things i've been watching: july edition

The Mist (2007. dir: Frank Darabont): Bleak. Bleak. Decidedly bleak. Lovecraftian tentacles from space meet Shirley Jackson's venomous terror of provincialism and those who embody it. EM Forster (in Aspects of the Novel) once famously called Ulysses "a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud," and "a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell." Those words spring to mind when holding one's nose and lowering oneself into the sewer that is Stephen King's reality. Joyce's, anyway, was brilliant mud. Reading Stephen King is like a bad love affair with a dangerous drug: the thrills get secondary to nausea and disgust all too quickly.

King pretends to be setting his fantasies within our modern reality, convinces us he is doing so by including references to brand names and current fads, but his humans are peculiar, I think, to his own mind. For instance, I've never heard of a Christian leader who cusses like a sailor in public. It seems to me a poverty of mind that the writer can't think of a way to make the Big Bad Christian Villain truly loathesome except by having her swear like the bedridden Regan in the Exorcist. The most chilling portrait of an evil Christian I ever saw was Paul Scofield's inquisitor in the Crucible, precisely because he exuded scientific rationalism. This one, in spite of the extreme talents of Marcia Gay Harden, is just a cartoon. But then, most of King's characters are. Our hero, well played by Thomas Jane, is an unabashed King alter-ego (well-to-do painter of fantastical movie posters living in a small Maine town). You come away with the impression that this story is peopled with caricatures as an exercise in revenge on King's part... the unschooled yokel who insulted him at the gas station, perhaps, or the African-American who accused him of racism in his books... the characters seem not so much people as little cogs in a personal vendetta machine.

(CAVEAT: Never having read the novella, I fully admit this may all have been peculiar to the film, for which he did not write the screenplay, in which case I'm being unfair to Mr. King and I duly apologize.)

In any case, the movie has much to offer. I will never forget the slow car-ride through the mist and the creature they see there. It also has the dubious honor of sporting the single most cynical ending I've ever seen in a motion picture, possibly barring Dr Strangelove... but that one was meant to be funny. This one is most decidedly not.




WALL-E (2008. dir: Andrew Stanton): I wept through most of this. Go ahead. Laugh. But once you accept that the robots are feeling and thinking, human in every capacity except biological mechanics, they seem so terribly vulnerable.

Of course, why would they be so humanlike? Why does WALL-E have such eclectic tastes and hobbies? Were they programmed into him? Why, since he was created as a trash compactor? Did he evolve into them over his 700 years alone on the planet? Then again, this is Disney, which is the answer to all these questions, including "and why is WALL-E so lovable?" Might as well ask why the cockroach living in the Twinkie is anthropomorphized. It's Disney! The real question is this: why do I have such a hard time accepting what my boyfriend calls "the Don't Asks" in this one? Maybe BECAUSE I was foully and egregiously manipulated into weeping through the whole damn thing, which strips one of any small vestiges of dignity. I suppose that Disney has been doing this forever (I remember the Incident Involving Bambi's Mom as being a traumatic but fruitful lesson in life's vagaries. If I were to watch it again now, would I experience it as PT Barnum-like emotional manipulation?) but it's been so long since I've watched one I'd forgotten that it treads the same emotionally blackmailing ground that Steven Spielberg frequents.

The first part, the bit on earth, is by far the best. There's some lovely silent (or, at least, quiet) comedy and WALL-E himself brings to mind an old favorite of mine, a little-lauded and independent sci-fi outing from the '80s called Android which also featured a robot enamored of old films and harboring eclectic and romantic tendencies.

Once the two robot-lovers rocket off to join the humans on the space station, the filmmakers' loving interest seems to fade a little, or the love gets superceded by the Message of the Piece. The space station is, however, where my favorite character resides, the little scrubbing robot called M-O. Adorable and hilarious.

All that said, I now feel unclean, and I'm going to watch some Peckinpah.




Weirdsville (2007. dir: Alan Moyle): I nearly turned this one off after five minutes. What saves it, what kept me watching, was the combination of Wes Bentley and Scott Speedman, so good they give actual dimension to the same stoner duo we've been watching in foiled-heist/drug-deal-gone-wrong/ODed-girlfriend-gotta-bury-her "comedies" for years. This one is just well-acted enough, just unusual enough, to keep me along for the ride. There's a Satanic cult, there's a gathering of dwarves involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, there's an abandoned drive-in, there's a kidnapped rich hippie played by the inestimable Matt Frewer. There's a metaphor about a rat flushed down a toilet that I just half-remember and maybe I made it up. Pro-drug? Hell, yes, it's pro-drug. You know those "relationships are hard but you gotta keep with 'em" movies? The moral of this one is, "Life as a drug addict is not easy but it pays off if you commit to it. Don't give up, bro."

pivotal double feature: one day in september and munich

September 1972: Munich is hosting the Summer Olympics. The Germans have high stakes in keeping proceedings light and positive, as less than thirty years have elapsed since the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler's Berlin Olympics are still impressed on the world's memory. On the morning of September 5, eight Palestinian terrorists from an organization calling themselves "Black September" climb over a short wall into Munich's Olympic Village, kill two and capture nine other Israeli athletes, coaches and referees.

What follows is unmitigated horror by any but the most barbaric standards. And West Germany, hampered by post-WWII lack of a trained terror squad and a constitutional ban on German troops entering into Bavaria, stumbles through an 18-hour nightmare of fumblings, boners and missteps, culminating in conflagration and tragedy during a muddle of a rescue attempt.

I was eight years old and it was my first Olympic Games. It was also the first time the event was broadcast live, but I didn't know that. It was interesting: Mark Spitz and Olga Korbut and the America v Russia basketball travesty. The hostage crisis seemed unreal to my child's mind, like war footage randomly interspersed with the more readily understandable sports coverage. This was the moment when I first heard the word "Palestinian", and, more than any other, despite Vanessa Redgrave, despite Karen Armstrong and the abysmal and bloody complexities of the situation, it is the moment that will forever ensure that Americans of my generation always feel, in a pre-thinking and primordial way, that the Palestinians are the bad guys. A kid knows some things instinctively, on a one-situation-at-a-time basis: that men with moustaches are not sexy, for instance (sorry, Mark Spitz), that messing around with the clock during a basketball game is unfair and uncool (hand over the gold, U.S.S.R), and that the guys with machine guns who invade a place of peace and kill the unarmed are, unequivocally, the Bad Guys.

One Day in September is a brilliant documentary. Its official narrator is Michael Douglas, but the thing is so adroitly assembled from archival footage and new interviews (including one with the only terrorist involved to have escaped death both at the airport and in ensuing years at the hands of Israeli vengeance squads) that Douglas speaks maybe thirty sentences during the whole piece. The tragedy and horror of it are extreme, and the end, when the camera hesitates on old footage of the evil and triumphant smile on the young terrorist's face, leaves you hungry to know what happened next, if justice was served, if the horrors were avenged.

Enter Steven Spielberg. Munich, catapulted into the world amidst a roar of controversy, follows one of the Mossad death-squads launched specifically to track down and assassinate the instigators of the tragedy. Based on the ostensible memoir of one of these commandos (George Jonas' Vengeance), it's a tough story to tell, spread out across years and continents and therefore involving a whole ton of exposition. It's tough in other ways. The catalyst event was short and focused: a few days in Munich. The retribution, on the other hand, comes across as an unending and unendable thing, a continually ascending and increasingly bloody spiral, in which every man killed is replaced by another in need of killing, and every act of violence is a terrible act of faith in one's possibly faulty, possibly devious informants and commanders.

Eric Bana is downright poetic in his controlled intensity as a man on a journey from innocent patriotism and righteous outrage towards haunted obsession and justified paranoia. By film's end, I was wrung dry of my initial bloodthirst, no longer occupying any particular point along the spectrum of Palestinian v Israeli enthusiasm, feeling nothing but a sort of empathetic exhaustion for both factions in their frantic and neverending tarantella. Obviously Hollywood is no place to learn your history (ask ten people who the Pharoah of the Exodus was; all ten will say Ramesses II, better known as Yul Brynner) and you can place pretty safe money on a guess that no more than, say, a fourth of any historical movie is strictly "true", but Munich succeeds in one important venture: it lifts the proceedings up away from the Bush-y "yer either fer us er agin us" black and white of self-righteousness to examine it in differing slants of light.

in bruges: slow-cut revolution

I have been, increasingly and for many years, disgusted with the action film genre. Gone are the days when "action film" means that action takes place in FRONT of the camera so that we can see it.

In the parlance of this particular movie: whatever cunt was it decided we'd only know an action film if the camera was in constant motion, so ye not only can't falla the action, ye can't falla the story neither? was it the same fookin' fella who started cuttin' fight scenes in those short, close-up chops so a person can't see if it's that Bourne eejit or t'other one that's gettin' his pate knocked sidelong? and speakin' o' that, what mess of blind monkeys was it gave both Oscar and BAFTA to the spastic retard who edited that last Bourne rubbish? It's like if yer at a race an' you give the trophy to the fella who spun around in the most circles instead of the one who crossed the finish line. It's like a whole section of the filmmaking industry has got its collective head stuck up its collective arse.

All hail, then, Martin McDonagh. You gotta love a guy who errs on the side of lyricism in making his mobster film. There's Peckinpah in him: he's not scared by the weight of violence, nor is he cowed by poetical beauty or mixing the two together. He's as irreverent as Tarantino and far wittier. He loves his characters, loves telling a good story. This is his first full-length film, and my guess is that, after he's got a few more under his belt, he'll look back with regret on some of the scenes he left out or left in. By all means watch the deleted scenes on the disc. The impression they leave is that the original film was going to be a darker, more brooding observance of a young man who's committed a damning and unforgivable mistake following his fated path into hell and destruction, and it was lightened up along the way. No matter: the movie works as is.

McDonagh's biggest strength as maker of violent and very funny plays is that in every character, even the most corrupt, he sees the innocence, and likewise in the most innocent he sees the corruption. It's the secret ingredient that allows so intense a mixture of tragedy and comedy to work smoothly and without giving offense. In a McDonagh piece, the men who live by the strictest code are often the most violent, like the Ralph Fiennes character here, and the less morally certain the character is, the more relaxed and less apt to blow your head off.

Not that he toes the line when it comes to incorrectness. His targets are myriad. In this movie, retards (when's the last time you heard that word?) come into a lot of flack, as do Americans (after decking an American: "That's for John Lennon, you yankee fucking cunt,"), dwarves, gays, drinkers of half-pints ("one gay beer for my gay friend, one normal beer for me,"), militant non-smokers, fat people, priests, and every fookin' one else. Somehow it's all joyful and stumbling and just plain funny enough to be non-arrogant and non-offensive.

Most importantly, there's not a choppy bit of editing or nervous, jostly camera in the whole film. It flows easily and well, perhaps a bit slowly, but this is the final journey of a damned fellow into hell, and so the stateliness lends an air of reverence. The action is still there, and the violence has the weight of real violence for being in real time. Brendan Gleeson is an all-out champion, Ralph Fiennes is a prince among actors, and Colin Farrell has finally found a project worth his hard-working efforts. Because McDonagh was a playwright, this script has alongside its snappy dialogue actual visual themes running through it. Headlessness is one. The Day of Judgment is another. The Boschian endgame goes just up to the top without falling over it. It's funny, and sad, and well-photographed, and chilling truths are delivered in the same breaths as the funniest lines.

Here's hoping it revolutionizes a very weary old genre. Longer scenes! Stiller cameras! It's my new battle-cry: tripods for everyone! For God's sake, set the damn thing down!