Election (2005); Triad Election (2006)
Election and its sequel, Triad Election, have been playing in various festivals over the last few years, the buzz around them and their director, the prolific Johnny To, being considerably strong. The buzz is justified. Both films are tight, mean little gangster movies, and the now obligatory Faustian morality of the genre (still so overwhelmingly powerful in the first two Godfathers) works here too, because To isn’t trying to outdo Coppola in the Shakespearean grandeur department. To, like David Chase of The Sopranos, sees things more matter of factly.
The characters sell their souls for money and power, but it’s seen here as part of an inevitable process, an organic governing of society that involves the actual government, the triad (like our mafia) and assorted big businesses. The extinguishing of morality is viewed as evolutionary rather than tragic. To paraphrase a masterpiece that also happens to deal in inescapable corruption, To sees the future, though his films are quick to point out that the future, the past, and the present are inseparable.
At around 90 minutes and change each, you should just go for it and watch the Election films in a double bill, the majority of the stuff I just mentioned doesn’t come into play until the second, better, deeper film. Election is, inescapably, concerned with character introduction, we meet our various organizations and figure out the lay of the land as the forthcoming election for the Chairman of the Wo Sing Triad reaches its conclusion.
The election is meant to prevent violent upheavals in leadership, but I imagine you know how effective that turns out to be. The election of this first film is a close race between Lam Lok (Simon Yam), cold, calm, middle class, suburban looking, and Big D (Tony Leung Ka Fai) a dangerous hot head who resents the likelihood of finishing in second place. If you know your gangster movies, then you know Lok is the more dangerous, and this is confirmed beyond a shadow in the film’s abrupt, savage ending.
Election is a bit too dense for its own good. I hate to penalize films that make you work for the plot but I feel that it ultimately doesn’t benefit this film, particularly when compared to Triad Election. Election has a middle act that bogs down in the hunt for a relic that you don’t really care about, with convoluted loyalties that don’t ultimately add up to a whole lot; Triad Election is almost a horror film, following Jimmy (Louis Koo), a secondary character from the first film, as he takes on Lok for control of the triad. Where the first film feels cluttered, Triad Election is confident and more personal, detailing one person’s disintegrating integrity at a hushed, haunting distance. I know “distance” and “personal” don’t normally go hand in hand, but such is the strange tone that To works so well here.
This second film is also more violent and over the top, the lurid set pieces contributing to an escalating sense of a society reaching the brink of collapse, and being reigned back in by a larger structure of deeper corruption. Tradition, again, still turns out to be about who has the biggest stick. Several scenes should be mentioned, but let’s leave it at just one, that of several gangsters, in bizarre animal and clown masks that recall Kubrick’s The Killing, burying someone alive, the steady hum of a vent the only soundtrack. The broad arcs of gangster films are usually the same, it’s the bits of “business” in between that make or break them. Triad Election has enough great little vignettes of inhumanity for five pictures, but I’m going to let you discover the others for yourself.
Election : ★★★
Triad Election : ★★★½
Day Twenty-Six: The Roost (2005)
The Roost is an exceptionally low budget shocker that concerns a group of young adults (heading to a friend’s wedding) who run afoul a deadly roost of vampire bats. This would be awful enough, I’d imagine being eaten alive by killer vampire bats to be extremely unpleasant, except, the bats also turn you into a sort of zombie upon biting, and then the zombie can turn another person into a zombie, and before long we’ve got more bats and zombies than we know what to do with.
The Roost is not very good, in fact, its so poor in places that it plays more like a film you’d see on campus than a real theatre. The writer-director, Ti West, is obviously trying to pad a short into a feature film, and the result is some of the longest 78 minutes you’ll find at your videostore, or mailbox, or however you come about meeting your viewing needs. Among other things The Roost features a particularly pointless framing device: Tom Noonan (always welcome) appears in the beginning, middle and end to comment on the story like a host from one of those 1970s specials, or the Crypt Keeper. What this has to do with vampire bats and zombies is beyond me. The first five minutes of the film is the camera almost literally spacing out around Noonan’s castle. You may not make it all the way through this one.
Still, there’s some potential here. West is very young, and I imagine he had little to work with, and there is the occasional image that works. West has also found a slightly different menace and an effective setting for his film. The horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden executive produced and appears in The Roost, and he did the same for West’s forthcoming Trigger Man, which has already received some very favorable notices. West is also currently finishing Cabin Fever 2. If West makes it, perhaps The Roost will one day be a bizarre curiosity, until then though, its something you’d watch five minutes of before flipping the channel.
Day Twenty-Two: The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
What are we to make of The Devil’s Rejects ? I admit that I didn’t much care for Rob Zombie’s film when I first caught it over summer of 2005. I thought the film reveled in a certain vile killer chic, and laughed along with its band of madmen (who seem to be modeled after Charles Manson) as they indulged in relentless, prolonged scenes of torture. Zombie even perversely denies us the pleasure of a good guy, the cop pursuing them is just as insane as they are, the fact that he’s on the right side of the law seems to be more by accident than design.
I thought House of 1000 Corpses, his prior film as writer-director, was stylish, a more watchable than usual entry in the neverending chain that is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff. Rejects is interested in more though and I got on its wavelength in subsequent viewings. The film has an appealing lunatic bite, a flamboyant sting of lawlessness to it, and it’s in this acknowledgement of lawlessness that the film’s one truly great scene emerges. One of the killers, (Bill Mosely, in a performance that should get him more work) notices a potential victim praying to God, and laughs, and screams to the sky, if there is a God then strike me down with lightening. For a moment, we’re dealing in the pure, primal, animal fear of breakdown, of chaos that powers most great horror films.
You sense, like many recent horror directors, Zombie’s infatuation with past horror junk, but Zombie’s too head over heels in love with the tropes of the genres to overly intellectualize it or quote mark it like other filmmakers who’ll remain nameless. Zombie gets carried away and roots for the bad guy because the good guy’s squareness is repellent to him. He’s too busy embuing The Devil’s Rejects with a hellfire energy to instill it with any moral compass, and I dig the lack of hypocrisy, the cojones of Zombie. This thing rocks and rolls, and seems to be entirely uninterested in anyone’s opinion beyond it’s creator’s.
It also helps that Zombie has a found a mildly more original schtick this time. If Corpses was TCM, then Rejects is TCM part 2 as remade by Sam Peckinpah. The MTV splatter is gone here, and replaced by a dry, oversaturated Western cinematography that’s a breath of fresh air for the genre. We open with the mentally diseased Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe, if you’ve thought he’s chewed scenery in the past, you’ve seen nothing yet) opening fire on the Firefly Clan’s home, the family from Corpses, who murdered his brother in the prior film. Right away Zombie lays on the hyperbole: killers dressed in homemade armor, shotguns blazing with no apparent kickback, a Sheriff who walks in the line of fire like the Terminator, the mayhem reaching a gorgeous crescendo when a character fails to off themselves to spite someone else. Cue the Allman Brothers.
Zombie’s zeal is both his greatest asset and strongest limitation. One can’t tell where the satire ends and the misguided begins. Zombie lays on the purpilish dialogue, the Lynard Skynard, and the Tarantinoish digressions (though Tarantino would probably never sideline from the plot long enough to consider chicken fucking) and you’re left wondering if this filmmaker has any self-consciousness at all. That is, ulimately, the thrill of a Rob Zombie movie, or at least the first two Rob Zombie movies.
A teensy bit of self-consciousness might help though. Zombie could stand to learn that certain moments don’t need slow-mo to sell them or that some people don’t talk like ironically articulate white trash sailors (a much bigger problem with his Halloween) but, even as he is, Zombie is something to appreciate, he’s seemingly untouched by doubt, and he’s the only person working who’d showcase Sid Haig in something that could be called a star performance. What’s a matter honey? Don’t you like clowns? Don’t you think they’re fucking funny?
Review: Color Me Kubrick (2005)
The poster for “Color Me Kubrick”, featuring John Malkovich as a fruity, vaguely malicious hen who seems to have jumped ship from the nearest John Waters film, promises a dark, campy, comedy that the film never rouses itself to deliver. John Malkovich is Alan Conway, a man who successfuly scammed drinks, sex, and lodging from various people (usually on the fringe of showbiz themselves) by claiming to be Stanley Kubrick. Conway looks nothing like Stanley Kubrick, and, when challenged, knows little of the man’s work, but his brazen confidence somehow fulfills people’s notion of how a reclusive, legendary filmmaker should act.
Director Brian W. Cook (who, it should be noted, served as an assitant director on Eyes Wide Shut) has fun re-staging Conway’s exploits as broad visual parodies of Kubrick’s most famous films, and Malkovich truly has to be seen to be believed, he’s bizarre even by the standards of the Malkovich canon, but the film, ultimately, goes nowhere. “Color Me Kubrick” serves us, for 86 minutes, the same scene over and over again: Conway does his schtick, collects his reward, the mark discovers the truth, Conway runs off. Eventually, Conway fakes his way into a mental institute to evade the press and potential legal difficulty. Oops, I ruined the big ending.
- Bowen
Review: Harsh Times (2005)
Remember the first hour of the Denzel Washington thriller “Training Day”? Allow me to refresh your memory, it was funny, scary, and, especially for a studio film, disarmingly ambigious. Is play-by-his-own-(Hollywood)-set-of-rules veteran cop leading naive rookie (Ethan Hawke) to Hell, or simply showing him the only power plays that living and working in the batteground known as contemporary L.A. allowes? It turns out that we’re going to Hell (or are we already there?) and that Washington is the devil, and at about this point, director Antoine Fuqua pumps “Training Day” up with a bunch of over the top stylistics and Washington’s performance, at this point one of his best, appears to turn into a contempo version of the simmering demon fury of Pacino in “Scarface.” The more “intense” it got, the more I felt like I had been baited and switched.
“Training Day” was written by David Ayer, and he has written and directed “Harsh Times”, another seamy side of L.A. story. “Harsh Times” is about Jim (Christian Bale) and Mike (Freddy Rodriguez) two upper twenties guys torn between the lure of the rough life: selling guns, stealing drugs, screwing whomever they please, and the more conventional, acceptable life, they both have long term relationships with whom they struggle to stay good for, and jobs with benefits and taxable, above the table paychecks. Jim is a veteran of the Iraq war, and was honorably discharged for reasons that remain vague, but we know it still haunts him, and spurs him. Jim continually needs to create scenarios of equal danger for himself here in his homeland, and Mike knows he can only get away with it for so long, before he, or both of them, are killed.
So yes, Ayer has written his “Mean Streets”, about the strain one’s insanity places on a lifelong friendship. But, unlike Training Day, Ayer doesn’t let a lot of plot or structure get in his way, and this is all for the better. “Harsh Times” is exhilaratingly free form, depending entirely on the character’s whims, and the wide (and interesting) gallery of low lifes they encounter. Ayer has a gift with obscene dialogue that seems to bubble up on the spot, to reinforce and check machismo, ego, and id. As a diretor, Ayer doesn’t usually make the newbie mistake of showing off, punching up the material, to land a job directing Bad Boys III.
Christian Bale, probably needs to sell out and do a romantic comedy with Kate Hudson soon, because I’m not sure how long he can keep up this kind of pace, playing these kind of psychos (I’m counting Batman). That said, I’m tempted to call “Harsh Times” his best performance yet. Bale is extremely gifted, but I sometimes sense an actorly self-congratulation in him. Not so here. Jim is part DeNiro’s Johnny Boy from Mean Streets, but he’s smarter and more calculating than Johnny Boy (who really was pure id), and that makes him, of course, more dangerous. Jim is trying to get on with the Feds (the opening of the film sees him rejected from the LAPD) and their obliviousness (actually its closer to apathy) lends the film a sly commentary without resorting to “the state of things” pedantry. Bale’s performance is an authentic live wire, you honestly, and thrillingly, don’t know what he’s going to do next, wave a gun, or kiss you goodbye. The Jim role doesn’t play like a screenwriterly “troubled guy” and Bale doesn’t forget to clue you into Jim’s likeablity and the casual sexiness he can turn on like a switch.
Freddy Rodriguez is the good friend, and that’s always a little thankless, but he doesn’t have the burden of being the film’s conscience like Harvey Keitel did in “Mean Streets”. Mike is truly Jim’s co-conspirator, and they are both creatures of instinct, devoid of Scorsese’s obessive Catholic instrospection. Ayer is more interested in capturing a casual, amoral vibe, a beesnest of thug life that recalls the work of novelist George Pelecanos. Rodriguez proved in the otherwise skippable “Havoc” that he can find the devious tunes in his angel, choir boy face, he’s the honor roll student who’ll shive you in the ribcage.
The women, predictably in this kind of movie, are basically Concerned Wife, or Concerned Girlfriend. Eva Longoria is surpringly competent playing Rodriguez’s significant other and Tammy Trull finds a bruised elegance as Marta, the girl who Christian Bale loves but pokes in the face with a gun anyway. My only real problem, and its small, is the film’s ending, somebody’s gotta die, you know it, I know it, and Ayer certainly knows it, but what if they didn’t? In the case of the otherwise almost terrific “Harsh Times’ the biggest shock would be no shock at all.
- Bowen
Review: Factotum (2005)
The summary on the Netflix sleeve that accompanies “Factotum” says the following: “Based on Charles Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical novel, this edgy drama centers on a rebel writer with absolutely no desire to live a conventional life. A rootless jack-of-all-trades, Henry Chinaski (Matt Dillon) works in the factories and warehouses of Los Angeles and gets by just fine as long as he can indulge in his four primary loves — women, drinking, gambling and writing. Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei and Fisher Stevens co-star.”
All of this is technically true, but its misleading, and implies that “Factotum” is another of those, glory of the sexy, drunk, unemployed writer movies, that, while an appealing fantasy, (especially for an unpublished writer) is generally bullshit. Most unpublished writers look more like the guy who works at the laundry mat down the street than Matt Dillon, and they aren’t drifting in and out of beds belonging to women who look like Marisa Tomei, they are probably living with their mothers. These films generally pretend to be about flying in the face of convention, rejecting the usual, the safe, the staid, in the pursuit of art, but they are really more about the fantasy of not having to work, getting laid, being on a perpetual vacation only with the self-congratulation that comes with being a “writer”.
“Factotum” is so much better because it acknowledges all of that hypocrisy, and because Chinaski is aware of it himself, he doesn’t ask for pity, and so we begin to root for him, and laugh (in a black comic way) at the ways he perpetually screws up. Matt Dillon is terrific, I’ve never gotten why he hasn’t become more of a force in the industry, though it may be because his looks come with a danger that feels legitimate, and may scare people off a little (he seems uncomfortable in studio fluff). The film has an appealing, rambling vibe that reminded me a bit of the even better Steve Buscemi movie “Trees Lounge”, which was equally honest about its lead character. Watch them both over the weekend and feel better about yourself. A little superiority can go a long way.
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