Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I think I lost an assload of Harold Hellman reviews when my hard drive took a nose dive recently, but he was good enough to hit us with a whole new batch of stuff today, reviews from the Seattle Film Festival. Dig in, ‘cause it’s all good...
Hey there, Harold Hellman back with a few more writeups from this year's festival. By the way, I don't know if the handful I sent after the first batch (including Harry fave "Spring Subway") were too obscure for your readership, or if they disappeared when the Evil Genius (TM) lost his machine. Let me know if you want a resubmit. In any case, I hope you find something of interest in the half-dozen or so I'm sending today. More will be coming soon, including "Demonlover," "Cabin Fever," "The Eye," "Ping Pong," and "American Splendor," plus some stuff you probably haven't heard of but should keep an eye out for.
Cheers!
MAROONED IN IRAQ - Iran - written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi
In 1992, after the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein moved to consolidate his power within Iraq. He brutally put down the nascent resistance in the south, and he unleashed his chemical arsenal on recalcitrant Kurds in the north. The no-fly zone hindered his military options and prevented him from totally wiping out the Kurdish population, but he did a lot of damage, killed a lot of people, and made clear his intolerance for any sort of defiance.
This is the setting for "Marooned in Iraq," a new film that takes us across the border from Kurdish territory in Iran. Mirza, a well-known musical artist among the Kurds, receives word from his former wife that she left Iran with her new husband and has wound up in an Iraqi refugee camp. Concerned for her safety, Mirza recruits his two adult sons to cross the border and go looking for her. One of them is unmarried, having focused on the singing career he inherited from his father, while the other, more settled, is forced to leave his family to join the quest.
The story, such as it is, is pretty linear, as Mirza and his sons follow the ex-wife's trail, meeting various people and asking questions as they go farther and farther into Iraq. The biggest development is the loss of their transportation, when the elder son's motorcycle is stolen by bandits, and they're forced to go on foot or beg rides from others. Occasionally they run into folks more than once, people whose situation has changed since their last meeting, but primarily the film follows an episodic structure: go to location, encounter trouble and maybe learn something, go on to next location, and so on.
While I wouldn't characterize the film as a major success, there are a few reasons to recommend it. First, as is true of much of Iranian cinema these days, the cinematography is nearly flawless, and we enjoy images so clean and perfectly composed they're almost crystalline. That's especially valuable for viewers here in the West, who often view this sort of movie quite differently than it's experienced in its home country; we'll frequently disregard the arbitrary plot and watch the individual scenes as something like a travelogue of modern history, looking at people and places we otherwise get in sterilized form on the evening news. So, we say to ourselves as one of our protagonists helplessly watches wailing women clawing at the frozen ground, this is what it's like to find one of Saddam's mass graves.
There's also a fair amount of humor in the film, surprisingly so given the serious subject matter. One of Mirza's sons left no fewer than seven wives behind in Iran; he's looking for an eighth, though, because the previous seven have given him eleven daughters and no sons. As a world-class complainer, he provides much of the comedy, railing against his father, brother, and their situation in general.
Additional humor is provided by examining the ambiguous relationship people have with the larger political situation, and how most people are concerned only with what directly impacts their lives. Early in the film, for example, we meet a man who makes part of his living moonlighting as a medical doctor (with dubious treatments). He praises Saddam's brutality, because the steady stream of refugees means his business is flourishing. Later on, though, we run into him again, and he's been cleaned out by bandits; now he's condemning Saddam for permitting such lawlessness to thrive in the frontier.
Despite these qualities, the inert plotting will make the film tough going for Western audiences. (It didn't help that for a substantial portion of the first half, the subtitles were out of sync by seven or eight dialogue exchanges, meaning that for twenty minutes or so none of us had a clue what the hell was going on.) "Marooned in Iraq" gives us a first-hand view of remote, rugged terrain and its isolated peoples, and the sheer physical accomplishment of making a film in such difficult territory cannot be underestimated. Further, it has interesting things to say about the value of personal relationships in a world gone mad. Even so, it's still something of a slog, and I can recommend it only to those with a deep interest in Iranian (and Kurdish) culture and cinema.
EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED - written by Calum Grant, directed by Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle
Sometimes a marvelous idea can carry a film past some iffy execution. Yes, we've seen a lot of the material in "Ever Since the World Ended" before, but the specific perspective taken by the filmmakers often gives us a fresh new view on it. And while their approach isn't entirely successful, for a few reasons, there's enough here to attract interest from fans of the genre.
That genre is the post-apocalypse story. In the film, it's been fifteen years or so since a devastating plague has wiped out the vast majority of humanity. The San Francisco Bay Area, where the film is set, has gone from many millions of residents to just under two hundred. These remaining people have arranged themselves in a variety of ways; some cluster in commune-like groups, while others live alone. Some resources are plentiful and easy to acquire for the survivors, such as water, and electricity seems to be available for those willing to do the work. The city apparently didn't suffer much damage from anarchy and looting, so scavenging is still productive. Other supplies, however, are harder to come by, and pose some problems.
Now, while we've seen this sort of thing before, directors Grant and Litle inject some life into it by taking a documentary angle. They play "themselves" as survivors who scrounge up a couple of camcorders and some batteries and tour the city, talking to people about what they did before, how their lives changed, and what they do now. That means there's no story, per se; the film is organized geographically around their exploration. We get a couple of evocative establishing shots of empty streets and the fallen-into-disrepair Golden Gate Bridge, but most of the movie, for obvious budgetary reasons, takes place in enclosed rooms and natural spaces.
By taking this approach, the filmmakers get to investigate details that would be background at best in a fictional film. They've certainly done their conceptual homework, and have imagined a plausible social architecture for the city. There's a hippie-like peace-and-love clan in a house on a hill; these folks concern themselves primarily with maintaining a healthy environment for their children, and discuss open marriages like they're setting up carpool arrangements. We also meet a pair of stoner surf bums who do little besides living on the beach and eating fish. (Their stated desires for how their bodies will be treated after death provide one of the film's biggest laughs.) Most interestingly, we spend a lot of time hearing from the younger survivors, people who are too young to really remember life before the plague. Their consensus that older adults spend too much time mourning for a world the youths have never known, and that the adults' coping skills are therefore impaired and inferior, is one of the movie's most thoughtfully sad ideas. Another moment of great comedy comes when a man who may be the last surviving Native American on the West Coast describes what a pain in the ass it is to be an Indian, since all these terrified white people keep coming to him for spiritual guidance he doesn't feel particularly obliged to give.
Where the movie falls short, perhaps unsurprisingly, is in its physical realization. While the documentary format is a clever way of getting around the need for expensive and elaborate production design, we still feel as though we're missing something. One of the survivors describes how it's possible to follow the packs of dogs to learn where they're scavenging for food, but it seems like an oversight that we never actually see anything like this, even briefly. Likewise, we never see more than one of the millions of dead bodies, or even their skeletons, or the hordes of rats that must have exploded into the city to take advantage of the cadavers. Further, while some of the casting is inspired, there are a couple of characters who just don't work, particularly the guy who's supposed to have been living in the wilds for several years but who rather looks like he was pulling coffee in the Haight last week.
The filmmakers are to be respected, though, for having a strong idea and the good sense to recognize the best way to carry it out with limited resources. While it's got some flaws, and the ending is kind of weird, "Ever Since the World Ended" has a number of thought-provoking notions, some interesting characters, and not a few bitter ironies, and will be of interest to anyone who would appreciate a more restrained, analytical take on a common premise.
H - South Korea - written by Kim Hee-jae and Lee Jeong-hyuk, directed by Lee
If nothing else, "H" proves that the United States doesn't have a monopoly on the genre of effortlessly stylish but thunderingly stupid shock thrillers.
You know what I mean by this, of course. Ever since "Psycho" in 1960, but especially picking up steam thirty years later with "Silence of the Lambs," we've been subjected to an unending parade of mindless flicks that try to capitalize on their predecessors' success but that pick the wrong elements to imitate. These are movies like "Bone Collector" and "Copycat," "The Watcher" and "The Cell," slickly shot tales of fear and suspense that are impressive to look at and that work well in any five-minute stretch but that make very little sense in retrospect. It's this kind of movie that Jonze and Kaufman mock in "Adaptation," as Donald Kaufman spins his script "The Three" into an incoherent series of gruesomely silly set pieces.
And it's exactly this sort of movie that "H" aspires to be, if aspires is the correct word. It gives us an imprisoned serial killer, a nasty piece of work who targeted a half dozen women for reasons based in his own twisted morality. Ten months later, though, even as he sits on death row, his crimes are being repeated by persons unknown. The police are mystified, of course, as the prisoner had no apparent contact with anyone, and didn't have the opportunity to hire anybody to duplicate his murders. They frantically follow other leads while the bodies pile up, and of course they intensively interview their prisoner, trying to get clues about the new crimes, but it seems he may have an alternative agenda in mind.
It's not a bad setup, even though it feels like it's been assembled out of spare parts from a handful of other similar stories, notably the Hannibal Lecter movies and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure." But as the story unfolds, the movie keeps insisting on contradicting itself, or making distractingly dim-witted choices, just like its American counterparts. To begin with, the police work is exasperatingly sloppy; you keep frowning and saying to yourself, yeah, right. (Analyzing one murder scene, on a bus, an inspector says, "The victim was strangled from behind with a cord. This means she didn't know the killer." Maybe the subtitles don't contain all the information in the spoken dialogue, but still: Huh?) Along the same lines, the sidekick cop to the primary investigator seems rather too incompetent to be carrying a badge. Yes, he's supposed to be a loose cannon, but he stomps all over crime scenes and mishandles evidence to such a distracting degree that you start to wonder why Korean law enforcement doesn't screen its personnel better. And the film's big climactic revelation works as a pretty good gotcha, until you think about it for two seconds and realize how ridiculously implausible it is. It's the "Wow! Hey, wait a minute" response.
So on that level, "H" measures up, or down, depending on your point of view, to similar American works. Where it surpasses us, though, is in delivering the grisly nastiness on which the hardcore serial-killer audience thrives. As the film opens, an equipment operator at a landfill is discovering a body in the refuse. The police are called, and after they discover it's a dead woman, they also find it isn't the only body. Cut to an autopsy room, where on the table next to the one holding the first cadaver, there's the mottled, bloated corpse of an infant. The sight drew gasps from the American audience; a typical mainstream-friendly serial-killer movie, like "Red Dragon," would never show us anything like that. And that isn't even the worst thing in the movie. Hell, it isn't the worst thing in the first five minutes. In any event, if you're after grand guignol bloodletting, "H" will fill your bill.
Like its American counterparts, "H" is stylishly designed, cleanly photographed, and impeccably cast, and it doesn't have three brain cells in its head. Or, rather, it makes that assumption about its audience, figuring we will neither notice nor care that the movie doesn't make sense as long as we're given a bloody bombshell every five or ten minutes. And given our apparently limitless appetite for movies like this, it's hard to see where the filmmakers are wrong.
SO CLOSE - Hong Kong - written by Jeff Lau, directed by Corey Yuen
Mind-bogglingly cool action. Laughably dopey script. Yes, it's time for another excursion into the modern Hong Kong action movie.
Here's the premise of "So Close," from veteran director Corey Yuen: Years ago, Lynn (Shu Qi) and younger sister Sue (Zhao Wei) watched their father die at the hands of criminals who wanted his invention, a device or program or something (it isn't clear) that would link all the world's closed-circuit security monitors into a single console ("closed-circuit" evidently being a flexible term in the world of this film). Called "World Panorama," their father had invented it with the intent of giving it to the police, but the bad guys got to him first. One of the assassins, though, took pity on the girls, rescued them from his compatriots, and eventually taught them his trade; now, on their own, they use World Panorama to carry out contract killings.
Plotwise, it's a mishmash of elements from various high-tech action thrillers: a little bit of "Enemy of the State," a little bit of "Charlie's Angels," a little bit of "Mission: Impossible," and so on. As long as it's focusing on the fireworks, though, we don't really care. Yuen lights up the screen with some of the most imaginatively kinetic mayhem I've seen in a while, from a balletic assault on a kingpin's office, conducted in extreme slow-motion amid sparkling clouds of broken glass, to a wild car chase led by one sister as the other uses World Panorama to give her directions while simultaneously holding off an attack on her position by an army of killers.
The best action, though, is provided by Karen Mok Wai-man as Hong, an obsessively dedicated policewoman trying to sort out the increasingly confusing criminal underworld. One scene in particular is destined to be ripped off by Hollywood: She gets into an elevator with her partner, and then the faces of the two men behind her are replaced by rapidly-flipping mug shots as she runs through her mental database; and as soon as she identifies them as wanted men, the tiny space erupts into lightning-fast kung-fu chaos. Even cooler, though, is the scene a few minutes later when the policewoman comes face to face with the two sisters, and winds up handcuffed to one of them mid-melee.
Unfortunately, whenever the action flags, the aggressively awful story takes over. The worst element of this is a romantic subplot wherein the older sister is considering giving up the assassin gig in favor of the love of, well, some guy. I hate having to resort to such a dismissive characterization, but there just isn't much of a person there, especially compared to the film's women. He's generically good-looking in the Cantopop style, but he has little else to recommend him, which makes Lynn's dreamy fixation hopelessly ludicrous. One moment, she's mowing down thugs in wickedly entertaining style; the next, she's mooning over the Hong Kong equivalent of Freddie Prinze Jr. The message we take away from this, effectively, is that girls kick ass, until some plastic preppie gives one of them the googly eye, at which time the female must transform into a knock-kneed bobby-soxer. The contrast is so jarring and nonsensical, it threatens to give the audience whiplash. And it isn't campy fun, either: you could hear the audience's eyes rolling.
That's too bad, because if it weren't for the one-third of the movie that sucks ass, the two-thirds that rocks could easily cross over into the Western cultstream. Heck, the two-thirds that kicks butt kicks it so hard the movie just might cross over despite the fact that the rest is so crummy. It's clear that Corey Yuen can deliver on the high-octane goods; whenever "So Close" kicks into gear, Yuen fills his frame with a tornado of furious fun, but he's helpless to do anything with the wretched story in between the set pieces. Somebody, please, give him a script worthy of his talents.
THE ANIMATRIX - anthology
I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but one of the side effects of "The Animatrix," the collection of animated shorts commissioned by the Wachowski brothers as a companion to their "Matrix" trilogy, is to highlight exactly what went wrong between the first film and the second. While the overall project is worthwhile aside from that, it depends too heavily on the "Matrix" mythos to be considered a standalone anthology, so it must be evaluated in context. That, of course, includes not just how the content of the features influences the way we perceive the shorts, but vice versa.
The success of the first "Matrix," for me, is the gleeful devil-may-care tone of the film. It makes no secret of its sources; the Wachowskis are justifiably proud of the way they've thrown William Gibson, Katsuhiro Otomo, Philip K. Dick, Corey Yuen, and Joseph Campbell into a blender, along with the chapter headings from a freshman philosophy book, and made the whole implausible mess hang together so beautifully. There wasn't anything original about the film's premise, really, except the particular combination of existing ingredients, which happened to blend so alchemically. Beyond that, the real magic, the real kick of "The Matrix," is in the way the specific creative details and the no-holds-barred visuals totally overwhelm the derivative scenario. It's as though the Wachowskis are saying, yeah, yeah, saving the world, blah blah; now look at THIS, isn't this COOL?
Since then, though, the genre salad the Wachowskis whipped up has taken on a life of its own, and has come to be seen as a discrete category, instead of the goulash it really is. This is especially apparent in "Matrix Reloaded," which lacks the joy of the first film; it's as though they recognize that from 1999 to now, they've gone from upstart to institution, and as a result they have to take themselves much more seriously now. And since they're really getting down to the business of Saving The World and exploring the Meaning Of It All, they no longer have the creative freedom to indulge in clever little asides about why everything tastes like chicken, and the like. "Reloaded" is just as visually inventive as the first "Matrix," obviously, but it seems a little defensive somehow, as if it wants to be treated seriously as Film, which has the consequence of sucking most of the fun out of the enterprise.
It's exactly this contrast that "The Animatrix" inadvertently emphasizes. In its best sequences, it recaptures the fun of the first movie, identifying and drilling down on fascinating details, and exploring them thoroughly with great visual panache while not treating the overall world with too much solemn gravity. And, corresponding with "Reloaded," the less-successful segments try to do too much, attempting to nail down the virtual world of the Matrix as a legitimate alternative history while glossing over or rushing through the really interesting bits.
Take, for example, the short titled "Beyond," written and directed by Koji Morimoto. It begins (disregarding the initial office shots, as they were apparently added against the director's wishes) with a young woman looking for her lost cat. She hears from some neighborhood kids that the cat is evidently in a "haunted house" a little ways off, so they go to investigate. When they arrive, it becomes immediately clear that the building is considered "haunted" because the virtual-reality rules of the Matrix, unknown to its residents but obvious to us, are beginning to break down in this location. The first thing they see is a piece of litter by the front gate, hovering a couple of inches above the pavement; this leads the kids to a game of leaping into the air, plunging recklessly toward the concrete, and then, as if by magic, coming to a safe, floating halt a foot off the ground. It's a marvelously inventive piece, conforming to what we understand of the Matrix while showing us a new angle on what might be possible.
Then compare "Program" (by Yoshiaki Kawajiri) which begins as an apparent combat-training program in a samurai-like setting, and then gets much darker when one of the participants confesses to ulterior motives. Even aside from a lame ending, the short tries to expand the relationship the rebel humans have with the Matrix, but winds up telling us almost nothing we couldn't have figured out for ourselves. The animation in this sequence is dazzling, with a unique high-contrast atmosphere and remarkably fluid martial-arts action, but in the end the ambitious story falls flat.
That's also true of "The Second Renaissance (parts one and two)," which elaborately recounts the epic history that took humanity from the peak of its power to enslavement under the machines. It's interesting, I guess, but it feels sort of extraneous, and again doesn't tell us a lot we didn't already know or couldn't have inferred. (The exceptions are in the minor details; we get to find out exactly what Morpheus meant by "scorching the sky.") The only surprises in the piece are the explicit parallels drawn between humanity's fear of the machines and the atrocities we've already committed against ourselves, but these mostly feel gratuitous and obvious (e.g., a bulldozer pushing heaps of dead robots into a ditch) and don't really add a lot to our understanding of the world. There's some valuable moral ambiguity in the idea that humanity's violent paranoia brought about its own fate, and director Mahiro Maeda gives the short a spectacularly expansive look, but he can't overcome our feeling that it's a dry history lesson; it's telling that the segment is formatted as an entry in a computerized encylopedia. (Oh, and for those of you who are annoyed by the physics-defying idea of humans used as a power source for the machines, and who were holding out hope for a rationale more about parallel processors than fuel cells, this Wachowski-scripted piece cements in place the humans-as-batteries explanation, dumb as it is. Sorry.)
It's like this throughout the nine segments. "Detective Story" is a fun riff on film noir, and is given a strikingly grainy black-and-white visual quality appropriate for its theme, but again feels like it's just marking time. "A Kid's Story" provides background on the twerp who follows Neo around in "Reloaded," but seems more like it's pandering to the skateboard-riding demographic than telling a legitimately interesting story. (The director of both of these is Shinichiro Watanabe, of "Cowboy Bebop.") "World Record," on the other hand, zeroes in on a single athlete as he accidentally transcends the virtual world, and by focusing the experience through his perspective, with the wider reality an almost incidental background, the film (directed by Takeshi Koike) connects us directly with his shock, agony, elation, and, ultimately, his despair. And so on.
Now, to be fair, the animation is never less than remarkable in any of the shorts, and the Wachowskis are to be commended for offering such a prominent platform to talented animators who normally don't get this kind of wide attention because their work doesn't look like Disney or Pixar. I'm hardly the first to comment on the sadly limited mainstream animation market in the United States; perhaps the material on display here will help, at least in a small way, to change that. Director Peter Chung (whose "Matriculated" contains one of the anthology's more interesting ideas, even if it's a bit visually repetitive in the middle) said in comments after the screening that there's no plan for further cinema presentations of the anthology, which is unfortunate, but at least the DVD should give these artists some valuable and much-deserved exposure. It's just too bad that the project as a whole is so inconsistent, marred by the same creative miscalculations evidenced in "Matrix Reloaded."
Thanks, Harold. I’m going to see if I can find those other reviews you sent, and if not, maybe you’ll resend them. As always, your festival coverage rocks, man.
"Moriarty" out.
