The 2013 Udine Far East Film Festival will feature a tiny tribute to Mario O'Hara, a rare screening (Monday, April 22, 2.15 pm) of his pito-pito film Pangarap ng Puso (Demons, 2000).
O'Hara, who died June 26 last year, was actor, writer, director for Filipino radio, television, stage, screen. He was best known for writing and directing the wartime drama Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, 1976), for acting in and writing the screenplay of close friend Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Were Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) and for co-directing the recent political miniseries Sa Ngalan ng Ina (In the Name of the Mother, 2011).
Pangarap ng Puso was made at an odd juncture in O'Hara's career. He had just enjoyed a small success with his previous pito-pito melodrama Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998), a multi-storied, multi-charactered behind-the-scenes look at Filipino filmmaking, described by one of its actors as "a eulogy for the Filipino film industry." Bubungang Lata functioned as both expose of abuses and exercise in nostalgia, freely mingling the grinding realism of the filmmakers' hardscrabble lives with the supernatural presence of their predecessors (younger incarnations of aged actresses, dead husbands come back to life).
Pangarap was a different creature altogether--a brief, deftly sketched precis of Philippine history from just before the assassination of Ninoy Aquino Jr., through the toppling of dictator Ferdinand Marcos and rise of Aquino's widow to the office of President, and beyond. Along the way it depicts both military atrocities and the at times even more extreme violence inspired by those atrocities.
The film (set in Negros Oriental) touches on Negrense mythology, particularly the kapre: a huge, hairy manlike creature with sharp stink, who liked to play pranks on people.
It tells the shared story of Nena, daughter of a wealthy haciendero, and Jose, son of one of the haciendero's employees.
It's also a celebration of Filipino poetry.
If the film doesn't end up as an incoherent mess--and I'm not saying it doesn't, not entirely--that's because O'Hara manages to tie almost everything together into a bewildering, genre-defying Gordian knot, where Negrense mythology and Philippine political history are just differing aspects of the same sociopolitical-cultural landscape, and a young girl's love can assume the features of both angel and demon simultaneously.
This was when O'Hara was introduced to digital nonlinear video editing, which seems to have liberated him--his editing here at times resembled the shuttering of a single-lens reflex camera, at times the streaming consciousness of a young girl's febrile mind, free-associating ideas and emotions into a single narrative.
Occasionally O'Hara throws an image of the text being read onscreen, and one is reminded of Robert Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), where we hear the priest mouthing the words, we see the words being written in his diary. The idea seems to be less about reinforcing some point or concept through synesthetic means, more about reveling in the physicality of poetry--the scratchy texture of wood-pulp paper, the visual pop! of seeing ink applied to paper, the feel of words read from the paper rolling off one's tongue. Then the shock of realizing that the words one is enjoying holds significance for the drama onscreen, their meanings detonating in your head like timed explosive devices--
At roughly one hundred minutes' running time and made for three million pesos (roughly US$75,000), the film seems outsized in its ambition, startling in its imagination. Despite barely having the money to evoke a hacienda lifestyle, much less produce the effects needed for a war or horror movie, the film encapsulates the pain and passion and perversity of one small corner of the Philippines, towards the end of the previous millennium.
Coming this April 20th: a weeklong retrospective (here's a trailer/preview) of O'Hara's work as an actor, screenwriter, and director, with thanks to Jojo de Vera of the Sari-Saring Sineng Pinoy Blog. Will post links to the films soon (possibly no English subtitles except when noted; some of the films digitally enhanced and cleaned for improved visual clarity (again, when noted)); links to article whenever applicable.
Tentative titles to be shown:
As actor: Tubog sa Ginto
As writer: Rubia Servios and Kasal?
As director: Bulaklak sa City Jail, Uhaw Sa Pag-Ibig, Prinsesang Gusgusin, Bed Sins.
4.18.13
Sprang brake!
Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is some kind of masterpiece--compared to all the Girls Gone Wild videos, and lord knows I've seen more of them than I want to admit, his movie is the Citizen Kane of teenage vacation pics.
Easily the best moments come at the beginning, when the picture for maybe ten minutes doesn't really feel the need to explain anything--just splice together footage of girls and boys flashing nipples and ass cracks, gyrating and spraying beer everywhere like surf breaking on rockface, sprinkling cocaine on nubile skin like confectioner's sugar on a finely turned bun. For some ten minutes Korine achieves a verite ambiance, a brief vision that captures the langorous ennui of the American adolescent--the sense that life is mean and short and doesn't have much of a point, so one must grab what pleasure is available now, as much as one can. You almost believe he would pull out of all this a bloodily profound truth, something about these spring breakers from within their culture, on their own rap-booming, beer-spraying, bouncing-booty terms.
Yeah, yeah. Right off we're asked to believe that three girls wearing face masks and tiny shorts (they don't even bother pulling on decent denim) would rush into a diner, badger cook and waitstaff badly enough to receive money (and what was the cook with his pots of hot fat and kitchen knife doing all this time, hm?), and use the proceeds of that heist to fund a booze-and-drug fueled crawl through St. Petersburg, Florida (from the cash register of a fried chicken diner? Who eats there, Bill Gates?). We're asked to believe in a meth and arms dealer named Alien (James Franco) dumbass enough to scatter dollar bills all over his king-sized bed and loaded weaponry all over his room like M & Ms, yet smart enough to earn the money to buy a grand piano beside a drop-dead gorgeous swimming pool. Only in Florida, I suppose.
I'm not demanding realism, mind you; I know a demented fantasy when I see one, and the four coeds are an important part of Korine's fantasy. Gomez plays the good girl--not only does she attend regular church, she hangs out in a bikini without flashing a nipple, sucks on an oversized bong once that I actually noticed, and bails early before she gets into real trouble. Rachel Korine is second-best girl, having only functioned as getaway driver for the diner heist, and using a bullet wound on the arm as pretext for her exit scene. Only Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson go all the way, incarnating the director's concept of spring break's darker side, in day-glo bikinis. The girls' behavior is so precisely calibrated to their respective statuses (Gomez the Disney princess, Korine the director's wife, Hudgens and Benson as the bad bad girls), their rewards and punishments so schematically meted out that you can't help but think the story, with a bit of judicious sanitizing, could make for a nice discussion topic in next week's Sunday school.
Korine joins his one-time Dogme 95 co-conspirator Lars Von Trier in staging handsome-looking pictures that are occasionally provocative (a scene with a gun barrel inserted in the mouth is sure to provoke some kind of reaction) but when you really think about them have little real application to the actual world--and are hence weightless. What's left, really, are Korine's stylings, illuminating the surrounding darkness like a day-glo g-string in the dank Miami night.
I'll swallow your sequel
Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead plays surprisingly better than it appeared, at least from the loud and splashy trailers: the requisite five pretty youths headed for an isolated cabin, the mandatory evil presence (redneck cannibal, or generic Abomination). Only Alvarez probably realized that this was his best chance for going big-time--despite being (or especially because it's) only a sequel--and he wasn't about to waste the opportunity.
Alvarez's intent is announced with the very first shot, a breathtaking view of a vast wooded landscape (presumably Auckland, New Zealand) on the upper half of the screen--the shot is upside-down. Right off he's telling us to expect the usual, only it won't entirely be the usual.
The script presents a more thought-out than is standard scenario: instead of five horny adolescents intent on an orgiastic bacchanal in the woods, it's three friends and a brother trying to force a troubled young girl to quit her heroin habit. The storyline involves us for maybe twenty minutes, then is completely dropped when more supernatural antics take place, but for those twenty--and especially the last ten of those twenty--the premise works well (skip the rest of this paragraph if you wish to see the picture): her friends and brother aren't sure if it's the addiction speaking, and they do all the wrong things for the right reasons. For those brief minutes the movie makes explicit the idea The Exorcist refuses to confront: that demonic possession is a metaphor for addiction (drugs, sex, whatever), a supernatural excuse for us to be the very worse assholes we can be, to satisfy our appetites.
Love it that Alvarez doesn't use shaky-cam--at least not to the point of incoherence; love it that he doesn't slice the footage into a slurried mess (though he presents plenty onscreen, sometimes flung at the camera lens); love it that he largely avoids CGI--most of the special effects are either deft misdirection or classic magic tricks or plain, old-fashioned filmmaking.
There's a scene I'd like to point out, of Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) perched at the top of the cellar stairs while Mia (Jane Levy) crouches below, tears streaming down her cheeks. We know Mia will turn evil and we dread the moment; Alvarez's camera is pressed close to Mia's all-too-human and teary face, and we're aware that it looms over us while Natalie is poised upstairs, fidgeting with uncertainty--will she or won't she come closer, give Mia some comfort? Suspense and dread, and not a pixel in sight.
It's pretty good for what it is, an exercise in genre filmmaking; maybe its biggest problem is just that: it's a mere exercise in genre filmmaking. I've maintained that Drew Goddard's Cabin in the Woods, working from Joss Whedon's script, pretty much killed the genre--rendered all other permutations, no matter how well made, redundant by showing how silly it all is (Five kids isolated in a cabin in the woods--wouldn't they at least have cellphones? Paramedics on helicopters?). Watching this I can admire the filmmaking, the same time say the picture hasn't changed my mind any.
That is, till I saw Raimi's own Evil Dead 2 again on cable. Raimi had a big success with his first Evil Dead, and an offer was immediately put to him to remake the picture on a bigger budget. Raimi turned this down; he was hoping his upcoming Crimewave would be a hit, that he would win some financial independence. It wasn't, so he was doing the Evil Dead remake--only it wasn't just a remake; Raimi, presented with basically the same material, decided to change his interpretation and along the way throw in everything he knew about filmmaking which, as it turns out, is a lot.
Watching this, all memories of Cabin (and by extension this remake) were blown away like so much brain matter. This is the cabin-in-the-woods flick to end all cabin-in-the-woods flicks, by turns horrifying, hilarious, and droll. There are images here that recall Ray Harryhausen (the Necronomicon gnashing its teeth), and images (the laughing furniture scene) that recall--well, I'm not sure what: Buster Keaton crossed with Jan Svankmajer maybe? There are moments disgusting beyond belief (the popping eyeball scene) and moments disgusting beyond that, if you know where to look (the discharge pouring from grandma's ear is actually brother Ted Raimi's sweat, pouring out of his rubber old lady suit). There's a phantasmagoric beauty to some of the frames (the undead Andrea twirling on her toes; Ash's Oldsmobile turning in the air; the massive trees groaning, pulling their rootlike knees up from the ground in arthritic pain), a requisite for truly memorable horror. This is the genre's epically surreal, no-budget masterpiece; the Platonic ideal all other lesser pictures aspire to, at the same time shattering the mold of that ideal with modern power tools, forever.
Towards the end of this entertaining if ultimately disposable movie the iconic chainsaw finally makes its long-awaited appearance, and the audience members heave a sigh of recognition: "Yeah--" Dispiriting, till one realizes: who put that expectation in their heads? Accepteth no substitutes.
4.6.13
I
remember seeing Peque Gallaga's Oro, Plata, Mata (Gold,
Silver, Death) on the
big screen back in 1982--an impressive picture, back when our idea of
a Filipino film was Lino Brocka's social-realist melodrama Maynila
sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag
(Manila in the Claws of
Neon), or Ishmael
Bernal's multinarrative tapestry Manila
By Night. Gallaga's
epic was something else entirely: a period piece set in World War 2
full of endless tracking shots, slow motion, and (outside of the
independent films of Kidlat Tahimik, or the occasional surreal
experiment by Bernal) visual poetry for the sake of visual poetry,
never mind that it was rarely justified by the narrative.
Love Never Dies
Amour feels like a film Michael Haneke has been aspiring to do, a Bethlehem he has been slouching towards for years. From the pressure-cooker tactics he applied in Funny Games he has refined his technique to what we see here--two people trapped in a large apartment, struggling to survive.
The style in Funny Games was severe, the story confined mostly inside a spacious vacation house with few exterior scenes, a largely unflinching (if often coyly oblique) camera peering into the different rooms with (except for one brief and startling exception of a gimmick) little comment or fuss. The style in Amour is if anything even more spare, the camera locked down for most of a scene, unwilling (unlike the one in Funny Games) to look away, the staging calling for very little camera movement or cutting and (again save for a brief sequence) even less fuss.
That exception I feel is unfortunate--Haneke seems to have perfected his grindingly claustrophobic style; to indulge in fantasy no matter how inventive or restrained or even relevant (it's a metaphor for escape, or its impossibility) seems superfluous, even disruptive. The interruption lets us off the hook for a moment, relieves the oppressive atmosphere.
This is a horror story, of course; think of a man torturing his captive wife to death and there's really little difference save this: the torture in my example would have gone on far longer. Haneke has finally come around to telling a story about recognizably ordinary (if affluent--that apartment is huge) people, in this case an elderly married couple; aside from the aforementioned brief flight of fantasy the whole film could be happening to your neighbors in the apartment next door. And instead of anger or sadism the driving emotion here is the eponymous one, expressed in the somehow more appropriate French.
Much has been written about Emmanuel Riva's performance as Anne, the eloquent depiction of her character's gradually decaying body. I say this is not so much a solo as it is a duet--crucial is Jean-Louis Trintignant's Georges, with his intelligent, all-too-aware eyes. He knows what's happening, he knows what is to come, and the knowledge threatens to overwhelm him.
Might as well note that Haneke doles out plenty of suffering for both actors--Riva sits in a bathtub naked, scrubbed vigorously by an unpleasant nurse; Trintignant huffs desperately (not to mention suspensefully and hilariously) after an intrusive pigeon. You don't know if he is only acting his arthritic limp, or his excruciating attempt to get up off the floor; you only know that it's almost too much to watch. Is the scene necessary? I think so--it shows Georges still able to care for a living creature, though you wonder if perhaps what he really wants is to twist the bird's neck (with Haneke both are possible, perhaps even inevitable)
There is no escape here; no puncturing the plausibility of Haneke's scenario (unlike fellow shockmeister Lars Von Trier, whose scenarios (save in The Idiots) have almost always been implausible, and hence easy to dismiss). This is easily Haneke's most horrifying film because it says that love that is selfless and passionate and enduring is also monstrous. The film shows you (step by step, moment by moment) the how and why of its monstrosity and you can't contradict the case being made, you can only agree with it--perhaps pray it doesn't happen to you.
It's Haneke's best work to date, I think; possibly Haneke's terminal work...after a film like this, what else does he have to say, really?
Big Wheel
Unlike Amour which lends a kind of stripped-down finality to Haneke's career, Leos Carax's Holy Motors seems more like a thrown-together, extravagantly appointed photo album of all the films he's seen and all the films he's made and all the films he's likely to make--the picture hurls allusions and ideas at you like sparks off a Catherine wheel. It's brilliantly unhinged, liable to go any direction like a runaway horsecart, yet still you sense the presence of the director at the reins, maintaining the illusion of complete abandonment (or is it an illusion of complete control?).
The film can be a metaphor for any number of things: the Shakespearean notion that life is a performance we're always trying to rehearse for (but end up improvising); the conceit that higher powers (Oscar's chauffer Celine (Edith Scob, the mad doctor's disfigured daughter in Franju's Eyes Without a Face) calls a fellow driver "Ectoplasm on wheels!"--are the drivers ghosts or spirits?) manipulate our destiny; the sense that life is a neverending job from which we long to punch out.
Bits seem contradictory, if not confusing--Celine mentions that Mr. Oscar (Denis Lavant) has nine appointments, nine encounters (if you like) in which he participates, responds to or initiates, either alone or with others. I counted thirteen 'episodes,' not nine: man in 'forest;' banker; beggar woman; motion capture; Monsieur Merde and model; father and daughter; entr'acte with accordion; assassin and double; street shooting; dying old man; Jean; home; limo garage.
Celine tells him about the appointments when he's playing a banker so the first two are out; the entr'acte I take to be an entr'acte--outside the narrative; the street shooting is (or so Celine claims) an accident, and so (it's implied) is the encounter with Jean; Oscar confirms that the next appointment after the dying old man is his last, so the garage should not included, which leaves us with--what, seven episodes? Do we consider Monsieur Merde and model two episodes (first half in the cemetery, second in the sewers)? Do we include the entr'acte? Adding to the confusion, the credits have Lavant playing eleven roles (we can take out Mr. Oscar as his meta-persona and the accordion player, but do we count killer and killed?).
Kylie Minogue sings heartrendingly in a vast space that recalls Orson Welles' The Trial and the climax of Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva, both shot in the Gare d'Orsay, both filled with a dark opulence that seems to have inspired this film (her scene was actually shot in the abandoned La Samaritaine department store near the Pont-Neuf bridge, Carax having used store and bridge in his previous Les Amants du Pont-Neuf). Minogue calls herself Eva but her real name (as much as we can ascertain anything in this picture is real) is Jean. When the man she is to meet runs up the stairs
he calls out "Jean!"--does this signify that what happens to Jean and her partner is real and not
staged, hence Oscar's anguish?
All very mysterious; doesn't help that one has the nagging feeling Carax is chortling at all the effort being expended on unraveling his tangled web (for the record I believe Oscar's appointment list went something like this: beggar woman; motion capture; Monsieur Merde; father; entr'acte; assassin; assassinated; dying man; home). More profitable, I suspect, to simply sit back and have fun free-associating the metaphors as they flash across the screen--to sit back, in effect, and enjoy the ride.
Perhaps the closest we come to an explanation for everything (an explanation for anything?) is when Michel Piccoli--in a role Carax wanted to (ah-ha!) play himself--asks an obviously exhausted Oscar: "What makes you carry on?" Oscar's answer: "What made me start. The beauty of the act."
"Beauty?" Piccoli's Carax-like figure can't resist musing. "They say it's in the eye of the beholder." Pause. Then in a worried tone: "And if there is no beholder?"
3.13.13
Cinderella man
Ramona Diaz's Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey is possibly everything you're afraid it's going to be: an unabashed promotional documentary about the American arena-rock band Journey; a wall-to-wall concert of '80s pop-rock ballads; a retelling of the rags-to-riches story of Arnel Pineda, arguably the most popular of recent Filipino vocalists working in America.
Mind you, Diaz doesn't hide the fact that Arnel is actually the second replacement of the band's most famous vocalist, Steve Perry; nor does she hide the fact that many of the most popular songs Arnel sings were written and composed over twenty years ago. To his credit, Arnel doesn't gloss over this either; when during an autograph session he's asked point-blank about Steve Perry, he says "Without him I wouldn't be here."
That awareness saves the film from falling into a vat of its own cheesiness. Arnel knows he's not doing entirely original music; he talks about it at length at one point. But he's not bitter--he is and always will be grateful for being chosen to be the band's vocalist, and he sings the songs in Perry's voice and style without a trace of irony, or self-parody. If anything, that's the film's single most unsettling image: Perry's power-belting tenor pouring out of a frail little dark-skinned Asian with flowing long hair (it's like listening to the voice of Pavarotti pour out of Pocahontas).
I'd say the film wisely takes its cue from Arnel's attitude: it knows it's an instrument for the glorification of its patrons, but does its work well and refuses to act like an ingrate towards the hand that nourishes it. Along the way it manages to tell Arnel's story in some detail, from his humble beginnings as member of a fractured family eking out a living in the streets of Manila to his career as vocalist in a small-scale rock band.
Diaz doesn't gloss over and Arnel doesn't hide the fact that he used drugs, and was at one point alcoholic; unlike some reformed rockers, he doesn't wear the fact on his chest like a hair shirt--perhaps Arnel's most appealing quality is his groundedness, the way he modestly admits to his failings, and casually refers to his achievements without making too much fuss either way (it's a Filipino trait that on one hand keeps slowing down his ascent up the ladder of success, on the other keeps him balanced enough to avoid prematurely falling off that ladder).
The film of course ends with its eponymous song, and Diaz manages to play with some of the high-definition digital cameras and swooping crane equipment filmmakers enjoy using when creating documentaries of big-time rock bands (either playing with them or cutting in footage that uses them). Hard to begrudge her, though--like Arnel, she's only too aware of the once-in-a-lifetime chance to play with big toys; the temptation is naturally too much to resist.
Is this cause for celebration? Yes, I think so; a kind of gentle applause, that someone with talent has for once landed some kind of happy ending, that Filipinos are somehow inching forward in the vast American media landscape, conquering territory any way they can.
(The film will open on March 8 Friday in fifteen cities across the United States)
3.3.13
We doan need to watch no stinkin Awards show; we need only watch this.
Arguably the highest, most glorious point in Oscar history--the very epitome of artistic Hollywood achievement and good taste.
The moment poor Eileen Bowman opens her mouth as Snow White (possibly the most irritating of all Disney characters) the number drops straight down the toilet bowl and starts spinning; her chirpy whine (you have to work to acquire a voice like that) playing delicately on the eardrum like an icepick.
Love her foray into the audience. Always found the smiles on Oscar night plastic--here they look positively quickset, and cracking under the hard sun. Caught poor Dustin Hoffman (is that him? video's so blurry) doing his best Benjamin Braddock grin ("I want to say just one word to you, just one word: Plastics").
Bowman goes back onstage, then babbles a bit Norma-Desmond style before going into a Tropicana-style nightclub number complete with dancing coconut drinks and tango.
They wheel out a few of the living dead--Dorothy Lamour, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Vincent Price, Coral Browne. Always happy to see these people, though I wonder if they were happy to be seen in this.
Then the host (Merv Griffith) delivers the zinger: "Isn't it exciting Snow? Isn't it thrilling? It gets better." Look of disbelief on Bowman's face. "Meet your blind date--Rob Lowe!"
He steps onstage, takes a mike, and the moment he opens his mouth--oh yes, it got much much better, a stretched out, agonizing rendition of "Proud Mary." The dancing coconut drinks come back and kick the energy level so high the nightclub tables themselves get up and start dancing.
Pause; you wonder if the number's over. A drumroll--apparently not! Cut to the audience, where Gregory Hines looks as if he's asking himself "can I stop bending over now?"
They come to the Grauman's Chinese Theater number, and as Lowe and Bowman pull aside the sliding flats, you swear you could hear the strains of "Springtime for Hitler" play for a moment.
Pfft. Brooks can only wish he achieved something as tasteless; compared to this, he's fucking Vincente Minnelli. A high-kicking chorus line of theater ushers and usherettes follows, then Snow White appears center stage with a crown of stars planted in her hair, wearing a huge diaphanous gown studded with lightbulbs that recalls the abdomen of the Queen Mother in Aliens. They do a dramatic reprise of "Hooray for Hollywood."
The stairs close on this monstrosity, we see at the apex of the stairs a doorway done Chinese Theater style, the door opens, and out steps--Lily Tomlin?
But why not Tomlin? She steps down and for the first time in lord knows how long gives us a dose of sarcastic sanity. "I told them I'd be thrilled to do the Oscars if they could just come up with an entrance," she begins. "Think of it, more than a billion and a half people just watched that!" Funny, only she's temporarily upstaged by a final bit of madness--a man crawling head-down the stairs, flinging shoes offstage. "What," you wonder--"are loose footwear forbidden? After all that just transpired, unworn shoes onstage are in bad taste?!"
"I knew it was going to happen one day--the whole planet has gone Hollywood," she continues. "Welcome to the shoe!"
Oh yes. Makes one almost want to watch the upcoming shoe.
Almost.
I'm ready for my cigarette now, Mr. DeMille.
2.24.13
Zero Illuminated
After writing extensively on Zero Dark Thirty and the literature surrounding it, I'm struck by one other article that ingeniously and even brilliantly squares away its lack of context or characterization, pointing an accusing finger at the film's true antagonist--not UBL or Osama Bin Laden, not the American industrial-military complex and its complementary intelligence organizations, but something much bigger, the forces of history itself.
If we take this essay to have finally solved the riddle of Bigelow's film and its ambivalent (some would say confused) stance towards torture, then Bigelow's persistent apolitical posture turns out to have been a prescient aesthetic choice, one consistent with her film work since she met Susan Sontag back in the '70s. As the article puts it, the film is not postmodern, but post-postmodern, where it puts out a view, a sensibility, a story that competes for legitimacy in the public mind.
The article even puts to rest the suspicion that the film endorses torture--not really according to Rombes; it merely suggests that history itself demands the torture of suspects, with all the attendant consequences to be paid for and endured (the delays, the subsequent fall from moral grace). The film in effect notes that history itself is responsible, not us--I suppose as big a cop-out as any I can think of ("The Devil (history) made me do it!"), unless the film makes this statement in a state of dismay, not mere resignation or relief, and here (again) the film remains stubbornly silent. At this point Bigelow's narrowly focused POV starts to look less willfully ignorant and more heroically honest--when one character in the film profanely demands targets to eliminate, Rombes writes: "his words ring with a hot, burning truth about power rarely spoken in American mainstream films."
Like I said, brilliantly put; it actually made me pause to try rethink my thoughts about the film.
Maybe the biggest problem I have with Rombes' thesis is that looking at Bigelow's other work I don't quite see consistent aesthetic choices: just a lot of stylistic ones that help prop up a usually muddled script, Hurt Locker included (as I pointed out in my earlier article it's excellently made, but the central character doesn't make much sense). Strange Days begins with a fantastic single-shot action setpiece that runs for around ten minutes and says--I don't know what, exactly; the rest of the picture is far less coherent. Blue Steel is full of dread and cool metallic blue imagery that in retrospect feels ridiculous; Near Dark--arguably my favorite of her early work--is compellingly violent vampiric poetry that sometimes contradicts its own rules. Give me a more consciously nihilistic pessimist like late Bresson (Lancelot du Lac and L'Argent comes to mind)--he's every bit as deadpan and ambivalent, but you at least get from him the sense that he knows what he's doing; this stumbling along in the murky waters of political controversy clouds the waters more than clears them, and really doesn't help anyone much, least of all Bigelow.
Django Unzipped
(Warning: plot of several Tarantino movies discussed in explicit detail)
I'd already talked about how I think Tarantino's Django Unchained was sexist; now I've been asked to explain why I think the movie's racist.
I thought just linking a few perceptive articles would be enough; but just to humor those in question, I'll point out the highlights, and add a few thoughts of my own:
Keli Goff's Huffington Post article questions the violence--why, comparing this to his previous pictures, did he feel the need to amp up the overall suffering of African Americans in his picture? Why, for example, does he show Jews killed in Inglourious Basterds and Uma Thurman suffering in the Kill Bill movies but not in such voyeuristic length and with so much creative detail? Why single out black slaves, hm? As a kind of stinger finale, Goff also points out the telling detail that in his most famous film, Pulp Fiction, the black man is raped, and saved by a white man.
Don't totally agree with Ms. Goff in everything; she professes to be a Tarantino fan, and thinks the violence in Kill Bill "on par with watching ballet"--so speaketh an otherwise thoughtful writer unfamiliar I'm guessing with the works of Liu Chia-Liang and Johnnie To (In my book the first Kill Bill is Tarantino's amateur stab at the martial arts epic, its sequel only marginally better).
More damning I would say is Jelani Cobb's article, which begins by showing the injustice inflicted on the Russians by Tarantino's previous picture (I personally thought it oververbose and less than inventive myself). Cobb goes on to discuss both the use of the "N" word and the depiction of a black hero in the movie, noting that while the word in question was used during the time, here it's used so excessively, unconvincingly often it has practically been raised to "the level of a pronoun;" he goes on to talk about how the slaves offered continued resistance against their white masters to the point that the "slaveholding class existed in a state of constant paranoia about
slave rebellions, escapes, and a litany of more subtle attempts to
undermine the institution"--a reality that Tarantino not only ignores, but overturns with the notion that Django is the only non-passive slave out there. In effect, Tarantino reinforces the myth, the stereotype--and, Cobb insists, it is a myth and stereotype--that the slaves never fought back; they mostly shuffled along clad in their leg irons and esoteric metal neckware.
I'd go further on this: with all the suffering endured onscreen and in reality, with the wide variety of experiences and stories to tell, with all the strength and intelligence the enslaved can muster--is bloody payback the only response Tarantino can have them take? I'd like to ask African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett his reaction to the Tarantino flick, only I suspect it isn't necessary; he's already done his take, and a subtler, finer, more nuanced response I doubt can be found.
I'd especially point to a key dialogue that takes place between two slaves, concerning the power and importance of reading and writing and, beyond that, knowledge (a discussion I'd have with my students, many of whom seem unaware of this aspect of history and their ancestors' role in that history). At its lowest level, that of reading words, an educated slave can help his flight by reading maps and street signs. When a slave learns to write words he can forge a day pass (a note authorizing his passage through public roads)--allowing the runaway, oh, at least a day's head start. If said slave could read, write, and compose, why he could actually begin to strike at the heart of the institution itself, which is basically a set of laws printed on paper. So when I say "is that all Tarantino can think for them to do?" I'm serious--the fight against slavery took many forms, and that of blowing a white man's head away with a shotgun is the least imaginative I can think of.
2.3.13
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