The Man With A Surveillance Camera

As I make clear in this week's "Hidden Gems" segment for CBC Radio, Adam Rifkin's Look is no masterpiece. But I'm always a sucker for a film with a novel storytelling gimmick, and a film shot entirely on surveillance cameras certainly qualifies — even if Rifkin cheats all over the place on that premise. If you can get past the convention that every camera in the film is wired to pick up crystal-clear sound, and if you can forgive the exploitative opening scene with a couple of oversexed teenage girls taking their clothes off in a dressing room at the mall, and if you're not expecting any profound statements on our Orwellian culture... well, Look holds your interest. Faint praise, I know, but it's impossible to find 52 unsung DVD masterpieces every year. Sometimes you gotta bend a little.

Click here to hear me make the case for the film in more detail.

The Musicgoer: Camera Obscura's My Maudlin Career

CAMERA OBSCURA
My Maudlin Career
(4AD)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

“I don’t want to be sad again,” sings Tracyanne Campbell on the title track of Camera Obscura’s new disc My Maudlin Career. Then she’d better not listen to “The Sweetest Thing,” in which a woman talks about going out on a date in a (probably futile) attempt to forget about the man she really loves — the one with a voice so sweet, she’d trade her mother to hear him sing. Or “James,” which marks the first anniversary of her boyfriend breaking up with her — and, to add insult to injury, telling her “He hopes that we can still be friends.” (“Oh James, you broke me,” Campbell croons. “I thought I knew you well.”) And maybe she should avoid “Forests & Sands” — on that one, she describes wishing she could just will her blood to freeze to avoid falling in love all over again with a new boy.

All things considered, Campbell should really just skip right to the joyful final track, “Honey in the Sun,” and its peppy chorus about her heart feeling “as warm as saxophones and honey in the sun for you.” But that’s just Campbell; anyone else who likes tunefully melancholy pop music sung with a self-deprecating Glaswegian accent should snap up My Maudlin Career at their first opportunity.

Moviegoer Diary: Lady Snowblood, The Phenix City Story

LADY SNOWBLOOD

Plot In A Nutshell
Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 Japanese action thriller about a young woman (Meiko Kaji) who makes it her life’s mission to track down and kill the band of criminals who killed her father and raped her mother.

Thoughts
I flew home to Ontario last week to visit my family, and this was probably not the most appropriate movie to watch on my laptop during the crowded plane ride. Luckily the little girl sitting two seats away from me was too absorbed with her crayons to pay any attention to all the scenes of blood geysering out of people’s chests like Coke from a shaken-up soda can, and her mother (who was sitting between us) seemed surprisingly entertained by what she saw, and what she could pick up from reading the subtitles. “Good movie, huh?” she asked me at one point, completely free of sarcasm. I nodded enthusiastically.

And it is a good movie, even if it’s mainly known these days as the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Kill Bill doesn’t just borrow the “vengeful woman checking names off her list of revenge” plot from Lady Snowblood; Tarantino’s contorted, needlessly confusing non-chronological structure has its origins in Lady Snowblood as well. And one of Kill Bill’s most resonant ideas — catching up with a gang of criminals 20 years after their heyday — is part of Lady Snowblood as well. Budd, the character played in Kill Bill by Michael Madsen, a badass reduced to living in a mobile home, forced to work in a down-at-heel strip club and take shit from his boss every time he shows up a little late, has his origins in Noboru Nakaya’s Banzo, a former criminal whose daughter Kabue, unbeknownst to him, works as a prostitute to fund his pathetic gambling habit. (Yuki is eventually killed in turn by Kabue, completing a cycle of vengeance that Tarantino only implies in the scene where Uma Thurman kills Viveca A. Fox in front of her daughter.)

Tarantino’s detractors call this kind of stuff borderline plagiarism, but I see it as inspired riffing, similar to the way bebop musicians will improvise their own new melodies over the chords to “Tea for Two” or “What Is This Thing Called Love?” More important than what Tarantino lifts from Lady Snowblood are the things that he changes (themselves probably inspired by dozens of other, even more obscure movies forgotten by everyone else but enshrined brightly in Tarantino’s memories): making the target of The Bride’s vengeance her old lover instead of her parents’ killers; creating more interesting relationships between The Bride’s former criminal associates; making The Bride’s spree of vengeance her own choice instead of a mission she inherits from destiny; making her a mother herself. Plagiarism is a task undertaken only by cynics; whatever their flaws, Tarantino’s films, to my mind, are guided by a more positive emotion. What is this thing called? Oh yeah — love.

RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

THE PHENIX CITY STORY

Plot In A Nutshell
Phil Karlson’s 1955 docudrama about the efforts of an aging lawyer (Richard Kiley) and his son (John McIntire) to break the ruthless crime syndicate that has turned their Alabama town into a den of vice and corruption.

Thoughts
The Phenix City Story starts out square, and then turns... well, not hip, exactly, but a whole lot more willing to rub your nose in violence and ugliness than you’d ever expect from a movie made in 1955.

The turning point comes about halfway through, when the local mobsters decide to scare Richard Kiley away from running for state attorney-general on an anti-vice platform. Their method? To kidnap the daughter of a black friend, kill her, and dump her body on Kiley’s front lawn. (There’s a note pinned to her blouse: “THIS WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR KIDS TOO.”) Even more horrifying is the casual response of the policeman who takes the phone call alerting them to the crime: barely pausing to take another bite out of his sandwich, he drawls, “Someone just threw a dead n***er kid onto the Pattersons’ lawn — go on out an’ have a look.”

The violence scarcely lets up from there: in one memorable montage showing the mob’s attempts to intimidate voters away from the polls, old men get beaten up, women get smacked around, and even little kids trying to deliver the newspapers get slapped around, their papers thrown into the gutter. We see implied rape, rocks thrown through church windows, offices set on fire, people thrown down stairs, and dynamite tossed onto people’s porches. The hero of the film breaks a chair over a guy’s head and nearly drowns another man in the river. Is there another film from this era that shows so many men with bloodstains on their untucked shirts?

The fisticuffs are sloppy, but no less brutal because of it — the film’s signature sound is the wet slap of fists smacking into doughy flesh. (We see more of that flesh than we’d like as well — the criminal characters like to plot their next moves while sitting in a steamroom. One of those guys is so round and hairy, he could pass for a Tribble queen.) It’s a film that supplies sudden orchestral stings whenever anyone says keywords like “Vice!” or “Hell!” The wild-eyed emoting of John McIntire didn’t do much for me, but I can’t deny that it’s in keeping with the film’s spirit.

The script has a lumpy, first-draft quality to it that doesn’t work in its favour — the film starts slow, with a protracted musical performance and an overlong scene between Kiley and vice kingpin Edward Andrews, only to rush through Kiley’s election campaign and the subplot about one of Andrews’ employees quietly gathering information to use against him. There’s a lot of narration papering over the cracks — and as if that weren’t enough, a long opening crawl explaining that the film we’re about to see demonstrates how “a people united in the common cause of decency could peaceably overthrow the yoke of oppression under which they had existed for almost one hundred years.”

I liked The Phenix City Story, but more as an exploitation picture than a hard-hitting exposé about small-town corruption. I know it has a reputation as one of the great low-budget gems of the ’50s, but am I the only person who thinks the film it resembles the most is Patrick Swayze’s Road House?

RATING: 3/5

The Only Man Who Understands Joaquin Phoenix

If you want to dispel the disheveled, undignified image of actor-turned-alleged-rapper Joaquin Phoenix from his recent appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, the best way to do so is to see him play the lonely Leonard Kraditor in Two Lovers, the film that his Letterman interview was supposedly promoting. Gone are the scraggly beard and the unfocused gaze; the only reminder of Phoenix’ peculiar real-life antics is a moment when he breaks into a goofy, impromptu rap in the back seat of a car. (“L to the E to the O-N-A-R-D!”)

It’s a rare upbeat moment for Leonard, who remains emotionally fragile even a year after breaking up with his former fiancée. He’s moved back home into his parents’ apartment in Brighton Beach, making deliveries for his father’s dry cleaning business during the day and cocooning himself in his bedroom at night. In the film’s opening scene, he impulsively tries to commit suicide by jumping off a pier into the ocean. Not exactly prime marriage bait, and yet Leonard soon finds himself pursuing relationships with two beautiful women: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father’s prospective business partner, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), an elusive blonde who lives in Leonard’s building. Sandra is the nurturer of the two, not to mention the one Leonard’s parents would like to pair him up with, but it’s Michelle, who’s also seeing a married man on the side, whose alluring air of emotional damage Leonard is more drawn to.

The film was directed and co-written by James Gray, who has four films to his credit, three of them — The Yards, We Own the Night, and now Two Lovers — starring Phoenix. It’s one of the great unsung symbiotic director/actor partnerships in modern film — rivaled only, perhaps, by David Lynch’s relationship with Laura Dern. Where other directors see only Phoenix’s brooding movie-star handsomeness, Gray sees the bottled-up tears, the son who knows he’s a disappointment to his father, the overgrown teen, ill at ease in his skin, who still hasn’t figured out how to become a man. At the moment, Gray’s films are much more acclaimed in France than in North America, but don’t hold that against him — the deeply felt, proudly unironic We Own the Night, in particular, looks more and more like a modern crime classic, while Two Lovers is the kind of smart, sharp, grown-up, neurotic New York romance even Woody Allen has stopped making.

I spoke with Gray last week about Two Lovers, his amorality of romance, and the eternal enigma that is Joaquin Phoenix.

Q: Two Lovers is the first film of yours that doesn’t deal with the criminal world. What inspired the switch in genres? Does it even feel like a break to you?

James Gray: To be honest, it doesn’t feel like a break at all because what I wanted to do, always, was to make films about people and behaviour. So really, the crime genre thing is only an excuse to explore a certain aspect of human behaviour — insanity, obsession, that kind of thing. All I really left behind was the machinery of the genre, and I was glad to leave it behind.

Q: No matter what genre you’re working in, is there a type of character or a sort of situation that you find yourself returning to, that’s a constant in your work?

JG: That’s probably harder for me to say than for you. I never sit there and think, “This story has this checklist of ideas that other films of mine have, and so I’ll pursue this idea.” But if you’re making a film that’s personal, it will naturally mirror your personal concerns. I’m very interested in class mobility or the lack thereof, in ideas of destiny, of loneliness and melancholy. I like to say that if you get to make the same film over and over again, you’re lucky, because it means that somehow your personal vision is respected enough that they’ll let you do it.

Q: Two Lovers is the story of a man who winds up pursuing relationships with two beautiful women at the same time, even though he is not anyone’s idea of a ladies’ man — he’s suicidal, he lives with his parents. Does he seem like an improbable Casanova to you, or is he only improbable in conventional movie terms?

JG: Well, the first thing I would say is that I don’t agree that he’s some kind of amazing Lothario.

Q: You’re right — Casanova is really the wrong word for him.

JG: Yes. I mean, he actively pursues the Gwyneth Paltrow character, and she overtly talks about how uninterested she is in him sexually. The Vinessa Shaw character, on the other hand, I think is quite realistic in that there are people who have an almost pathological need to feel like they’re saving someone, and that damaged quality is precisely what makes Joaquin’s character appealing to someone like Vinessa. I’ve known many people like that. And it’s important to realize that she doesn’t know, like, 30 per cent of what the audience knows about Joaquin — she sees this guy who dances with his mother, who does magic tricks for her brother at the dinner table. I buy it. And I think to not buy it is to adhere to a slavish devotion to cinematic rules — in other words, “Character X has to be really handsome for Character Y to like him.”

Q: How moral do you think Leonard’s behaviour is? Is he doing something wrong by juggling these two women?

JG: That’s a fantastic question. I’ve never been asked that before. I would say... I don’t know. We are moral and yet we are not moral, do you know what I mean? I think he’s a person. None of us has an unswerving moral compass, none of us is the idealized version of Abraham Lincoln or Socrates. It’s probably pretty bad, what he does to Vinessa Shaw, but I bet Vinessa Shaw’s done it to someone else. What’s that they say? “All’s fair in love and war.” And don’t forget: his parents are pressuring him to be with Vinessa as well, which is probably one of the things that makes her unappealing to him.

Q: The film really does create a sense of the world closing in on Leonard, especially in those scenes in his parents’ apartment — you’re always seeing him hemmed in by walls and doorways. It doesn’t feel like a set.

JG: There’s a reason for that — it’s not a set. I was very adamant that the camera shouldn’t be able to go places where a person couldn’t be. In a set, you can move the walls and put the camera where a person could never be standing. But we shot Two Lovers in a real apartment, and the space takes on a life all its own, and becomes a character all its own. You can understand why Leonard would be a product of that world, and why he would want to leave it.

Q: Is it healthy for him to be living there? Or is it giving him the sense of order that he needs?

JG: Wow. I don’t know. These are great questions. If he weren’t living there, he’d probably be dead. But at the same time, in the long run, it’s probably unhealthy. I don’t think his parents have bad intentions at all. I think they’re probably very well-intentioned. But you know what they say: the world is ruined by well-meaning people.

Q: I read an interview with you where you said that if Joaquin Phoenix couldn’t be in this movie, you wouldn’t have made it. What makes him such an irreplaceable presence for you?

JG: Here’s the thing. When you’re focused on what actor to cast, you really contemplate a couple of things: how interesting is the person to watch, and why is the person interesting to watch? And for me, Joaquin is one of the best young actors there is at being able to relate to you both an external conflict and an internal state of struggle. Joaquin doesn’t even have to say anything, and you can still tell he’s at war with himself, which is rare and remarkable thing for an actor to be able to communicate to an audience. I wanted it to be clear that Leonard is in a daily struggle with himself, and I couldn’t think of anybody who could communicate that idea better than Joaquin.

Q: Did he talk at all about retiring from acting when he was working on this film?

JG: No. Well, towards the end, the one thing I got was he kept saying, “I’m tired.” But I just took that to mean “I want a break.” I didn’t think I’d turn on the TV two months later and see him falling off a stage.

Q: I suppose one of the things that perplexes people about this decision to give up acting and become a rapper is that he’s such a gifted actor — it seems like what he was born to do — and it’s hard to understand why he would pursue a new career that, at least based on the evidence so far, he doesn’t have the same aptitude for.

JG: I think you’ve just explained it. If something comes easily to you, wouldn’t you just take it for granted? You say he was born to act, and he probably was, which is why he doesn’t treat it with respect. I could be wrong. Look — how many times has Sean Penn announced his retirement from acting?

Q: It’s true: there’s something about these high-achieving actors — Sean Penn, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton — that gives them this conflicted relationship with their profession.

JG: I can’t explain it, because it’s specifically about acting. You never hear about Federico Fellini or Akira Kurosawa saying, “I’ve had it with this directing thing. I’m going to start selling ice cream.” Acting is the one profession on earth in which your job is to deny who you are. There are people who live that life, but there very few people whose job is specifically that. But Joaquin is his own man. He marches to the beat of his own drummer. He’s very idiosyncratic. He’s a true artist. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him, and I must say, it’s very impressive to me — I care too much about what other people think.

The Musicgoer: Bat For Lashes' Two Suns

BAT FOR LASHES
Two Suns
(EMI)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

Like Tori Amos, Natalie Merchant, Beyoncé, and Garth Brooks before her, Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan has many personas inside her, all of them battling for studio time. Her alter ego on Two Suns is a character named “Pearl,” a blonde, narcissistic femme fatale whose baneful presence emerges on tracks like “Siren Song” and “Pearl’s Dream,” battling for control of the album with the more mystical, earthy Natasha. (Natasha is the one who dedicates the album to “all the gracious muses and magicians” whose light she basked in “while this music was growing inside me.”)

I’m of two minds about this album. One part of me — oh, let’s call him “Sergio” — finds all this “duality of woman” stuff and the lyrics about “1,000 crystal towers in 100 emerald cities” pretentious and affected and spent much of the album rolling his eyes. But my other self — my true self — got so swept away by Khan’s rich, charismatic voice and her incense-in-the-nostrils Tori Amos atmospherics that Two Suns' lyrical shortcomings hardly seemed to matter. She’s a star, no doubt about it, and if she wants to claim there are two of her, so be it — maybe we can expect twice as many albums from her as her career develops.

Foxx And His Friend

Director Joe Wright makes many attempts throughout The Soloist to get inside the mind of its central character, Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic musical genius and former Juilliard student now living on the streets of Los Angeles. Pretty much all of them are unsuccessful — especially an extended psychedelic lightshow that’s meant to capture the essence of Beethoven’s Third Symphony but which looks more like the screensaver on my MacBook.

On the other hand, the movie does a smashing job of getting inside the head of its other main character: Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times who meets Ayers, discovers his fascinating story, writes a series of columns about him, and soon becomes his reluctant caregiver. The film is narrated by Lopez, but in a nice touch, a lot of that narration is spoken as if it’s Lopez’ first draft — he rephrases sentences on the fly, and at one point takes out a crack about California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger not just because Arnie jokes are clichéd, but also (and here’s the kicker) because it’s too generic and therefore “lacking in context.”

Yes! That’s the kind of ruthless self-critique — hard on Schwarzenegger, harder on himself — that so few movies about newspapers capture. (State of Play, the other crusading-journalist drama currently in theatres, couldn’t be less interested in the craft of newspaper writing.) There’s a nice scene early in the film, where Lopez has just begun digging into Ayers’ past, and is told by a Juilliard records clerk that no one by Ayers’ name ever attended the school, to which Lopez, irked, replies, “But then I have no story!” Any reporter who’s ever had a promising idea for a story smash against the brick wall of facts will smile with recognition.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Lopez, and he’s perfectly cast here as an idealist who’s spent decades building up a tough outer layer of cynicism. Watching Robert Downey Jr. do anything onscreen is currently one of the greatest pleasures of going to the movies — the man radiates such intelligence, wit, and soul that it’s fascinating simply to watch Lopez sit outside a homeless community centre waiting for Ayers to show up, or sit at home late one night, listening to an old LP of Neil Diamond singing “Mr. Bojangles.”

The Soloist is being marketed as a tale of the indomitability of the human spirit, not unlike Susan Boyle — “Not only can ugly people sing, but schizophrenic street people can play musical instruments too!” But the movie, smartly, focuses instead on Lopez’ character — the real question at the heart of the film isn’t whether Ayers will be “cured” or if he’ll simply be able to pull himself together long enough to perform music in public — it’s whether Lopez will have the courage to accept responsibility for Ayers’ well-being and make him a real part of his life. It’s a question so many of us have to face at some point in our lives, whether it’s occasioned by a troubled friend or an aging parent, and most of us react with the same terror, the same desire to find some loophole that will allow us to run away, as Lopez.

The script is by Susannah Grant, one of my favourite mainstream screenwriters — her credits include Erin Brockovich, 28 Days, and In Her Shoes, movies which may look like middlebrow chick-flick star vehicles, but which are almost always smarter and more thoughtfully written than they appear. Jamie Foxx gives a sensitive, restrained performance as Ayers (or as restrained as you can be while wearing whiteface and a shiny Uncle Sam hat). And Catherine Keener is excellent in her few scenes as Lopez’ editor and ex-wife. Why hasn’t someone paired her up with Downey Jr. before this? There’s a scene where she gets drunk and almost casually tears Lopez to shreds with just a few well-chosen words. What other actress could square off against Downey Jr. as ferociously as Keener? She’s a masochistic reporter’s dream girl.

"What's Your Next Movie Going To Be About? Some Guy From Afghanistan?"

Disconcertingly, there were TV cameras in the CBC Radio booth as I did this week's "Hidden Gems" DVD segment. Apparently, Mothercorp's television division is pondering the possibility of filming the morning radio show and packaging it as some kind of TV (or possibly internet) broadcast. It's not a bad idea; after all, it was that same sort of synergy that turned that Billy Bob Thornton interview clip into a YouTube sensation. Plus, it helped me empathize with Muthana Mohmed, the central figure in the film I was talking about, Nina Davenport's documentary Operation Filmmaker. I can totally see where the constant presence of cameras in your face could make anybody a little bit testy.

Anyhow, click here to listen to the segment. It's just audio for now, but who knows? Perhaps video links to these segments will be available soon as well. They always said I had a face for radio; before long, you'll have the proof.

The Musicgoer: Micachu and the Shapes' Jewellery

MICACHU AND THE SHAPES
Jewellery
(Rough Trade)
*** (out of 5)

My word, the annoyances that indie rock critics are willing to put up with these days! The reviews of Jewellery all seem to agree that it marks the arrival of an exciting new pop-music maverick, 21-year-old Londoner Mica Levi. And if I were judging her solely on the basis of “Golden Phone” and “Calculator” (which sounds like Deerhoof covering “Tequila”) I’d agree. Her jittery, skittery, covered-with-littery sound really does capture the hyperlinked, short-attention-span psyche of the text-message generation.

But it’s as if Levi has consciously added at least two elements that will make the other tracks on Jewellery as difficult to enjoy as possible: she encrusts even her poppiest melodies with untuned guitars, primitive, off-key yelping, the whine of a vacuum cleaner, and word-salad images of vultures and “curly teeth.” Are my aging ears just too beholden to outmoded notions like “melody” and “harmony”? Perhaps — I never got the Fiery Furnaces either. But when I read the rhapsodic reviews in outlets like Pitchfork and Coke Machine Glow, I find myself wondering what “indie restaurant critics” would sound like. I picture them eating a salad filled with sand and pieces of broken glass and proclaiming how refreshing and delicious it all is.

Reporting For Duty

Cal McAffrey, the hero of State of Play, is a veteran investigative reporter for the Washington Globe, and it’s hard to picture a character more flattering to journalists’ idealized image of themselves. As played by Russell Crowe, he’s friends with every cop on the beat (even bringing them coffee in exchange for leads), but he’s also on intimate terms with influential politicians like rising congressional star Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck). When he walks into Ben’s Chili Bowl, the venerable greasy spoon on U Street, the guy behind the counter asks him if he wants the usual. He drinks his liquor out of Dixie cups. He drives a beat-to-shit Saab with a heap of fast-food wrappers and old notebooks tossed onto the back seat. He writes his stories on a 16-year-old computer and has nothing but disdain for Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), the pretty young blogger whose quick-hit style of journalism is crowding out his old-school shoe-leather methods. He’s not much to look at, with his long, floppy hair, unironed shirts, and flabby gut — but that’s the floppy hair of truth, thank you very much. And the flabby guy of integrity.

State of Play is a boiled-down version of a six-hour BBC miniseries that aired in 2003. (The story involves a journalist investigating the death of a female congressional aide — an apparent suicide that turns out to be a murder connected to corruption and adultery in the highest corridors of power.) I’ve read a lot of reviews decrying all the cuts the American version made to the original story in order to fit it into a two-hour movie, but having watched the BBC version just last week, I didn’t miss them. This isn’t Hamlet we’re talking about here; this is really just a glorified airport novel, and losing all the soap-opera stuff about Cal’s love affair with the congressman’s wife, quite frankly, works in the American version’s favour.

The big difference between the two versions is that the BBC State of Play is cast with actors while the American version is filled with movie stars. Not that the American cast isn’t packed with talented performers — the supporting players include Helen Mirren, Jason Bateman, Harry Lennix, Jeff Daniels, and in a single scene in the nothing role of a medical examiner, Oscar nominee Viola Davis — but there’s still an air of beautifully photographed glamour hanging around all of them — even Cal’s cluttered apartment is an amber-lit masterpiece of shabby chic.

In the BBC version, on the other hand, the Russell Crowe part was played by Life on Mars’ John Simm, who lived in a featureless, generic apartment with zero cinematographic appeal and whose shapeless, rumpled suits didn’t even register as an anti-fashion statement. But the humdrum visuals helped this overheated plot feel grounded in reality — when the various figures betrayed each other, went to bed with each other, cried when the others died, it felt like there were consequences. In the American version, you experience these moments more as “plot bombshells” and opportunities for the name-brand cast to emote. If there’s a TV show the American State of Play reminds me of, it’s not the BBC original, but the Showtime series Damages, which also consists of lots of less-than-convincing scenes of high-priced actors shouting at each other in offices and conference rooms.

But I shouldn’t be so disdainful of State of Play, which has a satisfyingly convoluted plot, but still makes time for charmers like Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman to do their thing. (I love the moment where Bateman, playing a flashy PR flak, responds to Crowe’s compliments about his car by asking, “And what do you keep in your garage?” — pronouncing it “gay-rayge.”) It would have been nice, though, if Bill Nighy could have been persuaded to reprise his role as Cal’s editor from the original — Mirren’s fine, but Nighy’s sly turn is a scene-stealer on the level of Jason Robards in All the President’s Men.

Indeed, State of Play palpably yearns for the days of All the President’s Men, when journalists were plausible movie heroes instead of embattled real-world victims. But those days are long gone, and it doesn’t help that, for all of State of Play’s hugger-mugger about corporate chicanery and the erosion of civil liberties, the crime at its core turns out to be a whole lot less consequential than Watergate. The ideal audience for the film would appear to be newspaper reporters — and unfortunately for State of Play’s box-office prospects, there are fewer and fewer of those guys around with every passing day.

He Has A Ph.D. In Horribleness

Some days, we all need a song to cheer us up. Maybe we're frustrated at work, maybe we're having trouble finding love, or maybe the freeze ray that we're hoping will gain us admission to the Evil League of Evil has liquefied the gold we tried to steal from the neighbourhood bank into a Baggie's worth of dark yellow glop with a vague scent of cumin. Well, that last situation is probably unique to Dr. Horrible, the main character of Joss Whedon's online musical triumph Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but it's hard not to get caught up in his plight anyway. That Captain Hammer is such a dick.

What was my point again? Oh yes: that Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is my "Hidden Gem" DVD pick this week on CBC Radio. Click here to listen.

The Musicgoer: The Juan MacLean's The Future Will Come

THE JUAN MACLEAN
The Future Will Come
(DFA)
*** (out of 5)

The Future Will Come, announces the title of the sophomore disc from the hipster-approved electronic dance outfit The Juan MacLean, and if the music it contains is any indication, the future sounds a whole lot like the late ’70s. The opening track, “The Simple Life,” is an eight-minute slice of Giorgio Moroder/Tangerine Dream synth that could be a lost track from the soundtrack of Midnight Express or Sorcerer. At least until Nancy Whang and John MacLean’s vocals kick in and bring the track down to earth just as it was starting to levitate.

MacLean is one of the principal architects of the DFA sound, and every track of The Future Will Come presents a musical idea and then doles out the variations right on cue. But the desultory Human League-style call-and-response vocals lack the sharp, observational wit and the overriding sense of purpose and focus that DFA labelmate LCD Soundsystem brought to their second album, Sound of Silver — or, to strike closer to home, that Edmonton’s Shout Out Out Out Out incorporated into Reintegration Time. If The Juan MacLean aren’t careful, the future just might pass them by.

Starved For Detention

Hunger, the first feature film directed by British visual artist Steve McQueen, is extraordinarily alive to the senses. Most films merely give you an idea of how things look; Hunger, on the other hand, conveys in vivid detail how its setting sounds, how it feels, and especially how it smells. You can practically feel the odors wafting off the celluloid and stinging your nostrils. If some movies are a feast for the senses, Hunger is like a dose of ipecac.

It’s set in the Maze prison outside Belfast in the early ’80s, in one of the crowded H-Blocks housing members of the IRA. As the film opens, the prisoners are already deep into their so-called “dirty protest,” during which they refused to bathe, grew out their hair and beards, routinely dumped their urine-filled chamberpots into the corridor outside their cell doors, left their food to rot in the corner of their cells, and smeared their walls with excrement. (The prisoners were hoping to pressure the British government into granting them political status. The difference was not merely a semantic distinction between common criminals and political prisoners; political status would mean, among other privileges, that they would not have to wear uniforms or do prison work.)

McQueen’s depiction of the inmates’ self-imposed squalor is repellent and yet there’s a beauty to the images all the same — or, more precisely, there’s the unmistakable sense that we’re seeing these events through the eyes of an artist. Hunger’s story is told almost entirely through visual means — a long shot of a prison corridor as the rivulets of urine start flowing under the doors; long, slow pans across the cell wall, like an artist’s canvas bearing its thick impasto of shit, a prisoner furtively masturbating under his blanket, long hours of monotony suddenly broken when the guards invade the cell block and haul off the prisoners for a violent forced scrubbing.

But McQueen provides an equally vivid portrait of the guards’ point of view. The film begins, in fact, with a long sequence showing guard Ray Lohan (Stuart Graham) having breakfast and driving to work. In a harrowing touch, he crouches down and checks underneath his car before he climbs in to start it — what must it be like to spend every day knowing there’s a possibility that someone has hooked your ignition up to a bomb during the night? One of McQueen’s most memorable recurring images is of Lohan taking a cigarette break, standing outside, leaning against prison wall in his dark pants and blue shirt, a column of sweat staining the middle of it, letting the snowflakes fall onto the back of his hand, soothing his torn and bloody knuckles. Graham gets barely any dialogue at all, but his performance is an indelible portrait of a man performing a brutal job and suffering quiet but unending agony as a result. When Lohan meets his shocking, brutal end, one wonders if it came as a relief.

Hunger’s approach to its material is similar to the one Steven Soderbergh used in Che — keep the exposition to a minimum, focus on the collective experience instead of the personal one, let the details and the images speak for themselves. But where Che struck me as an interesting but ultimately failed experiment, Hunger finds a way to tell the emotional story as well as the political one, to be cerebral as well as physical, to immerse viewers in the filthy, mundane world but also show its characters transcending it.

In a way, Hunger’s most remarkable performance may also be its greatest weakness. I’m talking about Michael Fassbender, who plays Bobby Sands, the IRA member whose 1981 hunger strike made headlines around the world. Fassbender shares the film’s only significant dialogue scene, an unbroken, 17-minute, single-take conversation with a priest in which Sands defends his plan to starve himself; Fassbender also whittled himself down to the point of anorexia in order to portray Sands in the days before his death. (In the ’80s, Robert De Niro’s weight gain for Raging Bull was considered the ne plus ultra of actorly commitment, but now we’re living in a much more austere age — we’re much more impressed in 2009 by displays of self-deprivation from Christian Bale or Michael Fassbender.)

Fassbender’s skeletal body, his grey skin covered in sores and lesions, looks truly horrifying... but can this be called acting? In this final section of the film, it feels as though McQueen narrows his purpose to the immediate task of documenting the wasting away of Bobby Sands’ body. No, not even Bobby Sands’ body — Fassbender’s body. That extended dialogue scene is a feat of actorly focus, I suppose — but for me, the use of a childhood incident to explain Sands’ motivations seemed like an unnecessary (and fairly banal) “Rosebud” moment to me. Of all the shocking, extraordinary events this movie covers, Sands’ childhood was the thing I was hungering the least to know about.

Reaper Madness

This is a piece I wrote for a package in this week's SEE Magazine about the ongoing crisis in the newspaper industry. The topic will probably be a familiar one to anyone who reads film blogs — namely, the steady disappearance of local film critics from papers across North America. I interviewed Sean Means, film reviewer for the Salt Lake Tribune, who's been keeping track of the dispiriting trend since 2007. I didn't mention it in the piece, but it's also worth taking a look at David Poland's ongoing list of what he calls "The Last 120 Film Critics in America," which contains the names of everyone he can find, online or in print, for whom reviewing movies is a full-time paid occupation.

My gratitude goes out to Mr. Means, who was very generous with his time and who made a very impassioned defence both of movie criticism as an honourable occupation and of local journalism and criticism in general — two subjects very close to my heart.

* * * * *

Movie critic Sean Means keeps a list. Ask him about it, and he’ll laugh darkly and refer to the nickname he’s acquired as a result of it: “the Grim Reaper of film criticism.”

The sobriquet is inaccurate, though. Means, who reviews films for the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah, isn’t killing off film critics; he’s merely documenting a troubling trend that began in 2006, when a cluster of high-profile veteran movie critics at various print publications were either reassigned, bought out, or laid off altogether: Kevin Thomas at the Los Angeles Times, Jami Bernard at the New York Daily News, Dennis Lim and Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice. And the disappearances didn’t stop: in 2007, Michael Wilmington quit the Chicago Tribune, Jonathan Rosenbaum retired from the Chicago Reader, Eleanor Ringel Gillespie took a buyout from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and a host of lower-profile regional critics from places like Houston, Detroit, Tampa, and Minneapolis-St. Paul all vanished as well.

That was the year Means began keeping a list of “the departed” on his blog, “The Movie Cricket.” Right now, there are 50 names on the ever-growing list, which in retrospect seems like a harbinger of the troubled state of the newspaper industry as a whole. When time came for budgets to be slashed, local movie critics (and arts journalists in general) seemed like some of the most expendable people on the staff.

“The bean-counters always go with the idea that local news reporting is where they can make their bread and butter and that arts coverage and feature writing is a luxury,” Means says. “But I tend to think the opposite is true. In any substantial market, you can go anywhere to find out where the accident was or where the robbery took place. Everybody covers that. I think the thing that makes a newspaper unique are columnists, critics, editorial writers, that sort of thing. And arts criticism is a big part of that — you don’t get arts criticism on TV stations. This is an area where newspapers can excel and be unique — and not just locally, but nationally as well. People come to the Tribune site from all over the country to read movie reviews.” (Here in Edmonton, I feel compelled to note, SEE Magazine is the only publication with an all-local team of film critics. The Journal and the Sun use syndicated reviews, and Vue Weekly’s lead critic, Josef Braun, lives in Toronto.)

Means, who’s been the Tribune’s film critic for 16 years and their film blogger for the last three and a half, bristles at the notion that syndicated movie reviewers can do the job just as well as a local writer. For one thing, Means says, those syndicated reviews tend to be either wire reviews written in a homogenized, generic style that adds little to the conversation about a particular films; or they’re written by a critic based in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago and whose mindset inevitably feels disconnected from readers in other regions of the country. And can newspapers afford to let their readers feel even more disconnected from them?

“Another thing that concerns me,” Means says, “is that there is homegrown, regional cinema all over the country that is never going to get covered in the New York Times until it reaches a certain critical mass. And that critical mass doesn’t happen unless the regional critic takes up the cause and starts writing about it. Here in Salt Lake City, for instance, we have a thriving subgenre of Mormon-themed films, a few of which filtered out to other parts of the country largely because I and other critics in Salt Lake paid attention to them. That wouldn’t happen if my paper just ran wire reviews.”

Means says every addition to his list pains him — many of those names represent friends and acquaintances — but he was especially puzzled by the Los Angeles Daily News’ decision to drop critic Glenn Whipp from their roster in December, and then reassign critic Bob Strauss in February. “For a paper in a media capital like Los Angeles not to have a movie critic is astonishing,” Means says. “In Los Angeles, that’s not just a luxury; movies are your leading export. Movies are a business story, it’s a lifestyle story. If you’re a paper in Los Angeles and you’re not covering that, then you’ve forfeited a large part of the territory that you’re never going to get back.”

The unavoidable question at the end of all this is how long Means thinks it’ll be before his own name gets added to his list. He says he feels reasonably secure — his blog is one of the Tribune’s most popular online features, and he spearheads the paper’s extensive coverage of the Sundance Film Festival, which practically happens in the paper’s backyard.

“The higher-ups tell us we’re fine,” Means says. “But that’s no different from any other paper anywhere from here to Tierra del Fuego — everything’s great, until it’s not great.... But if you look at the papers who cut these film critic positions early on, you’ll see that they’ve had to keep on making cuts. Whatever the supposed benefit of that would be didn’t take. So I think maybe they’ve realized too late that what they gained in short-term savings is offset by what they’ve lost.”

Take it from the Grim Reaper. If he’s not an expert on loss, who is?

Moviegoer Diary: Zift, Four Flies On Grey Velvet

ZIFT

Plot In A Nutshell
Director Javor Gardev’s noirish drama, set in 1960s Sofia, about a man who gets caught up in the search for a missing diamond after being released from prison after serving 15 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

Thoughts
Zift — the title refers to a substance akin to chewing gum, a large, nasty, black, indigestible-looking wad of which the film’s hero, a baldheaded brawler named “Moth,” carries around in his pocket — was made in Bulgaria, but its main sources of inspiration are American noirs, right down to the black-and-white cinematography and the plot’s echoes of D.O.A. (his hero is tricked into drinking poison, and spends the rest of the film knowing he has less than a day to live) and Gilda (the heroine takes the stage of a nightclub while dressed up like Rita Hayworth and performs a Bulgarian version of “Put the Blame on Mame”... although the lyrics of this song deflect the guilt by suggesting we “put the blame on the moon”).

And yet rather than feeling like a rote exercise in noir style, Zift has a vibe that’s all its own. There’s not a single twist in the script that’ll surprise anyone familiar even in passing with noir conventions, but the charm of the film is the way Gardev keeps letting one strange-looking supporting character after another barge into the scene and hold up the action by passing along some dubious piece of folk wisdom or sharing some gruesome anecdote. (I particularly liked the one about a metal sheet flying off a truck and decapitating four women sitting side by side under the hair dryers in a beauty salon.)

This loquaciousness (loquacity?) is not shared, however, by Moth — actor Zahary Baharov has a weary, deadpan expression that suits the material well. He’s wandering through a world that has changed drastically since he last saw it, and while everyone he meets feels compelled to share information with him, it’s the least useful information imaginable if he wants to make sense of his surroundings. Baharov looks like a combination of David Thewlis and Jason Statham, with just a touch of Buster Keaton in the puzzled yet patient expression in his eyes.

He’s also stark naked for a good chunk of the film — at one point, he’s taken hostage and has his clothes taken away from him. He escapes, though, and it turns out that he’s been held captive in the basement of a women’s spa — Zift’s comic highlight is his naked sprint through the spa’s mazelike corridors, running past and occasionally leaping over dozens of similarly naked women. It’s like a parody of Viggo Mortensen’s naked steambath fight in Eastern Promises. The tattoos covering Baharov’s body are much more amusing than Mortensen’s — the first time we see him, he’s got his arms stretched behind his head, revealing a tattoo on his armpit of a woman spreading her legs wide open. You can figure out for yourselves what the artist did with the underarm hair. Eastern promises, indeed.

RATING: 3/5

* * * * *

FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET

Plot In A Nutshell
Dario Argento’s 1971 giallo about a musician named Roberto (Michael Brandon) who accidentally kills a man, and is then hounded by the masked psychopath who witnessed the crime.

Thoughts
I noted above that none of the plot twists in Zift would come as a surprise to anybody remotely familiar with film noir, and I’m told that none of the revelations in Four Flies on Grey Velvet will surprise anyone who’s seen a couple of giallos. So it’s my good fortune in this case that I haven’t seen many giallos, and so the twists Argento cooked up here still had the power to surprise me. They’re kind of arbitrary and illogical, and yet I still feel like I should have seen them coming.

And, similarly to Zift, the charm of Four Flies isn’t its plot anyway, but the odd characters hanging out on the film’s periphery. I especially liked Roberto’s excursion to a country cottage to solicit advice on dealing with his psychopath/blackmail problem from a friend, a self-styled philosopher bum named Godfrey, or “God” for short. (He’s played by Bud Spencer, and when he first appears onscreen, Ennio Morricone supplies a quick choral “Hallelujah!” on the soundtrack.) Elsewhere in the movie, there’s a scene set at some kind of avant-garde coffin show, and a racy joke about Frankenstein’s monster raping his creator and then going on a rampage across the countryside. There’s a policeman who tells Roberto that the last thing a person sees remains imprinted on their eyeball for a few hours after they die — and who hooks up a murder victim’s eyeball to a futuristic laser machine in hopes of finding a clue to the killer’s identity.

Basically, it feels like Argento threw every goofy idea that happened to cross his mind into this movie. There’s a wonderful opening sequence set during a rehearsal of Roberto’s jazz-rock band — complete with a shot from inside one of the musicians’ guitars, looking out through the round hole behind the strings. As Roberto drums away, a mosquito starts buzzing around his head; it lands on his drum, but flies away before Roberto can succumb to the temptation to smack it with a drumstick. Unluckily, though, it lands on the lower cymbal of his high-hat, where Roberto takes great delight in squishing it. The sequence doesn’t add a thing to the plot, but its breezy humour sure does win you over — and encourages you not to take anything that happens next too seriously.

The film’s best character, in fact, seems at first like the least promising one: a gay private detective whom Roberto hires when the killer’s threats turn violent. The detective — Arrioso is his name — is introduced as an effeminate, literally limp-wristed stereotype, but Jean-Pierre Marielle plays the character with a detached amusement that becomes quite winning. Arrioso tells Roberto that he’s worked more than 80 cases over the course of his career as a detective, and that he hasn’t solved a single one of them — but to his mind, that’s a point in his favour. A streak that amazing can’t go on forever, after all; it’s only logical.

Argento eventually kills Arrioso off, but he gives him a beautiful sendoff — when Arrioso sees that the person who’s killed him was his number-one suspect, he dies with a smile on his face, having successfully closed a case at last.



RATING: 3.5/5

Thunderheist Catches Lightning In A Bottle

Here's an interview I recently did with Isis, one-half of the band Thunderheist, whose self-titled debut CD is bit-time hot-and-sleazy fun. Not only was Isis a blast to talk to, but this piece gives me an excuse to repost the "Jerk It" video, which is a clip that I absolutely cannot stop watching. Enjoy!

* * * * *

“There goes my ADD again!” laughs Isis, frontwoman for the Canadian dance-rap duo Thunderheist. At first, I think she’s just indulging in a little self-deprecating humour, but as our interview continues, I realize that she meant that comment literally. She’s funny, she’s friendly, and as anyone who’s listened to Thunderheist’s self-titled debut CD can tell you, she’s a tremendously sly, sexy, fun presence behind the mic — but she couldn’t stick to a subject for five minutes if you held a gun to her head. When I spoke to her, she and Thunderheist DJ Grahm Zilla had just returned from South by Southwest, the massive film and music festival in Austin, Texas, and it’s a wonder all the stimulation didn’t frazzle her permanently.

“South by Southwest can destroy you!” she says. “You have to be very smart to not let it destroy you. You need at least a week of recovery time. Hey, have you seen Wanted?”

What, the Angelina Jolie movie?

“Yeah. You know those recovery baths?” she asks. (She’s talking about the scenes in Wanted where the main characters, who belong to a team of hired assassins with vaguely supernatural powers, sit in tubs full of milky liquid that magically heals any wounds or broken bones or gunshots they may have acquired during their latest assignment.) “That’s what I needed after South by Southwest. I was bruised on my thighs from crowdsurfing and falling. It’s ground zero. It’s a whole lot of rock-and-rollers and a whole lot of alcohol and a whole lot of barbecue. I mean, this is a bad idea! Who came up with this idea anyway? I want to get that guy. Give him my medical bill! Ha! But it was great. I met Perez Hilton, I met Kanye West — he’s an asshole in real life too. And you get to see how the other half lives. Oh! I was on Fashion Television too. I was really excited about that — I almost cried. I was like, ‘I’ve finally made it! Fashion Television is interested in the fact that I’m actually breathing!’”

Are you keeping up? If not, Isis understands — she happily admits that without Grahm Zilla around, she has a tendency to ramble. “I’m winging it!” she says cheerfully. “I try not to overthink things. Grahm’s the perfectionist. We’re a package deal — nothing’s sold separately. He brings structure into my life. I’d be wandering naked in the desert, given half a chance. He keeps me grounded and stable and productive and keeps me away from all those things that can destroy you in this fucking industry. I’m a free spirit — I’m going to be one of those hippie moms their kids are going to hate. ‘If they want to go streaking, let them run free!’ Maybe I’ll get a puppy first and see how that goes.”

It’s hard to know which half of Thunderheist is responsible for the genius way they’ve marketed themselves. It would seem to take a whole lot of savvy Grahm-style calculation to generate the level of press coverage that Thunderheist received a full year before their album was even released, or to place their song “Jerk It” on the soundtrack of The Wrestler. But Isis chalks it all up to dumb luck. (“We were fumbling around in the dark!” she says.) They were lucky, she says, to have a MySpace page back when MySpace hadn’t gotten oversaturated and could still break a band, and they got lucky again when they decided to hold a fan contest to create a video for “Jerk It” — and one of the submissions turned out to be one of the most attention-getting clips of recent years.

How to describe the awesomeness of the “Jerk It” video? The concept is simple but elusive on the page: we see tantalizing slow-motion close-ups of various parts of a young woman’s body — the sinews of her arm slowly flexing, her legs and shoulders jiggling ever so slightly, sweat pooling on her collarbone — as she performs some offscreen function with her right hand. It’s hard not to leap to the conclusion that she’s... well... jerking some guy off, but midway through the video we see that she’s actually holding a gigantic rooster upside-down by its feet. The slyness of the visual double entendre, the eroticized photography, the girl’s off-the-charts cuteness, plus the irresistible catchiness of the song itself... as music videos go, it’s kind of perfect.

“It’s pure innuendo,” Isis says. “A hot chick, a song called ‘Jerk It,’ and then you put a cock in the video — okay, a rooster — it sucks you in. It’s so simple but so genius. It’s like the guy who invented bread. Or the sandwich guy. Genius! It definitely upped our sex appeal by, like, 65 per cent.

“But it’s not a song just for 20-year-old kids who club a lot. All my friends’ parents work out to ‘Jerk It.’ I have a friend who works at a pool and does a seniors’ class and all these elderly women synchronize swim to ‘Jerk It.’ And they love it! It’s a freedom song — it says, ‘Don’t care about what people think about you, because right now, you are so awesome!’ I’m talking, like, Oprah awesome. It’s a song for any kid who thinks he’s too fat or too nerdy — it says, ‘Fuck ’em.’ I think people subconsciously get that.”

Is she right? Watch and decide for yourself...

Tempus Fugitive

Timecrimes may sound like a corny title for a science fiction movie, but it's actually a pretty reasonable English translation of its original Spanish title, Los Cronocrimínes. Let me savour that title one more time: Los Cronocrimínes! Just the thought of speaking those syllables on the air was enough to make me want to make Timecrimes this week's "Hidden Gem" pick on CBC Radio — but the fact that it's a pretty nifty-clever little braintwister didn't hurt, either. Here's the link to click. (Purists, beware: as with last week's review of Let the Right One In, the clips I'm using in the segment are from the English-language audio track of the DVD. That's purely for the sake of the segment — the host and the producers want there to be sound clips from the films, and so playing the English track allows me to discuss a few foreign titles that I wouldn't be able to call attention to otherwise.)

The Secret Policeman's Other Mall

I assume that Jody Hill wrote Observe and Report as a vehicle for Danny McBride, the comedian who starred in his first film The Foot Fist Way as well as his HBO series Eastbound and Down. Mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt, the main character of Observe and Report, is another one of Hill and McBride’s patented low-rent alpha males, unpleasant, overweight jerks abusing every bit of the limited authority society has seen fit to award them, universally disliked (save for a small number of low-IQ underlings) but completely oblivious to the repellent effect their personality has on the world around them. McBride excels at playing these types of guys, but while I admire his fearless refusal to endow them with even the slightest of redeeming features, his commitment results in characters so toxic they’re practically unendurable — even for someone like me, who thinks there’s nothing funnier than awkwardness and discomfort, not even dick jokes. (Maybe that’s why Eastbound and Down worked for me when The Foot Fist Way didn’t — it parceled McBride’s performance into manageable half-hour chunks. Plus, it contained a lot of dick jokes.)

McBride has a cameo role in one of Observe and Report’s best scenes. Furious with Ronnie’s constant interfering with his investigation of a series of crimes at the mall, a real cop named Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta) takes him on a “ride-along,” then deposits him in the city’s worst neighbourhood. Inevitably, Ronnie is quickly surrounded by a gang of glowering drug dealers led by McBride, a tough so proud of his drug-dealing 10-year-old son that he got his face tattooed on his chest. I don’t know if studio pressure forced Hill to make the film without McBride in the lead, but thank God he caved: the fact that Ronnie is played by Seth Rogen, the man whose face practically symbolizes laid-back slacker harmlessness, makes it all the more hilarious when Ronnie pulls a baton out from his pantleg and proceeds to beat the thugs up so quickly and ruthlessly as Oldboy dispatching that hallway full of attackers.

That scene is the first hint that Ronnie may be more than a deluded, pathetic jerk still living at home with his alcoholic mother (a hilarious Celia Weston), and that he might actually be dangerously crazy. He’s a cross between that cop John C. Reilly played in Magnolia, constantly monologuing to an imaginary Cops camera crew about the duties of being in law enforcement... and Travis Bickle, dreaming of the day when a cleansing rain will come along to wash all the scum off the streets. (Or at least get rid of that Arab guy at the lotion kiosk who he’s convinced is secretly plotting with Al-Qaida to blow up the Chick Fil-A.)

And then, about an hour or so into the film, when Ronnie and his second-in-command Dennis (Michael Peña) embark on a drug-fueled orgy of pointless mall destruction, you start to suspect that Observe and Report might be going as insane as Ronnie. When Ronnie tries to join the police force but fails the psychological exam — turns out it’s not a good idea to mime blowing your interviewer’s head off with a shotgun — you start to wonder if this will be the first Hollywood comedy that ends with its main character shooting all of his co-workers before getting gunned down by a SWAT team.That doesn’t happen, but the film’s actual climax is nearly as jaw-dropping.

It's a sloppy movie in a lot of ways. I wish Hill hadn’t used a pair of dorky-looking Asian twin brothers as a recurring sight gag, and there’s something tonally off about the (studio-mandated? ironic? subversive?) happy ending. It would also have been nice if he’d done more with a couple of the supporting characters, especially the wary-looking security recruit played by Jesse Plemons (who’s so terrific as Landry on Friday Night Lights).

On the other hand, Hill gives Anna Faris one of her best-ever film roles, as a cosmetics salesgirl who goes on a pity date with Ronnie, only to drink herself nearly unconscious — smash-cut to her lying in bed, bleary-eyed, a vomit stain on her pillow, with Ronnie on top of her, pounding away. I’m trying to come up with a way of explaining why this scene is hilarious instead of just plain offensive, and I keep coming up short. Certainly, the sheer awfulness of the scenario gets a shock laugh — that vomit stain is really quite the touch! But I think part of it has to do with Faris’ blissful drunk routine in the scenes leading up to it — I like how she makes sure Ronnie is picking up the tab, and only then starts pounding back tequila shots like there’s no tomorrow. Faris makes you believe in this woman, who can blast the filthiest rap song imaginable from her car stereo and still become traumatized when a flasher exposes himself to her. She’s a woman who can wake up in the middle of getting date-raped and yell at the guy for stopping.

The key scene in Observe and Report may be the one where Detective Harrison tells Ronnie his application to attend the police academy has been rejected. There’s nothing he’d rather do at this point in the film than crush Ronnie’s dreams — his partner is even hiding in a closet so he can eavesdrop on the whole delicious scene. And Ronnie is crushed. Devastated, in fact. So much so that the detective walks out of the closet before the conversation is even over. “I thought this was going to be funny,” he says sheepishly, “but actually it’s just sad. So... uh... I’m going to leave now.”

I suspect that might be most audience members’ reaction to Observe and Report as well. How big can the market possibly be for Jody Hill’s brand of misanthropic comedy? The box office reports will be well worth observing.

Moviegoer Diary: Martyrs, The Big Gundown

MARTYRS

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Pascal Laugier’s 2008 entry in the “extreme French horror” subgenre, in which the seemingly motiveless massacre of a seemingly innocent French family turns out to be revenge on the part of an escapee from a shocking religious/scientific experiment.

Thoughts
I haven’t done a Moviegoer Diary entry in a while, and seeing as I had a death in the family a little over a week ago, perhaps Martrys was not the best film with which to dive back into the pool. Truly, I watched this movie with my mouth agape for at least two thirds of its running time, and I hesitate to say much about what happens in it for fear of ruining the experience for anyone brave or foolhardy enough to watch it.

I first heard of the title a few months ago on the Mondo Movie podcast when Ben Howard and Dan Auty discussed it as part of their roundup of last year’s FrightFest in London — and the film seemed to render them as speechless as I find myself now. I knew I had to check it out; it’s not quite as grueling as Inside (for me, still the most intense of this new wave of French horror/torture movies), but it’s pretty sensational, and marks Pascal Laugier as perhaps the most promising horror director to come along since David Cronenberg.

Without discussing any particulars, I can tell you that Martrys has a few things working in its favour. First, the plot takes at least three hairpin turns (I wouldn’t call them twists), each one more surprising than the last, each one expanding the world of the film and the meaning of what we’ve already seen in genuinely provocative ways. (I hate even having mentioned the massacre of the family at the top of the film, since that little bloodbath comes right out of the blue as well.)

Second, Laugier pulls off three unforgettable images of... well, let’s just call them “female bodies in extreme distress.” The mildest of the three is the opening image, of a young girl clad only in her underwear, her face beaten and bloody, running frantically away from what appears to be an abandoned factory building. (The scene seems like a homage to the opening of Kiss Me Deadly, and the film builds to an equally apocalyptic ending.) The next two are even more astonishing; one involves an actress whose physical condition is its own special effect, while the final and most daring image involves an excellent (and completely horrifying) makeup job.

Third, Martyrs’ brutal concluding section —easily the hardest part of the film to watch — finds a way out of the can-you-top-this cul-de-sac of most extreme horror films by taking the story in a completely unexpected religious direction. Dan and Ben likened the film to The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I know sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually a useful comparison. Not that many critics are buying it — the film just started playing theatres in England and the critics at the Guardian and the Independent both dismissed it with briefly, unusually contemptuous one-paragraph reviews.

We’ll see if it’s received any differently here in Canada, where it just came out on DVD — the film is a Canada/France co-production and was shot, amazingly enough, in Quebec. My big fear is that the Tories will find out Canada helped finance this film, which is definitely out of step with mainstream tastes, and use it as one more wedge in their battle to cut off arts and culture funding. We’ve seen this thing happen before, some 30 years ago, when Saturday Night magazine made a little Canadian horror movie called They Came From Within, partly funded by the National Film Board, into a cause célèbre. The director of that film? David Cronenberg.



RATING: 4.5/5

* * * * *

THE BIG GUNDOWN

Plot In A Nutshell
Director Sergio Sollima’s 1966 spaghetti Western, in which lawman Lee Van Cleef is hired to track down a Mexican rebel (Tomas Milian) accused of raping and killing a 12-year-old girl, only to become increasingly convinced of the man’s innocence.

Thoughts
This is the first non-Sergio Leone spaghetti Western I’ve ever seen, and it only makes me want to explore this rich genre much further — although the lack of quality DVDs and the fact that most of these films are known by a bewildering number of alternate titles will make the journey a difficult one.

But if I can have some Ennio Morricone music blaring at me the whole time, I don’t think I’ll mind. The opening credits for The Big Gundown are set to a wonderfully vulgar Morricone overture, complete with a sensationally overwrought vocal performance by a singer billed only as “Cristy.” The credits are deliberately modelled after the ones in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, but why not model yourself after the best? These are credits that really fire you up — immediately you’re in the mood to watch the hell out of this movie.

And your attention is rewarded with a cracking good yarn. The film isn’t as mythic as the Leone films, but what film is? The script (co-written by director Sergio Sollima) reminds me a little of Donald Westlake’s comic crime novels in the way that it keeps allowing Tomas Milian’s crafty Mexican to get caught by Lee Van Cleef’s relentless lawman, and then devises one clever way after another for him to wriggle out of his grasp. My favourite is the bit where Milian, his hands tied behind his back, uses his toes to price Van Cleef with a stinger from a cactus and tricks him into thinking he’s been bitten by a snake. You can’t help but see echoes of Van Cleef and Milian in Tommy Lee Jones’ relationship with Harrison Ford in The Fugitive — only here, it’s the lawman who’s the stoic one instead of the runaway criminal.

The Big Gundown also contains a fascinating supporting character in Baron Von Schulenberg (Gérard Herter), a Prussian marksman with a neatly waxed mustached and a monocle who lurks around the edges of the story. I’ve never expected to run across an Erich Von Stroheim type in a spaghetti Western (“The sun looks like a big ball of blood!” he announces happily in one scene), and his presence in the climactic showdown that gives the film its title is a welcome novelty.

Sollima really nails that ending too. The dust of the final gun battles has cleared, and only Van Cleef and Milian remain standing — former adversaries, now respectful comrades who now must each go their own separate way. “You would never have caught me!” laughs Milian triumphantly as he rides off — and instead of letting us hear Van Cleef’s reply, Sollima lets Morricone’s theme music have the last word, with Cristy dementedly oversinging the words “Never! No, never! Never! No, never!” over and over again. That’s how it’s done, directors!



RATING: 4.5/5

The Musicgoer: Marianne Faithfull's Easy Come Easy Go

MARIANNE FAITHFULL
Easy Come Easy Go
(Decca)
*** (out of 5)

Artistically speaking, Easy Come Easy Go is slick but unremarkable. But as a demonstration of the awesomeness of Marianne Faithfull and producer Hal Willner’s musical connections, it’s a jaw-dropping achievement. It’s a covers album, but what a covers album: the only thing more amazing than the list of songwriters (Colin Meloy, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Randy Newman, Morrissey, Neko Case) is the list of guest artists: Cat Power, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Antony... and I’m going to stop right there because I think I just made a few drama majors’ heads explode.

It’s the kind of album where to name the talent involved is to review it: the idea of Faithfull dueting with Cat Power on a Neko Case song is 10 times more thrilling than anything they do with it. And while the notion of pairing up Faithfull’s gravelly growl and Antony’s feminine croon is inspired, but at eight minutes, “Ooh Baby Baby” long outstays its welcome. Faithfull’s weathered voice is at her best on The Decemberists’ “The Crane Wife 3” and Brian Eno’s lullaby-like “How Many Worlds,” where the lyrics are more important than melody; on songs like Duke Ellington’s “Solitude,” however, she’s out of her depth. It’s time for Faithfull to knock off the “Great American Songbook” stuff and give us another Broken English.

Guerrilas In The Mist

All right, where were we?

When last we checked in on the hero of Steven Soderbergh’s Che, it was early in 1959. The Battle of Santa Clara had been won, thanks in no small part to Guevara’s able command of a small, outnumbered band of rebel fighters, preparing the way for Castro to roll victoriously into Havana and seize the reins of power. We also got a few brief glimpses of Che Guevara, now a blazing symbol of left-wing revolt, during his 1964 visit to New York to address the United Nations.

As Part Two of Che — a.k.a. Guerrilla — opens, it’s 1965. Soderbergh has changed aspect ratios and Guevara has changed his base of operations, knocking around Africa and Europe using forged documents and disguised as a middle-aged man, before winding up in Bolivia, where terrible poverty and an exploitative mining industry seem to provide the ideal conditions for Guevara to foment another Cuban-style uprising. And so, he rounds up another small band of guerrillas, and with a little behind-the-scenes assistance from Castro, sets up a training camp in a remote patch of Bolivian forest. He goes by the codename “Ramon” these days, but whatever you call him, when you’ve got the famous Che Guevara on your side, victory seems assured.

The key word there is “seems.” Part Two of Che spends its 135-minute running time minutely documenting how the Bolivian campaign went wrong. The reasons for the rebellion’s failure are simple enough to summarize: the Bolivian Communist party declined to lend Guevara its support, while the CIA was only too happy to train and supply the Bolivian army. Plenty of other things went wrong too: the Bolivian peasant population, distrustful of outsiders by nature, never rallied behind Guevara the way the Cubans had; and Guevara lost his communication links to Cuba and the outside world early on in the campaign, resulting in morale-draining food shortages.

As in Part One, Soderbergh’s depiction of these developments is intentionally, stubbornly anti-dramatic. There isn’t a traditional dramatic arc to this movie, with a series of conventional scenes, leavened with colourful incidents and subplots and strategically placed doses of mood-lightening humour, designed to prepare you for an emotional climax; instead, Soderbergh takes you on a long, grueling march through Bolivia with his eyes trained solely on the next tree, the next hill in front of him.

There aren’t really even any characters in this movie — Soderbergh makes practically no effort to differentiate the various soldiers in Guevara’s company from each other, and even Guevara himself is a remote figure whose innermost thoughts are kept secret from his men and the audience. He’s the guy with the thickest beard; that’s about the most you can say about him. (When Guevara loses his cool and berates the stubborn mule he’s been forced to ride during one of his serious bouts of asthma, it’s startling precisely because it’s one of the few scenes in the entire movie devoted to an individual’s emotions rather than the collective experience.)

When I reviewed Part One, I said I’d hold off until I’d seen the whole thing before talking about Benicio Del Toro’s interpretation of Guevara. But it’s a hard performance to evaluate — it’s so subservient to Soderbergh’s overall conception of the film that part of me wonders if you can even call it a performance at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. Del Toro reminded me, in a weird way, of how Gabe Nevins functions in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park — he’s got the right look and the right energy, but the only inner life he has is what the viewer projects onto him.

Part Two of Che opens by showing us a map on which, one by one, slowly, systematically, the various countries of South America are highlighted — even though the movie never takes place in most of them and memorizing the map won’t help you understand the story any better. That’s Che in a nutshell for me — it reminds me of that hilarious moment in the audio commentary on the DVD of The Limey where screenwriter Lem Dobbs rails at Soderbergh for spending so much screentime on establishing that there’s a shortcut down the hill from the house where Peter Fonda’s character lives. “It’s your fetishistic nature,” he shouts. “You want to be very clear that there’s a side street, but you don’t want any backstory for the human relationships or characters. But goddammit, people are going to know there’s a second way down that hill!”

“Yeah,” Soderbergh coolly replies. “I like knowing where people are. I don’t care who they are, I just want to know where they are.”

After four and a half hours of Che, I think I wanted less “where” and more “who.” And maybe less Che as well — like the Che T-shirt stretched across Luis Guzman’s potbelly in The Limey, this movie manages to seem thin yet bloated at the very same time.

Jon And Wendy And Lucy

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jon Raymond, the Oregon novelist and short-story writer whose work provided the basis for Kelly Reichardt's films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. His book Livability, which contains the original stories those films are based on, came out in January, and I'm very anxious to pick it up to see how his sensibility translates to the page.

* * * * *

Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s film about a young woman sliding into economic oblivion when her car breaks down in small-town Oregon, was released in December of 2008 — right about the time when the public’s awareness of the full, terrifying extent of the American economic crisis was sinking in. The small, unassuming, deceptively simple film could not have been more out of step with Hollywood — or more in touch with the anxieties of the nation.

“I think we hit the zeitgeist about as well as we could have hoped,” says Jon Raymond, the Oregon novelist who co-wrote the script of Wendy and Lucy with director Kelly Reichardt, based on his short story “Train Choir.” “If people are like me, money is one of the only two thoughts they ever have. It’s odd to me that more movies don’t talk about it. I guess money does come up in sort of weird, fantastical ways — in bank heists and things like that. But rarely does it appear in the quotidian way it does [in Wendy and Lucy].”

Wendy and Lucy is Raymond’s second collaboration with Reichardt — he also co-wrote her acclaimed 2006 drama Old Joy, which was also based on one of his stories. They met through a mutual friend, director Todd Haynes, and began working together when Reichardt, who had liked Raymond’s novel The Half-Life and mentioned she was looking for material that could be adapted into a film. He gave her “Old Joy” to read, not thinking there was anything very cinematic in its story of two estranged friends on a hiking trip, but Reichardt saw possibilities in it. Plus, it had a small cast of characters, a manageable number of locations, and she could put her dog Lucy into the movie as well. (A star was born: the dog would go on to share top billing in Wendy and Lucy two years later.)

Raymond admits that at 50 pages, the Old Joy script didn’t look much like a conventional script. And even Wendy and Lucy, despite having a stronger plot device at its centre, courageously spends much of its time lingering on seemingly tedious, undramatic activities. “All the courage there is on the part of Kelly,” Raymond says. “This kind of storytelling is pretty easy to do in short story form, but it’s so rare to see someone gear up the whole apparatus of a film and do something that’s so patient and so attentive to character.”

It’s a world Raymond knows very well — the Walgreen’s where much of Wendy and Lucy takes place is just two blocks away from his house. And he’s just a short drive away from the trainyard where the film reaches its heartbreaking conclusion. (NOTE: Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want the ending spoiled.) “I don’t know for sure what happens to Wendy after that scene,” he says. “My sense is that is that although she might attempt to get back to the dog, but I doubt she ever does. It’s probably a 50/50 chance that she makes it to Alaska [her original destination]. And I’d guess there’s about a 20 per cent chance of something truly horrible happening to her on her train ride out of there.”

The odds of Raymond and Reichardt working together a third time, on the other hand, are pretty solid: he’s written a new screenplay that she’s currently in the process of casting. “I always tell her, ‘I hope you don’t start reading more books,’” Raymond says. “I think as long as I can keep her from reading any other writers, I’ll be okay.”

The Joy Of Sexton

Here's a profile of singer/songwriter Martin Sexton that I wrote for SEE Magazine. It has nothing to do with movies, but it does contain a lot of information about artichokes. No big insights or revelations here, but on the off-chance there are some Sexton fans out there, I thought I'd add it to the blog. He's a tremendously likable guy, and while he may not be the edgiest musician in the world, he does put on a terrific live show.

* * * * *

Martin Sexton is driving through central California with his nine-month-old son Shane on his lap and a belly full of artichokes.
“We just ate at a place called The Giant Artichoke,” says the singer/songwriter, who’s currently touring to support his new live album Solo. “It is situated in Castroville, the artichoke centre of the world. We had deep-fried artichoke, as well as artichoke soup and artichoke bread.”

And is the restaurant shaped like an artichoke?

“No,” Sexton says, “but it does have a giant artichoke on the roof. Classic. I try to seek these places out, just to keep it interesting.”

Variety has always been Sexton’s watchword — not just in his diet but onstage as well. He’s recorded eight albums, including 1992’s self-made, self-distributed In the Journey and his signature 1998 major-label debut The American, but his engaging live shows are what Sexton has built his career upon. Think of a funkier version of Cat Stevens, or a hipper, NPR-friendly version of Jack Johnson, with a three-octave vocal range that allows him do the occasional yodeling solo without looking the least bit ridiculous. There’s a bit of the jazzman in there too, both in the Slim Gaillard-style swing of his guitar-playing and his willingness to reinvent his own discography on the fly.

“I’ve always looked at my songs as a set of monkey bars,” he says. “I can play on them differently every day. I can make a song like ‘Candy’ [a wistful version of which appears on Solo] into a bunch of different things. The night I recorded the version that happened to make it onto the record, with that long rock outro, was the first time I ever played it like that. That was total spontaneity.”

Sexton comes by his spontaneity honestly: he started out busking in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’d get people’s attention with the yodeling, he says, and then he’d spin a few stories between his own songs to keep them interested — maybe throw in a couple of familiar covers as well. On Solo, for instance, Sexton performs Prince’s “Purple Rain” and The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends,” and even if he doesn’t entirely erase your memory of the originals, he does a surprisingly deft job of adapting them to his own shaggy-haired sensibility. “Busking is a good school for performance,” he says. “Instead of getting good grades for doing well, you’d get dollar bills. And instead of ‘F’s, you got nothing. I’m not that much of an old-school showman who’s always putting on a smile for the audience, but I think people sensed the joy I take in what I do. I’ll cry sometimes when I’m singing too. I’ll laugh, I’ll get mad — it all seems to fly with the people in the audience.”

You can get away with practically anything if you’re true to yourself: that’s Sexton’s advice to live performers: don’t try to sound like anyone else, he says, and whatever you do, don’t listen to music industry professionals. I ask Sexton what would have happened to him if he’d followed the advice of people in the business, and he doesn’t even want to speculate. “Oh man, I don’t know,” he says. “I’d probably have a bad haircut and the wrong kind of shirt on. I don’t think I’d be doing what I’m doing. I’d probably be taking orders at the freaking diner. Those guys want you to sound like what’s on the radio, and they want your songs to all sound like each other. And that’s not me — I’ll range from soul to rock to Ray Charles to ‘Purple Rain’ all on the same record.”

As a result, Sexton’s never had one particular song to be indelibly associated with, but even that’s kind of worked out in his favour. When people come to see him live, he says, he knows they’re there to spend a full evening listening to him, not to hear some fluky hit from 15 years ago. “There are all these guys whose names you don’t remember but they had that song, ‘Blah-De-Blah-Blah-Blah,’” Sexton says. “I don’t want to be that guy.”

Fang Heaven For Little Girls

The unsettling, bloody visage of young actress Lina Leandersson in the above photo can only mean one thing: that the haunting Swedish vampire fable Let the Right One In is the topic of this week's "Hidden Gems" DVD segment on CBC Radio. Fortuitously enough, the film pairs up well with Extinction Song, a new play by my friend, writer/director Ron Jenkins, that debuts tonight (April 2) at The Citadel here in Edmonton, and which deals with the world of children in a similarly eerie, evocative way. If this blog has any Edmonton readers, I recommend checking this play out as well — Jenkins is definitely one of the good guys.