Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The Interview

Do you think maybe Kim Jong-Un doesn’t have a Canadian sense of humour?

Even though this is a Sony production (American film made for a Japanese company) it’s a primarily Canadian satire. Seth Rogan wrote the story and stars (as Aaron Rapaport) and it was filmed in B.C. But more importantly, its targets are not just the North Korean dictator but American culture, in all its naive simplicity. Canadian comedy is especially tuned to its southern neighbour’s follies — it has to be or it would be swamped.

Indeed the satire of Kim Jong-Un is the minor aspect. True, the dictator has his godly pretence deflated, in scatalogical terms, but also in his sentimentalizing. Interviewer Dave Skylark (James Franco) destroys him by bringing him to public tears with memories of their demanding fathers and — what else? — a Katy Perry song about some windbag. Kim finds her music “empowering.” Though the film alludes to the North Korean peoples’ suffering and its brutal, self-indulgent dictator and though its climax does (spoiler alert) blow him up, the political substance stays at the level of an X-rated Mad magazine. It’s played for laughs not realistic political discourse.

The bulk of the satire is against the American attitude towards politics and entertainment. The Skylark show takes pride in its success at providing what its audience wants. If Rob Lowe admits to baldness, have him on to remove his wig. Have everyone irate when Lowe’s confession is cut off in favour of a story about the threat of nuclear attack. If Matthew McConaughey has been shot having sex with a goat, “Get that goat. I have some questions for that goat” — as well as the star. The film shows American journalism run like the shallow entertainment industry—pandering to the lowest.

Rogan’s basic joke is that this film does too. However funny the lines, they express a laddish, puerile titillation. Political strategy is limited to honey potting and dicking. The show’s first great success is having Eminem admit to being gay — a surprise despite his admitted “breadcrumbs” trail of clues in bis lyrics. Our unlikely heroes have the familiar Starsky and Hutch — back to Tom and Huck Finn — barely unadmitted bromance, and are given improbable hetero sex scenes to prove they’re straight as a bow. Sorry, arrow. Hence all the butt-hole jokes, including the stash of the CIA ’s back-up missile. The guest appearance of real TV news figures confirms the reduction of news to entertainment.

Franco is especially effective as the personification of the ignorance in American journalism. He’s all the Fox bimbos rolled into one. He thinks Stalin is Stallone. Despite his film-sense he doesn’t understand the CIA’s intention to “take him out.” In his stupidity he’s helpless before the dictator’s palsy manipulation. But the film manipulates its audience the same way, with cheap sentimentality. Especially all his folksiness and American allusions, when the dictator gives Skylark a puppy he wins us over too.

Kim Jong-Un has probably not received a more sympathetic representation in the West because the film plays him as a helplessly sentimental chap. He enjoys American entertainers and is up on the lingo. “I have no comment on Margaritas.” His rage and nuclear threat lose our sympathy but the film’s point is how easily we can be swayed by such cheap and ready emotion. That’s standard practice in US politics. Gift puppy Digby recalls Dick Nixon’s infamous dog Checkers and wife Pat’s cloth coat. The film’s target is our dumb politics, making us such easy dupes, rather than that particular dictator.

The climactic action scenes also send up the American film audience’s expectations. For Skylark, “Kim must die. It’s the American way.” But the North Korean heroine prefers a systemic change over that one man’s death. The ridiculous plot Skylark initially proposes — a surprise arrival of a SEALS squad with an inflatable motor boat — finally happens. Before that Rapaport and an enemy bite off each other’s fingers (digital manipulation?) and particular attention is paid to a tank squashing the soldiers in a jeep. The slow-mo rocket en route to Kim’s helicopter points to the aestheticizing of violence in American films since the balletic shoot-up that closed Bonnie and Clyde.

The film opens on a sweet little North Korean girl innocently singing a scabrous attack on America (“Die America, please die”). That introduces the military use of sentimentality. Skylark’s tagline — “They hate us cuz they ain’t us” — works both ways. As the dictator admits and the film proves, words can be more violent than weaponry. In emphasizing the Americans’ devotion to ignorance and cheap emotion the satire ranges beyond the putative target of North Korea to include America.

And what of the international politicizing of the film? Sony should have known what it was risking by identifying the North Korean dictator so clearly, instead of fictionalizing him like Chaplin’s Adolf Hinkle in The Great Dictator. Once committed to the project it covered itself in shame by however briefly aborting its release. Rogan and Franco emerge as very effective comic actors. Too bad Kim Jong-Un couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the film over his Chivas Regal, caviar and Havanas, secure that his citizens won’t be spoiled by such pleasures. Instead his thin skin and — so far — empty threats only deflate his power image further. For that relief much thanks.

Mr Klein (1976)

Amazing how the best films speak to the moment whenever they are viewed.

I watched Joseph Losey’s Mr Klein (1976) the day France voted with a near-majority of the UN Security Council to require Israel soon to vacate the “occupied” West Bank without any assurance that its genocidal neighbour enemies won’t use the advantage to destroy her — as they frequently threaten.

Of course, the “occupied” refers to parts of Judea, Sumeria and Jerusalem that were included in the Jewish state of Palestine that the League of Nations committed to 90 years ago and that the UN later confirmed. Israel, that is, is declared to be “occupying” its own land and is required to leave it, even after Jordan was carved out of it earlier and the “Palestinians” — the term hijacked by Arafat for refugees not just from Israel but from Jordan and Egypt— have consistently refused their additional portion of that land since 1947 if it meant peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state.

The UNSC motion would also have violated the 1967 armistice, under which Israel would improve its security by keeping some of the land retaken in that defensive war and returning some in exchange for peace treaties with its antagonistic neighbours. For peace with Egypt they returned the Sinai, which is bigger than the present Israel. The Palestinians have refused to negotiate peaceful coexistence. When Israel vacated Gaza in 2005 the Palestinians in effect had their new state. Instead of proving peaceful partners they launched relentless rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and built an aggressive tunnel network into Israel school grounds.

Of course Israel’s self-defence is always translated into aggression. The term “disproportionate” has been twisted to condemn Israel for Palestinian casualties despite her unprecedented efforts to reduce them by warning of attacks, restraint from firing back, and especially Hamas’s hiding its weapons and soldiers among civilians, eager to spend their own peoples’ lives to stigmatize Israel.

As France suffers increasingly numerous and violent incidents of antisemitism, causing a dramatic increase in French Jews’ fleeing to Israel, the government mouths its disapproval. After all, France has welcomed the Jews since Napoleon in 1806 mandated their acceptance if they behaved as Frenchmen first. But the true spirit of the nation seems closer to the Dreyfuss affair and to the senior diplomat who within the last decade went unpunished for declaring Israel “that shitty country” at a London soiree. This is the France Losey plumbs in Mr Klein. The film was made in 1976, but set in occupied Paris in 1942, but still serves as a barometer of the anti-Jewish pressure in 2014.

Robert Klein (Alain Delon) is a handsome happy Paris bachelor, at least a third-generation Catholic, with a posh flat and furniture, obvious wealth and social status, enjoying the gentile’s privilege of buying the valuable art and antiques from doomed Jews at cut-rate prices. His affair with his lawyer’s wife is briefly suspended for a younger live-in.

Klein’s complacency is shaken when a Jewish newspaper arrives addressed to him. The film shows his attempts to avoid misidentification as a Jew, to distinguish himself from a Jew with the same name. The more the hero tries to distance himself from the Jews the more he becomes entangled in their fate. He’s even adopted by the other Klein’s dog (a German shepherd, of course). By the time the documents that would clear him of the Jews’ doom arrive he is swept into a boxcar to the gas chambers.

In the film’s opening scene a French doctor brutishly examines a naked woman who is trying to prove herself Aryan. She is nakedly doing what Delon’s character will spend the film stylishly doing — denying any connection to Jewishness. The doctor’s verdict is not assuring, however, which she keeps from her husband (as he does his from her). In the last scene there is a possibility that Klein is accepting his fate. He may be going with the flow of doomed Jews as throughout the film he went with the flow of the antisemites. His “I’ll be back” is not just a naive promise to his lawyer but the larger warning that his period’s and his culture’s antisemitism will find a way to return. In any case, this Mr Klein is a man whose culture and decency did not keep him from collaborating with the persecution and the annihilation of the Jews. He remains a man for our seasons too.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Bunuel's Robinson Crusoe (1954)

Luis Bunuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954) is a classic example of the auteur film in its initial sense: the director’s vision and style emerge from the tension with the conventional materials assigned him. Later he would make more freeform films with a more blatant style that transcended the term “auteur.”

Bunuel was among three hands scripting the famous novel, which was too famous to highjack. It’s Bunuelian in smaller touches.

His Crusoe exhibits many of the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie. Obviously he’s ingenious, clever, perseverant, what a man who survives 28 years on a jungle island would be. But Bunuel takes his liberties. That pottery wheel seems a Magrittean incongruity. The scale of the hero’s little world seems too impressive, too grand a reward for the Protestant work ethic to be credible.When Crusoe is ultimately rescued he returns to the image of the bourgeoisie, neatly coiffed, elegantly dressed and perfumed, a lord worthy any manner and manners. But Bunuel suggests several kinks in the bourgeois whiz's armour.

When Crusoe leaves the later mutineers to maintain his legacy he envies them for possessing what he lacked: companionship. But those surlies promise about as much community and collaboration as the beggars of Viridiana. Bundle's Friday notes that the white sailors are as murderous as his enemy cannibals, even if they don't eat their victims.

As Defoe describes, when Crusoe accrues his man Friday he un-christianly reduces him from person to weekday and makes himself his Master. He discourages the grovel but encourages frightened awe — and total obedience. Even on a two-man island the European white man is a colonialist. After overcoming his own fears of Friday’s cannibalism and desire to escape Crusoe comes to trust him with the weapons, gives him full training and ultimately rewards him with -- the right to smoke. In '54 that reward was just minuscule; today it's read as fatal. Crusoe will take his savage in full livery to the English jungle, society. That makes Crusoe the model of the European slave keeper. He anticipates the hypocrisy and arrogance of Bunuel's Fernando Rey characters.

Bunuel’s spirit especially gleams in the religion scenes. (Remember his famous line: "Thank God I'm an atheist.") Crusoe has learned to recite his rote faith well, but flounders when he tries to explain it to Friday. Bunuel gives the pagan (aka uncontaminated) Friday an impish rational skepticism that Crusoe can’t handle, only feel superior in dismissing.Turning to his parrot for agreement betrays Crusoe as a reciter of unabsorbed rote, unable to respond to basic questions. Unburdened by the cant, Friday can plainly ask: If God keeps Satan alive to tempt man why does he punish man for sinning?

In an earlier scene Crusoe goes off to his echo vale for the delusion of company, when he cries out to himself and receives his echo. In choosing a Psalm what Crusoe shouts and yearns to hear is a confirmation of his faith, of the existence of his God, a renewal of his soul. What he gets is a hollow taunt of himself. Choosing the psalm makes his need for religious support, which the empty echoes can’t fill. Crying for soul renewal he strides forward to fill the screen with his strictly material presence, his soul unswelled.

Whether or not in Defoe, Bunuel allows his island an immaculate conception. Where Crusoe’s cat found a lover is never known but her litter embodies the fertility and mystery with which the natural wilds outruns our logic and pragmatism.

Twice Bunuel gives Crusoe the discomfit of erotic stirrings. The first is when he sees a dress blowing on his scarecrow. The second — more angrily suppressed — is when Friday dons a dress and gold necklace and plays at war. The is Bunuel’s delight in tweaking sexual repression rather than DeFoe’s. It's Defoe's classic novel but Bunuel's most promising early film.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Top Five

With Top Five writer-director Chris Rock establishes himself as a major American film-maker. From his background in standup comedy and film acting he educes a stirring parable about confusions of identity.

Andre (no relation to Woody, really) Allen is trying to leave his successful comedy career in order to make serious films, like his new film about a black hero of the Haitian revolution. As in Stardust Memories, the star’s fans avidly prefer his early work, “the funny ones,” and don’t want him to get serious. As Andre notes, they’re unaware of the serious import of his comedy. Where Woody Allen’s character sinks ever deeper into the serious, Rock’s Andre finds fulfilment in returning to his comedic roots. His impromptu standup performance proves he can be funny (i) without drugs/booze, and (ii) by drawing serious insights from his own life (e.g., Don’t make any serious decision after getting a blow-job).

In a pre-title street scene Rosario Dawson and Rock argue over whether any film can be plumbed for meaning. Within the narrative, Dawson’s Chelsea Brown is skeptical about Andre’s connection between the (very) first Planet of the Apes and Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination the next day. But in the pre-title scene, before their characters have been established, Rock argues against film analysis and Dawson for it. Of course, even as himself Rock is playing a role. He is making this film and it’s chockablock with meaning. Down to the closing Rap song: “Nobody knows what it means. But it’s provocative.”

The central characters all are fragmented identities. Andre’s film success has been based on playing Whammy the Bear, such a complete abdication of character that he appears buried in a bear suit. His self is invisible. When he played himself on the standup stage he felt dependent upon drugs, so there was a kind of health in thus hiding onscreen, until a good woman’s love helps him.

Actually, that’s two women’s love. The woman who pulls him out of dependency is reality TV star Erica Long (Gabrielle Union), whom Andre is about to marry in a network TV spectacular. That's marriage as show. As Erica is aware, she is a void, without any skill or strength, just the empty status of her TV image. She's counting on Andre’s celebrity to sustain her. This marriage is the last thing she has in life, hence the dedication of those blowjobs that persuaded Andre to marry her. In a pathetic parallel, Andre’s ex-wife admits daily torment that she dumped him before he became rich and famous. But she at least went on to a new husband and a hearty family life. Without Andre Erica faces oblivion.

The film covers Andre’s saving from that marriage and his own career misdirection by a NY Times columnist Chelsea Brown. But even she is a figure of fragmented identity. She admits to writing Cosmopolitan “fluff pieces” under a pseudonym. Andre is shattered to discover that all the while she has been spending the day with him as a presumed simpatico she also writes, under a male pseudonym, the column that has targeted him mercilessly over the years. Even that assault has some justice, though, because she has been disappointed by the comedian’s fall from the peak of his performance at her college.

Like Andre, Chelsea is a recovered addict, disappointed by several relationships and experiments, but she gains stability from her little daughter. In family life as in the street rope-skipping scene, Andre prepares but holds back; she jumps in. After they both suppress their discovery of attraction, they are both shattered when Andre discovers her other Times identity. Though she starts out skeptical, she’s won over by his natural exchanges with family and strangers. His open wit at the family scene persuades her he can do comedy straight and justifies her maneuvering him into the club performance. There he rediscovers his natural/best self.

Against those three fragmented characters Silk (J.B. Smoove) stands strong and alone, the only major character without identity issues. He has been Andre’s friend, support, protector, since their schooldays. Now he bails him out two more times, once after Andre’s drunken arrest and ultimately out of his wrongheaded engagement to Erica. We don’t see this happy ending, but it’s strongly suggested when the gift bag Silk gives Andre includes one large shiny shoe. That recalls the Cinderella story Chelsea’s little daughter is considering. Paradoxically, Andre’s fairy-tale ending is solidly rooted in the reality of Chelsea and her daughter. With Silk’s approval and help, Chelsea asserts her best self to realize Andre’s and they are fulfilled together.

Andre is arrested on the eve of his stag party. Shaken by his exposure of Chelsea Andre drinks a few beers in the supermarket, then destroys the Whammy beer display. It’s an attack on his old humiliating persona. The intensity of his anger at Chelsea proves his ardor for her. As the scene is caught on closed circuit TV, then aired on the network news shows, it threatens to spoil his network wedding — which may have been Andre’s subconscious intention. But the producers rewrite the reality to make that scene part of the drama, not real. That leaves Andre with two choices: the fiction of the wedding to Erica or the fairy-tale ending with Chelsea. This time the fairy-tale is more real.

Why is the film titled Top Five? I don’t know but it’s provocative. It refers to the characters listing their top five Rap acts. It seems a black thing though Jerry Seinfeld adds his. When Andre asks the retreating Chelsea for her list she gives it, in tears at losing him. Maybe it proves yet another of her qualifications. Erica isn’t asked. Maybe it’s a variation on the identity theme. We show ourselves by our choices, whether as trivial as our favourite Rap stars or as serious as our choice of careers, mates and selves.
One more thing. In a sense this films is Post-racial even if America isn't. The pre-title conversation is about whether the first black presidency has changed anything. The woman sees a shift. which the man denies. Andre fails to demonstrate that a black man still can't get a cab in NYC. That's an obsolete prejudice about prejudice (at least in this movie). When the tar-colored blacks are covered in feathers it's a lusty pillow fight. As that continues, the myth of the superpowered and profuse black stud terrifies - another black man, not some threatened master race. There are apposite allusions to GW Bush (a well placed portrait) and to the first black president. The white comedians and characters blend in evenly with the black. Andre's debate with his agent with/about The N Word is the main reminder of the old sensitivity. But in the comedy club performances, race is like gender and personal experience -- not an oppressive division but part of the comedian's experience from which to draw his schtick. Some of the best scenes play the warmth and exuberance of the black community. Race is not the issue in this black man's film full of black characters. Personal identity is.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Ida

In lifelike black and white Ida compares three characters’ choice of life in bleak 1962 Poland.

The jazz musician lives his passionate art but is a gypsy, hitchhiking, roving from gig to gig. His offer of marriage, kids and a dog — in short, the conventional “life” — proves insufficient to win the heroine away from her path.

Her aunt Wanda lives the most secular life but is riven with discontent and an unsalvable pain. We first meet her as a slatternly slob who has always refused to take her niece (Ida) out of the Catholic orphanage. She couldn’t and didn’t want to.

That first sense of Wanda is corrected when we learn she is a state judge, admired for her wartime fight against the Nazis. But as our sense of her widens we learn that because she went into that her war she couldn’t protect her young son. He and Ida’s mother Roza were murdered by the Polish farmer who had initially hidden and fed them. As she now administers the Communists’ justice she can only feel her old ideals defeated. Her present trial is of a man who with his grandfather’s sword beheaded a row of tulips. Thus are the old glories fallen.

Wanda’s apartment is revealed in the same way she is. At first it seems small and sordid. Then it seems bigger, with classical music and some comfort. But after she jumps out the window we realize how big, well appointed and sunny it is. Like her career this aspect of her status is not enough to encourage her to keep living.

In contrast to the rootless saxophonist and the dissolute judge paralyzed by her loss, Ida proves the most rooted character — despite being uprooted from what she thought she was. Just before taking her vows to become a nun Ida learns she is Jewish. The farmer who killed her mother and cousin saved her by leaving her at the church. Though meeting her aunt only confirms her desire for religious security, Wanda’s suicide impels Ida to try the life she is about to decline. She dons Wanda’s dress, high heels, slivovitz, dancing and a lover.

But just when we expect her to stay with these worldly pleasures she returns to the convent. Only after experiencing her aunt’s life is she ready to reject it. Having known temptation she can claim a virtue that is genuine, not the untested virtue Milton rejected as “cloistered.” After learning her true roots she finds the most secure grounding in her adopted one.

In the last shot Ida walks up a darkening country road toward us. Several cars pass in the opposite direction, an emblem of the secular world she is moving away from. As she strides toward us she is firm, resolute, swelling almost to fill the screen. This contrasts in growth and substance to the first shot, where in wan service she helps touch up a statue of Christ before restoring it to its pit in the convent courtyard. Her faith has grown from cosmetic to profound.

The farmer digs up the remains of Ida’s mother and Wanda’s son, not to make amends for their murder but to secure his ownership of their old farm. He is a good man reduced to pragmatism. His gesture and his confession are at once horrible and grand. As Wanda described Roza, she always had stained glass beside the cowshit. This film is abut such intense paradoxes, the concatenation of the sordid and the glorious. Ida’s holiest action is the cross she makes when burying her mother’s remains in the Jewish cemetery. Her sentiment transcends the religious difference.

Ida learns her family name is Lebenstein. Leben is living. This film asks: How shall we live?