The Clash: Westway to the World (1977-1986)

2000, Directed by Don Letts



This is another in our Julien Temple retrospective although it is directed by Don Letts, it is clearly influenced by Temple's first movie. Temple's second movie about the Sex Pistols came out around the same time.

I suppose the thing that keeps rock documentarians up at night screaming into their pillows is the Spinal Tap movie. After one sees this -- and nearly everyone who is going to go see a rock documentary HAS seen This Is Spinal Tap -- how can one not draw comparisons to every other rock doc? Letts avoids those Spinal Tap moments by just letting the members of the band speak, one on one, directly to the camera and then edits their commentary through a complete history of the band, from their humble origins, through their Sex Pistols & Ramones epiphanies, to the height of their artistic career (London Calling) and then through the excesses and finally their explosive break-up. Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon who have the most to say dominate most of the commentary. Even when they describe their biggest excesses - the "Stalinist" cult-like nature of the early band, the Sandinista LPs and Strummer's obvious hurt from this critical disaster, they never come off as seeming silly.

Letts also allows each of the members to paint portraits of themselves and you leave with a better understanding of the often volatile personalities behind the band. Strummer comes off as the thoughtful leader of the group. He mainly found himself trying to keep the peace between the arrogant but talented Mick Jones and the wild Paul Simonon while keeping an eye on their junkie drummer, Topper Headon, who would be the most tragic member of the band if Strummer hadn't died last year. I could watch Strummer talk all day in this film - visually, it's hard to take your eyes off him. But it's clear that each member needed the other. Mick was the ego, Paul the id and Strummer the parental ego.

Here's what Letts has said about the technique of letting the musicians speak for themselves (source below) although its surprising that he says Strummer was disinterested!:

Well, I knew their party line, I knew what lines I could and couldn't cross, and I knew how far I could push them as well. I thought about having a voiceover because most band members can't string a couple of sentences anyway. These guys didn't have that problem. I'm really pleased that they managed to tell their story themselves. That was what was interesting about doing this project, I realized they were all still The Clash. Mick was into every single damn detail, Topper wanted to get some money, Joe was disinterested, and Paul wanted to look good.

In terms of flow, Letts mainly works chronologically although some stories appear out of sequence. Letts quickly sets the scene and suggests that The Clash's roots were in the dark side of '68 protest rock, the Rolling Stones "Street Fighting Man" and reggae. Strummer's first group The 101ers was a garage band and he describes how inadequate he felt after seeing the Pistols. He meets Jones and Simonon at the dole line and thinks they are going to beat him up. Letts shows what looks like footage from their first rehearsal and first gigs. Their political roots, some might say, are shallow but Letts shows their participation in the black riots in London ("White Riot" was written about that), protest reggae and the members admit that early on Strummer was basically running a "Stalinist" cult kicking out one of their drummers because he was too materialist. You'll have to make your own mind up whether their politics were mere posing what with their major label backing and such or truly heartfelt. I think the music speaks for itself. We then see them graduate to stadium shows - their clothes get flashier and their body language gets more hostile towards each other. And then finally, their odd breakup (during the photo shoot for Combat Rock) is recounted by the photographer.

And then there are the stories -- the arrest for killing pigeons. The Clash beating up a producer who got on their nerves. The ground-breaking London Calling sessions with Guy Stevens and how they came up with the classic cover photograph. Mick and Joe going to Jamaica to bond and leaving Paul behind (he's still bitter).

The only real Spinal Tap moments come when Letts allows others to speak for The Clash and thankfully this is very little. A rock critic comes on and intones about "tower blocks and urban alienation and disaffected youth and all that..." Terry Chimes, their first drummer who "didn't particularly like them" and his desire for a fast car getting him kicked out of the band are, perhaps, unintentionally funny. The sound engineer

Letts has clearly seen Temple's first Sex Pistols film. He uses similar pacing but avoids the worst aspects of that film by letting the band speak for themselves. Temple's second Sex Pistols film (The Filth and Fury) does the same. An interesting note, Letts was the original DJ at the Roxy, arguably the first London punk rock club. He directed all The Clash albums. He also appears in "I Love the '80s" on VH-1!

The DVD extras are nice but its disappointing that they couldn't release a second disk with all the original concert footage and videos. There is a truckload of extra interview footage (more Strummer, yay!) so I guess that makes up for it. Note - he talks about the band Suicide and how he thought Alex Vega was "the bravest man" he ever saw perform since the band was so hated in England. Poignant to watch considering his early death.

Research links:
Here's an interview with Letts in which he references Temple:

GI: So where did filmmaking come into the picture?

DL: People were picking up guitars and the stage got kind of filled up. I wanted to pick up something so I picked up a Super 8 camera. There was myself and a guy called Julien Temple. Punk rock encouraged people to get involved themselves, the whole DIY ethic that still works for me on a day-to-day basis.

Meta-Note: I've redesigned my template a little. Thanks to Loki's template for providing the source for my "currently watching" on the sidebar.

Quentin Tarantino has a weblog

I believe it. Who else what spend so much time defending himself against accusations of sexism?

I apologize if you found my portrayal of female characters sexist, but that wasn't my "agenda." Perhaps you missed the point of KILL BILL -- The Bride is underestimated by Budd, who treats her as a stupid animal. She gets her revenge. She even kills Bill. She is reunited with her daughter. If you find that strong pro-female message "sexist," I can only say that you're trying to find faults in my work, alright?

Quentin's Web Diary. Well, it's sort of a diary -- so far it's mostly him answering questions from fans but that's okay by me.

Bullet (1996): "My body shall pay recompense"

Set on the East Coast, using a starkly realist tone, the direct-to-video Bullet tells the story of the final journey of a what appears to be an irredeemable convict thug. Where Earth Girls was a light and airy comedy-musical with a standard Hollywood ending, Bullet is a dark, morose and at times uncomfortable film with a much less happy ending. However, like Earth Girls, Temple is once again thrust into a situation where he is working with an actor-writer and its hard to tell where the writer's vision ends and Temple's begins. In this case, the writer, Mickey Rourke, couldn't be more different than Valley Girl Julie Brown. Rourke, in perhaps his last leading role, co-wrote this with Bruce Rubenstein, who explains in the featurette that it is based on true events in his life.

Rourke's film is very much an actor's film, utilizing a talented ensemble that includes a young Adrian Brody as younger brother Ruby, Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs) as his mentally ill older brother Louis and Tupac Shakur as Tank, Butch's prison nemesis. Rourke plays Butch, an ex-convict who has been in prison for several years and is apparently at the root of the dysfunction of his lower middle-class Jewish (non-practicing) Brooklyn family. Butch was a promising ball player who turned sour when he discovered drugs and whose demand for money to support his habit so terrorized his parents that they slept with their door locked. His older brother, a delusional Veteran who thinks he is still in the special forces, blames Butch for the disintegration of the family and complains that things were better, if they can get better, when Butch was in the slammer. His alcoholic father can't stand to look at his son and fears that he will go back to his old thieving and drugging ways. Ruby, who was 12 when Butch went away, is an aspiring artist who looks up to his brother.

Now Butch is back from prison and is reverting to his old junkie ways. Or is he? The story invokes Sun Tzu at one point. Tzu was famous for his observation that the best warrior uses deception to achieve his goals. Is Butch really back to his old ways or does he have a plan to redeem himself to his family?

The story opens up flying over a pastoral Autumn forest with classical music playing in the background. One almost thinks the next scene will be some Merchant and Ivory mansion or a prep school. Instead, we fly into a huge a prison as rap music takes over the soundtrack and float down until we meet Butch. It is his last day in prison and none too soon to judge by the menacing glares he receives from other inmates. As he leaves his cell he tells the officer that he can "bet his ass" that Butch won't be back.

He meets his brother and his best pal Lester, a proto-metrosexual, at the prison gate, gives the place the bird and pulls a bag of heroin of his pocket, "courtesy of the state." He and Lester shoot up while Ruby drives them back into the city. Upon arriving, Lester points out two customers of Tank (Tupac Shakur), rich kids from Long Island whom Butch proceeds to humiliate by stealing their clothes and money. When attacked by one of Tank's minions for messing with their customers, Butch responds by sticking a knife in his eye and tells him to warn Tank that he is back in town. We are certainly led to believe that this is one irredeemable hardened thug.

But little hints are given that Butch is not what he appears to be. He shoots up alone in his room and flashbacks to prison where he sees danger lurking everywhere. Since the film drops repeated hints that Butch was abused in prison, raped and sodomized, we can guess that the people he sees in the vision are the people who menaced him. We see that his drug addiction is most likely tied to the total loss of his dignity and the hellish time he had in prison. We then see him in his cell looking at one of Ruby's drawings. He later tells Ruby that he should make something of himself using his artistic talent. And its not too much of a stretch to find out that this is his objective -- to redeem himself by saving Ruby from the same life that he led. How he does this is the crux of the film and the central problem. Other than getting us to slowly like this guy Butch, the film really has nowhere to go and meanders for the last hour or so building up to the conclusion where Butch sacrifices himself to save his brother.

This was probably an unfortunate experience for Temple since the movie seems like it was almost dictated by the star in a heavy-handed fashion. There's even a scene where Rourke preaches to some kids in a bathroom not to use drugs. Rourke, who once demanded that there be a scene in Barfly where he looks into the mirror, has a similar scene here -- except this time he smashes the mirror with a golf club. It is a dolorous and masochistic performance -- uncomfortable. Ted Levine's character is also hard to watch. An abusive schizophrenic who pads around the house in soiled underwear and teaches neighborhood kids how to use a knife to slice necks, he has little to do in the movie except serve as Butch's conscience. He has bugged the house and listens to the conversations in his bunker-room providing commentary ("buncha pansies!" when listening to Butch and Lester discuss homosexuality). The only reason I think he is here is to give Butch a bit of an excuse for what would otherwise be thought of as a weakness of character and apparent sociopathy. Like Butch, Louis is not what he seems. Although he claims to be a Marine veteran (he cites action at Lebanon and Vietnam), he sometimes says he was in the 7th Cav (the Army is 7th Cavalry) and other times says he was in "Special Forces." At the end, though, he shows that perhaps he isn't totally delusional and redeems himself by exacting some revenge in Butch's name.

Temple is a background player in this actor's movie - even the music was reportedly dictated by Mickey Rourke (Butch is a laughingly a Barry White fan and Lester, his proto-metrosexual pal, listens to "I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt"). Temple's main influence is through the visuals and the sound. To maintain a constant tension he uses the constant rumbling of the overhead trains. He finds both beauty in watching the trains pass each other and makes a statement of how the world is passing by this drug-torn neighborhood. He releases tension by languishing on the street art and the garish statues in Coney Island. Unfortunately, beyond that, he's just the guy behind the camera. I'm guessing he may have helped Tupac in his acting scenes. Shakur really underplays his character and, as rappers go, was not a bad actor. Still, this was an offbeat choice for Temple -- a stark crime drama set in foreign milieu and he have to give him some props for trying something new.

Notes: Rourke's own redemption may be at hand as he takes his first leading role since Bullet in the much-anticipated Sin City.

Earth Girls Are Easy: So quick bright things come to confusion

Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)

Julien Temple sold out. That's the short of it. After such a promising beginning with, well, Absolute Beginners came this turkey. Despite Beginner's cult popularity in the States, it was a bomb in England -- Temple fell into making mainstream rock videos for Culture Club and David Bowie. Arriving at Hollywood, himself as alien as the furry beasts in this film, to reinvigorate his film career was the next choice.

Earth Girls suffers from a problem that plagues so many Hollywood movies. Too many cooks, little identity. I count about three different movies here, all of which go in different directions at differing times. Movie #1 is a rock video musical starring the two-hit wonder and co-writer Julie Brown. Aficionados of Trivial Pursuit: 80's Edition will know Julie as the other Julie Brown - the non-Downtown Julie Brown, a San Fernando Valley Girl who somehow broke the charts with "I'm A Blonde" and its follow-up "Big and Stupid" -- both songs plus a few others are conspicuously placed in Earth Girls almost in Bollywood fashion. The songs rarely have anything to do with the plot but they're colorful and fun, reminiscent of the '80's style song and dance rock videos. We'll call this movie "Julie Brown is Easy"...

Move #2 is the one starring Quirky Hollywood It Couple (of the moment) Jeff Goldblum and his spouse Geena Davis, trying to recreate the magic that they fleetingly captured in The Fly (1986). Their movie is another Beauty and the Beast love story - except this time Goldblum transforms from the Beast, in this case a blue furry alien, into a chest-shaven "hunk", well, at least a hunk in Geena's eyes. Replete with a tribute to The Nutty Professor and some poorly realized 3 Stooges slapstick with his fellow aliens, this 2nd movie is a might bit trite and predictable - a standard Hollywood flick rushing towards a happy ending and thousands of empty popcorn boxes. There there's the sex scene. Well we won't get into though. And even though he is a little more subdued than other films, Jeff Goldblum is still, well, Jeff Goldblum, love him or leave him. There's a whole weird psychology to these Goldblum-Davis films, too, that I'm not sure I wanna go into. This movie is called "Goldblum and Davis -- Together Again, If you Care"

Finally, is the one made by Mr. Temple and his Absolute Beginners cinematographer Oliver Stapleton. It's an expressionistic movie that questions just who the aliens are -- the three horny critters from beyond or the La-La land of Angelyne (the billboard goddess's first movie), stoner-surfer pool guys and the neon billboard bedecked Strip. This movie is a sort of plasticland version of The Brother from Another Planet and a Top-40 Repo Man. The highlight is the aftersex dream that Geena Davis has. It's an over-the-top tribute to 50's alien films and its perhaps the film that might have been had Temple been given more artistic reign. Really, if you get ahold of this immediately fast forward to this scene -- it's awesome and it saves the film from being a total washout. Maybe this film should have been called "Hollywood Films Aren't Easy"...



Each movie foils the other and the result is a mis-mash with some assorted high points and plenty of groaning, reach-for-the-fast-forward moments. Temple is trapped between Julie Brown's self-promotion and the Davis-Goldblum quirk-a-thon and tries to make the best of it. Like Spike Lee's School Daze, the other rock video musical that year, Temple provides plenty of references to past Hollywood movies set with a late '80's pop soundtrack. I do like some of the imagery Temple manages to slip in - the plastic spaceship dropping in a swimming pool, the aliens cavorting through a suburban home, Angelyne & her famous car station and the surfer's wagon getting lodged into the giant donut.

Among the high points:
- The opening scene in the garish alien spaceship is a psychedelic homage to the X-rated Flesh Gordon and '50's EC Comic Books
- Jim Carrey in a pre-fame ensemble part has his moments as Wiploc, the red alien who cleans up well as a surfer dude. Both he and Wayans have a blast satirizing valley culture.
- Proof that Damon Wayans can't dance (a stand-in and special effects save him).
- Fetish factor: A whorish lingerie-clad blonde-wigged Geena "the Amazon" Davis smashing up her cheating boyfriend's kitsch L.A. bachelor pad, microwaving his football and burning his Madonna albums. Mitigating fetish factor: She's singing a schmaltzy song while she's doing it.
- L.A. Observatory converted into the Deca Dance nightclub

Program Notes: Julien Temple Film Festival

Julien Temple was born in London in 1953. He had little interest in cinema until, while studying at King's College, Cambridge, he discovered the director who would become his lifelong hero: Jean Vigo. When he went on to the National Film and Television School, he encountered another and, for him, equally influential manifestation of the anarchist spirit: The Sex Pistols.

Source: Screenonline

As noted in the previous posting, Temple has bemoaned that he came into directing at the wrong time:

As I was saying, when I started making films it was a joke if you were young and wanted to make a film. They would literally say, "Fuck off and come back in 30 years and we might listen to you if you've got a nice gray beard." Whereas now it's the other way around. Film should be made at any age, obviously, but it was a shame that you couldn't do anything when you were young. (Source: Bomb Magazine)

Temple has directed countless rock music videos. He is the go-to guy for many "classic rockers" which is ironic given his beginnings. Unlike some of the more contemporary "big director" types who do music videos like Spike Jonze and Michael Gondry, Temple seems to be merely putting food on the table. Although some of the videos do showcase some of his interesting imagery and camera angles, they are mostly straitforward takes that emphasize the artist over any storyline. Perhaps the reason so many of these stars like to work with him is because he is unimpressed:

"I'm not at all interested in rock and roll stardom. I never was. That's why the Sex Pistols were wonderful. I was always interested in what people were saying and what the music did to me rather than whether the people were stars. And actually, the more you work with big stars, the less impressed you are." (source: Bomb Magazine)

Here's are just some Temple's videos (the more notable ones are in color):

• David Bowie - Blue Jean
• David Bowie - Absolute Beginners
  
• The Kinks - Come Dancing
• The Rolling Stones - Undercover of the Night
• Sade - Smooth Operator
• The Stray Cats - Rock This Town
• Wilson Phillips - Hold On; Release Me
• Neil Young - Rockin' in the Free World
• Tom Petty "Free Fallin'"
• Van Halen: "Jump"
• Culture Club: "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?"
• The Kinks, "Predictable".
• Stray Cats, "Stray Cat Strut".
• The English Beat, "Save It for Later".
• Mitch Ryder, "When You Were Mine".
• The Kinks, "Don't Forget To Dance".
• The Rolling Stones, "She Was Hot".
• The Kinks, "State Of Confusion".
• Accept, "Balls to the Wall".
• The Kinks, "Do It Again".
• Mick Jagger, "Just Another Night".
• Mick Jagger, "Lucky in Love".
• Neil Young, "This Note's for You".
• Tin Machine (Bowie), "Under the God".
• Tom Petty, "Yer So Bad".
• Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, "Into the Great Wide Open".
• Neil Young, "Unknown Legend".
• ZZ Top, "Pincushion".

IMDB's complete list is here. Missing is perhaps one of his bigger videos: Kim Carnes, "Bette Davis Eyes"

Coming full circle and slight off-topic here's a fun link to a video-music mash-up of scenes Temple's movies with a Madonna video:

Ray of Gob - Source

Julien Temple Film Retrospective

Time to look at the life's output of The Sex Pistols's filmographer. It's been almost 25 years since Julien's first film The Great Rock and Roll Swindle scandalized the world. Temple might be considered part of the first punk filmmaker generation. Or was he just a lucky guy who glommed onto Malcolm McLaren's ride of the century. Or did McLaren recognize a raw talent? In any case, his career hasn't been a stellar one. In interviews he has complained that when he arrived in the early '80s he was considered too young and by the time the 90's rolled around he was considered too old. Relegated to making Wilson-Phillips and Janet Jackson videos to make ends meet, Temple managed to make a few potentially great ones and a few critically panned movies. The time is ripe for a retrospective and a reconsideration!

The Red Envelope, if you please?


Our line-up:

Earth Girls Are Easy (Special Edition DVD)
Bullet
The Filth and the Fury: A Sex Pistols Film
Pandaemonium
UK Subs: Punk Can Take It
Absolute Beginners

Two other punk filmmakers have been invited to be part of this retrospective to examine how much Temple influenced their work.

Clash: The Westway to the World (1977-1986) (Don Letts)
24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom)

Asian Film Blogger

Here's a treat I found while trolling through MilkPlus's wonderful links. Tom Vick is a guy steeped in Asian cinema, has written for All Movie Guide on the subject and shows Asian movies at a museum. You're not going to find experts like this writing for the local paper - Tom is a good example of why the "blogosphere" (sorry, no other word) is such a useful thing.

He has started a blog where he writes about whatever interests him in this ouvre -- and that's a pretty wide swath as Asia includes China, Hong Kong, Japan, India (Bollywood) and so on. He also includes some useful links for those who want to read up on these films that are often hard to get information on -- at least in English.

His (fairly) new journal starts here if you want to get in on the ground floor - here's his mission statement from his first post:

Lately I’ve begun to realize that lots of people, especially here in the United States, no matter how curious or interested, may only be aware of a small fraction of what Asian cinema has to offer. This blog will be an attempt to share some of what I’ve been fortunate enough to discover, along with a few detours into more general film topics.

Worth checking on and adding to your RSS reader -- he will definitely be on my blogroll when I get around to constructing it.

Tom's latest film programming for Washington's Korean Film Festival 2004 can be seen here.

P.S. Thanks to Milkplus for including my meager offering in their blogroll. Read their latest review of Collatoral.

Irreversible: To confront the visage of offence

(this is a third draft and I think it's final but who knows...)

A Civil War colonel being carried off the bloody Gettysburg battlefield was heard to say about the carnage, "man proposes, God disposes." In Gasper Noe's nihilistic, brutal and, at times, tender Irreversible, there is no God to dispose - only man, acting out his most primal desires and fears while God watches silently above.

We are reminded of Tim Roth's character in Invincible when considering Noe's cinematic technique of running the film in reverse: there is no future, "just a state of things and events" where "man hurries past"- and we are also reminded that this was the philosophy of a man aspiring to join the National Socialist elite.

In Irreversible, Noe takes us on a terrifying and disconcerting ride through a single day (in reverse) that "starts" with a brutal murder inspired by an equally brutal rape and ends with a quiet morning under a blue sky, the beginning of this fateful day. What is it all about? Noe only offers at the beginning and end of the film that "time destroys everything." But this is only a day in a life, so we have to conclude he is saying the events of the film are just a microcosm of a larger drama that has been and will go on playing beyond the events of this film. In this sense, time in itself is a collaborator in man (and his civilizations) irrational urge to destroy (or dispose) of all that he holds dear. Where Noe's film fails is in trying to advance a credible reason for all this death and destruction.

Playing off our most primal fears, fear of violation, fear of being ostracized, fear of homosexuals and foreigners is generally the domain of horror and exploitation films and in many ways Irreversible mimics, at least in the beginning, many of the grindhouse genre of those films -- I Spit On Your Grave, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and so on. But Irreversible is not a film that belongs in the horror genre even if it borrows liberally from it. Consider the true first scene, where a sad, grotesque naked man (who played a torturous butcher in Noe's previous film) sitting on a bed in an apartment above an S&M club where a murder has just taken place intoning the movies "catchphrase": "time destroys everything." But we then learn that it isn't time that has destroyed this man, although age has certainly ravaged him. Instead he is an ex-convict, put in prison for having sex with his daughter - in other words his despair and circumstance is related to the very bad and destructive choice he has made. Another man, sitting fully clothed on the same bed responds:

Clothed man: "No bad deeds, just deeds."



Naked Man: "We gotta start over.  Gotta live. Go on fighting. Go on living"



Clothed: "Right. Got something to drink?"

The clothed man suggests man in his costume, hiding his true self and apologizing for his unspeakable deeds. The naked man represents man's irrepressible Id who confirms his unceasing drive to continue to destroy ("go on fighting"). They then cackle, much in the same way the Fates do in Macbeth over the action going on down below them. Fate is invoked several times in this film. First, of course, with the catchphrase which implies that time destroys things and that man is helpless to end it. Later in the film the female lead, Alex (Monica Bellucci) also invokes fate and says she "read" it is inescapable because of dreams of premonition.

Later we find that Ms. Bellucci's character dreams she was in a "tunnel that broke apart" and later that day she is raped in a tunnel. Her rape then enrages her male friends who subsequently commit a murder in a club below the two cackling men. In both cases, bad choices are made, emotionally driven in some cases and just stupid in others (Bellucci's character's choice to walk alone in a darkened tunnel). Noe's thesis, if this was his thesis, falls apart immediately. Time and fate aren't in play. The Fates are just as unknowing as the rest of us.



Or perhaps this is what Noe really meant but just made an incoherent film that doesn't support his thesis. Some reviewers have suggested this is the case. Noe has been interviewed as saying he just wanted to show a psychedelic trip which goes from good to bad - was he just joking or did he really intentionally intend to show something so blase and inconsequential. Press releases stated that the movie was made in a very short period of time and was, in some cases, improvised. His star Ms. Bellucci when asked what the film is about can only say its about vengeance. Critics like Rex Reed who have applauded the film say so because of the "ideas" it presents - but Reed is unable in his review to state just what these ideas are.

Let me take a stab. First, Noe does not believe in Fate. Yes time destroys all, but it is man that is time's agent. This film further suggests Noe instead has a belief in a world in which the most base and horrible things happen because of the human male's basic psychosis. Notice that I said male and not just human. The Dante like Hell that is "The Rectum" which opens the film has been criticized as being homophobic but I think Noe is just using the setting because it is one in which he can show ONLY men. It is ONLY men that are shown in the first half of the film, after all. Even the prostitutes, we are to find, are all transexuals. The two thugs that accompany the men in search of the rapist. The men in the restaurant. The taxi driver. All men.

We see scenes where two men, one who is repeatedly referred to as an ape and the other who appears calm and rational, racing through the streets asking people "where is The Rectum" and when they find the club called The Rectum asking the denizens where is La Tenia, Spanish for the tapeworm. The Rectum is the void - the void in man's heart and soul and the tapeworm is the psychosis that lives there. And in fact, La Tenia, the "villain" of this piece is, based on the rape scene, an extremely psychotic character. Like the two men that open the film, the two men (Marcus and Pierre) represent the Id and the ego that when combined can release murderous rage. That Pierre (the cool rational one) is the person who commits the murder and the fact that the person who dies is innocent (and not La Tenia) suggests a further absurdity.

In the second act we see our first woman. Not coincidentally, she is comatose, beaten and bloody. This second act features a seemingly equal number of men and women at play but for all the fun and games that goes on, at the bottom of it is a deep sexual tension. During this act, the fulcrum of the movie is a rape in the tunnel of Marcus and Pierre's lover and friend, respectively. For the only time in the movie, the camera rests and watches the horrible event unfold. It is a hard to watch 10 minutes of an anal rape followed by a brutal beating. Time goes backward from that scene into a party that verges on an orgy. Sexual tension between the main characters, near sexual orgies in a bedroom, the offer of sex (and sex enhancing drugs) in a bathroom dot this scene. In the only real non-sexual part of this scene, Monica Bellucci's character (Alex) hugs a pregnant friend and pats her stomach suggesting that there is a deeper seriousness lying in women made possible by their ability to create via childbirth. We later find that Alex herself is pregnant.

The film reverses again to a subway scene prior to the party, where we see the three main characters having a conversation about guess what, sex. The characters are uncomfortable even as they loudly argue about the most intimate details of their lives. Monica Bellucci's former lover and now friend (Pierre) is pressing her to tell him about her current sex life and why he we not a good performer with her. She tells him that he cared too much for women and he should care more about his own pleasure. Her ideal partner is her current boyfriend who we have seen mostly as a sort of asshole who says whatever is on his mind and only thinks of his own pleasure. But she also tells him that she can get off not just from physical activity but from seeing her partner get off. Whether she knows it or not, she is suggesting woman's basic predicament in being tied to men in her life in light of what the filmmaker seems to think about men in general.

The third act is set in serene places such as Alex's golden-hued home and an idyllic park. We are still in a male-female world but here the women is more in charge. The man (her boyfriend Marcus) teases and tries to trap her but she is making the decisions as to when and how they are going to have sex. The man retreats to go to the store and kisses Alex through a plastic shower curtain. They are together and despite their intimacy and despite the joy that their intimacy brings to them, they are still apart. Marcus leaves and Alex takes a pregnancy test and smiles in joy at the results. In another film, this scene might be more poignant since we are to assume that the brutal assault she will endure later that day will probably end the pregnancy but Noe presents it matter-of-factly.

The next scene is just as visually stunning as the first scene (the one featuring the murder) but is totally opposite. Instead of weird droning electronic music, we hear one of Beethoven's most beautiful pieces (the 7th Symphony). This final scene is simple. Monica Bellucci lays in a park reading a book as the camera swirls overhead. But through the magic of DVD, an examination of this final scene could not find any men in it. All the other people in the park are either women or children and most of the children look like little girls.

The scene also invokes Kubrick. It is an obvious homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not only is the starchild poster shown but the combination of the music with the swirling camera evokes both the spaceship scenes in 2001 and the final swirling psychedelic ending. Many have criticized Noe for having the pretensions to compare himself to Stanley Kubrick but I have always believe that Kubrick never really made movies about the actual subjects. Instead his movies were more about larger themes -- Full Metal Jacket (another movie with a first act that had no women), for instance, is about a similar issue - the tension between the sexes as personified by war -- The Shining is about man's cruelty to others based on societal pressures... I think Eyes Wide Shut is about repressed desires. I have no problem with Noe trying to identify with Kubrick.

Noe has made a visually stunning, cleverly structured film that is not really about a psychedelic trip or about just vengeance or even just a horrible day in a life of three people but instead a bleak, nihilistic message that man as a whole is doomed because of his inability to relate to women and each other and because of his own basic primal fears and desires. But his view of women seems simplistic in light of this. Are they not also destroyers and aren't men needed (at least in design) for the act of procreation. The rage that Marcus and Pierre feel would be justified, wouldn't it? Would it be safe to assume that if Marcus and Pierre were female they might have acted the same?

And then there's the ending. It looks hopeful, maybe or maybe not. The camera turns to a blue sky and through the shutter of a strobe light we see the cosmos. The strobe though is intense and hard to look at. Is the camera pointing at God? What is his role in all this? Or is Noe suggesting that because God remains so distant and dazzling that there is no hope? With that ending, I'm a bit lost. Is the message of hope just an artificial one seen through the shutter of an artificial medium - film -- or is it suggesting that man's brutality can't be cancelled out by woman's role in creation?

It took me several tries - but I think this is what Noe is getting at. Well, you may have your own opinions. If anything, this movie causes people to either gnash their teeth because of the a) violence b) rape scene or c) supposed racism/homophobia... but it has also caused some praise Noe as the Next Big Thing often without a good reason except that he's showing the brutality of the world to the petite bourgeois masses. I'm not ready to declare him the next Kubrick (and even Kubrick didn't always live up to his own baseline) but I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next as I'm sure it will be challenging.

Notes: As I may have suggested, this is by no means a "family movie" or even a first date movie. If you see it with other people, though... I would consider putting a moratorium on discussions about it until you give it several days to sink in. Also, watching it on DVD allows for some experimentation. I watched it once through by forwarding through the controversial scenes (you know which ones) to see if the film worked without them. I couldn't really come to any conclusions or insights doing this but its nice to be able to deconstruct a film like this. One might also try to watch it in the original order -- I didn't do this but I tried to do it with Memento (a movie which also uses a similar reverse time technique).

Office Space Extravaganza

Lumino Magazine has interviews with all the cast members of Office Space here. This was about the most truthful movie I have seen to date about what life was like in the '90s. My favorite scene is watching the office guys walk across concrete gullys and such to get to the restaurants next door. In office space land, there are no sidewalks. And of course anyone who lives in DC can sympathize with the classic opening traffic scene.

Thanks to kotke.org for the tip.

Greencine - Should I Reserve greenenvelopes.blogspot.com?

I've just activated a membership with Greencine, a Netflix-like service that boasts more indy, foriegn and obscure films. Since I'm doing a Julien Temple retrospective in the near future, I searched both services and actually found Netflix had one more film than Greencine. Score one for Netflix. I also looked for Grey Gardens -- and it's only available on Greencine.

I'm on the 2-DVD plan which costs $15 a month. We'll see if their service is as fast as Netflix. I'm getting three day turnaround on most DVDs. It helps that Netflix has a distribution center in nearby Gaithersburg.

David Raksin is Dead, Wrapped in Memory

David Raksin died this week at the age of 92. He was taught by Gershwin and Schoenberg, two great composers from the opposite end of the spectrum, worked for Chaplin and with Bernard Hermann, the great Hitchcock collaborator.

He's best known, as you will no doubt hear, for his theme from Laura but his scores for many movies is also worth considering. His legacy was great and his haunting music from Laura (forget the schmalzy renditions of the title song and rent the film) and other films influenced other more contemporary films such as Twin Peaks (TV) and later the wierd and wonderful movie Fire Walk With Me. Angelo Badalamenti kept with Raksin's '40s sensibility throughout the series, although his music is a bit more lush and ethereal. It's no coincidence that the name of the girl found in the first scene of Twin Peaks is Laura. Here's the theme from Fire Walk With Me. This music makes a great companion piece to pondering this man's long and fruitful life (I always like my tributes to musicians and composers to be either covers or music influenced by).

Alex Ross, who knew Raksin, writes a brief but interesting remembrance of the composer including this fascinating tidbit:

Incidentally, Raksin not only wrote a glorious, swaying theme for Laura but also introduced a striking electronic innovation. Everyone who's seen the movie remembers the scene in which Dana Andrews stares at Laura's portrait and falls under her spell. The mood is set by eerie shimmering chords on the soundtrack. What Raksin did — as he explained in an interview with Roy Prendergast, author of Film Music: A Neglected Art — was to record a series of piano chords with the initial attacks omitted. The engineer turned on the microphones only after each chord had been struck, and continued bringing up the levels until ambient noise saturated the ringing tones. Raksin then made tape loops from this spectral, disembodied sound. "It was the interplay of the partials without the ictus," he explained. Some years later, the Beatles used the same trick to create the massive piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life."

David Raksin, 1912-2004

Notes: This isn't an MP3 blog but at times I'll use audio. I do not own the server that this song came from - it is a "found object" and it may be removed at any given time. I have no idea if the server owns "copyright." The referring page for the MP3 is here. If you like the song, I suggest you buy it. Here's a link to various prices for this soundtrack where you will get a much better quality and full recording if you would like to purchase it. I recommend it heartily.

Here's an Amazon search on their classical music site for David Raksin.

The Movie Generation - Classic Trash Front and Center

Here's another decent Movie journal I've discovered recently written simply by someone who calls themselves Moviezilla. Not as wordy as MilkPlus, but the author knows his classic action-horror-comic book movie genres pretty well and I like those flicks just as well as I like the hoity-toity make-ya-think flicks... he voices strong opinions that he's more than happy to defend - I wish I was more like that, in fact.

Like the other cinemablogs, he uses plenty of images sprinkled throughout. I'm not sure if I'm going to go that way - as it takes a little more html elbow grease than I'm willing to expend - but it sure makes for a pretty presentation and occasionally helps driving home a point.

I'm also not sure I'd ever admit this:

Me and my brothers are, and have always been, avid readers of the Conan comic books. We still buy the weekly issue and use much of our time reading about this righteous mans ways. Conan of Cimmeria isn't your off the shelf type of hero, he's brutal in his ways, he's intelligent, he's muscular and can fight off every demon thrown his way. I think this is one of the many reasons why people like to read about him, he doesn't think twise when it comes to killing the bad guys, and most of all he doesn't sugarcoat the way he deals with them either.

... but then again, it's an example of the dedication and knowledge Moviezilla brings to the table -- that and someone of the spelling errors and I'm guessing he or she's a younger person - nothing wrong with that but you can turn on the spell checker in Blogger, you know, 'Zilla! At any rate, I come to praise ya and I hope to see more of your thoughts on the classic cheese of near yesteryear.

Anyway, when I get around to constructing a blog roll, this will sure to be in it. He has an atom feed (whether he/she knows it or not)- just append /atom.xml to end of the URL (below).

Movie Generation

Invincible: Nature Seems Dead, and Wicked Dreams Abuse

(image courtesy Netflix)

What is the measure of a man? Is it money and power? Is it strength? Is it goodness? Or is it a man's vision and what he does about it? Werner Herzog, in Invincible, his first film in 10 years, offers no easy answers but leaves enough clues for one to decode it.

Zishe Breitbart is a simple and tender blacksmith living in a Polish village who is discovered by a Berlin talent agent when the circus comes into town and holds a strongman challenge. The talent agent convinces Zishe, against the warnings of his family, to seek his fortune in 1930's Berlin, where he becomes employed by a Erik-Jan Hanussen, a fraudulent clairvoyant who has wormed his way into the ranks of the rising Nazi party and dreams of becoming the Minister of the Occult. Zishe is cast in Hanussen's show as Siegfried, a blond-wigged Aryan strongman. Breitbart meets the woman of his dreams, Marta, a stateless pianist held in thrall and sexual slavery by Hanussen. Zishe, who is not particularly religious or political, is taught by Marta that everyone, not just the bogus Hanussen, can have visions. But rather than visions of delicate beauty that Marta has, Zishe instead dreams of a future populated by red and black crabs scurrying over a railroad tracks as a distant train approaches. And while Breitbart helps Marta realize her vision to play Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, he has becomes haunted by his own.

When his little brother, a precocious prophet in his own right, arrives in Berlin to remind Zishe of who he is, Zishe takes off the wig and declares himself, to the boos of the Nazi audience, to be the new Samson. Thinking that he will be fired the next day, he is instead told by Hanussen that since he has attracted a new audience of Berlin Jews, he can hardly be let go. Zishe's performances though cause the Nazis to riot but emboldens the local Jews, who make him into a hero. Hanussen, meanwhile, is being groomed by Hitler to be his Minister of the Occult and spends more and more time with Goebbels and Himmler. Everything comes to a head when Zishe calls Hanussen out as a fraud in front of his Nazi friends. The results are unexpected as the tables get turned on Hanussen when his own heritage is revealed.

The film opens with scenes of a small marketplace where goods are measured and axes are sharpened. Benjamin tells Zishe a story about a Prince who thought he was a rooster and was only saved when a sage convinced him to eat at the table like a man but to "never forget that he was a rooster." Zishe's father also warns him to not forget who he is. But who is he? Zishe cannot answer this at first except to tell Benjamin that "I am what I am" - this is prior to the scene where he rips off his wig and identifies himself as the new Samson. After Hanussen is dealt with by the Nazis, Zishe appends his identify as not just the New Samson but the Protector of his People and returns to the village to prepare them against the coming Nazi tide. But his people reject his vision and ask that he prove his strength before they follow him. Unfortunately for Zishe, this last act as a strongman leads his death and, tragically, the death of his people, who we are to assume will be swept into the coming Holocaust.

Very loosely based on the true story, Herzog uses the notion of a New Samson and his ultimate failure at saving his people to express a profoundly negative view of the world and to resurrect his common motif of failed dreams. But he doesn't recommend not pursuing these dreams -- certainly that is the story of his life -- but also not to give great hope that you will succeed. As a counterpoint, he offers the emptiness of Hanussen's view of a world in which there is no future, "just a state of things and events" where "man hurries past". In the end, Herzog offers two final scenes on Zishe's deathbed. In the first, Zishe, looks out the window at his little sister who stares fondly at Zishe from his hospital window suggesting the sad reality of the present. Earlier in the film, she finds the Passover bread for her parents and suggests a price. The price of the present is that Zishe may be remembered and that is all. But then, Herzog offers a ray of hope. Zishe's final dream is back to his nightmare landscape of red and black crabs but now he is carrying his brother Benjamin over the crabs and then let's him go over a seaside cliff. Looking up at the boy floating away Zishe says, "Father. Benjamin is flying..." Benjamin, who has earlier determined that people like Hanussen are like "shopkeepers with empty shelves - you have nothing to offer us" has kept his faith in Zishe who has, as Benjamin earlier counseled, remembered who he was. In return, we are given hope that Benjamin will heeds his brother's vision and find a way to survive the hordes of red and black crabs, the Nazi scourge. Like Zishe helping Marta achieve her beautiful but seemingly trivial vision, Benjamin, with his faith in Zishe, ultimately helps Zishe realize his and understand that a man's (or woman's) visions may still be great even if their final effect is seemingly small.

Additional Notes: Tim Roth turns in one of his finest performances as Hanussen, his face at times appearing almost inhuman as he mouths his love for Hitler and the godless future that it promises. The child who plays young Benjamin is also a stand-out as all too often these parts are wrecked by annoyingly bad child actors. Jouko Ahola recalls a gentler early Schwarzenegger (and has similar self-conscious acting chops), though it is doubtful, with his unconventional looks that we will see him again in a role of this magnitude. Herzog's film was maligned by the critics as too long and boring but it deserves a second look in DVD form (even if the extras here are pretty disappointing) where one can go back over previous scenes.

Links: Werner Herzog site
Rotten Tomatoes Invincible page
Imdb.com Invincible page
A tribute to the real Breitbart

MilkPlus - A Great Movie Journal

Milkplus

- Awesome reviews and healthy community providing comments
- Lots of links to other similar web journals
- Takes itself a bit too seriously
- Worth checking out anyway

Kingpin: The horror is in the house?

NBC CEO Bob Wright, We're Coming After You, Bitch!


The networks said they wanted a Traffic meets Sopranos. The writer-producer wanted to remake Macbeth by way of The Godfather. What we got was Dynasty (Spelling is a co-producer!) meets Tarantino, a violent and sex-dredged proto-soap about the rise of doe-eyed Miguel Cadena (Yancey Arias), an American-educated Mexican family "advisor" to his uncle Kingpin, his gringo wife Marlene (a haggard Sherilyn Fenn) and his older murderous brother Chato (Bobby Cannavale). Unfortunately, the mini-series had the misfortune of debuting in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, where the concept of a crime drama that smeared the borders between good and evil might have been a bit dissonant with the patriotic "black v. white" (not literally) war drumming at the time.

Two stories set in America run in parallel to the Mexican story and suggest that they would collide in the finale,had this sseries not been axed by the network jackanapes after six episodes. The first subplot, follows the disgrace and redemption of a Chicano DEA agent (the proverbial "white hat") who after her fall in El Paso (connected with hijinks by the Cadenas), she is transferred to Houston where, unlikely as it might seem, she stumbles once upon a Cadena family connection (although she never finds this out). The second story - I wouldn't call it a subplot, is also set in Houston and provides the comic relief. Brian Benben, who I thought was great in Dream On (HBO), plays a gambling plastic surgeon who has fallen in with the Cadenas and now has storage locker full of their cocaine he needs to get rid of to please the local enforcer and pay for a messy divorce. In the first few episodes, he meets and becomes friends with the much younger Shay Roundtree, a breakout as a baby-faced assassin who first gains notice in a stunning hit scene where his skateboard plays a key role. Roundtree's and Benben's unlikely father-son (dealer-enforcer) relationship, set in place by episode six, was perhaps the most original aspect of the entire series.

Episodes 1-2 deal with Miguel's takeover of the family and we're introduced to his lovely family that will no doubt continue to cause him problems. Episodes 4-6 show him struggling to maintain his power as he fights the Tijuana cartel, deals with a local Chief of Police, a Mexican senator and his friendly local CIA agent. Throughout it all, we see, a la Michael Corleone, his reluctant descent into evil. Like Tony Soprano, though, his biggest problems come from his own family. By the last episode, his brother has become unhinged after being raped in jail and is bent on revenge even it means bringing down the family and his wife is dealing with a secret cocaine habit for which he is terrified that he will lose the last person he can trust. In response, his young son is showing signs of stress and worry as the he starts to pierce the secrets and lies around his sheltered existence.

Kingpin does fall back on TV cliches at times and suffers what has, thanks to the Sopranos, become a shopworn theme. The over-the-top villains that accent each episode are fun to watch don't always lend to believability. Given the fact that the series star is essentially a bad guy (and we find out how bad in episode five when he puts an innocent prostitute to death), I suppose you need these wacko villains to draw a distinction from his measured evil via their unbridled evil. The whole family vs. Family is, as I contend, really owned by Sopranos already and, at least within the first six episodes, the scenes with the son and the wife's personal crisis tended to drag things down. Maybe in a few years, we'll be ready for a similarly themed story but not until David Chase shoots his proverbial wad. I surmise that they were trying to set up a finale where the son would be truly threatened (some of the dream sequences suggest this outright) but at least in eps. 1-6 the boy's problems seem trivial compared with, say, going to war with the Mexican government or Chato's prison rape.

The real main theme, at least for this first batch of episodes (there were twelve planned total eps) I think is Miguel's corruption a la Michael of the Godfather. He's no innocent in this, either, the series points out, and had plenty of opportunities, one would conclude, to disassociate himself from the family but his greed and ambition win over and he knows it. It's pointed out that he holds dual citizen ship in the US, his wife is a lawyer and he's Stanford educated. The crucial scene, I think, occurs in the episode 5 where in Miguel must decide the fate of an innocent prostitute who has accidentally killed a crony. At first he wavers but his brother convinces him that she could be an inconvenient witness and bring the family down. This brings him to a flashback where he is handed a gun as a young man but can't do the deed himself and instead hands it to his brother. Is his path selected not just because of his own ambition but to prove himself to his ruthless family as well? Will he someday have to be the one that pulls the trigger on his brother, who is later accused of threatening La Corporacion - he spares him in the end of episode six but for how long? Like the murder of Banquo, the murder of this innocent, though, will be the one that haunts him. Alas, we'll never know, though, unless NBC makes a movie like they did with The Last Don. You can see these crucial scenes at Yancey Arias's website here.

David Mills, a local guy, created this work. Mills, you might remember, was the Washington Times journalist who interviewed Professor Griff of Public Enemy in the '80s and led to Griff's banishment from the group because of anti-Semitic remarks. Mills has written and produced NYPD Blue, Homicide, the afore-mentioned The Wire (he's apparently pals with Baltimore's David Simon) and was exec. producer of HBO's overlooked ghetto soap opera, The Corner. Like Shay Roundtree and Michael Cannavale, I expect to see lots more from this guy - hey, how about a mini-series on DC's own: Rayful Edmonds?

Some interesting guest-starring shots from the likes of Danny Trejo ("From Dusk to Dawn"), as a sadistic but stupid family rival in ep. 2 and also Darius McCrary ("Vampires: Los Muertos") as a hiphop rap producer-criminal (eps. 2-6) lighten things up. There's too little of Ana Mercedes as Tio Consuela (ep2-3), the family witch -- who I'm guessing would have been outed by series end as The Big Bad -- but then we'll never know (unless David Mills wants to write something in our comments section???).

Unlike Firefly, alas, there's no wrap-up movie or anything in the works. NBC showed this and then buried it. The DVD, which can be rented via Netflix, includes uncensored scenes that probably didn't make it to TV (I dunno, not having seen it when it came out) and interviews with Mills and the major actors.

IMDB.com link
TV Tome (imagery courtesy of)

I Want An Animala of My Own ...

... but my co-op has a strict no-pets policy...

"RRrrrrow-rer?"

We Heart "Lost Skeleton of Cadavera"

The "Office Space" of the Aughties.

Best Lines

• Skeleton: "Hello Animala"
• Skeleton: "I sleep now" (and then immediately pass out)
• Skeleton: "Obey the lost skeleton!"
• Kro-Bar: "Sorry, sometimes my wife forgets that she is not an alien from outer space. "
• Evil Scientist Dr. Roger Fleming (training Animala): "Tip, tip, tip, tip"
• Kro-Bar: "Aliens? Us? Is this one of your 'earth' jokes?"
• Dr. Roger Fleming: "You don't know the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. But you will! You will!"

Best Scenes

• Kro-bar and Lattis stand confused in front of cabin door - why doesn't it automatically open like their spaceship?
  
• Animala being coached into how to be a date for the evil scientist ("You are Animala! But I shall call you Pammy").
• Animala showing the aliens on how to eat (face down in food).
• Ranger Brad looking down at Animala between his legs.
• The aliens being forced to dance for the skeleton.
• The skeleton "climbs" down a rock.
• Paul Armstrong (the good science guy) dances for Animala.

My Wife Is An Actress: A Jealous Knave

Yvan Attal wrote, directed and starred in this film and it shows. No one told him that no one gets as obsessively jealous as his character anymore, even in American sitcoms. The setup is, well, read the title. She's not just an actress but an apparently famous actress because everyone refers to her by her first name, Charlotte.

Set in Paris, London and on the Eurostar, Yvan shuttles back and forth between their home (in Paris) and Charlotte's latest film. Several gags - well, one big gag - liven up the movie but mostly its a tedious affair. For some reason, we're supposed to believe that Yvan is envious of John (played by Terrence Stamp), a blowhard English actor whom Charlotte is starring with. This leads to Yvan taking acting lessons, meeting a pretty aspiring actress (prettier, in fact, than Charlotte if you ask me) while Charlotte, driven crazy by Yvan's erratic behaviour, starts to fall for John. Well, it's a romantic comedy so you know how it will end up.

There's also an incoherent sub-plot involving Yvan's pregnant sister who is obsessed with Jewish people and wants to circumcize her son even though, I think, she isn't Jewish, or maybe she is, it's never really clear or its some sort of French humor that doesn't translate.

Grade: 2/5 Stars (would have been 1 star but the Big Gag scene deserves one star for creativity)

Recommended Venue: If anything, this is a date film, which you might use to impress a rather dim women easily impressed by anything that's French. Fact is, though, there are better French films for that purpose (try The Housekeeper)

The Village: Isolated Endings

The Village opened this weekend and is the 4th film from the Night Shyamalen producer/writer/director powerhouse. Night is principally a storyteller, so if you're looking for some sort of deeper message, this isn't the movie. If you are looking for a mystery and an almost surprising ending and have the time (and money) to spare then this is your thing.

The setting is a turn of the century (1897 is the given year) village, isolated from the rest of the world, and in some sort of mysterious truce with creatures that live in the woods. Some of the interesting things about this village is that there's absolutely no religion, nobody who really works (except for the poor schmuck that has to stand watch in the tower) and a cabal of Elders who keep secret lockboxes in their homes that they guard from their children. Other than that, life is idyllic and the only rituals have to do with the supposed creatures (the color red is outlawed in the town and you can't go outside the boundary).

When the creatures start making incursions into the village, the fear rachets up. But its really the young people who drive the plot forward. A love triangle results in the stabbing of Lucius (played by Joaquin Phoenix). While Lucius lies dying, his blind girlfriend, played by the daughter of Ron Howard, is sent out in the woods, to get medical supplies from town.

Without giving much away, the spotlight then turns back on the Elders and the secrets that they are keeping. Suffice to say, they have isolated themselves for more reasons than just the creatures in the woods. One by one, we learn that they have all had tragedies in their lives before coming to the Village and this led to the isolationism and shunning of the real world.

Despite the problems this has caused, including more tragedies (the film opens with the funeral for a child who has apparently died for lack of medical care), in the end the film affirms this isolationism as the correct response to fear and grief.

What really creates dissonance is that this choice is that whole thing is made possible only because the lead Elder (played by William Hurt) is incredibly rich. And furthermore, the blind girl encounters nothing but charity when she ventures into the real world so it can't be all that bad.

And that's why I say, don't go to this film expecting to discuss any deep ideas afterwards - instead, go to see a finely crafted, and mostly well-acted (Signorney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson and William Hurt) and beautifully filmed movie.

Recommended venue: Wait for the DVD rental (if you can stand the ending possibly being spoiled).

Grade: 3/5 stars.

Introduction

This is where I satisfy my itch to write -- here I mostly tackle movies and stuff I see on TV. It's called Red Envelopes in homage to Netflix. I really don't care if anyone reads it but welcome, in any case. If you like it or hate it feel free to leave some comments.

My other journals are where I write about music and food and alcohol.

The Barbarian Invasions

A DVD review

Once of the nice things about services like Netflix is the availability on demand of foreign and more hard-to-find films. This would probably not have been stocked by my local Tower Video and there's probably only one or two copies, if that, at Blockbuster.

The Barbarian Invasions, written and directed by Denys Arcand, is a deft satire on the "utopia" that is socialized health care and, in parallel, the emtpy values and legacy of the radicals who won the culture war in Canada (and to some extent in the US) in the '60s.

The plot is simple - a son attends to his dying father in Canada. But the dying father (Remy) is an unreconstructed leftist college professor who we are told makes as much per year as his son makes in a month. He is also a flagrant womanizer who has used his position as a professor to bed co-eds and brags about his conquests (he brags about bedding one girl six months after his marriage). His more level-headed wife has left him as a result. Shades of a certain former President and his ever-distant spouse!

The son, Sebastian, who the father openly disrespects as the Prince of all Barbarians, is a successful London "risk manager" engaged to a gorgeous art appraiser who has, with no complaint, elected to join him to Montreal for the "fun and games" of Remy's disintegrating life.

To Remy, his son is a despised "arch-capitalist" who doesn't read anything but email and "plays video games." There something to be said about that - Sebastian's head is glued to a cellphone for the majority of the film and he doesn't seem to take any joy in life except when he's playing arcade games. But Remy pretty much thinks anyone (terrorists, drug dealers) or anything else that creates cognitive dissonance with his "utopian" delusions is a barbarian.

After the son is summoned by the mother (with apparently no input from Remy), the movie starts with one of the best opening long-shots I've seen since The Player as a nun takes Holy Communion from a pristine white chapel into the depths of the hospital, a dilapidated green-hued hell overcrowded with zombie-like patients and disinterested attendants. Here we see the father's plight, sharing a room with three others and, we are told, lucky to not be situated in the hallway where many others have to reside. In a subtle comic move, after offering communion to the others in Remy's hospital room, the nun diplomatically refrains after hearing him rant.

The son (Sebastian) arrives and, in order to provide his father the best care and comfort, maneuvers through the immense and surreal Canadian health bureacracy and the corrupt legal system. He does this via a series of bribes to officials and the Mafia-like Union, diplomatic overtures to the police and even drug scores. Part of the humor is the laser like intensity the son brings to the enterprise and the shock at all the co-opted French-Canadians at his activity. One of the flaws of the movie is that it is hard to understand the son's motivation given his father's attitude towards him. Maybe it's just pure love as it certainly ain't guilt - I don't know.

Sebastian originally proposes to move his father to Baltimore (I assume Johns-Hopkins) for better care but the father rejects that because he will be killed by "Mohammadens" - Remy sees barbarians everywhere - and that since he voted for Medicare he would die by Medicare. Instead, they do go on a series of trips to Vermont for testing. Along the way, in the United States, the camera pans over little American flags set along the road in stark contrast to the lack of any national pride in Quebec.

The film spends much time studying Remy's life and his shortcomings while he rails about the world and his son. Remy is gently asked (by the nun) whether he attended to his father in his dying hour (of course not) and he thereafter begrudgingly accepts Sebastian's charity -- that's not to say he doesn't remain careless and disrespectful, but this starts a more intense and honest soul-searching.

Remy's discussions with the nun and others about religion, communism, colonialism and genocide are telling. At one point Remy rants about the millions killed by European colonialists in North and South America as reason to overlook the supposedly lesser genocides by Communist countries in the 20th century. But then later he rails about how the Pope stood by during World War II and let people die in the concentration camps. Remy seems to be saying that one genocide is excusable while the other is not. He also uses these examples as proof that history is a series of evil episodes therefore proving that God doesn't exist. The nun, who he has put in tears, says that if this is indeed true then she has to believe that there is a God around to forgive us our sins and that indeed man left God and not the other way around.

The movie is apparently set not that long after 9/11 in 2002 and we are reminded of the event via some of the hand-held footage of the planes going into the WTC and references throughout the film. At one point, a hospital security guard is distracted by a discussion on 9/11 where a commentator notes that the attacks may presage an invasion of barbarians.

But in Arcand's world, the barbarians have already invaded, aided and abetted by a self-absorbed intellecual Left, as personified by Remy and his friends. In one of the most telling scenes, Remy's friends (who are brought back together by Sebastian) sit on the porch of a lakefront cabin and wonder whether there was any "ism" they didn't embrace. One of the characters jokes, "cretinism" but Remy, now fully hopped up on heroin to reduce the pain (another sub-plot I won't go into) admits that perhaps "cretinism" was the thing he most embraced. He tells a story about how he hosted a Chinese exchange visitor to his University and prattled on about the wonderful Marxist gains her country has made, realizing later that her patronizing glare hid the fact that she had spent two years in a re-education camp feeding pigs and both her parents had died as a result of the Cultural Revolution. His friends, who are mostly full of vapid chatter, are for once speechless.

The film is surprising in that came from Miramax and won an Oscar. I haven't seen Arcand's other films but a precursor to this film (which resurrected many of the characters) is entitled The Fall of the American Empire. But Arcand denies he is a conservative but that he is nonetheless critiquing the Left. From a discussion on the film with BBC:

"The great virtue of capitalism is that it’s working. If you have an efficient business you’ll go out of business if you don’t provide goods and services at the right price. Does that make me a conservative? I don’t think so. I’m just saying there’s a failure of imagination on the left. We don’t have any working proposition right now. And that is why people of my generation are so intellectually desperate. They have no ideology to cling to and every ideology they believed in has proved itself wrong or unworkable for practical reasons."

The film ends with the final reconciliation of the son with the father, Remy's death and the son leaving Montreal. But before Sebastian leaves, he sets up Remy's heroin source (the daughter of one of Remy's mistresses) in his Mother's old home. She tries to seduce him and he rushes out the house in guilt. In a parallel to an earlier scene, where Remy looks out his hospital window and sees a world passing him by, Sebastian looks out the window of the jet plane as his fiancee rests her head on his shoulder. Will he return again to Montreal and take the beautiful woman living in his old home as his mistress or will he continue on the straight and narrow with his fiancee? The final shot shows the plane ascending in the clouds suggesting that instead, for good or ill, Sebastian is stronger than his father and has become part of the world. We, the viewer, are left on the ground pondering our own role in the world.