The Black Isle

Name those pandas (via Panda Fix):

Shanghai in the ’30s. Not exactly beer and skittles.

Sino-Japanese war 1932 executions

Japanese colonel, murderer of American POWs (see details below). He looks strangely like Alfonso Cuaron.

Shanghainese movie star (maybe)

They are right, you know. You can find it all on eBay!

The Filth and the Fury
Directed by Julien Temple

Inspired by the good reviews that Julien Temple’s new doc on Joe Strummer out of Sundance (one of the few praised films there this year), I nudged his doc on the history and collapse of the Sex Pistols up my Netflix queue. It’s an energetically-paced entry-level doc, especially the first half, though I suspect the whole thing’s been significantly cleaned up because the surviving Pistols are here as talking heads and don’t do any self-flaggellating. Even the Malcolm MacLaren-hating was pretty mild, and nothing you didn’t already know about. “The Sex Pistols died at the right time for all the wrong reasons,” says John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten, the most lucid and soulful of the bunch — and who currently hosts a children’s TV series on bugs in the UK! That’s just about the most thoughtful thing anyone says in the entire film. And then he winds up in tears over the memory of his pal Sid Vicious. The kinder, gentler, huggable, loveable Pistols?!

It’s nice to be reminded again though how effective their youth anthems were and still are. The cheesy punk bands of the present day have nothing on them. Funny also how times have changed — thirty years ago, in 1977, the big thing was their Silver Jubilee anthem “God Save The Queen” with its “No future! No future!” chorus and today, Helen Mirren’s about to win the Oscar for her very sympathetic, very respectful portrayal of the very same horsey gal.

What I saw last night:

Half Nelson
Directed by Ryan Fleck, Written by Fleck and Anna Boden, Edited by Boden

This is the best independent film I’ve seen in a long time. People wanting to make human-scale movies about “a man with a problem” or “a connection between unlikely people” really need to look at this. It’s got some of the old mainstays of the indie genre: drugs, botched romances, children from broken homes, interracial understanding, and the storyline may make you want to retch — crack-addicted schoolteacher (white) forms unlikely friendship with 13-year-old student (black) — but Ryan Fleck’s direction of his script is brisk, assured, and he never ever hits any of his points hard. There are no gratuitous scenes of drug use, just the disastrous psychic consequences of it. The friendly neighborhood dealer doesn’t shoot guns, he proudly shows off his collection of black Americana Mammy knick-knacks, unconsciously giving away his troubled attitude to race and community. And most crucically, there’s no ponderous explication of why schoolteacher Dan (played by Ryan Gosling) is the wrought-up young idealist he is, with shelves filled with books on black social history and communism; instead, Fleck gives us a brief dip into dinner at Dan’s parents’ house where we meet the boozy, gently-careworn ex-radicals who produced him.

(Best Actor nominee) Ryan Gosling is terrific as Dan, the troubled social studies teacher who’s continually asked to stay on message but all the while burns to teach his hungry black and Latino charges more about the darker passages of American history. He’s alive in the classroom, invigorated by the kids, but once out in the world, he’s an anti-social limp rag, haunted by botched relationships and a very deep sense of futility. The girl he sometimes coaches him in basketball and who becomes his guardian angel is played with touching, sturdy watchfulness by Shareeka Epps.

Everything in the film is played just under the surface — because of it, the movie engages more than the vast majority of indies in the “overcoming addiction” mold where the meaning and moral of everything is shoved down your throat. Fleck and Boden’s confidence in the use of suggestion, the reliance on what’s not said as much as what is, and above all, their whole-hearted trust in character, bring to mind the work of French directors like Jacques Audiard and Arnaud Deplechin.

From Slate:

In his recent memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, art critic Robert Hughes pinpoints the moment he decided to leave his native Australia to begin a new life as a permanent expatriate. It was a warm evening in 1962. Hughes and his mentor, popular historian Alan Moorehead, were talking shop as they pounded down Gewürztraminer at Hughes’ apartment in Sydney. “If you stay here another ten years,” Moorehead told him, “Australia will still be a very interesting place. But you will have become a bore, a village explainer.”

Wow, that captures it exactly! A village explainer. Must remember to use this in the right circumstances.

What I saw last night:

The Naked Kiss
Written, produced and directed by Sam Fuller. It’s been about 15 years since I last saw this at college in England, where I loved it to bits because then it all seemed so new to me (the way I also adored those overwrought Robert Aldrich movies). Still think it’s a hoot today, though its lopsided structure bugs me more now — slow, circuitous build, sudden denouement — perhaps because I’m deep in the process of revision on my novel, trying to work out similar problems. I still love the creepy musical sequence with the kids in the hospital singing the Blue Bird of Happiness song (see clip above), and it was with great pleasure that I was reminded of what, in fact, “the naked kiss” was — the kiss of a man who, from the way he kissed, you could instantly tell was a pervert.

Heading South
Written and directed by Laurent Cantet, the French filmmaker who I think is as underrated as Francois Ozon is overrated. This film about middle-aged white women sex tourists (led by the always game Charlotte Rampling) in Haiti in the late ’70s is so fresh in its perspective, so boldly unpolite that I would have put this on my top ten of 2006, if it weren’t for the very disappointing, very slapdash final ten minutes. How could Cantet have lost his nerve so suddenly and so terribly? It’s still a terrific film worth watching, if only for the oddity that is the lousy ending — proof that even the greats can falter like us little people.

Scene from Jan Fabre’s play “Je Suis Sang” (I Am Blood).

From NYT, Jan 21, 2007:

“We are living in 2007,” Mr. Fabre said in a telephone interview from his studio in Antwerp. “It’s even more cruel than in the Middle Ages. People are still torturing each other, in wars, for religion. It’s not a very pleasant thought. Of course our body is still the same.” …

“Je Suis Sang” originated in 2000, when Mr. Fabre was invited to create a production for the mammoth Avignon Festival. The stage was the grand Cour d’Honneur, a central courtyard in the medieval papal palace. When Mr. Fabre went to see the fortresslike space, he thought of its history of brutality, and its religious and political prisoners over the centuries. “A lot of blood is on the walls,” Mr. Fabre said, “You cannot see the blood anymore, but you know there were many killings.” So he wrote a nonlinear text in French and Latin, a meditation on human fate with an incantatory quality. “It’s a kind of poetic manifesto,” he says. “A lot of elements in the text refer to the Middle Ages, a lot of symbols, like the pelican as an idea of Christ.”

French critics were conflicted but impassioned. Calling it a “bacchanal of the subconscious,” Le Monde’s Dominique Frétard wrote: “Bursting with life, death and sex, is the piece unbearable? Is it simply fake? That is not the issue. The piece represents what living theater should be. It confronts us with disturbing questions, an exciting form, a distressing text. It deals us a blow beyond the petty-bourgeois reality that so often poisons the arts.”

Alice Munro, that peerless composer of miniature epics, has a short story in the February 2007 Harper’s which took all of last night to read. John Leonard’s review of Zoli by Colum McCann in the January issue made me think I have to buy it (and then let it languish on my shelf for months, or years).

Current Mood:

Bored

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Written and directed by Dito Montiel

Much better than I thought it was going to be, considering that it came with the stench of Park City (it was made with help from the Sundance Institute and bears marks of its trademark “healing” properties, not to mention its wretched “triumph of the human spirit”-ism). An autobiographical coming-of-age tale told in two intersecting halves: first, of young Dito (played by the very good Shia Labeouf, suddenly no longer an annoying child actor) who is dying to get out of his violent, soul-crushing Queens environment (knucklehead buddies and stifling household), and of older Dito (played by Robert Downey Jr.) having to come home from California after close to 20 years to try and seek closure.

Before the Sundance-y sermons arrive in the later half of the film (along with Rosario Dawson as the older version of young Dito’s girl), the film is pretty fresh in its depiction of an aimless mid-’80s teen world where Manhattan seems not just a subway ride but many whole social universes away, so far away that its glimmer doesn’t even figure in the kids’ dreams. At times the film veers closer to I Vitelloni than Raising Victor Vargas (which I absolutely detested), and I had high hopes for where it would lead us — that it would live up to the dark, damning opening line of the film: “My name is Dito Montiel. Everyone you see here I will eventually leave.” (Or something to the effect.) It flirts with all the difficult feelings of guilt and retroactive anger, of mixed feelings for his limited, controling Dad and clueless, unhelpful Mom, then shies away from fully exploring them. Those were the emotions that would have made the film resonate with the kind of bittersweetness a film like that should have.

A much more affecting film that deals with very similar emotions is Guy Maddin’s new masterpiece Brand Upon the Brain, which, despite its surreal atmosphere, is as honest and true about life, growing, and aging as any I’ve seen: Young Guy (yes, as in the auteur) spends his childhood with his older sister and parents on an isolated island, where Mom watches him through a telescope in her lighthouse, bossing him every minute. He has unhappy feelings for her throughout, and as a grown man, when he returns to visit her in her old age, his unhappy feelings remain but they’re adulterated by other new feelings (pity, sorrow, empathy?) because she’s now old and frail, and like everything else, quite beyond repair.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated
Written and directed by Kirby Dick

This “expose” of the MPAA’s secret cabal of movie raters is done in the most revoltingly smug way imaginable. Kirby Dick even appears in the film, soul-patch and all, the crusading journalist showing up the sinister cabalists from his swank home office in the Hollywood Hills or whichever cliffside his Bauhaus dingleberry cleaves to. It’s lazy stuff, getting easy quotes from people in the biz who’ve been slapped with demands for cuts or the NC-17 rating, and he responds to everything with kneejerk liberal finger-wagging, as if just being on the side of the angels were enough.

When he’s not getting quotes from people complaining about the system, he’s driving around with a private investigator he’s hired (she’s gay, of course, for the extra frisson, I’m sure), trying to find out the identities of the secret movie raters like some sniggering, fourth-rate Hardy Boy. As if that was the most important point in a story about censorship! He neglects to ask any serious questions about storytelling, about art, about why filmmakers would want to tell certain kinds of stories in certain kinds of ways, and how, perhaps, different people see things in a different light. Yes, yes, by all means, spend a few minutes calling the censors out as homophobic prudes, but it’s unconscionable to just point to this and crucify them for it without any deeper discussion. Instead of an overview of modern American censorship and the ways in which ideas are being shaped in society today, what we get is a piece of suburban goofery — a middle-aged man running around and making phone calls trying to Punk Those Bureaucrats, telling us nothing we hadn’t known before.