Saturday, February 21, 2015

American Juggalo (2011)

There’s a marvellous dynamic in Sean Dunne’s 24-minute documentary American Juggalo. As genre, the film documents an annual convention cum festival. It could be the Republicans, Rotarians, Democrats, professors of Modern Languages, Chevy sales folk, but no — it’s the Juggalos, hardcore fans of the Detroit hip hop duo, Insane Clown Posse. 
To start with, it’s a freak show. The cameo appearances are weird, incoherent, stoned. They are almost always profane: “I am a motherf*ing nice person - I can cook like a motherf*er - that makes some f*ing straight up f*ing grub. F*ing chicken fried steak, f*ing collard greens, f*ing mashed potatoes - all that f*ing sausage, gravy, biscuits... f*ing everything man... I cook like a motherf*er.” So Chevy sellers they’re apparently not. 
These people are unattractive. If they’re not naturally repulsive they break out the studs and tattoos and weirdo garb to become that. As the title suggests, the Juggalos are a bathetic antithesis to the slickness and suave of Richard Gere in American Gigolo. A typical film audience will grow more and more irritated or disgusted by this parade and will feel increasingly superior.
But as the cooking guy may suggest, these weird losers touchingly yearn for some normalcy, some acceptance, even some romance: “I wanna find a skinny ass little bitch, make her fat and then we lose weight together... then we bond.” They use what they have in unconventional ways, like this gal: “It says 'Titties 4 a dollar' - my boyfriend wrote it. Yeah I show my titties to everyone... getting money.” 
For four days here the losers can feel like winners. As one woman remarks, “I had an old man tell me that there was nothing good left in the world and I actually believed that sh*t until I came here seeing all the titties, all the weed, all the fast food... I mean this shit's bomb.”
If we can rein in our revulsion the characters can become sympathetic. Apart from those with children (around or inside), they’re not hurting anyone. They’re just cutting loose for a brief good time, like any conventional people — bankers who break out their flowered golf shirts, secretaries who’ll grab a two-martini cabana lunch — because they’re on holiday, on a reprieve from the world that suppresses them. To our surprise, they’re not all losers. Several are managers of their departments. One man is a brain surgeon here for the LSD. 
Then comes the kicker. One member extols the group’s ardent brotherhood. This is a loving community. There is no judgement or rejection. There is no bigotry. They all accept each other regardless of their physical or behavioural quirks. With this speech the film turns its exposure against us. The more we have allowed our disdain, disgust, dismissal of these people to grow, the more we have assumed our superiority over their difference, the more the film now makes us the target of its satire. The parade of weirdos is a test of our tolerance.
     Most of us should leave this film chastened. Mightily amused, then chastened.

Monday, February 16, 2015

50 Shades of Grey

I’ll take two approaches to 50 Shades of Grey.
(i) The story
Not having read the book, I can only describe the film as a feminist caricature of male dominance, in business, social conventions and especially sex. Here is male power extensio ad nauseum.  
Women embrace the story because it’s pure fantasy. Christian Grey (what a safe name for a guy who works in the ambiguous netherworld) is a dream lover. Played by a rippling underwear model, he’s a handsome single billionaire who runs a high powered network of investment, development and charity. He plays classical piano, flies and glides, is equally accomplished at literary references and jogging, has cars, closets and apartments to die for — and he’s not gay. The twist is that he’s not Cary Grant but a practitioner of the current trend, rough sex. His playroom does not come from Home Hardware. I think.
Anastasia Steele (i.e., a deposable princess with a hard core to resist his hardcore designs) literally falls for him when she first enters his office. She wants sex, love and romance, the latter two of which his life scars prevent him giving her. She is pretty, slender, a virgin, but is ultimately reluctant to accept the flogging and punishment his alternative to love-making requires. She will follow him into his world but wants the right to say when to stop. After submitting to so much, Anastasia eventually takes back her power.
Christian was originally seduced into being a submissive. There he discovered the joys of being controlled, freedom from having to make decisions or determine his will. Every tyrant would love to sell that bill of goods. Now he contends he will offer Anastasia that liberty, as if it wasn’t for primarily his satisfaction. He sets the firm terms of their relationship — in a legal contract, no less — that protects him from her desires, like their sleeping together, going out on dates or being affectionate. He will run the whole show. So like a guy, he still has the nerve to blame her for attracting, weakening and changing him. It is to laugh.
The film ends like the scene of their first meeting: the elevator closes separating them as they say each other’s name. Expect a sequel. Or two. Increasingly shadier if not Greyer.
(ii) The style
The film is directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, who as Sam Taylor-Wood was one of the brilliant young visual artists in Britain. She won the most promising artist award at the 1997 Venice Biennale and placed second to Chris Offili for the 1998 Turner Prize. Her art photography background sets the film’s visual style: glossy shallow opulence. Her opening city is metallic grey. Scene after scene gleams like a Vogue layout. Everything is expensive, classy — and cold. So are the characters. Both leads’ mothers seem all plastic face, the adoptive fathers impotent jokers. 
Though bondage has for some time been a suggestive staple in the glossy fashion mags, there’s a piquant tension here between the flashy layouts and the flayed flesh beneath. To preserve an R rating (and box office), however, the sex scenes are still softcore, apparently a sellout from the extremities that gave the novel its sting. We see the Steele naughty bits a lot but nothing of the lower Grey front.  Don't expect the DVD to provide that selected short subject. Indeed the sex scenes are so tame the film can be charged with domesticating transgression.
     This work clearly grows out of Taylor-Wood’s previous films. Her 2002 commissioned portrait of David Beckham for the National Portrait Gallery was a film that watched the beautiful man sleeping. He was at once the subject of the film and the object of the world’s gaze — for once the woman’s gaze not just the male. Her Nowhere Boy (2008) examined the early years of the young, sensitive, abandoned lad who became John Lennon. Her Crying Men recorded a number of famous men crying, including Lawrence Fishbourne, Paul Newman, Sean Penn and Robin Williams, familiar men in an unfamiliar openness. Like into what that bully Anastasia is trying to convert our poor Christian, turning the cocksure into henpecked. It may take another two films to do that, but I'd bet she will. Unless Sam Taylor-Johnson is given free rein to be as daring in these films as she was in her art.  

Leviathan

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan compares our two order of life: the divine and the human, aka our spiritual and our worldly, aka grace and nature. 
The title’s allusion to the book of Job refers to the magnificence of God’s creation, especially how it dwarf’s man’s makings and understanding. In contrast, the man-made leviathan is the monstrously corrupt and dehumanizing political system that enables the village mayor Vadim to destroy the virtuous Kolya, his family and even his Moscow lawyer Dimitriy. The latter retreats broken and disillusioned in his faith in Russia’s law. For the leviathan metaphor the mayor is cast as a blithering blubber and not the mean and hungry look.
The film opens and closes on the vast pounding sea, which with the spectacular sky shots represents God’s creation. The sordid village landscape, the monster cranes destroying Kolya’s house and auto-body shop and the scenes of brutal court process represent the human leviathan, an unfeeling monster. The judge’s speed-speak recitation of the court decisions portrays that justice as mechanical, impenetrable, inhumane. Thus Kolya's protest against unfair expropriation leaves him homeless, his wife Lilya dead, their son reorphaned, and himself unjustly jailed for her murder.  
In Job the leviathan is the whale, of which we see two here. One is the huge skeletal reminder on the shore where Kolya’s teen son Roman finds solitude. The bones express the death of God’s largest creature, so the loss of His influence. 
This is confirmed by the corrupt Orthodox priest’s support of Vadim’s crimes and sins — and his benefit from them. The platitudes of his sermon collapse under Vadim’s reflection of the priest’s hypocrisy. “God’s eyes are always upon you,” the shameless criminal mayor tells his son. For the mayor and this priest, both man’s and God’s laws apply to others not themselves. Both men build their empires by exploiting those laws. The priest’s ornate garb expresses a wasteful self-service, insensitivity to his community’s needs and a vanity that betrays the essence of Christianity. 
The second whale is a small live one we see in the sea behind our last view of Lilya. Perhaps it’s our clue to how Lilya dies. The head-scar consistent with Kolya’s hammer argues against her suicide. But we know Kolya too well to share the corrupt court’s conviction. Young Roman’s anger seems insufficient to let his father stay in jail for him. The small leviathan in the water may be the signature of the large leviathan, the mayor’s monstrous system, suggesting one of his henchmen did her in, to frame Kolya, as he showed he could kill the lawyer earlier.
The death is not explicitly explained because we don’t need to know how she died. The film’s point is not the one character’s fate but the overgrowth of corruption and injustice that pervades modern society, with even the self-serving church’s support. 
     The film clearly condemns the Russian oligarchy. Hence the Putin portrait on the mayor’s wall and the zeal with which Russia’s past leaders’ pictures are used for target practice. The men will need more vodka before targeting Yeltsin. As for the current monster, Putin, "his time will come." Though the flow of vodka makes it specifically Russia it’s not exclusively Russia. Other modern societies have the same unfeeling legal system, corruption, compromised church and their own form of numbing narcotic. This exposure of Russia is an exposure of our time. That it was made in suppressed Russia speaks all the more for its courage and passion.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

The Outrageous Sophie Tucker

There’s a puppetry credit at the end of the Susan and Lloyd Ecker documentary of the life of Sophie Tucker. I assume that refers to the modest special effect where occasionally an image of Sophie moves her limbs and body against the still background. That minor flourish could be the film’s central metaphor. Sophie’s animation sets her apart from the static world around her.
Of course her 60-year career, which extended from vaudeville and radio through films silent and sound to television, through WW II and Korea, was hardly static. But however dynamic or even frenzied the world she still stood apart, her voice and manner and innovations always ahead of her time. The first and last of the red hot mamas made even the fast-moving world around her seem static.
Her brassy bawdy style facilitated the various stardoms from Mae West through Bette Midler (and  Lady Gaga). Her rhythms, timing and emotions made her the first of America’s great jazz singers. Her early self-advertisement made her the first star to brand herself. Later her personal outreach to individual audience members, whether townsfolk or soldiers, made her the first to reach beyond the mass appeal of stardom, to recover the individual connection by reading and responding to thousands of fan letters.
In several ways she anticipated much of our modern feminism: her sexual authority and initiative, her celebration of her own unfashionably abundant body, even her apparent ultimate lesbianism. Her influence on the careers she mentored — e.g., West, Judy Garland, Jerry Lewis, Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Paul Anka, etc., etc., etc. — is incalculable. 
     Sophie Tucker was a large woman with a large career and an even larger heart. She’d make any world seem inert in comparison.  

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Mr Turner

Mike Leigh’s J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall) is like Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (Mozart): a vulgar boor blessed with a divinely inspired genius. Those extremities encapsulate the basic human condition: we start with animal urges but strive for ethereality.
As Spall plays Turner, his language parallels his art. He grunts, growls and snorts like an animal, but bursts into period polysyllabics, using words with which even the noblemen are unfamiliar. He paints with spit and daub but tosses off brilliant insights for his Academy colleagues to improve their work. 
He boar-like ruts with his adoring housekeeper. In parallel scenes his father shaves a pig’s head, then the artist. A man of excessive and coarse flesh, Turner in his art moves away from the physical and towards the ethereal and abstract. As his doctor prescribes, “Rest the body and the soul will find solace.” Turner is driven to leave off painting the material world and to try to catch light.
      The art and general community are less accepting. Queen Victoria dismisses Turner’ art as “vile,” others call it rubbish, and he becomes the butt of music hall comedy. 
Of course that is the traditional plight of the artist. The best see beyond the current conventions and market expectations so their vision requires they court rejection. Turner resists the market temptation to the point of rejecting a 100,000 pound offer for all his work, preferring to bequeath them to the nation (the Tate has them still).
The film begins and ends on images of women working while Turner stands apart, an outsider, looking and translating the world into art. After he dies his second wife Mrs Booth (Marion Bailey) keeps scrubbing her windows in their Chelsea home, preserving his passion for clear vision, smiling in memories of her third husband. 
Meanwhile, his unfortunate housekeeper Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson) stumbles through the dark home Turner vacated, closing the door to seal the film’s darkness. Hannah is dying from scrofula and was simply abandoned by Turner, despite her love for him, his occasional bonk, and her having learned to help him with his paints after his father’s death. Turner rejects his own wife and daughters because they had no sense of him either as a person or as an artist. Mrs Booth appreciates his “little pictures” but has an insight and appreciation of the man, even if she doesn’t get the art.
Despite his callous treatment of his women (including his rather rough courtship of Mrs Booth), Turner has a sensitive side. He forgives an irksome painter’s debt. When he meets Ruskin’s still virgin wife he intuits her loneliness and predicts the vapid critic will discover love for her. Turner’s pain at his little sister’s death seems to prompt his tears when he draws a splayed young prostitute and when he tries to sketch a young woman drowned at sea. 
As the latter evokes the drowned Ophelia, it may be Turner’s aversion to sentimentality that drives him away from Academic painting. Or he may simply be appalled by the suffering of innocence. The advent of the pre-Raphaelites’ sensuous materiality in the late Royal Academy show suggests Turner knows his time has passed (as he defended Claude Lorrain, "a man of his time," against Ruskin’s dismissal). Of course Turner’s abstraction would only explode in the next century. 
Touched by Mr Booth’s traumatic experience shipping over African slaves, Turner paints that vision into a large work.  In order to experience a storm Turner has himself lashed to a mast. By intensely experiencing the physical world he discovers the ethereal. In his last words Turner laughs off Ruskin's intellectualizing of Turner's light: "The sun is God. Ha Ha."
     The film’s very impressive set design and photography serve Turner’s art. The densely detailed street scenes and interiors represent the representational tradition, the shots of skies, countrysides and dusks and dawns Turner’s abstraction. In fact the film’s narrative line evokes the impressionism Turner prefigured. Incidents happen scene by scene, often without links or continuity, creating a cumulative effect not directly related to any one part. Contrary to the Royal Academy “critic,” Turner was not “losing his eyesight” but gaining new vision.

Friday, February 6, 2015

Understanding Brian Williams (this is not a movie)



Sometimes a lie isn’t a lie — a deliberate attempt to deceive — but an honest mistake in memory. We’re especially vulnerable to remembering what didn’t happen if the emotional experience was strong enough to outweigh the mere event. How we felt rings clearer than what transpired. That happened to me recently.
A few months ago I had to get a special medical test at a new clinic way out on the S.E, fringe of Calgary. The wild frontier, especially as we live near the N.W. edge.
Everything appeared to go well enough, my looming mortality considered. But three days later a wild animal (a cougar, I believe. Four legged.) was seen prowling the area. That clinic was put into lockdown until the cougar was shot dead. That changed everything. I felt I’d just had a new mortal threat.
Normally I’m hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the threat of being eaten alive. (The neighbourhood dogs don’t count. I’m not paranoid. Really.) But here a wild hungry cat and I were in the same space. She could probably smell my scat. We were separated only by time. I would have been the beast’s buffet had she popped over three days earlier. Or if I’d come three days later — a later booking, a postponement, trouble finding a parking space, whatever. I felt I’d survived a rare danger. This is where I enter Brian country.
There was Brian, obviously feeling insecure being flown in a helicopter in a very dangerous location (i. the sky; ii. where people are shooting up at helicopters). He later learns a plane had been shot up roughly in that time and place. There was I, feeling imminently mortal for my medical test, anxious about traversing civilization to get there on time, and I later learn about a danger of which I hadn’t been aware. Same difference. 
The emotion of fear blurred out the fact that neither of us actually experienced the threat, but we remember it anyway. In time we remember the threat not as remote but as lived.
So don’t feel bad, Brian. It happens to the best of us (you, me). Of course, I’m not a journalist, supposedly reporting the facts. But it happens to the best of us. 


Wednesday, February 4, 2015

A Most Violent Year

Though writer/director J.C. Chandor sets this neo-noir in 1981 New York City, the recent peak of corruption and violence, it reflects equally on the current tarnish of the American Dream. As a result of unfettered capitalism the virtuous hero cannot succeed without seriously compromising himself.
Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac, a planet away from his Llewyn Davis) plays an ambitious Latino determined to become an American success without compromising his ethics. He dresses elegantly, tastefully, without the flash of the old film gangster. His speech and comportment show a man of tight control. He knows where he wants to get to — but will only take “the right path."
He bought his gangster father-in-law’s heating oil business but wants to succeed honestly. He has followed the standard practices of the industry. Now, as he struggles to raise the $1.5 million he needs to close the purchase of a waterfront property to receive and store international shipments, he’s threatened with criminal charges and suffers violent thefts of his oil. He resists the teamsters’ thuggish insistence on arming his drivers. He’s buying the property from an Orthodox Jewish businessman who is, like Abel, committed to an archaic code of conduct. He’ll flex to give Abel three extra days to raise the money, but he won’t be in the same room with Abel’s wife when she has to sign the contract.  
Morales is a man of morals but he’s not quite Abel to sustain them — if he wants to succeed. To save his business he has to borrow from a rival at a usurious rate, mortgage the apartment building he shares with his kid brother and — climactically — tap the large sum his wife has been — without his knowledge — skimming off from the company. That’s tax evasion, the sub-standard practice of American business. Though that saves him from borrowing from a gangster, to escape the criminal charges Abel has to promise to support the DA’s political ambitions. So if Abel manages not to be owned by the gangster, he slips into a corrupt coalition with Lawrence ((David Oyelowo), the DA turned self-serving politician.
In a twist on the genre Abel’s enemy is not some gang boss, as he suspects, but free-lancers who have been stealing his loads to sell to his rivals. That’s the trickle-up theory of corruption, ambitious individuals working on their own, against the law, but abetted and rewarded by Abel’s rivals, who buy their plunder.
Like Abel, his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) has climbed out of Brooklyn to live the high life. They’ve just moved into a new suburban estate. She wears only Armani. As Chastain plays her, her accent shifts between Brooklyn and Manhattan, like the two sets of books she she has maintained, and she doesn’t share her husband’s aversion to guns and their deployment. She’s proud that her husband is unlike her gangster dad, but it’s her calculated crookedness that saves Abel/s fortunes.
In contrast to Abel’s success, his hapless friend Julian (Elyes Gabel) aspires to Abel’s success. His plan is to progress from driving to sales, but he’s broken by the assault he suffers from thieves. On his first trip back he fights off the robbers with an illicit gun then flees. He doesn’t have Abel’s discipline or strength. He cracks under the feeling of vulnerability that stimulates Abel. Ultimately Julian is helpless, with nowhere to go, a family to support, no hope, so he kills himself. Abel’s first move is to stanch the tank’s bleed of oil. That’s the black blood at the heart of American capitalism. 
     The film closes with Alex Ebert singing his own stark summary of the film, “America For Me.” It’s a bitter song, about the ambition and selfishness that by denying compassion make even the apparent winners losers.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Selma

Ava DuVernay’s Selma is more important as a social document than as a film. It reminds America of the brutal history from which it has not yet escaped. Like any period piece it reflects not just the time of its setting but also the time it is made.
First, it recalls the drama of Martin Luther King’s leadership in the 1965 march from Selma Alabama to the capital city Montgomery. That forced the Voting Rights Act ensuring African Americans the unimpeded right to vote. It’s a stirring story but a sad one because it recalls the horrible violence of the white suppression of the negro, extending to the murder of white sympathizers as well. The blatant hatred is chilling.
The black woman director makes this very much the black perspective on those events, without the usual valorizing of some whites. She pulls no punches on the violence, especially in the church explosion that killed five little girls and in the vicious police attacks on civilians. It’s also the woman’s perspective, as Coretta King’s role is emphasized, especially in mediating between King and Malcolm X, and in the assertive career of a hospital worker played by Oprah Winfrey.
When the epilogue text explains the later career of King’s aides Selma becomes the turning point in US politics. From there a generation of African Americans moved into the mainstream. And Dr King’s speeches still stir the soul.
Perhaps more importantly, the film reflects on today. Clearly the nation is still stuck in the quagmire of racism. The political system still privileges the white man. That’s what Sarah Palin was saying when in the wake of Obama’s first election she declared “Give us back our country.” There is still a systematic suppression of the underclass’s attempt to vote, whether in voter registration, voting regulations and conditions, or the farce of the hanging chads that snuck G.W. Bush past Al Gore. Especially given the new unbridled power of the PACS, the voting system is still rigged and corrupt.
Nor has President Johnson’s War on Poverty been won either. If anything the gap between the richest and the poor has widened and the number and desperation of the poor have ballooned. Cops still get away with the unwarranted murder of African Americans, as do white civilians armed with the Stand Your Ground clause. 
So electing a black president did not make America post-racist after all. In the Republicans’ belligerent refusal to respect his office, explicitly preferring to ruin the economy rather than cooperate, and in the virulence the president has evoked in the vox populi, the old racism has metastasized but remains systemic. 
If we don’t have a George Wallace now we have the Koch brothers poised to spend a billion to buy the next election. The Right-dominated Supreme Court is a far cry from the assuring humanity of the film’s judge, Martin Sheen (of course). Seeing the engagement of the Christian church in the civil rights movement, one has to ask where is the church today? Where are the church leaders speaking out against the oppression of the Spanish American underclass, the systemic poverty and restrictions on education and voting rights? And how do today’s Tea Party class and Christian Republicans stand against the leadership their church took in the civil rights movement then?  
We need to see Selma, then, both to be reminded of that signal point in American history and to see how our present system harbours new forms of the old systemic bigotry and inequality.
     With that important business going on here it seems trivial to reduce the discussion to the film’s Oscar nominations. The Best Picture nomination acknowledges its importance and its achievement. As for the other categories, there was just too much better competition this year. As a film this isn’t in the same league as Boyhood, Birdman, Foxcatche etc. But Selma has a social value beyond its mere function as a film and for that we should be grateful.