Showing posts with label Guy Maddin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guy Maddin. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 7 — 2006

Previously: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005...

Two quick notes, skippable for the disinterested. The Decade Review Revue continues because I always meant for it to take a long time, spread well past when your list-collating people are collating lists of such things. Not because we are now properly in a new decade — as a man once said, "Nobody likes a math nerd, Scully" — but because I enjoy this project and can take my time. See, reviewers and columnist types — those with niceties like editors, paychecks and readers — have to do constant pulse-taking and odometer-checking as they jog their beat. So right about now they're, what?, supposed to be writing about awards and/or festivals and/or generating think-pieces about, like, what celebrities wear to court. Daaamn, that's a harsh gig, but I ain't judgin', I'm just sayin'. Surely this is a stubborn exercise in what my sixth grade teacher politely called “divergent thinking” but the post-mortem on The 2000s is not done till we’ve weighed all the organs and sewn it back up.

One of the reasons the "Two Zero Zero X" lists take so long to write is that I make a point to investigate a lot of films from each year that I hadn't caught up with and rewatch anything I have not seen in awhile. So, logically, the more recent the year of inquiry, the less time I've had to see everything I'm interested in. But I'm finding that it doesn’t really matter. Gaze, for instance, at this original Best of 2006 round-up, and note that it doesn't look much different from a mash-up of the list below plus a couple of foreign film holdouts from 2005 and a couple of items that would show up on this 2007 list. We're entering territory largely already covered, since this journal's inception in 2005. So dread the upcoming day when I have to discover if I really have more to say about Grindhouse (2007!), but in the meantime, welcome to 2006, which isn't so different from last time we visited 2006...

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2006

10. V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, scr. Larry Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, from the comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd)

Well, you can draw this stuff, but that doesn't mean you can film it. The V for Vendetta comic that Alan Moore wrote between 1982 and 1985 extrapolates a political dystopia out of '80s Thatcherism and sets against it a sort of man-against-the-system freedom fighter missing link between archcriminal terrorist Fantômas and the proto-superheroics of The Shadow. It is an almost-direct-engagement of contemporary political situations by way of enlargement. The polemics on-page are located at the inflamed ends of a spectrum, which is the position from which, gods bless him, Moore always makes sociopolitical argument, which is to say that the comic is about Fascism v. Anarchy. The older and wiser Moore gets, the more he boils human power struggle down to these terms, which makes for compelling art and zero tolerance for, say, American and Australian filmmakers futzing around with his book. Multipurpose metaphor, of course, is how one builds things to last.

Of the transition from agitprop comic to the McTeigue/Wachowskis/Silver poli-sci-fi film, Moore offered the astute criticism that the metaphor has been remolded to a sort of contemporary American liberal response to neo-conservativism. This is, of course, meant as a complaint, but might as well be a compliment, because, Jesus, ain't that something? Joel Silver surely has his own peculiar voice as a producer, and the verdict may be iffy on the voice of Mr. McTiegue, but part of the Wachowski project thus far has been to dance a highly subversive ballet on the stage of the monolithic studio system without allowing the sundry associated pressures to interfere with their choreography. The decade's preferred commercial spectacle genres were superhero action and nerd fantasy literature adaptation, and, 2006 being Life During Wartime and a Dark Time for the Nation and Post-9-11 and all, V for Vendetta is rather a break in continuity in this pop art dialectic. It sprays graffiti on the broad, oppressive walls of Batman Begins, and, because it wears a mask, can walk right up and do its business in broad daylight.


9. Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven, scr. Verhoeven, Gerard Soeteman)

There is something of the same work being done in Black Book as in decade fellows The Pianist and Inglourious Basterds, in that cine-serious authors with hearty, ironic senses of humor have made deep-probe adventures set in non-battlefront corners of World War II, and largely in reaction to how the war is depicted and discussed at the movies. In their particular ways, Polanski, Tarantino and Verhoeven find their tendencies to puckish perversity roused by an interesting unresolvable tension: war, this war in particular, provides a marvelous toy chest with which to build stories, and is at the same time the most disgusting thing of which human beings are capable.

Black Book is then a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the ark popped open at the beginning, and the whole adventure story scorched by punishing fire. Verhoeven and actress Carice van Houten go on an epic marathon run with heroine Rachel Stein as she tries to outrun the razing of the European landscape, hopping and dodging through story-modes and transforming from refugee to resistance fighter to girl spy to revenger. If John Rambo grunted that to survive war, you have to become war, here are a dozen variations on what he might have meant, and they all boil down to the constant, increasing moral compromise. Whatever you do to survive in the moment, you pay for later. Whoever is on top after the battle needs a scapegoat. If a principle is exhibited in this formula it is the conservation of mass: all that shit is going to end up dumped on somebody, over and over, forever and ever. If there are tips provided on how to survive the ordeal of existence, they are that once in awhile chocolate can save your life, and never climb into a coffin before it is your time. This is Man's Inhumanity to Man as action-adventure spectacle, and a Thrilling Survival Tale of the Enduring Human Spirit in which history is chronicled in one endlessly long black book.


8. Gumby Dharma (dir. Robina Marchesi)

Shucks, back in 2009 I had hoped Gumby Dharma, the epic-in-miniature biographical documentary about Art Clokey, would find a good distribution channel and lead to sudden widespread interest in Clokey's animation, and there would be a bunch of exciting articles about Gumby for me to read. None of this happened, and, worst of all, Art Clokey stopped motion on this plane of existence early last year, passing away on January 8, 2010 at the age of 88. The bulk of his work remains poorly represented on modern home video formats and Gumby Dharma has shown on the Sundance Channel and was finally released on video in March, 2010.

Documentaries about filmmakers and their work are in no short supply, and in sundry form litter the Special Features menus of a thousand DVDs. Gumby Dharma is automatically interesting for those who value Clokey’s work, but it also builds a case for its subject as a filmmaker worthy of study beyond just the recognizability of Gumby bendy toys. This work begins by telling Art Clokey's story without flinching, which means personal and professional triumphs are not inflated beyond their context, and death, drugs, disease, loss, abuse and bad behavior — those examples inflicted by Clokey or upon him — are met head-on. If that is not extraordinary for a 21st century documentary, please, please do not forget that we are still talking about Gumby cartoons, and that this is a story that has never been told with such depth and honesty. This is not to paint Gumby Dharma as some sort of scandalous exposé of Art Clokey; it is, rather, a complicated, naked, and ultimately joyous portrait of a man, an artist, an animator, a filmmaker.

Last time around, my notes focused on the film's excellent formal choices and valuable research and historical testimonies, and delicately rendered profile of Clokey. I do not want to lose sight of what I feel is Gumby Dharma's overriding thesis, which is that the animator possessed a unique vision of the world and was able to channel that into undulating, speaking, dancing clay. All that passion and pain, curiosity and fear, weirdness and love pulse through Gumby; Gumby skates and plays along the path, and he is the path, the ball of clay, the heart, the part, the enterable book, the blade of grass, the you.


7. A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, scr. Linklater from the novel by Philip K. Dick)

These things cannot be defined in tidy syllogisms or anything, and this isn't about, like, rules, man. But to help sort things out, we might say that: Obviously not all films about drugs are proper head movies. And at the risk of offending, what I'm talking about with this classification does not include a vast majority of stoner comedies, nor the sort of SFX-heavy audio-visual spectacles one might use as an in-home Laser Floyd show. A great head movie A) is about and/or is an investigation into consciousness expansion and/or warping, and/or B) examines, encapsulates, and/or explains the human experience with an eye that is part anthropological, part philosophical, part spiritual. Hints that the film might open up with a chemical key are optional. Whew!

A Scanner Darkly has those qualities, so by my count Richard Linklater has two fine head movies under his belt, and a handful of interesting experiments (the Before Sunrise/Set diptych and Waking Life, which are earnest almost-theres, Slacker, which plays better straight or very caffeinated, etc.) Where the beautiful and fuzzy-hearted Dazed and Confused wafts by on a Circle of Life/Family of Man buzz, A Scanner Darkly is paranoid, doomed, tragic, cottonmouthed. Fueled on dread, it is set entirely during that bad moment you are coming down, notice your fingernails are way too dirty, there is a stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, and maybe you're not coming down after all. So get this: undercover agent Bob Arctor goes so deep under that he ends up investigating himself, and watching with a detective's fascination as the twin serpents of Id and Superego begin uncoiling from their cosmic hula around the center pole. Do try this at home, but maybe not in public.

When last we saw Keanu Reeves on this journey, the effect was opposite: Neo staring back at the threshold of perception, seeing the code beneath the skin, and finally learning to sense the gold that unites it all — no glass, no scanner. If Robert Zemeckis' mo-cap freakout Beowulf accidentally captures the acid-vision nightmare that humans are weird-eyed puppet husks being jerked awkwardly around too-vivid sets, reenacting some kind of mythological parody, the computer rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly serves a not dissimilar function. Here the stage is made vague or simplified with outlines and color planes, while the surface of the players players crawl and squirm; the whole world is covered with a thin metaphorical hide, a construct, a mask, a cartoon envelope that can't quite be peeled back but isn't quite telling the truth.


6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (dir. Gore Verbinski, prd. Jerry Bruckheimer, scr. Ted Elliot, Terry Rossio)

Curse of the Black Pearl reformed the theme park ride’s impressionistic story of skeletal pirates, hoarded gold and the wages of sin into particularly buoyant four-quad fantasy action adventure. With the scant narrative materials of the theme park source material used up, Dead Man's Chest scrapes up the unused themed visuals (fireflies), settings (bayou), and ambiance, then goes about the business of transforming the Pirates of the Caribbean series from a potential string of cast-connected sequels into a trilogy proper, and that is an exponentially more difficult exercise. That is, Dead Man's Chest has to connect forwards and backwards to make three scheduled films into a one massive three-chapter story. To illustrate the difficulty and ambition of that task, consider that while remembered as "trilogies," The Godfather is not built like this, Star Wars is not built like this, and so forth. Pirates is outsized, long-form original storytelling, whether it is "branded" as a concern of a major corporation or not. On the business end, where all films are merchandise, someone in a suit seems to have remembered that the merchandise is still art, that despite all their cruise lines and shopping mall emporiums, The Company is still in the business of stories and characters.

This is all simply to say that despite the increasingly pre-drinking-age milieu of the Summer Movie Game, the Pirates films are unusually committed to and serious about that game. They are crafted with the belief that an audience is invested in the tale and the world, so every nook, cranny, and cannon is crammed to the brim. Completely, seam-burstingly overstuffed, to be sure, but this middle chapter in particular is a Valu-Pak film; it's so much movie. There is faith here that this story should be dense and all subplots should intertwine and motivate each other, that sets should be rich with detail, every single character should grow or change or be tested — that each of them is someone's favorite player and so should have a hero's entrance, a crowning moment of cool, and a dramatic exit — and that half the spectacle is of actors acting. That makes it noisy and exhausting, but heartening next to most of its glib, insincere competition — say, Universal's Mummy movies.

Pirates is blessed with a glinting edge of perversity— an eye for grotesque design, admiration for mischief, a hard-on for the masochistic dimension of heroic sacrifice, and not a little bit of out-of-the-blue weirdness. It is far more sexed-up than Lord of the Rings, and more tripped-out than Harry Potter, breezier than both by several factors. If the comparison to fantasy-lit classics of their kind seems unfair (or unfounded), consider that Pirates is aiming exactly that high, and that ambition alone is pretty damn cool. With this installment, it becomes clearer that in its overstimulated noggin and wistful heart, this story is about mortality, about the death of imagination and adventure at the hands of global business expansion, cultural imperialism, colonization — about fun withering in the brutal sun of finance. In this light, that the Pirates of the Caribbean movie overlay onto Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride does a tragic disservice to both the park and the films can only be bitterly fascinating.


5. The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho, scr. Bong, Baek Chul-hyun)

The monster is big, but could probably fit in your living room if you have high ceilings. We traditionally read human-size monsters as a warped Us or a feared Other, and the bigguns as metaphors for some pressing sociopolitical terror, both are favorite subjects for extensive probing with psychoanalytic theory, and fair enough to all that. The best of the best, from King Kong to Mothra Vs. Godzilla, Q — The Winged Serpent to Jurassic Park, find some magical way to make the ground-level, people-sized story as compelling as the beast rampage and about something besides mere survival. That is no mean feat.

The Host injects intense big monster mayhem into a droll dysfunctional family comedy, warping it into a search-and-rescue abduction suspenser as the Park family looks for their youngest member who has been swiped by the creature, and frames it all in Brazil-style paranoid government thriller. Somewhere near the center of this is another superlative performance by Song Kang-ho as Gang-du, the monster-napped child's scruffy nitwit slacker father. Song plays Gang-du something like Shaggy in mourning having lost Scooby, beginning with literal pratfalls and emotional slapstick, until the lovable cartoon dope is hardened and seasoned with hellfire, and somehow coming out on the other side as a lop-sided, smushy-hearted hero.

So we have here a daikaiju black comedy sprouting agitprop polyps and one can't really predict where it's going, what will happen next. This is not to say that The Host plays as a crazy quilt mash-up, or is as nuts as, say, #3 below, or dreams of being something other or "better" than a giant monster picture. Instead it dreams bigger, striving to be the best giant monster picture it can be.


4. The Notorious Bettie Page (dir. Mary Harron, scr. Harron, Guinevere Turner)

You don't get to be notorious all by your lonesome. "Notorious" is a reputation, and that requires observers to cast an opinion. It goes without saying that pinup models are the locus of much fantasy projection — that's pretty much what they're for. Besides the obvious, consider the imagination fuel of even innocuous swimsuit cheesecake photo. We might imagine the scenario suggested by the photo, or the circumstances of the photoshoot itself, the unseen photographer and the photographic apparatus. We imagine those body parts not on display, hidden by wardrobe or pose, imagine the dimensions not captured in 2D. We imagine the model in movement, imagine her voice, and imagine a personality onto the mute, frozen figure. When we look at Bettie Page, we project an imagined Bettie onto her.

Harron and screenwriting partner Turner begin The Notorious Bettie Page with a basic map of the strategy that will branch out through the film. Adult bookstore customers inquire about the selection of under-the-counter specialty photos ("unusual footwear" stuff, if that means anything to you), but in short order the shop is raided by cops: one trenchcoat crowd replaces another, and Bettie Page finds herself summoned before Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate subcommittee hearings on pornography and juvenile delinquency. So there we have it, two audiences hunting for the same photos but imagining their own Betties for their own reasons and to their own ends, and the flesh-blood-and-bangs Bettie the cause of it all, or tied up in the middle of it, or maybe just there and being Bettie.

Now any old model, real or invented, could potentially serve as subject here. Harron, Turner and Gretchen Mol — their flat-out sparkling, bubbling, fully-carbonated Bettie — never indicate for a moment that they've distilled the ultimate secret true story of their subject. Rather, the film suggests that any biography by its very existence imposes a narrative on the raw data of a life and creates a character in the process. To tell the story of Bettie Page is to make Bettie Page into a story. This, Notorious indicates, has its potential virtues and pitfalls, but is the process by which identity and legend are built.

It has to be Bettie, or at least she is a perfect subject. Page's latter-day immortality as cult pin-up is the reason this biopic exists, and that interest was stoked by the apparent mystery of What Became of Bettie Page? By the mid-'50s she'd become the most photographed model in the world. She worked in nearly every form of non-explicit adult photography, from Playboy centerfolds to 8mm catfight films to underground bondage photo clubs to burlesque revue movies. That's a lot of audience, a lot of imagined Betties. What Bettie Page meant in the middle of the 20th century is not what Bettie Page meant by the end of the century, by which time she'd become America's retro sex icon of choice, plastered on comics shop walls, motorbike gas tanks, and photobooks destined for the coffee tables of the très hip across the nation. That's a lot more audience, and more Betties. The interim is legend, speculation, rumors, stories. And where was Bettie? Unaware that this was happening, that anyone cared about antique nudie pictures, that so many ghost-Betties had come to life.

What The Notorious Bettie Page does that is so intelligent and kind — charitable, really — is suggest that all of our fantasies of Bettie Page — those sexual and political, those that would make her victim or legend, those that would see her in bondage or in angel wings — are legitimate and integral parts of her biography, and her extensive body of modeling work continues to fascinate and inspire, which is the legacy of that work. The photos and films, you can have. The story, whichever you prefer, you can have that too. But only Bettie Page lived the life, and that is not something to solve and explain. That, you don't get to have.

As she once said in Striporama (1953), her only speaking role on film, "I'm illusion!" "You mean you're not real?," gasp the baggypants comedians who would possess her. Replies Illusion Bettie: "Of course I'm real."


3. Brand Upon the Brain! (dir. Guy Maddin, scr. Maddin, George Toles, Louis Negin)

Guy Maddin — the character in Brand Upon the Brain! and director of Brand Upon the Brain! — puts a fresh coat of whitewash on the island lighthouse where he grew up, and feverishly reminisces about his childhood loves, traumas and love-traumas, dramatized as careening melodrama/mad scientist/teen detective/wild child/evil mother/incest romance/zombie horror/steampunk melodrama and made in the style of, um, a Soviet montage/German expressionist/Hollywood silent comedy/abstract cheesecake peepshow. That's all literal as it is metaphorical, and though this is poetic interior autobiography and rumination on the nature of Memory and Self, nothing could be more accessible: it's sex-fixated and silly, the plot never stops moving for five seconds and it's a knee-slapper front to back. No doctors or lit majors need to assist with the decoding, as the plum-syrup narration will do it for you, and it's impossible to be inscrutable when everything is on the table.

Maddin's lighthouse is famously stocked with out-of-fashion early cinema, pulp fiction and avant-garde clutter, but fret not, all you have to do is experience the sight of how that stuff branded his brain, and learn in short order what is so special about all that moldy old stuff. Maddin is, in these blatant ways forever fetishistically gazing at a silver-emulsioned past, a memory eating itself up like nitrocellulose decomposition, but is also forward-thinking, evolutionary. Everybody and their mom knows how to psychoanalyze a filmmaker based on how he frames a shot, can pick out Major Themes from table setting mis-en-scène, and knows which props are phallic and which ones criticize American foreign policy. So what if, asks Guy Maddin, we start with the assumption that this work is already done, and set archetypes and personal symbols on a romp through a story-space that purports to dive straight into the psychosexual miasma of the artist's head? The result is a wholly original breed of comedy, an exciting new kind of storytelling, and cliché-decimating entertainment built entirely out of clichés so disused you've never seen them before.


2. The Black Dahlia (dir. Brian De Palma, scr. Josh Friedman from the novel by James Ellroy)

Certain crimes — big, terrifying, era-defining crimes, mainly — speak to us with layered voices, at first seeming to be manifestations of some core societal fear, but ultimately telling us more about what we are afraid of than actually confirming those dangers, prejudices and myths. e.g., in the moment it can appear, through spin or sincere interpretation, that the Manson Family crime spree confirmed dark fears about hippie culture, drugs, rock music, California. Certainly those events and those figures spoke to a significant portion of the population in exactly that way. But those crimes were so singular, Manson himself so exceptional, the scene so one-of-a-kind that, really, it doesn’t say such a thing at all. In that case, we’re left with a tragedy about this particular nutjob con man, his brainwash victims and their subsequent non-symbolic coincidental murder victims. This is not a cozy thought, but in the ensuing hysteria and excitement Charles Manson is given a constant public forum, and the families of victims are forever caught in this ugly saga. That Family of victims extends on out along this fractal arm, from Roman Polanski in the micro to the entire Love Generation in the macro. When this feedback loop is turned up loud enough, somewhere in the mix Manson’s code-speak bilious rants end up being made true: you wanted a Devil, he’ll be your Devil.

After the tawdry facts of a crime, and beyond the personal aftermath for survivors, the further tragedy is in the myth-making. If we’re adept at keeping our eye on the birdie, the underlying theme tends to be how good the media is at finding an angle to sell a story. Even if we’re dealing with the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11/01 or Jeffery Dahmer, data points are not a story: you need a narrative hook. The big ones leave us all scarred, even if that mark is only across the imagination. So:

Meanwhile, over in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue, Elizabeth Short is transfigured in death into The Black Dahlia. And that particular body, with those particular memory-searing, picturesque mutilations, might have captured public imagination for a few weeks, but that’s not The Story. The Legend of the Black Dahlia is that this poor Massachusetts girl wanted to be in pictures, and ended up in pieces. That seems to say something; about this untamed town that wants to be a desert; about this Boulevard of Dreams littered with the shards of broken would-be starlets; about a Dream Factory that is really a high stakes business running on the blood of pretty young things; about a Tinsel Town adorned with razor wire.

That would be the legend, of course, and it’s a good one — so good that its whirlpool sucks down L.A. “supercop” and local celebrity pugilist Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, doing impotent moron in meltdown like a champ). Poor sap only lasts, what? A week?, so caught up is he in dead white girl mania and troubling, circling questions that are not beside the point, but not conducive to solving the crime. What is this strange system by which starry-eyed women offer themselves up to men with money and cameras? Is this germane to the question that James Ellroy says is at the heart of this mystery, which is: why do men kill women? We note here, that this is the kind of thing that Short's murder makes one think about. Blanchard can't reconcile the black alchemy that discards the bodies and leaves the immortal part on a screen and made of light. He can't make it add up, and as is the hotheaded flatfoot's fate, ends up pursuing the Dahlia into Hell — that is, his throat slit and body fed into the furnace by his mob-connected informant. Blowing out of this world as a spectacular, blinding, horrifying supernova is no substitute for the dream of being a star.

After all is said, done and revealed, Blanchard was scrambling through life to protect an image. His fancy home is funded with stolen money, his career accomplishments puffed up, his promotions earned for their P.R. value, his fame-making boxing win a rigged fight, his live-in girlfriend poses well on his arm but he isn't sleeping with her. In his main squeeze, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson who, you know, poses well and adequately fills out an angora sweater), Blanchard has built a perfect rescue narrative; she's an ex-prostitute-gone-gold-hearted, and he helped her go straight. His motivations are not just covering up his culpability, living a lie or faking it till he makes it. He protects the ones with a good Story.

This is the guy who is "supposed to be the hero," as per the real protagonist, Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett wearing a hat), who holds an ice pack to his aching skull as his partner's corpse is fed into the inferno. Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice, then, promotional nicknames invented by the LAPD, which ostensibly describe their boxing styles, more or less indicate their personalities ("I can't move! I never move!" wails glacial Bucky), and indeed one rages and one is slow to thaw. But it's bullshit, too. "You're a political animal!," the Deputy D.A. chastises the broken-down Blanchard. So are they all, and for the Bucky and Lee it means they're pawns, moved to Homicide and put on the Short case because they're the Supercops. Don't you read the papers? They're characters in someone else's story.

If Bucky is tortured by Beth Short at first, it is because the media ruckus over the dead white woman — whose link to The Industry is not even a whisper of a dream, whose movie-derived nickname is entirely posthumous and newspaper-invented — is drawing him away from important cases he could be closing. And maybe, he tells Lee, this Beth Short wasn't such a nice girl. i.e., the crime needs solving, certainly, but maybe it needn't be glorified, made legend. As Charles Manson often points out, he wasn't shit until you put all those TV cameras on him. But.... there stands Kay in her underwear, and sliced into her back are the initials B.D. As it happens, that stands for "Bobby DeWitt," her old pimp. It stands, symbolically, naturally for Black Dahlia. That doesn't go away when you blink. "Who are these men who carve themselves into other people's lives?" the V.O. ponders, and as serendipity would have it, B.D. are the initials of a renowned director of thrillers, horror pictures and neo-noirs who happens to be directing the scene.

The tale connects Paul Leni's Expressionist melodrama The Man Who Laughs (1928) — a horror film for all intents and purposes — with a (fictional) stag reel starring Short. In direct connection, both are shot on the same set (a frankly insane conceit), the former inspiring the later, a beautiful link in the film's chain of mouth trauma that begins with Bucky's symbolic castration when he loses his choppers in the boxing ring. It is a chart of cinematic lineage, as well, in which German avant-garde technique moves overseas and mingles with hardboiled detective fiction, and the resultant new genre baby eventually grows up and Brian De Palma falls in love with it and has to make The Black Dahlia. In these and sundry other ways, De Palma implicates and investigates himself among those who mythologize this crime specifically, but more generally cleave bodies on screen and burn images onto imaginations.

Bucky solves this one, insofar as he learns the details of Elizabeth Short's death. He follows the money, of course. And all are implicated — De Palma and Mack Sennett and the men with the cameras, media and politicians, institutions and underlings, gardeners and carpenters. By the end, Bucky finds the housing development under the Hollywoodland sign was built of rotten wood and hides a film set with a murder shed out back. The very city itself is a façade constructed of corrupt materials. He might've guessed earlier, when the unstable town vibrates in an earthquake. When we leave Bucky, he's still hearing the crows, still seeing that body on every empty lawn. The facts and the legend are both etched on him now. The big ones leave us all scarred.

The citizens of this Los-Angeles-as-black-hole play at being human beings, covering their faces with flimsy masks to indicate profession, social strata, gender, identity and character (arche-?stereo-?)type. The faster they put on their costumes, the faster they are ripped away by the howling void swirling at the center of The Black Dahlia. It is blacker than black in there, so black we need the French to name it. We call it noir.

More on Bucky in Noir-land, symbol-chains and metafic here.


1. INLAND EMPIRE (dir., scr. David Lynch)

David Lynch's shot on video horror movie tops the very short shortlist of that lowly genre's unabashed masterpieces. It is not as bizarre spectacle as Boardinghouse nor as depraved and feverish as Splatter Farm, but it has many fine qualities and is scarier. INLAND EMPIRE was received, ignored, and criticized in a manner that means mounting a defense, writing a simple appreciation and beginning a cursory exploration all amount to the same thing. Insofar as INLAND EMPIRE is a difficult work, three roadblocks typically greet those having difficulty, and rather than demerits, they are simply its qualities. 1) INLAND EMPIRE is a piece unabashedly shot on digital video, and arriving in theaters with the announcement that Lynch has no future plans to shoot on film. 2) INLAND EMPIRE announces itself as a narrative feature and contains abundant plot information but is firmly rooted in modes of avant-garde cinema that include the non-narrative and entirely abstract. 3) The narrative of INLAND EMPIRE is consistently oblique, but explicitly links itself to mystery stories. It seems to offer thousands of clues and few conclusions. At its most explicit it seems to suggest that it might be solved, at its most opaque it seems to suggest that something crucial and meaningful is being missed.

Speaking of solutions, these problems are all, naturally, intertwined. If there is any help to be found below, I would suggest instead that perhaps if you are sitting in front of INLAND EMPIRE with your eyes pointed at the screen, then you do understand INLAND EMPIRE. Unless your eyes are closed.

Lynch often foregrounds the materials used in the creation of his art — like a Jackson Pollack drip painting, the fabric and construction is the subject. Even his figural paintings are dollopped with paint and scribbled on, flat-planed and collaged. Think of the puppet robin meant as real in Blue Velvet or his film-loop-on-sculpture "Six Men Getting Sick" or the incandescent "Premonitions of an Evil Deed", a stunt film of poetry and prowess shot on a Lumière camera. INLAND EMPIRE is boldly, proudly a video project, exploiting and exploring those things only video can do. The result is Lynch's most abstract feature since The Straight Story (1999) and most experimental since Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1990). That is, a true experiment of the let's-see-what-happens variety, this one exploring the visual qualities and editorial rhythms of consumer grade digital video, and in shooting hours and hours of scenes with no master blueprint for assembly.

How to Watch INLAND EMPIRE may be, as Roger Ebert once opined of Dune, to let it wash over you like a dream. This is, in this case: don't fight it. It is the same advice Lynch gave critic Martha Nochimson when they looked at a Pollack together: you do understand it, he told her, I saw your eyes moving across the painting. To engage that dream any more analytically will find one scrambling for purchase, just as in a dream or maybe as when trying to explain one. Some things that happen, you're at a loss to articulate, some are intuitively understood. Anyhow we're squarely (well, asymmetrically) on the shoulders of Laura Dern as actress Susan Blue, who is warned off making the film On High in Blue Tomorrows, and then walking alongside Susan playing Nikki Grace, who is perhaps her own person or several people. An issue that frequently arises when discussing Lynch's film is that the filmmaker finds increasingly sophisticated ways to preserve what he loves about Mysteries, and that love is not in the solving but of luxuriating in Mystery itself. As Sandy asks Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, "you like mysteries that much?" And Jeffrey answers: yes. So analytical language will be wrongheaded at worst, coy-sounding at best. It is not that Lynch films can't be written about, but the task is like tracing letters in smoke or drawing diagrams on wet paper with a fountain pen filled with perfume. And yet, here we are.

This free-associative ebb and flow creative process births a work about a film struggling to be born — or perhaps resisting its creation — and documents the challenge put forth to Laura Dern. Never positive during shooting where her character had been, or where she was going, Dern is ultimately playing an actress grappling with a role. This is a film of linking and connection, disparate geographies, identities, chronologies that peer at one another through torn membranes, down dark hallways, through burn holes in fabric, ruptures in spacetime. Passageways are important in Lynch's work, and all of the films contain a signature movement/image in which the camera descends/dives/probes/is-sucked-into a mysterious black hole: moving deeper into Another Place. In Lost Highway, Fred Madison wanders into a dark corner of his windowless home and emerges somewhere in his own echo chamber head. Blue Velvet famously tilts down from the sky, dives underground, enters a severed ear, reemerges from a reconnected ear and gazes back to the heavens. INLAND EMPIRE is a series of tunnels sliding into one another, connecting back on themselves.

Susan Blue's task is to fully understand Nikki Grace, and to do so she ventures all the way inside and inside out — for Susan to understand and become Nikki, she'll have to plumb the mystery of herself. Along the journey she finds and embodies a replicating chain of Lost Women, ventures all the way to the heart of the universe to find the most lost of souls, and in the end perhaps she does not fix everyone, but finds them. Susan gathers the lost to her and they rejoice.

And these are the keys to INLAND EMPIRE, but there are so, so many keyholes to be tested. Like Mulholland Dr. on back to Eraserhead, INLAND EMPIRE begs to be played with, have its pieces shifted, riddles catalogued and links tested. The puzzle-solver is not on a fool's errand, but is engaging INLAND EMPIRE as designed: playing an infinite game.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 4 — 2003


The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2003

10. Final Destination 2 (dir. David R. Ellis, scr. J. Mackye Gruber, Eric Bress)

Hysterical-pitch odium fati sustained over the film's entire running time, Final Destination 2 believes that between death and taxes, you can often dodge your taxes. The adjective — if not meaningful examination of the concept — "nihilistic" is bandied about in pop film criticism, and applied to such inappropriate, diverse guy-movie films as Fight Club, The Dark Knight, the work of Quentin Tarantino and Joel and Ethan Coen. But this practice is not usually coupled with explanation of how and why these films are nihilistic, frequently merely acts as an indicator that the film metes out much destruction and violence, and comes with the unspoken assumption that nihilism is evil, everyone knows this, and everyone agrees. But the Final Destination films, in which "evil" simply does not compute, present a true nihilistic vision, and it is jolly, sadistic and liberating.

In theoretical abstract, the slasher film genre template treats characters as hash marks on a machete handle, a series of deaths standing in line, waiting for their turn to step up to the camera and bite the dust: there shall be six girls for the killer, and when they are used up, the contract is filled. In practice, most slashers are also mystery, suspense or survival stories, and play games with assumptions, toss out red herrings and turnabouts, and make film-long sport of the killer winnowing the herd until a worthy adversary remains. While slasher films are slightly more complex than a checklist of Teens to Kill Today, they still add up to parables about Death Ever Vigilant. Final Destination 2 is not terribly more complex than that checklist. It pushes checklisting to the limit, relishes the slow drag of every downward stroke, completes each mark with triumphant flourish, and, cackling, moves on to the next empty box.

When we take a step back from our lives, loves, problems and relationships, a shape emerges. The pattern: everything dies. Once in awhile, fine, compassionless art comes along that dares to find the whole thing just too goddamned funny.


9. Freddy vs. Jason (dir. Ronny Yu, scr. Damian Shannon, Mark Swift)

It took nearly two decades for the Destroy All Slashers! picture of Fangoria subscribers' dreams to materialize. The prolonged gestation and distance from the films that inspired it serve Freddy vs. Jason well. Maybe it is the waning cultural relevance to audiences and decreasing financial reliance on these ex-titans of idiot terror that facilitates this goony-assed monster cakewalk. Maybe it is the opposite, the canonization of the beasts by a generation who knows the demons by reputation only and by nostalgic old-schoolers — those who recall the humorless, hulking and dumb Friday the 13th films as brutal and compact blunt instruments and the convoluted, dreary Nightmare on Elm Street pictures as witty, and colorful dreamscapes.

Whatever stars had to align for the project to occur, the screenplay is approximately as reverent as a kid wearing a Halloween mask shoving cotton candy through the sweaty, stifling mouthhole. Director Ronny Yu sustains a tone of knowing inanity and fevered all-hero-shots imagery (unforgettable: Jason as a fiery scarecrow cutting a swath through a cornfield party — Jason has it better here than in every Friday the 13th film combined). The raison d'être fight scenes are cleanly, kinetically staged, gag-packed and loaded with lovingly detailed gore. The first, funniest and constant joke of this utterly, happily unnecessary high-concept comedy is that there is a movie called Freddy vs. Jason, because a lot of people wanted to see a movie where Freddy fought Jason.


8. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (dir. Gore Verbinski, scr. Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio)

If Disney animator and attraction designer Marc Davis once noted that theme park rides are not suited to storytelling (and said with inside authority that “Walt agreed”), then Disney park enthusiasts the world over have been arguing that idea's validity and meaning ever since. Because the most famous rides do tell stories, they are just vague, impressionistic and broad. Or perhaps they don’t tell stories, but utilize a vast grabbag of storytelling technique to give form and lend the impression of narrative to non-narrative experiences. The company as a corporate entity and the creative personnel in its employ have been in continual artistic dialogue about issue since the planning stages of Disneyland, and it is not limited to the treatment and perpetual revision of the parks, but spread across Disney’s media output. Recall, for starters, that the Disneyland television program was born of a partnership with ABC to secure funds for the park’s construction: Disney film and TV and the parks have always been speaking to each other.

The 2000s saw Disney adapting several theme park attractions into feature films, beginning with Mission to Mars (see our 2000 Faves List), and The Country Bears (2002... don’t bother checking the Faves List), and 2003 brought the trend to a climax of sorts with the dumb but fascinating dud The Haunted Mansion and the launch of a series of smart, too-rowdy, wildly popular Pirates films, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Several dark rides, classic and otherwise, play off the Disney movie canon in interesting ways because familiarity with the films implies or causes a narrative throughline. i.e., Snow White’s Scary Adventure, particularly in earliest incarnations, is impossible to “follow” without knowledge of the film. It requires further argument, but some dark rides cherry pick the stories of their parent films, some compress, some allude, some reinvent, but all are in dialogue with another medium.

Film is not necessarily a narrative medium, but it goes without saying that is its most popular application and the vocation of the Disney feature film department. The ‘00s attraction adaptation films then are faced with the task of fleshing out the ride narratives (such as they are), or at the very least inventing personalities and characters to drive those stories (exception?: The Country Bears). The Haunted Mansion, for whatever reasons, is the most steeped in Disneyland lore and chooses a story that approximates the experience of riding the ride, to the point that it visually indicates the path one takes to arrive in New Orleans Square, passing the Enchanted Tiki Room on the way, and turns Eddie Murphy's character and family into surrogate parkgoers trapped in fate's Omnimover. Black Pearl instead takes the simple-but-effective plot of Pirates of the Caribbean — here are the spoils of sin, both earthly treasure and death, and here are the antics that created these skeletons — and runs it forwards, backwards, inside-out. The film crams every nook, cranny, cove and cannon full of Story, elaborating backstory for a zillion evocative but vague details from or coulda-been-from the ride. As the multiple visions of Pirates of the Caribbean talk to each other across the theatre, the movie sweats and strives, expending much effort on those things the ride cannot do. That is: baroquely detailed narrative, the flyaway charm of human performances (Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp as dueling opposite-number freakshow captains, one dead, glowering and purposeful, one too-alive, foppish and chaotic, both insane) and — that thing the movies do very best of all — the (erotic) pleasures of moving photographs of pretty girls (Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom). But the mystery and immersive marvel of the ride elude the movie for the same reasons, resist capture the more the tale is fleshed out, until breathless and exhausting, The Black Pearl tosses one back ashore, drenched, dreamy, and addled.


7. Gozu (dir. Takashi Miike, scr. Sakichi Satô)

Like Happiness of the Katakuris and Dead or Alive 2: Birds, Gozu is one of the projects on which Takashi Miike's scatterbrained any/everything-goes inspirations align to form a coherent whole. Gozu rides on the shoulder of gangster Minami, as he is assigned to assassinate his criminal mentor, Ozaki, whose mounting madness is concerning the bosses. Beginning as curveball yakuza thriller and landing somewhere far outside the stadium, the film becomes rapidly infected with Ozaki's madness as it winds deeper through Minami's grey-matter maze.

Other bad-boy/weird-boy artists may share Miike’s delight in gross-out body horror, the love of a dirty joke about sex and/or violence gone too far. But truly no holds are barred here, as homosocial bonding explodes into homosexual panic, the knight’s quest sets down in a labyrinth of sexual confusion, and gods old and new assert their terrifying alien presence. Takashi Miike thirsts for transgression, strives for perversity, cannot resist jerking any string he sees tied to an audience. This keeps his films bubbling and alive, and he knows that in a morass of horror the greatest shock tactic of all are moments of clear, quiet beauty. Miike is fearless.


6. Cowards Bend the Knee (dir. Guy Maddin, scr. Maddin, Adam Gierasch)

Guy Maddin's multipart not-serial "Hands of Dr. Orlac" riff was originally presented in 10 chapter loops, viewed privately through kinetoscopesque peepholes. What an experience that must have been, staring into a tunnel that bends back into your brain, or maybe Guy Maddin's brain. One wonders if Los Angeles is at all envious toward Winnipeg, as it pours hundreds of millions of dollars into productions without a fraction of the inventive results Maddin achieves with a $10 cheque from the National Film Board in pocket.

The armies of screenwriters tasked to invent ludicrous stakes-raising plot points every 20 pages cannot produce events as numerous or outrageous as Maddin jams into sixty seconds, as he hurtles through exposition with terse, exclamatory intertitles. Those all up on Charlie Kaufman's jock for fracturing his commercial impulses into an imagined awful twin brother might die of astonishment as Cowards Bend the Knee follows one "Guy Maddin," hockey star turned hairdresser, who ditches his preggo girlfriend in the middle of an unsanitary abortion, and embarks on a murder quest that his new squeeze will let him touch her boobs, if only with her dead father's transplanted hands. While drenched in/fixated on the techniques of early cinema (and in love with the ironic, mysterious, poetic effect of decay upon the physical materials of formerly-ultra-modern films as much as how cool women's make up was in the '20s), Maddin cuts more times per minute than Michael Bay. Only one of them, however, uses the Moviola's Veg-O-Matic attachment to 1) convey "images" containing "information" and in "a meaningful way", and/or 2) harness the powers of Eisensteinian montage to portray the moral conundrum of fisting your girlfriend's mother to avenge a dead hockey player.

Perhaps direct comparisons are meaningless, but combining apple and orange peels may make nice potpourris.


5. Memories of Murder (dir. Bong Joon-ho, scr. Bong, Kim Kwang-rim, Shim Sung-bo)

From even the first ant-covered corpse found in a drainage pipe, the rain drenched crime scenes are saturated with clues — killings timed to weather patterns, clear and consistent modus operandi, footprints in mud, and a surplus of forensic biological evidence. But alas, it is 1986, in a nation with no labs for DNA testing and no precedent for serial murder. And lo, Detectives Park (Song Kang-ho, more in a moment) and Cho (Kim Roe-ha, obsessed with kicking people) are a bit lazy, a bit sadistic, sloppy of method and utterly unprepared. And so the bumbling, undisciplined rural police force matches wits with South Korea’s first documented serial killer, but the cops are only half-armed. Brooding Detective Seo is sent in from Seoul to assist, and actor Kim Sang-kyung plays him with cool dude quiet, supercompetant with haunted brain always abuzz, and the threatened Park and Cho act as unhelpful Watsons to his stymied Holmes, attempting to show up the better investigator. But Seo is a man unstuck in time, the state of ‘80s forensic science in South Korea can’t keep up. He responds by becoming more haunted.

Memories of Murder, like director Bong’s The Host, approaches its story as if it could belong to a dozen possible genres, allowing blind, unpredictable left-hand turns, sometimes straight into the headlights of oncoming traffic. The strategy illuminates everything in turn. A police procedural about the flouting and botching of procedure, a comedy of errors as nitwits scurry against the tide of horror, a study in masculine one-upmanship and bonding, a crime thriller about ethical slippage as men of nebulous goodness quest to capture an evil made of smoke, a period piece about the way the present leaves scars on the future as history washes away.

In the film’s final moments, Park has long retired from the force, moved on to sunnier pastures, but pays a visit to that ditch from long ago. A passing child indicates that the murderer may have recently stopped by to peer into the tunnel. Song Kang-ho stares into the camera in the greatest close-up of the young millennium. Just his face, straight ahead, expressionless but brimming, as his memory floods: all that has happened, all those intersecting paths, who he’s been, how the case transformed him multiple times over, how these crimes and horrors destroyed him and improved him. A killer walks, a detective looks at a ditch, the afternoon is lovely, the clouds roll insensately on.

One performer’s resume highlights over ten years: Joint Security Area, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, The Host, The Show Must Go On, The Good, The Bad and the Weird, Thirst, and more bit part work for Park Chan-wook. Certainly a cool job list, but also of vast range and depth of character. His performance in Memories of Murder alone might have placed him in consideration.

Song Kang-ho is the actor of the decade.


4. Oldboy (dir. Park Chan-wook, scr. Park, Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Chun-hyeong, Lim Joon-hyung, Garon Tsuchiya, based on the comic by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi)

Wonder why Oh Dae-su is locked up in that room for 15 years! Wonder why he is released! Wonder what the title means! Oldboy teases with well-measured mysteries and patient reveals. What would you do if you were locked in a room for 15 years? If released? If... And from set-up to final moments, Oldboy offers those great hooky What If?s that fold back to reveal relevant moral questions both less fantastical and more difficult. Live octopus consumption, giant ant hallucination, (and, yes) one-man, one-hammer vs a hallway long goon platoon fight. Oldboy traffics in indelible never-seen-it-before images and heightened situation vitality that is the reason for pulp art.

Oldboy offers among its freaked-out images and wild ideas the most dramatic (multiple senses) transformation (multiple senses) of a leading man of the decade. Choi Mun-sik's soulful and scary performance begins in bloated, drunken aimlessness, melts into shaggy, impotent rage, hardens into dour, inky single-mindedness, shatters into sensitive snowflakes and disappears on the wind.


3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (dir. Peter Jackson, scr. Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkein)

The panoply of geeks and tableaux of mean-anything "yeah, man" symbolism of Jackson's Weta-fied take on Lord of the Rings finally accumulates into an 11-hour version of the 7-minute traffic jam dolly from Week-End across the gatefold art for Eat a Peach. An acid-burned money shot of cave-Lugosi Gollum in ecstasy as he splats into the hot sauce (dude, the camera goes through the Ring) punctuates a climax that boils down to three midgets drawn by destiny into a cartoon volcano to fight over evil jewelry, and well, let us not forget to note that is a very strange way to end a very expensive event movie.

Return of the King is not over after that, and like the Ring, resists dissolving in the heat. How ever exciting or violent or scary Rings was along the way, in any given moment Papa tells us that yes, the fairy tale has a happy ending. And it does. And then tides lap those mythic shores and it just keeps ending. And it just keeps getting sadder. Or... not sad. Wistful. Perhaps Mr. Frodo Baggins does not suffer the torments of poor John Rambo, but like Herman Blume of Rushmore, part of him will forever sigh "Yeah. I was 'in the shit.'" We don't need to look to movie warriors to understand this, or to warriors at all. After you've gone through a life-changing trauma, the thing is, you are changed and traumatized. And that is another way to end a very expensive event movie.


2. The Matrix Reloaded / The Matrix Revolutions (dir., scr. Larry and Andy Wachowski)

"One thing I've learned in all my years, is that nothing ever works out just the way you want it to." —The Oracle, The Matrix Revolutions

By the time The Matrix was released on DVD (and moved 3 million units), it was readily apparent worldwide sensation would be granted a sequel. And while its conclusion is open-ended enough to warrant further installments — in a way, on reflection seems to demand them — the film is actually cannily constructed to stand alone, should the $63 million dollar experiment have failed.

The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, however, written concurrently, produced back-to-back, released months apart, are the work of storytellers who have been guaranteed a forum. Three chapters, that is the length and breadth of the window. At the conclusion of The Matrix, Thomas Anderson fulfilled messianic prophecy, was resurrected from death to combat the apparent devil of Agent Smith, and flew away as a rabble-rousing Marxist Superman Christ, and it appeared that the Wachowski brothers had gorged heartily on DC comics, anime, Hong Kong action movies and non-medicinal marijuana before stumbling into their Intro to World Philosophy class; The Matrix is psych-pop riot on scale with Jack Kirby's Forth World comics or The Dark Tower. And these things are going on, to be sure, but if The Matrix made it apparent that the Brothers had read Joseph Campbell on the Monomyth, Reloaded implies that the enemy Machines had read Campbell, too.

It is a frequent complaint but not really true that since action scenes in the Matrix itself are the conflicts of avatars in a computer program, those fisticuffs, chases and gun battles are rendered dramatically weightless by the same masterstroke (I know it is frequent, because I've checked Rotten Tomatoes). Certainly by the story's explicit rules, if you die in the Matrix, you die in your chair on the hovercraft thing. Something else is going on with the digital dreamworld though, and it always hinged on the idea that what happens in the Matrix is just as immediate and vital as events in the physical world: there is no spoon, but you have to deal with the idea of the spoon anyway. The Matrix, as literal a reality for the film viewer as Zion, Machine City, the Construct, the Train Station, or any movie you've ever seen, provides, if not complete Brechtian distance, a certain metaphorical brain-padding.

The Matrix Reloaded, point by point, loosens the screws on everything The Matrix seemed to be saying, vis-à-vis Christ figures, Chosen Ones and designated hero-saviors, then in final spectacular blow-out kicks them over. The Matrix does trace Neo's walk down a well-trod path, even if in comparison to Establishment-approved heroes, his route is richer, more subversive, disobedient and slightly bonkers. Those who find the story satisfactory as the Übermensch ascends and the credits roll may gaze upon Reloaded and mutter, as does poor Morpheus, "I have dreamed a dream and now that dream is gone from me."

Maybe we hate to see this happen to Morpheus, who we once met as particularly charismatic kung-fu Ben Kenobi, but there was always a problem with his worldview. Morpheus began his exposition on the Matrix not by emphasizing the horror of bodily imprisonment or painting the human/Machine paradigm as host/parasite, but in terms of ideological oppression. He says the Matrix is a prison for the mind, and frames it in sociopolitical terms, telling Neo that you are enslaved by economic systems, government, media... and religion. He spends Reloaded taking contrary position to rational, pragmatic pessimist Commander Lock. He places faith in prophecy and believes the Oracle to have supernatural powers. He's dogmatic. He is great at criticizing other people's dogma, but blind to his own. For a man who sees providence everywhere, he's somehow never examined the question that begs: providence in service of what?

And Neo breaks it to him, that the very concept of The One, the seductive story of a supernatural savior was another level of control. Neo is dejected too, though it should have always occurred to this man who does not like the feeling that he does not control his life. Well. Nothing ever works out just the way you want it to.

Confidence, vision and purpose bind the Wachowski's filmmaking. Every action sequence is a little carnival of invention, telescoping in scale, packing in oddball poetic detail, always expressed in crystallized, striking images of comics panel clarity, always concerned about — always about — movement in time and space. As every moment is meticulously designed and crammed to the hilt with Meaning and Cool, one is hard pressed to choose a favorite. But if this is about choice, consider this contender, as dark messiah defector Agent Smith steps onto a green-tinted, abandoned urban playground, a viral Loki in black Secret Service suit, a flock of crows dispersing in honey-thick slow motion. Perceptive time snaps back to normal, and Smith gives Mr. Anderson a rousing, ominous speech about his doomsday perspective on "purpose": "We're not here because we're free, we're here because we're not free." And Agent Smith, it turns out, is in no way "wrong." There is a visual motif in the trilogy, of halls full of pillars, which are pummeled by gunfire, chipped away by kicking and punching, used as shields and cover for ambush. The pillars are blasted, but not to be taken for granted.

As the second film variously negates, inverts, complicates and deconstructs the first, so the third reconfigures, reprograms and reinserts the code. The thing about Christ figures is that they don't kick people to death, and must understand perfect sacrifice. The Matrix Trilogy completed is larger than a headtrip cyberpunk messiah myth; it is an exegesis and meditation on the purpose, use, abuse, and meaning of the Monomyth in our lives. Everything that has an end also has a beginning, and this story was never complete until the God From the Machine murmurs, "it is done." Each step of the way, the Matrix films grow increasingly wise, profound and/or profoundly bananas. If all the Wachowskis will reveal is that The Matrix is "about robots vs. kung fu", by the end they are also about mecha vs. tentacle monsters, samurai vs. ghosts, and a giant talking baby head vs. a blind wizard. The final fistfight is as much about Hegelian dialectics as dueling imbalanced Christs, Vishnu avatars amok, the will to power and the strength to sacrifice, control and receptivity, as it is about every slacker's battle with his boss. It's truly the Dude vs. The Man. It's purpose that binds them.

Some things in this world change, some never change, and nothing ever works out just the way you want it to. Maybe that's for the best. The Wachowskis make strong, sometimes difficult, often weird choices with the Matrix trilogy. Now you have to understand why they made them.


1. Kill Bill (Vol.1) (dir., scr. Quentin Tarantino)

A’right, here’s a thing we should get out of the way right up front, you and I. I'm going to say this part in English so you know how serious I am. Kill Bill is one movie. It was written as one movie, and shot as one movie, and treated up to a point in the editing process as one movie. It is one long movie delivered in two parts, just exactly like Children of Paradise. And just-exactly-like-Children-of-Paradise, it is acceptable to spread a viewing across two evenings, but the story isn’t over until the credits roll on Vol. 2.

And now we have that out of the way. So the reason the break between Vol.s is ingenious is that it ought to help underline the complex structure of Kill Bill. The plot worms and winds through the Bride’s list of Things To Do Today: Kill Everyone, but the narrative folds on itself. Not chronologically as in Pulp Fiction's loop-the-loop, but it thematically doubles, a technique Tarantino would explore in the persistent halving of Death Proof and the caduceusian build of Inglourious Basterds, twin snakes winding around a central pole. It is not perfectly accurate that Vol. 1 is all action, ass-kick and adrenaline, Vol. 2 all talk, heartbreak and tears. There is, after all, a lot of jump kicks and a lot of talking in both halves.

If Hamlet is about a protracted case of deciding to do some revenging, exacerbated by a too-smart/crazy-for-his-own-good hero, aware of the impending complications of others' agendas and moral skew, Kill Bill Vol. 1 is about the difficult task of orchestrating and focusing on a hearty revenge even once that choice is made. Also, oops, there are complications. Conventional wisdom has it that Kill Bill is painted broad-stroke bold, a story so primal and simple that it dares to put the ending in the title. Reality is that revenge is never a straight line, and this thing is pitching screwballs before it gets to the mound. Rococo characterization of every supervillain badass, every brutal, balletic action sequence paced and beat-out with a storyteller's instinct, every scene lovingly hand-injected with endorphins, liquefied condensed film stock and bubbling fizzy love. Every prop is a personalized emblem (quickcheck the lioness motif through the films) starting with The Bride's sword, though not every object is gifted with half an hour of elaborated backstory, one has been imagined, from the Pussy Wagon's keychain to Sheriff McGraw's collection of aviator sunglasses, from GoGo Yubari's beaded knife sheath to The Bride's yellow ASICs with FUCK U embossed on the soles. In a world of Red Apples and Fruit Brute, every watch is The Gold Watch to somebody.

And everybody broke somebody's heart, and, revenge being a forest, everyone's trees are blocking someone's sun. They all came from somewhere, are going somewhere, and meet a crisis point in that forest. So here is the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (even our spelling bee flunkout auteur must know this does not acronymize into "DiVAS"), once bound as teammates, bound in a Massacre at Two Pines, now bound on a List. To varying degrees we see (or will see) where they've been, how they grew, how they changed by choice or circumstance, learn their designated Tragic Flaws and understand their sins. They'll get to change one more time, and then they'll get chopped up, but everyone will have their say. The enigma among these vipers is the silly Caucasian girl who likes to play with samurai swords, the one we've been calling The Bride, 'cause of the dress. The others, it seems, have been schooled and tested, risen and fallen, and have discovered what kind of people they are and will be. The Bride, though, has a long way to go on this mission of self-discovery. Poor girl thinks she's on a revenge mission. We'll see how long that lasts. Silly rabbit, doesn't she know Trix are for kids?

Who knows what kind of life experiences outside "the video store" that Top Critics agree Mr. Tarantino has not had, wish he would experience and bring to bear on his storytelling. From here, it looks like he's lived as much life as any of us.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 1 — 2000


Preamble

The end of a decade comes but once every ten years! Arbitrary and traditional as Top Ten lists are, the division of history’s ebb and flow into ten-year cycles is even more pervasive and less meaningful. What we collectively imagine as The Sixties or The Eighties are no such thing. History does not wait for round numbers. Nonetheless, here we are. 2000 through 2009.

Historians form a master narrative through an ideological lens. The most persistent shape for film history narratives is a teleological model explaining how film art and film culture has arrived at its present state. When Roger Ebert laments of Transformers 2 that it marks the “end of an era,” he envisions film history piling up to the circumstances where Transformers 2 is possible, a series of manipulations and accidents that add up in backward view to explain how we got to this moment. First the highway is built, then the cars are set in motion, somebody doesn’t brake fast enough, and the dominoes topple until the ambulances arrive. This construction is intended to locate root causes and pivotal events, and also cooks up an aroma of inevitability. Most of us build casual causal arguments about film culture in this fashion, even if we know it involves cynicism or naïveté, simplification and received wisdom.

Consider a familiar case: the present-day event picture. They do exist, and without even bothering with a specific title, imagine a summer release action-fantasy, calibrated for maximum width of appeal and depth of box office receipts, and oiled up with cutting edge technology. One or two of these pictures, though extraordinarily expensive, prop up a studio’s entire fiscal year. Consider how frequently one is presented with the idea that this is the legacy of Star Wars, that lavish effects extravaganzas, shopworn goodie/baddie conflict and juvenile exuberance makes the most money. If we are expressing a bellyache, this is framed as: this is Star Wars' fault. Shade that outline, detail it, change the resolution, whatever. Maybe we want to say it was the one-two punch of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) that dumbed down studio product into a stream of mass-appeal blockbusters. Maybe we want to make it a flurry of increasingly powerful jabs with The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1975), Jaws and Star Wars, the Coppola film additionally accounting for the contemporary model of awards-bait prestige title epics, the Friedkin for the sure-bet adaptation of any national bestseller, no matter how trashy. Maybe we want to point out that the Movie Brats once celebrated as artistic insurgents during the death throes of the studio system proper ended up establishing the template for the modern blockbuster-as-genre. Maybe we want to complain that things used to be better or different... or that they are roughly the same, that Gone With the Wind was 1939, and The Sound of Music was 1965, or that the meaningful difference is the breaking of block booking and studio production... the pivotal event being the outcome of the Paramount antitrust case in 1948.

Maybe we want to fawn over Casablanca (1942) as the finest example of the studio system’s ability to produce magically slick, universally beloved entertainment. Maybe we want to remember that our greatest film critic, Mr. Manny Farber, thought it was a corny junkyard of spare parts that worked better in other movies. Could be that the demise of RKO is ultimately as responsible for Revenge of the Fallen as anything else.

Each citizen in a world of moviegoers builds a little history of film for themselves, complete with private pantheons, household classics, the unjustly dismissed, overpraised or overlooked. These histories are influenced by our selective blind spots, parents and gurus, taste economies, social engineering and pure dumb chance. List-making is an act of criticism all by itself. It winnows and excludes, reveals and conceals, and for the list-maker causes at least cursory examination of critical values and assumptions.

It is not the most insightful critical practice. List-making is also rife with problems and begs a lot of questions, particularly of the apple/orange variety, and can easily slip into attempt to stratify and quantify the unquantifiable. As much as an awards show, the building of lists can transform art appreciation into a sporting event. When it comes to matters of “Greatest” and “Best,” what we’re really talking about is “Favorites” perfumed with false objectivity. We don’t cotton to objectivity at Exploding Kinetoscope. An objective observation on a movie would read something like “the film was projected onto a screen at a rate of 24 frames per second.” Farber also said in interview that the last thing that matters is whether a writer “liked” the movie or not. Point taken to heart, but it is also the inevitable starting point for all that follows, all critical arguments and observations proceed from preference.

In a series of ten lists of ten, Exploding Kinetoscope will present my ten favorite films from each year of the decade, 2000 through 2009, with a brief appreciation of each of the 100 (or so) films. The brave and bold may wish to read “favorite” as “the best,” but I make no concessions but that they are favorites. Were the project to identify the 100 most influential films of the decade, or most revolutionary, zeitgeist-capturing, popular — “important” in some way — films, the titles would be different. A list-maker might even be forced to include Transformers 2.

The only qualities I am making conscious effort to project are honesty and a degree of eclecticism. The lists were not built with an eye to looking smart, sophisticated, worldly, populist or contrarian. If they end up that way, so be it.

The project begins two months before the end of the year because I take forever to write pieces. This will allow the year to actually end before the 2009 list is unveiled to thunderous silence and boredom. I take forever to write pieces because I am lazy.


HOW THIS WORKS: Practical Matters (AKA – Boring. Skip.)

Like any responsible blogger, I normally contribute an annual favorite films list at the end of each calendar year. The films considered for inclusion in those lists are any new releases first available for viewing in my geographical area during the year in question. As I am located in Los Angeles, this allows inclusion of limited releases — generally for small films, dumped films, and those special December films funneled in for awards season consideration before wide release. It also includes pictures from exotic foreign lands on their first American release.

When I make lists for years gone by, foreign films slip back into proper alignment by their release date in country of origin. If this sounds arbitrary, it sort of is. The reasoning is that year-end lists are built with the intention of pointing readers to recent releases and celebrating personal viewing experience of that year; the purpose of retrospective lists is to weigh recent history after some cooling-off time. So, for example, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance appeared on my original 2006 Favorites list, but now has to contend with 2005 releases — which actually improves its ranking. As to whether festival screenings, non-US limited releases, etc. influence the determination of year of release, I confess the entire system is built on whim and fancy. I have tried to iron out major defects with cursory Internet-based “research,” but feel free to notify the manager of any errors.

Speaking of cooling off, heating up, the dispassionate eye and the seduction of novelty... well, that’s why I am doing this. Things look different in the long view, and I’m more confident in the lists from 2000 to around 2006 than recent years, simply because I’ve had time to see more of 2000’s films than 2008’s, and more time to think about them.

Documentaries, experimental film, art video and genres not yet named all compete for space with narrative features. Features are defined by Academy rules — 40 minutes minimum — and do not vie for position against short subjects... except in one(?) rare (arbitrary) case below, in which a short was just too goddamned good.

Do keep in mind that the completed set of ten lists would not necessarily represent a set of top 100 favorites of the decade. One year’s unranked #13 could be better than another year’s #1. For the bean counters, at the end the individual lists will be shuffled into a weigh-distributed master list of 50 titles.


Favorites of the Two Zero Zeroes, Pt. I — 2000

10. Final Destination (dir. James Wong, scr. Wong, Glen Morgan, Jeffrey Reddick)

Jeffrey Reddick’s repurposed X-Files spec script (that’s fine, it wouldn’t have jibed with what we see in “Tithonus”) was repurposed and rewritten into a feature by Files first stringers Glen Morgan and James Wong. The hook is irresistibly silly, a slasher movie with no slasher, and in a stroke of bold, unapologetic redundancy, “death” itself is the killer. Boring teenager Alex (the boring Devon Sawa) has an unexplained precognitive vision and convinces a handful of passengers not to board a doomed 747. Thus thrown off-track, Death is forced to work overtime to burn, decapitate and smush all escapees. Imagined as an implacable force of nature and visualized as shit falling over and blowing up, Final Destination’s vision of mortality is the most fatalistic in all pop horror cinema. The first great horror franchise of the brink of the new century, the Destinations are loud, rude, pitiless black comedies with one single-minded two-fisted joke to tell.

Director James Wong moves through the hollow space between death setpieces at an acceptable clip. The characters are bound to be little but Reaper-feed, but the first installment doesn’t even bother to sketch its people as types or caricatures (however, everyone is distractingly, pointlessly named after historical horror film figures). Sequels would reach grander heights of invention, comedy and ludicrosity, but Final Destination is the first wicked hammer drop in death’s Rube Goldberg machine. The joke is on everything with a beating heart.

9. Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan, scr. C. Nolan from short story by Jonathan Nolan)

Pity poor Leonard (Guy Pearce, looking like a battered, blown-out half-developed Polaroid) who cannot form new memories since his injury, whose brain self-purges approximately every ten minutes and whose body constantly snaps awake while in perilous situations. Pity the audience of all sloppily written and edited pop cinema product, for we possess attention spans, allowing us to track plot holes, oversights and fudge-ups, recognize clichés and retain information without being condescended to. Presupposing capable viewership, Memento runs backwards, requiring that its revenge thriller clockwork not only be tooled with precision but fully reversible. The film’s thrumming ontological malaise and show-off structure tend to overshadow its pleasures as a terse and chewy crime picture, but these concerns are bound up together. As metafiction on the art of narrative filmmaking, Memento reconfigures the steady, regulated information leak of storytelling, applying its full smarts to suspense and mystery genres in which the shielding of the dealer’s cards matters the most.

If Memento says nothing more profound than that reality is simply the state in which we find ourselves second to second, that is enough. Leonard has lost the illusion that he is the sum total of experience, that a life lived provides anything but consequence and circumstance, that history conspired to make him the man he is today. He loses that when his head smashed into a mirror: self-perception shattered, slate wiped, scars permanent. Those who charge forth with confidence that we know who we are, know where we’re going, know where we’ve been labor under a very practical delusion. Those who wonder in anguish over who they are may be asking a question that does not make sense: you are the man looking in the mirror and asking who you are. Memento makes over Camus’ The Stranger as sunbleached California noir, in which perception is slippery, but it is all we have. The pictures lie. You must remember this.


8. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (dir., scr. Joel and Ethan Coen)

A rangy, meandering tall tale of the Depression era Deep South, Joel and Ethan Coen’s sole musical is also an amiably stoned ramble through screwball comedy, self-serious social issue films, and cornepone rural comedy. After 15 years of Coen films, the temptation is strong as ever to create run-on lists of every genre and text being pastiched, lampooned and paid homage, then marvel that the resultant film does not really resemble any of that parentage.

A swiped Preston Sturges title is applied to the sort of goofy crowd-pleaser that it was meant to stand in contrast to in Sullivan's Travels, and recalls some contradictions that Sturges shares with the Coens. These are, namely, ambivalence about characters, swinging between affection and distain, and incontrovertible authorial smarts playing push-pull with the desire to be taken Seriously. As Sullivan alludes in the broadest ways to Gulliver's Travels, O Brother purports to adapt Homer’s Odyssey. And it does, with cute, unceremonious parallels and offhand references, but the important thing is its purpose and spirit. O Brother is a period piece set not in a real historical era but in the accumulated imagined American past, populated by icons and legends, historical whitewashing and spooky folktales. Like the Odyssey, it is the historical epic romance of a nation as it wants to see itself. In the case of America, that is with much contradiction, truth and wishful thinking. O Brother presents the American hero as scrappy but upright, resourceful but hardscrabble, charming and clever but not too clever, rugged and handsome, wise-ass and silly, wandering but family-obsessed, lazy and hard-working. Above all, the very shape and subject of this comic myth celebrates and satirizes in the American character an incompatible desire to be an impossibly lucky winner and still possess hard-luck simple-value “Authenticity.” Witness, as Ulysses Everett McGill, proud and indignant that he is Bona Fide, makes a big success by recording that timeless ode to American shit luck, “Man of Constant Sorrow”. Adopting the Greek Pantheon sure makes it a lot easier to reconcile that that some days your manifest destiny is to roam, and some days it’s nothing but depression.


7. Mission to Mars (dir. Brian De Palma, scr. Jim Thomas, John Thomas, Graham Yost)

“Drifting through eternity will ruin your whole day.” So goes some wisdom from Brian De Palma’s marvelous spaceman thriller. Mission to Mars is practically a humanist retort to 2001: A Space Odyssey, its climactic moments dedicated to a pretty and inspiring filmstrip on biological evolution on Earth. Containing something to bewilder or sour nearly ever viewer, even the film’s final statement of wonder is marred by one badly designed transitional era CG alien effect. But all De Palma films have a little of this wonder, and no small amount of dread, as starry-eyed humans are ricocheted around a cosmic pool table along networks too daft to make sense of, dragged by forces they cannot see. Mission does, in its finale, marvel at nature, but until then it is variously spooked and awe-struck.

The climax of physical action occurs in the black void, of course, stranded between heaven and earth (well... between spaceship and Mars), safe home and unknown adventure, chilly womb and blazing death. The suspense device is of properly calibrating jet pack thrusters and conserving limited fuel supplies; the moral questions are of the same stuff: applied force, inertia, impossible choice and aiming carefully while navigating through space.

One zero G setpiece alone sees the director pushing the cinematic apparatus’ ability to organize space and time to a new plane: it is a De Palma Future. As the ship is about to enter orbit around Mars, a micrometeorite barrage perforates the hull, one space suit helmet, and one astronaut’s hand: bam, bam, bam, these are the crises in poetic simplicity, tiny rocks hurtling through infinity just to fuck up four heroes. The ensuing repair effort is a suspense scene of elaborate construction without parallel... except in the De Palma canon. Beginning with the image of atomized blood globules swirling lazily about the pristine ship, the sequence expands and flows into airless abstract 3D museum diorama. As four crewmembers undertake separate tasks in different locations and the atmosphere rapidly suctions out of the craft, their work unites the action, a seamless vignette about punctured seams. The source of the first leak is detected via the floating blood droplets, the second by a serendipitous packet of Dr. Pepper. The pieces and particles flocking in one direction to create a whole, the scene snakes through space, inside and outside, perfectly oriented in a place where up and down do not apply and time is the crucial dimension. Linked in purpose, discrete no longer, like the chromosomes sent to a blue planet from a red one, like the astronaut’s DNA model built of M&M’s, like the Dr. Pepper and the blood, like the clouds of Martian dust. Like pictures threaded in sequence, moving in time together to tell a story.


6. Dancer in the Dark (dir., scr. Lars von Trier, songs by Björk)

Old-time women’s picture hokum, nothing in Lars von Trier’s musical extravaganza holds any water or makes any sense, except that melodrama tells its own sort of truth. When the indignities and cruelties upon the innocent are piled high enough, any weeper turns into a dark comedy; tell a horror joke from the inside out, and with enough sincerity and it becomes a tragedy.

This joke is about a girl who gave and gave and a world that took and took, until she had nothing left. Von Trier has told this one before, would tell it again, and the challenge this time around must have been to test the limits of weepy excess while purging every semblance of reality: how far can either fundamental component of the film be pushed before it undoes the other? The martyr heroine is not only impoverished, abused, wrongfully persecuted and slowly going blind, but apparently suffering some intellectual disability, her every interaction and behavior exactly the kind of thing no one would do. Björk plays Selma as a walking Sacred Heart, a lived-in, humanity-stinking performance, a matted waif that one might feel compelled to slap for her own good, if she were not constantly being slapped already. The music is exuberant, aching and achey, and bitterly ironic in context. Björk’s own records thrive on a similar tension, as dance music that cannot be danced to, soaring pop as intimate and uncomfortable as crawling through the singer’s throat. As a victim/collaborator in Von Trier’s campaign, Björk adds another layer of contradiction and mystique to both the film and the art project of her public persona. For in Von Trierland, it is possible to become confused as to what is sincere or put-on, sophisticated or juvenile. Dancer in the Dark is both, of course. The kind of emotional rawness and thoughtful technique on display are simply too much work to muster up for a derisive chuckle. Dancer in the Dark is Passion play as escapist Mamoulian musical, and vice versa.


5. American Psycho (dir. Mary Harron, scr. Harron, Guinevere Turner)

Brett Easton Ellis’s gasbag novel is punctured, drained and distilled into an elegantly mean and hilarious feminist tract by director Mary Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner. While Ellis’s method of literary satire is to stand in one place, bare-knuckled, and punch the same spot over and over and over, Harron and Turner feint and bind, slice and dice with a thin, exacting blade. The subject is manly competition and conspicuous consumption in the world of late-1980s Wall Street investment banking, the case study one Patrick Bateman and the crimes engendered by boundless privilege and ridiculous amounts of money: disconnect from humanity, ennui, failure of taste and serial murder. As a period piece takedown of extreme yuppiedom, American Psycho picks an easy target, but courtesy of Ellis there exists a graceless, hammering take on the same material, proof that this is not as easy as it looks. Whether one finds the ‘80s stage dressing deft and funny or irrelevant nearly a decade after the fact, the thesis is tied to no one time and place, a hysterical burlesque of late period capitalism careening into a barbaric dead-end, the human body made ultimate disposable luxury commodity.

The excesses of Ellis’ novel are the point, but it is more excruciating than funny or horrifying, ideas more interesting to discuss than to read. Harron and Turner’s choice to clean up the grue, besides making the book filmable, eliminate Ellis’ habit of rubbing an audience’s nose in the material. The only lamentable cuts are of Bateman’s most far-out hallucinations — being pursued by a park bench, and witnessing a Cheerio being interviewed on television — that might have strained credulity even with this most unreliable narrator. The psycho himself is alternately locked in a human skin sarcophagus, and on berserk nude chainsaw rampage. While the film is largely lodged inside Bateman’s head, crucial space is made for the voices of the women of American Psycho. Turner is tellingly cast as the only woman who laughs in the protagonist’s face. In a moment like a clear, mournful bell amidst the cacophony, Bateman’s secretary, Jean (Chloë Sevigny, earnest and breakable, good as gold), steals a peek at the boss’ diary, and finds only primitive childish doodles of mutilated women. The film still closes with Ellis’ bleak jabber (and portentous inscription: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT), Bateman’s final embrace of nihilistic abandon, brain-snapped and sweat-drenched. But the summary of Harron’s Psycho is in the eloquent, beautifully composed scene of Jean alone, confronted with the swarming, dehumanizing rage of Bateman’s notebook. Whether the crimes of the book are “real” or not, the disease behind the symptoms is the same, and lost, confused, and hurt, Jean weeps.

Bonus points for a credits sequence that prefigures Dexter's opening by 6 years.


4. Werkmeister Harmonies (dir. Bela Tarr, scr. Tarr, László Krasznahorkai, from the novel The Melancholy of Resistance by Krasznahorkai)
























3. In the Mood for Love (dir., scr. Wong Kar-wai)


This is a film about extraordinarily beautiful people smoking cigarettes, which make extraordinarily beautiful smoke, and looking moody, sexy and tragic while they do it.

The story of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) lovers-never-to-be, neighbors united because their own spouses are cheating on them with each other, is both emotionally complicated, poetically pared-down. It is speaks to many things inside those prone to heartsickness, romantic longing and indolence. Like a series of lugubrious interlocking etudes, In the Mood for Love is vague and elliptical enough, repeats variants on its own themes with such seductive rhythm as to encompass itself in forward and reverse. It is a story about how a mutual case of blue balls prolonged over the better part of a decade, combined with a propensity for melancholy, can cause the afflicted to inflate intimacy and longing into having mistimed meeting one’s one and only Soulmate. In more sympathetic light, the opposite spin: love and connection flit through our lives, prolonging defining moments with an aching sustain, and sex just has nothing to do with romance. Chow and Su torture themselves into increasingly lovely emotional and-or sexual starvation, their stated motives may be to maintain the moral rectitude and dignity that their spouses could not. Of course, this just makes their anguish more perverse, their behavior creepier and more damaged.

Should you remove the mud, and let the whispered secrets float out like scribbled plumes of cigarette smoke, there is every chance that the voice of a broken heart has nothing to say but “Oh my God, oh my God. I should have fucked her.”

In the Mood for Love is truly and deeply about how gorgeous movie stars can look while smoking cigarettes in the rain.


2. “The Heart of the World” (scr., dir. Guy Maddin)
“Heart of the World” IS:
-Six minutes and some few seconds long.
-An erotic montage-edited frenzy about the erotic frenzy of montage editing.
-A romantic evocation of the spasmic lovemaking of silent Soviet sci-fi, Fleischer brothers shorts, experimental Marxist documentary and many other sorts of popular entertainments currently in vogue with audiences the world over.
-A loving, meticulous recreation of German Expressionism and Soviet montage that looks precisely like no Expressionism or montage that ever existed.
-Absurdist redemptive melodrama about the redemption of melodrama!
-A full history of passion, love, death, resurrection, erection, economics, religion, science, sacrifice and birth conveyed in such bold, decisive strokes that it takes place entirely in hyperspace!
-KINO KINO KINO KINO!


1. Battle Royale (dir. Kinji Fukasaku, scr. Kenta Fukasaku, from the novel by Koushun Takami)

Directed by the 70-year-old Fukasku, the last great film of the millennium closes with an imperative to the young: RUN.

Japan of the undefined near future finds its economy collapsed, unemployment rates soaring and youth in rebellion. The implied fascist government instates the Battle Royale program: each year, a ninth grade class is abducted, shipped to a small island, and made to participate by slaughtering each other until one child remains standing. From this high concept, equal parts compelling and appalling, proceeds Battle Royale. The giggly, angry, black satire plot reads, on paper anyway, like a premise John Waters might have imagined, had he been born some thirty years later. Its barely-science-fiction kill-or-be-killed tale meditates on universalist themes common to Lord of the Flies, The Most Dangerous Game, and Stephen King from Roadwork to Under the Dome: the scary speed with which the body’s survival instinct kicks in when under duress, the fascinating and varied ways in which civility disintegrates and societies break down.

Battle Royale is bitterly funny to be sure; its political bite sinks deep into the luxury culture, unhealed generation gap and entertainment tastes of postwar Japan, teeth scraping bone. The premise alone is enough, an overstated, ferocious lampoon of conservative social politics, and their bad ends for the defenseless and innocent. The BR program is ostensibly created to quell the rising tide of youth discontent, but is motivated by adult failure, fear, and anger scapegoated onto the nation’s teens.

But Battle Royale does not play out as a bad taste splatterpunk comedy, a sadistic action movie or, really, in any way expected at all. The film’s main modes inside its pointed, complicated satire are rich, novelistic storytelling and quiet, sensitive poetry. The strong backbone allows Fukasku to check in with the 42 students in various combinations all over the island, and on their mysterious teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano, also malevolent and weary), in quick sketch intertwining vignettes. Comically blunt intertitles punctuate the deaths, but the survival game is not the heart of this story, and the rest unfolds in the oblique, haunted tone of flipping through a high school yearbook with a headfull of psilocybin.

In careful, spare strokes, the film marks out miniature portraits of its dozens of 15-year-olds. The emotionally intense reality of adolescence is so vivid that Battle Royale seems willed into existence by the resentments, heartache and irrational impulses of the ninth grade class. Still, somehow the film stands at a contemplative distance from this hormonal miasma, those love stories that are really crush stories, bullying that is really dismemberment. The abject nastiness, adorable naïveté and poignancy of teenage social interaction is observed with empathy — respect, even— and on their own terms.

In the greatest movie scene of 2000, fierce and beautiful class track star Chigusa (Chiaki Kuriyama, blood type: A) is dying. Her friend Hiroki (Sousuke Takaoka) finds her, and though freaked out, picks up the dying girl and sits with her as dusk falls. And what can she want in those final moments? What is important right then? She asks Hiroki if he is in love. And yes, he is. She asks: but not with me, right? And no, not her. Hiroki can barely stand to look. But he will stay with her. Still nervous, even with nothing to lose, Chigusa musters everything she has and... tells Hiroki that he looks cool. Hiroki gives his friend the most beautiful last moment possible, as her heart simultaneously breaks and slows and stops. He tells her: “You’re the coolest girl in the world.”

What does it mean, then, to tell a generation to “RUN”? Contemporary as its other concerns may be, Battle Royale is not an anthropological exposé on the slang, savagery and mating habits of modern Japanese youth. It is about what it is always like to be 15, what it has always been like to be 15, and what 15-years-old means to a 70-year-old man. There is nothing sweeter than catching the extremely jaded in a moment of wistful reverie.