Death Sentence (2007)
Director James Wan (of Saw and Dead Silence) can never be accused of taking his time. The foreboding uh-ohs of his newest, Death Sentence, come fast and furious. We open on home videos of a family cuddling and bonding in a way that never happens outside of The Wonder Years. The dad (Kevin Bacon) talks about the future with his Promising Son. The dad has an Ironic For This Genre occupation (risk assessment) where he one day carelessly remarks that all things make sense in the world. That last one was a major, major UH-OH.
A few minutes later, the father and son are driving around in the city where they run out of gas and have to stop by Thunderdome to refill. The son’s throat is slit, and Bacon’s world is thrown topsy-turvey, and a typically careless legal system has nothing but jargon and compromise to offer. The catch here is that Bacon successfully offs the scum in question by about minute twenty. The scum happened to be the brother of even bigger scum though, and Bacon soon finds himself collar deep in urban warfare.
No one who thinks seriously about movies seems to like the Saw movies, but I admired the ingenuity of the first picture. James Wan and his writer Leigh Whannell managed to make a not quite competent Seven rip-off for a million bucks and ten days of shooting time, and got their feet in the door of industry in the process. The result may be questionable, but to have accomplished that at all is a bit of a feat. Dead Silence, their second picture released earlier in 2007, had an admirable Universal Horror fetish going on and little else.
Death Sentence, Wan’s third picture, and first without Whannell, works on its own terms. Yes, the script is absurd. Yes, Wan is still a show-off, turning every other scene into an elaborate CG assisted pan through some inanimate object (he’s still riffing on Fincher, without any of the finesse or much of the ambition.) Yes, the film is lit in such a way as to make The Crow look subtle. But the film has a blunt power, and that’s because Wan has an actor who can dive into the genre without compromising himself or looking sheepish.
Kevin Bacon is consistently underrated, and I think it’s because he’s too convincing exploring that coiled, bitter fuck you intensity that he does so well. There’s nothing self-conscious, or actorly about an angry, scary Kevin Bacon character: he’s angry, he’s scary, and he’ll blow your head off when provoked. He’s polishing a gun, not a mantel piece, and his work has consistently elevated films that would otherwise be forgettable. Check out his psycho in The River Wild if you haven’t already. The film plays things way too safe, but Bacon, Streep and Strathairn are a testament to what good acting can do for a just ok picture. Also watch Bacon’s work in Mystic River. He was the only of the three traumatized characters NOT to get awards recognition, and he was the only one I actually believed.
And you believe Bacon here when he morphs from accountant to Travis Bickle Rambo at the drop of a hat. You believe his indestructability because you find it impossible to believe that a man that enraged would allow himself to die. That’s absurd of course, but that’s the kind of logic you need to enjoy Death Sentence, and I did enjoy Death Sentence. Wan also, after three pictures, finally pulls off a legitimately exciting, suspenseful set piece. It begins when the gang spots Bacon and pursues him on foot through a crowded neighborhood, and ends in a brutal battle on a multi-level parking garage. Bacon soon finds himself shaving his head and ending the feud because Wan can’t resist cramming in a Taxi Driver rip-off. The film, after countless bloodless thrillers, is refreshingly nasty, with a still hypocritical but more convincing than you’d expect anti-revenge tang.
★★★
Bukowski: Born Into This (2003)
There are many moments of piercing human ache in Bukowski: Born Into This, but I think the key scene to the film, and to understanding its subject, occurs about forty-five minutes in. Charles Bukowski is sitting in a beat up plush chair, reading a poem for one of the cameras that seemed to follow him around quite a bit. The poem begins explicit and raw, detailing two lovers washing one another’s genitalia in the shower, and becomes something unexpectedly intimate and beautiful, transcendent even, and I’m reluctant to use that word after Allen lampooned it so in Annie Hall. And there’s something else, Bukowski, the legendary, acne chewed, chain drinking, chain smoking hardass, begins to cry.
“I’m getting sentimental in my old age”, he says, embarrassed, trying to turn the whole thing into a joke. Unless Bukowski happens to be a brilliant actor, which wouldn’t surprise me, this isn’t some canned moment designed to pump up the film, it’s alive and vulnerable, just like Bukowski’s work. John Dullaghan, the director of Bukowski: Born Into This, has an unexpected wealth of material here: readings, conversations with wives, family, co-workers. This film is blunt, candid, economic, and absolutely wonderful.
I’ve known of Bukowski in that distant Great Writers We Don’t Actually Read kind of way for most of my life, starting with a review I read early on of his Barfly. A cursory mention of the man appeared in the film Sideways and reminded me that I wanted to check him out. I saw Factotum, an adaptation of his second novel, early last year. Then I caught a portion of Born Into This around the same time on a movie channel, and the power of the footage finally inspired me to pick up a damn book. The library I frequent only had one volume: a collection of poetry called Slouching Toward Nirvana, one of his posthumously published works.
I read it over the next two nights, and drove to a book store and picked up a couple of novels in his “Chinaski” series: Post Office and Women. I was hooked: shaked and moved, by the man’s words. Bukowski pulls off something in his work that I normally don’t buy: the hard drinking man who does little, sleeps and screws a lot, and that’s somehow reflective of the fucked up world we live in. For most writers this is glossier porn, for Bukowski it begins as some sort of wet dream: the kind a man working a thankless job in a post office might have, and becomes something altogether more searching and dark. The drinking, the fucking, the smoking, the perpetual unemployment, it’s all a shell game in Bukowski’s work. His stories, his novels, his incredible poetry, are all about that brief, fleeting hope for some sort of human connection; a connection that’s best understood by understanding all of the taboo substances that are a part of our everyday lives: cum, shit, flatulence, saliva. The man’s words punch through in brief, curt bursts, an SOS from Hell.
Born Into This captures this and more. Bukowski is allowed to be brilliant, allowed to be vulnerable, but the film doesn’t shortchange the paranoia and violence either. There’s another moment where Bukowski, very drunk, accuses his last wife of being unfaithful, and disrespectful. He curses her, tells her he’s gonna get a Jewish lawyer to deal with her, and viciously kicks her off the couch. Linda Lee Bukowski, the wife in question, matter of factly tells us that she never took that again, and that is that. Later on we see footage of Bukowski’s marriage to Linda, and, again he begins to cry. Born Into This gets the contradiction of any man much less a great one, and it doesn’t burden us with explanation. The film gets that most art, whether its much good or not, is usually the work of the wounded; a cry for forgiveness or acceptance, or for the simple acknowledgement that its creator is as entitled to draw air as those that more settled in their own skin.
Bukowski himself would’ve probably ended this review two paragraphs ago, he notoriously hated movies, but there’s one more episode I wish to share. Linda Lee sits over Charles’ grave and recalls his last breaths after succumbing to leukemia at the age of 74. She gets to the breath part, about to describe the change of expression in his face and the lifting of the pain he probably felt all of his life, and stops, and turns her head sideways. She pauses, holding it in, and resumes the story. It is one of the most graceful handlings of hurt I’ve ever seen in life or film, as graceful as her troubled husband’s work, and almost as extraordinary. Charles, you’re forgiven sir.
★★★★
Rambo (2008)
Of all the killer Movie Gods of the 1980s, Sylvester Stallone was always the most disarmingly poignant. Schwarzenegger’s casting as a robot was all too apt, and Bruce Willis doesn’t count because he’s an authentically great actor who managed to escape the ghetto. I never believed Stallone in kill crazy mode though, he’s too vulnerable and, at times, too funny; funnier than people have ever given him credit for. Oscar is maligned, and I never understood why. Demolition Man is, intentionally, quite funny. Even an unintentional howler like Tango and Cash has moments, primarily due to Stallone’s chemistry with Kurt Russell. Stallone isn’t an actor, but he’s a non-actor in a more personal way than a Schwarzenegger, any evident technique would ruin a Stallone performance. Stallone is a raw nerve: pure, unchanelled, unchecked empathy. Stallone is his characters, and his films, even the ones not called Rocky, are his shot at some sort of self-salvage, his reckoning.
And he’s canny. Rocky Balboa worked, despite some major problems, because the actor was humble and witty enough to make the character a surrogate Stallone again, which we hadn’t seen since Rocky II. Rocky III and Rocky IV were absurd even by the standards of the 1980s, Stallone’s desperate bid to trump the little man’s syndrome that he apparently suffers from, and Rocky V? I don’t know what the hell that was, but I think it was some sort of mutant offspring of both good and bad Rocky movies, Stallone’s attempt to scale back and hunker down, but the results were stillborn. Balboa got the formula right again, and was an unexpected financial and critical success.
Which brings us the inevitable Rambo rebirth a year and some change later, called, logically, unavoidably, Rambo, the various titlings of previous films in the series having become too convoluted to render any another option conceivable. Fourth Blood: Rambo Part III? Rambo IV: First Blood Part IV? All of that nonsense has been abandoned, and for the good. Is the movie itself any good? Or, more appropriately, does it satisfy the standards of the series and the genre? The film isn’t much good, and you can’t shrug off the crumminess of the Rambo movies in the same way that you can some of the Rockys. Rocky was a good-hearted lunk. Rambo is a more irresponsible shoot first, someone else asks questions later kind of guy. I don’t preach for responsibility in the movies, that’s the first and best way to kill their livelihood, but I’ve always thought that the Rambo movies were tasteless; their reliance on real issues and tragedies as shorthand for any dramatic heft tacky.
The old Rambos utilized the Vietnam war; the new Rambo is concerned with the issue in Burma, and Stallone opens his film with, I think, real footage of the atrocities the people are actually suffering over there. My sensors sounded a bit, this in the service of a just another revenge movie? Why? Stallone the director continues to ladle on the mistreatment in the grimy, largely boring opening half. Burmese=disease. Rambo=cure.
There’s still something to Stallone though, and he has a clunkiness that will haunt you. In his fourth gig as Rambo, Stallone looks worse than Mickey Rourke and that is truly saying something. Stallone seems to be suffering from some sort of EC comics style ironic punishment. You want to be big? You’ll be big! Stallone is as big as a diesel truck here, a wax Frankenstein monster that has finally, totally, retreated into his headspace.
But, like the monster, he’s susceptible to the charms of a pretty woman, and, by about the fifty minute mark, it’s go time. The second half of Rambo demonstrates that Stallone understands this series’ appeal as intimately as he does Rocky. Rambo is pure, primal id, and the second half, really just one long climax, has a garish, bloody, absurd power; with bullets the size of stakes tearing holes in people that the South Park boys would envy.
So, yes, Rambo does, ultimately, work by the standards of the genre, and it does convincingly resurrect the violent, lurid, un-PC MO of the 1980s action movies. I still think it represents Stallone playing counter to his gifts, but my opinion doesn’t trump box office dollars. That’s a boggle for another day.
★★½
Why Most Movies Are So Bad.
Because studios make shit like
Meet the Spartans and audiences reward them with 18 million dollar #1 movie of the week box office. We don’t normally do numbers here at BC but this is just too much, particularly when one considers the wealth of pictures that are currently playing in the theatres. Hell, even
Rambo, which I’ll get into tomorrow, is preferrable to this. Who watches that
Spartans trailer and says “Hmm, that looks good”?
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Our friend Travis seems to be refining his style to the point of near haiku…and I dig it.-CB
It must be hard making yourself standout in the Independent film market. The way I see it, there are two types of independents: the Quirky Indie and the Oscar Indie. The Quirky Indie has a weird, precious main character, a cast of equally eccentric but less important second bananas, and plenty of “quotable” dialogue (”honest to blog?!”).
The Quirky Indie always constructs some version of reality that may at first seem insightful but does not hold up to scrutiny. Even the best Quirky Indie often feels like a contrivance that you have to turn part of your brain off to fully enjoy. That part of your brain is the bullshit detector.
If you know anything about the plot of Lars and the Real Girl, you know it’s a Quirky Indie. It’s got the weird characters. It’s an obvious construction. Every breathy word, every “subtle” facial tick, every endearing eccentricity: it all means something. And don’t you forget it.
Then again, the movie sneaks up on you: It’s pretty funny. The denouement is pulled off nicely. It cuts to black at just the right moment. And, most critically, Ryan Gosling, as Lars, plays it straight.
Lars and the Real Girl is the story of a hyper-shy kid in his late twenties who feels he can’t connect with anyone, particularly women. But then Lars orders a sex doll and starts treating it like his real girlfriend. Crazy, right? Crazy. Lars’ family and the rest of the small town in which he lives grudgingly accept this extraordinary and worrying behavior. Lars talks to the doll. He makes food for the doll. He takes the doll to church. He constructs an elaborate biography and personality for the doll.
I’ll admit it: by the end of the movie, I’d largely bought the central conceit and invested myself in the mystery of the movie (essentially: why did this happen and how will it end?) despite myself. There’s plenty to quibble about. But this is not reality. Just turn off your bullshit detector and enjoy it.
★★½
In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2004)
There are always people you wonder about. People who take out the trash at the high school. People who work the nine to five shifts at the diners and gas stations. People who, in other words, live lives that aren’t routinely glamorized by Hollywood films. Someone once told me that there’s nothing more poignant than the sight of someone eating alone. I’m not sure if I agree, but it would certainly rate high on that meter of things that can casually break your heart. It is particularly poignant to see someone eating alone while obviously on a meal break in the middle of a shift of a thankless job that I’ve just described. What do these people do for happiness? What is their source of hope?
Henry Darger was one such person. A reclusive, fearful mouse of a man, Darger worked a variety of janitorial jobs until he was forced to retire at the age of 73. Several years later he died. His neighbors, who helped him get along financially from time to time, opened his small apartment-and discovered thousands of pages of writing. A few hundred of them are a sort of autobiography; several thousand more are an epic, epic, epic fantasy novel: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger is filmmaker Jessica Yu’s exploration of this man. Yu’s technique is admirably, deceptively simple: she tells Darger’s story through the art itself, as that was the only thing Darger left behind. Portions of the novel are memorably dramatized and large patches of Darger’s extensive illustrations are allowed to breath and move and inhabit the world that seemed to so consume this man. The autobiography is recruited to serve as substitute narration, an act of acknowledgment that Darger was determined to avoid while living.
Darger’s work is inspired and disturbing, revealing a lonely, paranoid, probably obsessive compulsive personality; a man who grew up bad and incapable of forming significant human contact. Darger, like many a writer, invented a new world as substitute for understanding the old one. Darger personifies the idea of the artist that we tend to glorify without thought: the man who has to create to live. In the Realms of the Unreal acknowledges the lunacy that resides on just the other side of the artistic coin.
These are the sorts of documentaries that appeal to me, these fringe stories of existence that point toward a larger acknowledgement of how befuddling life in general can be (another recent example being Crazy Love.) Yu’s film is beautiful and well-crafted; respectful of Darger but not overly sentimental as to his problematic nature. One thing did trouble me while watching: Darger’s work, and pre-occupation with little girls, seemed to me to be highly suggestive of pedophilic desires. Watch Darger’s desperation over finding a photo of a murdered girl that haunts his novel. Watch the frequent scenes of torture and violence that pop up in his book. Yu barely addresses this particular issue; she favors the “lonely old man” angle. Lonely old man, sadly, is the best that Darger could hope for.
★★★½
Heath Ledger Dead.
We normally go out of our way not to report the news here at BC, the play is the thing, but I feel it would be in bad taste not to at least acknowledge this. Heath Ledger was found dead yesterday. The details are uncertain and beside the point. Ledger, an actor destined to age well, to get better, wilder, more interesting, is no longer. He leaves behind a child, an ex-wife, and one performance of major note: Ennis Del Mar of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
Ledger was the force of Brokeback Mountain, and the primary reason I saw the picture three times in the theatre. I was expecting a high toned Oscar wank, instead I saw a good movie with a lead performance of startling gravity, particularly for such a young man. The smart alecks had to mock the mumble he invented for the role. Did these folks take a moment to peak behind the mumble? The voice, the gestures, the body language, Ennis Del Mar looked like a piece of notebook paper folded in half: shrunken, creased, trying to disappear from the world. The heartbreaker of the film is that, at the end, he essentially succeeds in that aim, with only a daughter to notice. Most actors his age are chasing starlets around in forgettable junk; Ledger, at twenty-five-ish, was chasing the ghost of Marlon Brando.
It wasn’t as large a role, but Ledger also made an impression in the brilliant hall-of-mirrors Dylan film, I’m Not There. He had one of my favorite moments in the picture: a bit of self-absorption (even for Dylan) at an outside meal with friends that signals the beginning of the end for him and the continually suffering Charlotte Gainsbourg. Ledger was also the highlight in an acclaimed film that I didn’t particularly care for, Monster’s Ball. Everyone was writing about Halle Berry but it was Thornton and his broken relationship with Ledger, his son, that makes the film worth seeing once. Ledger also had that film’s one truly shocking moment of humanity: a cry for help that takes a lightening turn towards violence.
Extremely pleased….
…with Viggo Mortensen’s Oscar nomination for his iconic work in Eastern Promises. Everything else was relatively in sync* with the various pointy head predictions.
*Turns out there were more surprises, oh well.
Smiley Face (2007)
Smiley Face is refreshingly disinterested in pleasing me, the viewer. That always pleases me. Smiley Face stars Anna Faris, and isn’t a sequel to Scary Movie, another sign of possible good things to come. The film was also directed by Greg Araki, who’s coming off a major career redefining best with the child abuse film Mysterious Skin. Again, so far, so good. Faris plays Jane F. (last name never supplied), a stoner who accidentally eats a shit load of pot cup cakes and has to go on a journey to pay a bill and talk a drug dealer (an amusing Adam Brody) out of confiscating her furniture; particularly her huge, expensive bed, the source of her lack of fundage to begin with. Hijinks and cameos ensue, justifying little of the opening promise.
I think it’s because I’m tired of stoner movies. The humor, the structure, and the result of these films are almost always the same. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle earned mild points by putting its heroes on a quest to get stoned, as opposed to going on a quest stoned (yes, that counts as subversion in this genre.) Otherwise, I’m afraid I just don’t care, the adventures are almost always too over the top and self-congratulatory, and you know exactly where you are twenty minutes into any of these films. To call most of these movies one joke is to be kind, to assume that “damn, she’s really stoned” rates as a single joke. Filmmakers need to dial these things back a little. Smiley Face, for example, shouldn’t turn into a bunch of madness about stealing the Communist Manifesto, it should instead actually stick with the idea of trying to pay a bill ridiculously stoned.
Anna Faris is wonderful, committed; she dives in and never tells you she’s above the material, though she is. Someone, somewhere, please stop underrating this talented actress, and give her something that she can really do something with. Araki would appear to be blowing off steam after the darkness of Skin, and I don’t begrudge him that, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll enjoy his movie. The funniest line of the film is “I’m taking a shit.” I just saved you a Netflix envelope.
★★
Cloverfield (2008)
For the first twenty minutes (more than a quarter of the film’s running time) you lean back, cross your legs, and smile in tedium inspired good humor. Does producer J.J. Abrams really have the cojones to do what it appears he’s done with his friend Matt Reeves’ film, Cloverfield? Did he really launch a massive, annoying internet campaign hyping a shallow little “will they or won’t they?” picture with shitty cinematography as the Godzilla of the Bratz generation?
The possibility irritates and amuses in equal measure, it would make for a VERY long movie, but you almost have to admire a man who’d so brazenly screw you over, Abrams’ ultimate reprisal against the people (myself included) who eventually saw Lost as the masturbation that it actually is. You want pointless? Abrams will give you pointless in spades, and this time you have to pay for it! Maybe the Statue of Liberty beheading was shown in the trailers out of context, it was the movie the characters in Reeves’ film were going to see, before catching a sushi special.
Eventually though, the monster does show up in largely fleeting glimpses and the advertising turns out to be fair; Cloverfield becomes a shockingly effective picture, exploiting its two primary influences (Godzilla, The Blair Witch Project) for all they are worth. I promised myself that I wouldn’t mention The Blair Witch Project in this post, no matter how pertinent, but all of the comparisons are unavoidably apt. Cloverfield is EXACTLY how you imagine that crossbreeding, and the film milks the dread that’s inherent in the limited vantage point of view that’s taken from Witch. Something can be, will, is, anywhere, chaos ready to spring at any moment. This gimmick revitalizes the cliches of the stomping giant monster movie; everything feels more immediate, disorienting, and jarring.
There’s actually a third influence, and it’s been just as roundly cited by the critics: the 9/11 attacks. Can I make a deal with all directors of giant critter movies in the next decade or so? If you want to make a just plain, balls out monster movie, great. If you want to make a richer film that deals in some sort of metaphorical way with the anxiety and ego deflation that the 9/11 attacks have brought on, then great, more than welcome to do so. I would, however, like to halt all future orders of the plain monster movie that makes just enough allusions to something deeper in the effort to get taken seriously when it really, truly has nothing else on its mind. Spielberg came close with his visceral, brilliant War of the Worlds, but mucked it up with an ending that’s anti-climactic and insulting even for him. The Mist’s pretensions get more and more absurd the farther you get from the theatre, etc, etc.
And I imagine that some will try to pin a tag of satire to Cloverfield. The characters are so intensely shallow and irritating that you can’t help but feel that somebody’s leg is being pulled somewhere. You keep waiting for the filmmakers to show some bit of awareness of the characters’ self-absorption, but they never do. Family is, with the exception of one brief, careless scene, never broached, all we’re supposed to care about is whether one tootsie can find another in a building that turns out, in a nifty development, to have partially toppled over.
The film, on its own terms, does work though, and the monster, when he properly appears, is a humdinger (all that “impossible to describe” hype is nonsense, I could sum him up in about five words) but the problem is that the film works just well enough for you to wish that the filmmakers had been a touch more ambitious and actually, for once, explored the society that’s getting eaten for a change, without the hypocrisy. Will someone ever do that? That’s a “will they or won’t they” for another day.
★★★
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