women? Yes, but it’s amazing how people can’t get past the crime and the fact that he fled and look at the facts.”

Polanski was also not convicted of rape — he pled guilty to the lesser charge of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.” A legal technicality, perhaps, but a significant distinction all the same. And while he did flee the country before the judge, Laurence Rittenband, pronounced his sentence, his reasons for doing so were far more complicated than wanting to evade paying the price for his crime. At the end of the film, even the prosecuting attorney, Roger Gunson, a morally upright Mormon, calmly tells Zenovich, “I’m not surprised that he left under those circumstances.”

Zenovich takes a few seconds to absorb the shock. “Really,” she says finally.

Gunson does a tiny shrug: “Yeah.”

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is the story of how a Hollywood playboy accused of taking a 13-year-old girl to Jack Nicholson’s house, drugging her, and having sex with her in a Jacuzzi somehow wound up as the victim in the case. And in Zenovich’s telling of the tale, it becomes clear that the villain is Judge Rittenband, a publicity-seeker who actively pursued the Polanski case, only to wind up caught between his desire not to be seen as giving a celebrity defendant a slap on the wrist, and the demands of the law — the crime Polanski was being convicted of simply didn’t come with a stiff enough sentence for Rittenband’s liking.

What resulted was a bizarre series of blatantly unethical behind-the-scenes legal maneuvers, with Rittenband even giving Gunson and Polanski’s attorney Douglas Dalton secret instructions on the arguments he wanted them to present before him that morning in court, essentially turning the proceedings into a mock trial.

Zenovich’s account of the trial is gripping but also playful — she didn’t get to interview Polanski, but he’s a vivid presence within it all the same, thanks to abundant archival footage and wittily inserted clips from his films. And there is talk that Zenovich’s film may play a key role in finally getting Polanski’s charges dropped and allowing him to return to American soil.

I spoke with Zenovich in December about her film, which will be released on DVD this month. Here's our conversation.

Q: Tell me about the origins of the film. I gather you started thinking about it around 2003, when Polanski was being talked up as a possible Oscar nominee for The Pianist.

Marina Zenovich: That’s right. There was an article in the Los Angeles Times about the scandal and would he be able to come back? And then he got nominated and the girl [Samantha Geimer] and her lawyer when on Larry King, and the lawyer said that the day Roman Polanski fled was a sad day for the American judicial system. And I just had no idea what that meant. It was the lightbulb moment.

Q: When I mention this film to people, they usually assume it’ll be about the circumstances surrounding the crime itself. But you’re more interested in all the shenanigans around the trial. Was that always the plan for the film?

MZ: I never set out to make a film about what happened that night because I firmly believe that no one knows what happened except for the two of them — and there were drugs and alcohol involved as well. I’m not an investigative journalist; I usually do films that are funny, and this was a very serious film for me. I didn’t even realize what a hot-button topic it was until I started telling people about it, and they would go, “Oh my God!” People think I’m defending Polanski — I went to a general meeting at a production company the other day, and in talking about my film, the word “pedophile” gets thrown around, and I have to end up defending Polanski. But if I start defending him, it sounds like I made this film to show his side of the story.

Q: Judge Rittenband does not come off well in the film, but do you think he was in a bind between the punishment the public wanted and the punishment the law permitted him to impose?

MZ: I think that’s true. He was clearly doing things he shouldn’t have been doing, including soliciting advice from journalists and associate district attorneys who weren’t on the case to figure out what to do. It was a very loaded case, and a very loaded person. And you have his films! One of Polanski’s friends said to me, “If only he’d made a comedy instead of Rosemary’s Baby, maybe this whole thing would have been seen differently.” Which is true! I wish Rittenband were alive to tell me what he was trying to do, because I interviewed another judge who served at the same time as Rittenband and who didn’t make it into the film, and he basically said, “This never would have happened in my courtroom.” It was just a perfect storm — I yearn, I honestly do, to find another story like this one. It’s very, very difficult. And I didn’t even know what it was when I began it. You get these little clues along the way and track people down and try to get them to talk. I mean, Polanski’s lawyer hadn’t talked to anyone.

Q: I’m sure you requested an interview with Polanski himself and were turned down, but in a way, do you think his absence actually wound up working in the film’s favour?

MZ: Yeah, I think it did. I initially wanted to do an interview with him simply because he’s such a good interview. But Steven Soderbergh, my executive producer, said it would be a mistake if I had him in the film. And you know, the idea of him in the present day talking about it — I mean, what would he say? I did try to get him, though. It’s kind of a funny story. I got his fax number from a friend and sent him a very heartfelt letter saying I wanted to investigate this story, that it sounded like a great topic for a film, and please let me know if you want me to do it. I was living in a small studio in New York at the time, and I had a fax machine, but I only put it on when someone called and said, “I’m sending you a fax.” As it turned out, he sent me a fax back, but I never got it — I didn’t find out until six months ago when his assistant called and said, “Oh, I was looking at a piece of paper we wrote to you in 2003.” I said, “What did it say?” And it said, “I do not want a documentary made about me. —Roman Polanski.”

Q: But Polanski is in the documentary anyway, via the clips from his movies. How did you arrive at that stylistic choice?

MZ: Jeff, my producer, always wanted me to use clips from Polanski’s movies, and I thought it was a very sexy idea, but every time we tried it, it just didn’t make sense. I tried likening Judge Rittenband to Noah Cross from Chinatown, and we’d put in a scene with Noah Cross in this ironic way, and it just took you right out of the movie. Any time a scene included words, the same thing would happen. It wasn’t until we had a good, solid cut of the movie that we figured out how to add scenes from his movies that didn’t have dialogue but which added layers to what we were trying to say. It was a very big lesson to me — you can’t insert those clips until you get to a certain point, and then you stop trying to figure out how to make this idea work and you can start just having fun with it. It was certainly lucky that Polanski acted in so many of his films — all those clips from The Tenant and especially his short The Fat and the Lean were this tremendous source simply of more images of Polanski.

Q: There’s this notion that crops up a lot when people talk about Polanski and this case, that somehow, simply because of the dark, weird movies he made and the kind of life he led, he conjured up some kind of bad voodoo that encouraged bad things to happen to himself. Is there anything to that, or is it just lazy superstition?

MZ: I feel like it’s superstition. What’s interesting to me is that all of Polanski’s friends I met talk about what a normal guy he is, a normal guy that a lot of extraordinary circumstances happened to. The DVD has two extra hours of stuff about Polanski, people talking about how funny he is, what a survivor he is, what a loyal disposition he has. To people who know him, he’s kind of this uplifting person — which is kind of astounding to people who think he’s this dark figure. I was in Italy at the Turin Film Festival, where Nanni Moretti was having a Polanski retrospective, and it was amazing to me to watch Polanski give a two-hour Q&A with the audience. There was nothing about Sharon Tate, nothing about the case — in Italy, he’s simply revered as a master filmmaker. It was very interesting, at the end of so much controversy about the film, to see him in Europe as something completely different from what he is in America. He resides in two alternate universes.

Q: What is the state of the Polanski case right now?

MZ: There was a motion filed a few weeks ago asking to dismiss the case, citing the movie as this extraordinary new evidence. But I don’t know how that will play out. It’s such a tricky subject to talk about, because I can so easily appear like I’m being sympathetic to Polanski. All I can say is, watch the film. There’s a lot in there that people don’t know about. Samantha Geimer, the girl in the case, has given interviews saying she just wants the whole thing to be over, but of course it’s Roman Polanski v. The State of California, so she doesn’t really have any say in this. Which is unfortunate. I just made my film, and had some pretty jaw-dropping moments, like when Richard Brenneman — a journalist who was covering the case — said Judge Rittenband turned to him and said, “Dick, what do I do about Roman Polanski?” I mean, my God! That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen! And how often is it happening? I’m sure it’s not just happening with celebrity cases.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Terrible Husband

Critics have never taken Sam Mendes entirely seriously as a movie director. Why? The man is consistently drawn to interesting, unusual material (the graphic novel Road to Perdition, Anthony Swofford’s military memoir Jarhead), he casts interesting, prestigious actors, and works with only the finest cinematographers (Conrad Hall in his first two films, Roger Deakins in his second two) — and yet here is, having delivered his fourth film, Revolutionary Road, and still he’s not entirely regarded as a “real” director. Maybe critics simply will never forgive him for winning the Oscar for his debut feature, American Beauty, which many have come to regard as a glib, shallow satire of suburban ennui. Or maybe there’s still something just a little too studied, too controlled about Mendes’ directorial style — he directs his films with intelligence but without a natural cinematic flair. You can sense him thinking over every shot, and you always know exactly what effect he’s hoping to achieve with them. He doesn’t seem like the kind of director who surprises himself on the set — or, worse, who wants to surprise himself. A really exciting director needs to let a little craziness leak into the frame now and then, and Mendes is perhaps too sane for his own good.

But that tension between Mendes’ caution and his artistic ambitions makes him an unexpectedly good choice to direct the film version of Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates’ masterful 1961 novel about Frank and April Wheeler, a young husband and wife who chafe at the conformity of life in the Connecticut suburbs but who are ultimately too weak-willed to break free of it. Leonardo DiCaprio is an interesting choice to play Frank, who commutes every day to a copywriting job he hates, and who considers himself cut out for a more interesting, stimulating life. Maybe in Paris, where he spent some time in his youth. But when April (Kate Winslet) suggests that they take their savings and actually make that idea a reality — to actually move to Paris, where she will work as a secretary while he “finds himself” — Frank, perhaps secretly aware that he’s not the brilliant mind he holds himself out to be, gets cold feet and seizes on April’s unplanned pregnancy as an excuse for them to stay put.

On most levels, Revolutionary Road is an impeccably made film. The production design by Kristi Zea (a great talent who also designed GoodFellas and Silence of the Lambs) finds a way to make the Wheelers’ home seem cozy yet prisonlike; Roger Deakins’ photography hits just the right note of autumnal melancholy, even when the Wheelers spend a day at the beach; and the supporting performances by Kathy Bates (as a cheerfully “Yoo-hoo!”ing realtor) and Michael Shannon (as her emotionally disturbed son) are comical without becoming caricatures. And the big, ugly arguments that erupt between Frank and April are terrifyingly convincing — full of the kind of wounding accusations that only people who’ve lived with each other and know each other’s true nature can invent. And there’s a terrific last shot, albeit one lifted straight out of the novel.

It’s puzzling, then, that Revolutionary Road can come so close to being an absolutely great movie, only to fail somehow to deliver that final knockout punch to the emotions. Could it be that all that craftsmanship holds you at too much of a remove for most of the running time? A lot of the film does seem to be taking place under glass — we’re looking at DiCaprio as he disembarks from his train, one anonymous, gray-suited figure among hundreds, instead of seeing this world through his eyes, knowing what it feels like to be swallowed up by the crowd. (Yates’ book was written from Frank's point of view while the movie feels like it’s told from the outside — a crucial difference.) The final sequence involving Winslet’s character is also unsatisfying — perhaps Mendes is aiming for artful discretion, but it comes off more as cold and dispassionate.

I admire Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe for not using any voiceover narration, but by failing to find another way to take us inside these characters, they gloss over the central point of Revolutionary Road — to make us recognize that Frank and April’s failings, their fears and compromises, are our failings too, and that our own lack of nerve does as much to trap us in our routines as society does.

I suppose I’m saying that Revolutionary Road would have been a better movie if it had bummed me out even more. But Cheeveresque suburban dramas are like film noir: the bleaker the ending, the better.