Icepicks to the Groin

In my never-ending quest to watch Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1000 Favorite Films, I embarked upon two largely misunderstood psychosexual thrillers from 1992, directed with chilly precision by European filmmakers in America. Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct successfully wallowed in controversy upon its release for Sharon Stone's infamous "twat seen 'round the world"; today though, it only seems like only one winking provocation amongst many. Like a gender transposition of the director's hilariously symbolic The Fourth Man, the movie punishes its protagonist for straying into sexual abandon and for missing all of the obvious warning signs. In the place of blasphemed Catholic imagery, rambunctious screenwriter Joe Eszterhas dumps Hitchcock blondes, DePalmaesque camera acrobatics, and over-the-top noir tropes into a sleazy, post-genre stew, with Stone's icy star-making turn as the main ingredient and George Dzundza's over-boiled sarcasm ("She got that magna cum laude pussy on her that done fried up your brain!", "He got off before he got offed") as the prime seasoning. Stone's blank, sculpted visage has since launched a thousand Skinemax knock-offs, invariably mingling sex, death, and even abnormal psychology without an ounce of Verhoeven's visual wit, a perfect counterpoint to Eszterhas's fun but overheated script.

The differences between the aggressive Basic Instinct and Polanski's more ruminative Bitter Moon are clear from the opening images: Verhoeven shatters perception with a kaleidoscopic mirrored reflection of a copulating couple, while Polanski opens on a gently rolling sea only to pull back and reveal that we were looking from a stateroom on a cruise liner through a circular porthole, obscuring vision but anticipating the story-within-a-story to come. Like an even scurvier Ancient Mariner, wild-eyed, wheelchaired former novelist Oscar (Peter Coyote) is compelled to weave his novelistic tale of kinky desire for and disillusion with the increasingly disturbed and desensitized Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner, who goes from perkily innocent plaything to blank, Sharon Stone-esque erotic avenger as the film continues). The audience for Oscar's unreliable narration is Nigel, maybe the most stereotypically repressed, British role Hugh Grant will ever play, along with those sexually-inhibited souls watching at home. He's on a trip to spice up his seven-year marriage to Kristin Scott-Thomas's outwardly placid Fiona, so his secret-sharer relationship with Oscar bodes ill for the future. The price of employing exoticism and experimentation to jumpstart a floundering relationship has rarely been more acutely presented on film.

Although the immediate parallels would seem to be between ice queens Mimi and Sharon Stone's Catherine Trammell (along with the uncanny confluence of nursemaid/dominatrix motifs if Jeanne Tripplehorn's Trammell-double counselor is thrown into the equation), the real twins are Catherine and Oscar, pleasure-seeking Americans through and through. Sexual instigators used to getting what they want, the pair are also writers, attempting to conflate their lives and their arts into a workable whole. Catherine, with what one imagines as functional, workmanlike prose, writes lurid crime novels that ambiguously come true, probably by her own hand. Oscar, on the other hand, is the classic failed novelist, purplish and high-falutin' in a way that's no longer popular. If Oscar's life story is anything to trust (and there are indications that it may not be), his Parisian downward spiral into sexual malaise and cruelty parallels his thwarted ambitions (although he seems at his most devilishly happy recounting his yarn to Nigel). So perhaps the most interesting contrast to be made between Catherine and Oscar involves their relative commercial successes: Catherine gets away with murder and indulging her psychosexual obsessions in real life because she caters to her audience's bloodlust safely through prose; art imitates life and vice versa until no one can tell the difference. But Oscar's failings as a novelist, his inability to reconcile his idea of a higher order of art with the erotic restlessness he feels with Mimi, haunt and degrade him as time goes on. Life refuses to conform to art, and both suffer. Similarly, Basic Instinct became a huge hit because of its wry sensationalism, and Bitter Moon, the altogether more challenging and less titillating movie, did not.

The two films dance with these notions of art versus life, storyteller versus audience, in a more playful mode than I may be conveying or the original audiences may have cared to admit. Polanski's mordant wit is in evidence throughout Bitter Moon, especially through Peter Coyote's flowery narration and in the early scenes of Oscar's and Mimi's budding kinkiness. Both he and Verhoeven frequently match formal mastery with a drolly ironic eye towards chosen genres and characters, and these mid-period works are exemplars of keen, feisty art-entertainment ripe for reevaluation.

2 - Rachel Getting Married

Directed by: Jonathan Demme
Written by: Jenny Lumet
Country: USA
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger

Don’t be thrown by the similarities between Jonathan Demme’s new film and other quirky dysfunctional family dramas like Pieces of April and Margot at the Wedding. Even at their best, those films tend to devalue any hope for pleasure, empathy, good will, or togetherness unless slathered in irony, hatred, or the knowing impossibility of real redemption. Enter Demme, the most humanistic of American directors, a chronicler of individuals of every size, shape, and stripe. Seemingly counted out post-Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme has since been amassing an impressive collection of undervalued documentaries, concert films, and adaptations/remakes. No one else could have revealed the heights and depths of sorrow and celebration lurking within Rachel Getting Married.

We begin with Kym (Hathaway), our thoroughly unlikable but fiercely honest heroine, returning from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding. We further encounter her doting dad (Irwin) and the estranged sister-bride (DeWitt), and mostly catch glimpses of their remarried mother (Winger). Before and during the wedding rehearsal we finally meet the black musician-groom (Tunde Adebimpe), his best man and Kym’s fellow rehabber (Mather Zickel), and their friends and family. I’ve been using the pronoun “we” because Rachel features highly probing, prowling handheld digital cinematography by Delcan Quinn, one of two major Dardennes-inspired camera performances (the other being The Wrestler) this year. Quinn’s eye bores into the (newly extended) family dynamics when the guests finally congregate for the rehearsal dinner. This sequence is painfully played out for all of the inherent in-jokes, awkwardness, euphoria, and generosity when one family first meets another; all of its discomforting potential is realized when, despite raucous recitations of family stories and confessions, Kym receives an embarrassed silence during her toast when she memorably dubs herself “Shiva, the destroyer of worlds” and clumsily tries to make amends according to the 12 Steps. At the heart of the film is a tragedy relating to Kym I won’t spoil, but its reverberations are clear even when its specifics are not. She, like every other major character in the film, “has her reasons,” to rephrase the famous formulation by Renoir, one of Demme’s earliest antecedents, but the trick is overcoming those reasons but for a day, an event, a celebration that engulfs the family: pride, history, and all.

There’s nothing token about the multiculturalism on hand, as those characters never exhibit nor discuss ethnic stereotypes. One waits for the objections to interracial marriage to be brought up or a Freudian slip to uneasily divide the celebrants, but thankfully nothing ever happens. Yet Demme isn’t so post-racial as to let the white, liberal Connecticut family totally off the hook. The wedding sequences themselves become overwhelmingly multiculti and polyreligious, putting into stark relief the intra-family squabbling and making it clear that the bride’s family is overcompensating. The juxtapositions of saris and rabbis, of belly dancers and jazzmen, are clever pokes at a family’s outward togetherness hiding inner turmoil. Blood is thicker than water, it seems, but wine is thicker than blood. But Demme likes people too much to hammer or humor them only; even the illusory reconciliation between sweetly drunken family members is given its fair heft, as a moment among moments, circling around a blessed event.

Some reviewers have noted a creative clash between what they see as the rote indie dysfunction of Jenny Lumet’s (daughter of Sidney) screenplay and the inclusive, celebratory tone of Demme’s treatment of the wedding-related sequences. Without knowing exactly what is Lumet’s and what is Demme’s and what is theirs jointly, I suspect the satiric diversity was there at the start but that the director enlivened and brightened what was a slyly funny but downer screenplay. The welcome cameos by Robyn Hitchcock, Roger Corman, and many of the other musicians obviously came from Demme, and they lend immeasurable texture to the jubilant wedding sequences, even when intercut with Kym’s intense black sheepishness. Music has frequently been at the heart of Demme’s evocations of Americana, mostly notably in the gawky cool of Stop Making Sense and the gentle, auburn soul of Heart of Gold. His son is a guitarist at the wedding, and as much as reality and fiction intermingle in this Dogme-influenced film, the making of and viewing of Rachel Getting Married are undoubtedly family affairs.

Make no mistake, the film is depressing; lies are uncovered, tempers slowly burn, words are exchanged that are hard to take back. The cast admirably manages to evoke the spontaneous but dutiful affection of a long overdue family get-together, before and as the agonizingly unspoken rears its head. Each performance is of a piece, although the three leading ladies (Hathaway, DeWitt, and the always welcome Winger) are especially commendable for their bottomless capacities to inflict and absorb contentment and contempt. Rachel Getting Married isn’t the beginning or the end for its characters, or for Demme, that master of pluralism, less a maestro or a ringmaster than an emcee for a boisterous, ever-enveloping get-together that’s gotta end sometime.

1 - WALL-E

Directed by: Andrew Stanton
Written by: Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon
Country: USA
Starring: Fred Willard, the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver

Apocalypse isn’t the typical subject matter for a children’s movie. But then again, neither is a rat cooking in France or over-the-hill superheroes, yet Pixar made it so. The studio is not simply the standard-bearer for American animation anymore but sits at the top of mainstream filmmaking in general. Its various directors and animators simply refuse to separate animation from cinema as an art form, kids from adults as an audience, art from entertainment as an aim. Pixar’s ninth effort, WALL-E, manages to fulfill all expectations for a science fiction story, an imaginatively-conceived animated film, a straightforward yet sophisticated treatise on consumption and environmentalism, and a further evolution of the animation studio’s celebrated product.

In liberally but adeptly using elements from science fiction films (most notably Silent Running, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey) and animation (anthropomorphized Disney characters, for instance) of the past, WALL-E builds upon a fine tradition of identifying the humanity of non-human beings and visualizing a fantastic but conceivable idea of the future. The unassuming and plucky little garbage compactor WALL-E, the last of his kind on a desolate and waste-covered Earth, utilizes silent-movie expression and underdog longing in his pursuit of EVE, the sleekly advanced probe droid sent to survey for signs of vegetation. Like Tracy and Hepburn and Allen and Keaton before them, WALL-E and EVE, the crumpled, neurotic male and the sharp, businesslike female who somehow fit together, join a clear comic tradition that grounds the film’s more esoteric premises. Their bickering couple dimension is all the more impressive for the film’s lack of dialogue, forcing nonverbal communication to uncharacteristically carry the weight. This “gendered” conventionality (noted by a few critics) seems a lesser problem when juxtaposed with WALL-E’s post-apocalyptic, anti-overconsumption elements.

Few mainstream films animated or otherwise push storytelling boundaries to establish mood, character, and theme as effectively as in WALL-E’s first, near-silent, Earthbound half. The main character’s sense of duty, higher aspirations, and quirky loyalty to humanity’s detritus are defined clearly and comically, his realistically-rendered robotic exterior masking the soul of a heartfelt romantic. In addition to being Pixar’s perhaps most ambitious film technologically, the futuristic fable also contains the most epic emotional canvas the studio has yet devised: the demise and rebirth of human culture as we know it. Swiftly and cleverly, the disastrous results of mass consumption and merging of government and business come into focus with likably smarmy (and live-action, thus connecting the film to non-animated reality in a way previously unknown to Pixar) Fred Willard as its spokesman. A political agenda can be extrapolated from the simplest of scenarios, and WALL-E’s devotion to homegrown values and collective responsibility isn’t hard to parse. Yet the film’s lightness of touch and deft mixture of good humor and barbed criticism rightly soften its political blow. Far from a screed yet denser than a supposedly apolitical cartoon, the film is as prescient and topical as one wants to make it, without losing a bit of its visual wonderment and other considerable virtues. Such a perfect mélange of social critique, entertainment, unforced technological fluidity, and storytelling acumen is hard to find in any medium; for Pixar it’s expected yet continually astonishing.

Unbearably poignant, the lonely robot of WALL-E is both the custodial guardian of his masters’ lost culture and a forgotten member of it. Yet WALL-E him/itself is only either doing his duty or chasing his companion, hardly ever consciously standing in as hope for humanity’s survival. He’s parallel to the single plant that can ensure humanity rejoining its rightful home, if recognized and used properly. Despite his and EVE’s agency, it’s the people who must take their world back. The delightful end credits sequence was apparently tacked on after an early audience screening, the only worthwhile result of that process I can name. From cave drawings to more sophisticated artworks, the chronicling of humanity’s future devotion to its world ends the film with the perfect dose of optimism while acknowledging the inevitable work ahead.

3 - Hunger

Directed by: Steve McQueen
Written by: Enda Walsh, Steve McQueen
Country: Ireland
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham

Brutal and poignant in its dedication to the materialistic aspects of common humanity, Hunger reconfigures and reenergizes the formal potential of political filmmaking. Directed and co-written by installation artist and Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, the haunting depiction of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands’s last weeks of life embraces its context without becoming a walking history textbook. With only a few major characters, one long, tensely-delivered dialogue scene, and moments of mundanity alongside moments of cruelty alongside moments of beauty, Hunger thrives by unflinchingly visualizing the cold reality of the Maze prison in 1981.

Intensely focused on each moment, McQueen’s film opens with the decontextualized daily morning routine of a man who turns out to be a prison guard (Graham), most harrowingly including his check for bombs underneath his car. A face in a mirror, bloodied knuckles, and shoving a uniform in a locker become, under the camera’s sure gaze, isolated events eventually crystallizing into a mosaic, beautiful on their own but disturbing in their building implications. Without knowing every facet of recent Irish political history, an audience member can still make the clearest distinctions between the violent and the violated, and how power is secretly fought by the powerless and how the powerful fight back. Every bit of calm is threatened by turmoil, and every burst of sadism is eventually met by a contemplative solemnity. Nothing is apolitical in these men’s lives, even if their fates are not officially recognized as such. Out of this alternately somber and dizzyingly aggressive maelstrom come Bobby Sands (Fassbender) and a priest (Cunningham) to debate whether Bobby should go through with his proposed hunger strike.

Their seventeen-minute long take conversation anchors and frames the film around it. While obeying the laws of exposition in detailing the political nuances of what will come after, the scene equally challenges and humanizes Sands as a person, as a leader, as a symbol for his cause. Depending on whether one agrees or not with Sands’s decision to hunger strike, his aggressively noble rationalizations may turn even a folly into a holy one. The unbrokenly shot conversation undoubtedly transcends its gimmick.

The remainder of the film is difficult to watch due to Sands’s minutely detailed physical suffering. As horrifying as the punishing blows and bloodletting of the movie’s first half, it makes it clear that Sands’s body as a vessel for his soul deteriorates rapidly even if that soul does not. Refusing food but unable to stand, Bobby remains defiant to the end. The body itself, in all its honorable, sad fragility as the final landscape for political dissent, takes center stage. The scenes still have a kind of unsentimental, clear-eyed beauty, and Fassbender’s performance makes the relatively superficial aspirations of, say, Christian Bale in The Machinist or even the men in Rescue Dawn, look practically immoral by comparison. In the end, a viewer must make up his or her own mind as to whether the subsequent results are adequately worth the agony endured, but Hunger’s unabashed politics aren’t about agreeing or disagreeing, it’s about recognizing a person’s ability to etch his protest inside and outside, for himself and for others.

4 - Happy-Go-Lucky

Written and directed by: Mike Leigh
Country: United Kingdom
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman, Sylvestra Le Touzel, Samuel Roukin

Has Mike Leigh traded his characteristic social realist dramedies for an irritatingly perky character study? Not quite. Utilizing his trademarked improvisational techniques to build characters and story with his actors, Leigh had the gall to help shape Sally Hawkins into the likable eternal optimist Pauline “Poppy” Cross and then not shatter her idealism into a million little pieces. Refreshingly sunny and open about her life and world, Poppy can, in individual scenes across Happy-Go-Lucky, seem like that one constantly cheerful friend who urges you to “buck up” during a bad day. But as the film builds and she has further encounters with strangers and friends alike, a portrait coalesces revealing a with-it, helpful woman legitimately curious and hopeful about the world around her. What a concept.

The relatively plotless film is nonetheless shaped by Poppy’s conflict with her driving instructor, the repressed, aggressively misogynist and racist Scott (Marsan). Ostensibly her natural opposite, he challenges her good faith in people with his suspicions and paranoid recriminations. It would have been easy to turn the character into merely a gargoyle but his apparent emotion nakedness garners some kind of sympathy, and those less inclined to take the Poppy pill can hope that his manner will rub off and depress his inexhaustibly positive driving student. Her personality attracts if not changes Scott, and after the film one can either imagine him becoming even more violent having been spurned or reacting more thoughtfully having met someone like Poppy, their choice.

Mike Leigh is unabashedly an actor’s director, but his use of widescreen opens up his Britain to a wealth of experience, with Poppy and Scott as the magnetic poles keeping things stable, with Happy-Go-Lucky nonetheless gravitating toward Hawkins. Her frequently funny and affable portrayal never veers into cloying sainthood or makes Poppy an object of ridicule because the film continually tests her resolve. In her natural fit as a schoolteacher, she tries to help bullied and bullying boys as best she can but never makes a crusade out of it. It’s not that she never extends her good will outside her immediate surroundings; it’s that it’s clear that the outside world doesn’t want it. As much as she looks on the bright side, people like Scott and the rambling homeless man seemingly out of Leigh’s own Naked and her bickering sisters enter her orbit and she enters theirs and they both leave as barely different people. Stormclouds continually threaten the horizon even if they never actually come. Although the most drama and tension is wrung out of Poppy’s encounters with Scott, no sequence is given much precedence over another. This narrative freedom allows a fuller, more complex view of Poppy to be reached at the end, of a person who takes things as they come without sentiment, a lack of humor, or preconceptions. Anyone willing to give her a chance should be rewarded.

5 - CJ7

Directed by: Stephen Chow
Written by: Stephen Chow, Vincent Kok, Tsang Kan-Cheong, Sandy Shaw Lai-King, Fung Chih Chiang, Lam Fung
Country: Hong Kong / China
Starring: Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Kitty Zhang Yuqi, Danny Chan Kwok Kuen, Tin Kai Man

Stephen Chow’s brand of goofball populism, even when coated in a family-friendly sheen, hits me in the right place. Seemingly a departure from his madcap previous films, Shaolin Soccer and Kung-Fu Hustle, CJ7 nonetheless shares with them a love for underdogs and simple, heartfelt morality. Having joined the pantheon of the most world-renowned bankable filmmakers, Chow takes a cue from another of that company, Steven Spielberg, in melding high-concept fantasy with an accessible worldview. Although the title is a reference to China’s Shenzhou manned rocket missions, it and its plot obviously also refer to Spielberg’s E.T. , another story of friendship between a boy and an alien that is a family drama at its core; where the films depart are in Chow’s specific concerns for the Chinese working class while adhering to his successful “mo lei tau” brand of ethnically specific nonsense comedy.

Working off a series of clearly defined dichotomies (rich/poor, appearance/reality, male/female), CJ7 couches its lessons of hard work, perseverance, loyalty, and forgiveness in a digestible but by no means unsophisticated package. The biggest coup perhaps is shifting the Everyman role from Chow himself to the lead character of Dickie (Xu Jiao), a precocious poor kid who, like most Chow protagonists, starts out talented but greedy and ungrateful, and gains wisdom through his trials. In subverting the expectations of both the audience and Dickie, who initially thinks his new alien pal CJ7 can bring him power, prestige, and good grades (ironically, this fantasy plays through references to Hollywood and even Chow’s own previous works), the film becomes the writer-director-star’s most earthbound, so to speak, project to date. Chow’s own resolutely grounded performance as Dickie’s father Chow Ti, firm, fair, a model of working-class dignity, brings a dimension of emotion, realism, even consequence missing from his previous films. For all of the CGI at work (and it is easily Chow’s most expensive movie to date), its real fireworks arise from genuine heartbreak and newfound responsibility.

Like E.T. but unlike most movies aimed at younger audiences, CJ7 portrays childish characters without itself ever becoming wholly childish. With one foot firmly in the harsh reality of Chow Ti’s construction job, the film is free to indulge in the whimsy of Dickie’s world. The otherwise visually inexplicable non sequitur of the large, obviously male actor playing a schoolgirl comes into focus by learning that performer Xu Jiao is actually a girl cross-dressing to play Dickie, thus balancing out the equation. This leveled gender dynamic celebrates itself by playing laughs off of Dickie’s discomfort at the “schoolgirl’s” pursuit and by making “her” the most physically imposing presence in the schoolyard milieu. That integrity and goodness can come from the most visibly unexpected of places is one of CJ7’s chief tenets, another being that foregiveness and renewed potential can overcome disappointments we feel between each other (Chow Ti toward his son and vice versa, Dickie toward CJ7). And CJ7 itself is adorable, rivaling WALL-E’s anthropomorphic hero in cuteness and, in its way, unassumingness. Its power is obviously lifted from E.T. , but its results are reversed in order to bring the creature’s selfless “humanity” as a model more clearly to the fore.

But no amount of rationalization can precisely capture or explain Chow’s sheer ridiculousness, still evident but surprisingly toned down in a kid’s picture. From Chow Ti and Dickie’s father-son game of cockroach-smashing to Dickie’s fantasy of Mission: Impossible 2-style gadgetry, CJ7 tilts the world of childhood transition somewhere between Ozu’s naturalistic satire I Was Born, But… and the Chow-starring high school gangster gagfest Fight Back to School. A heartfelt and loopy hug to the largest audience he’s ever had, Stephen Chow continues dismantling the barriers between high and low, East and West, silliness and sincerity.

6 - Burn After Reading

Written and directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen
Country: USA
Starring: Frances McDormand, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins

In the realm of terrific Coen brothers titles, Burn After Reading may be the best. It perfectly sums up the comedic holocaust that engulfs its characters in the end. It not only refers to the cloak-and-dagger plot but to the hilarious near-dismissal of the whole thing by J.K. Simmons’s CIA chief. And it’s also as anachronistic to the digital age as the bumbling gym employees Linda (McDormand) and Chad (Pitt) are to the contemporary state of political affairs. As ruthlessly detailed and resolutely existential as its predecessor, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, the film takes aim at pretention, vanity, and sheer idiocy on its own turf: Washington, D.C.

Even if the Coens never set out to satirize the self-centered power plays of D.C., with that setting they couldn’t have helped it. Malkovich’s unfortunately-named CIA analyst Osbourne Cox sets the tone, all preening pomp souring into self-absorbed despair upon being fired from the agency. His decision to write his memoirs (emphasis on the oir) coincides with his wife Katie’s (Swinton) investigation into his assets in order to initiate divorce proceedings; a mishap at the gym lands Cox’s financial and personal records into the hands of Linda and Chad, who, too narcissistically focused on the physical to worry about the ethical, are bent on blackmail to finance Linda’s plastic surgery. Meanwhile, dumbly suave Treasury agent Harry (Clooney) has been romantically embroiled with both Katie and Linda and responds to what he sees of the building plot with more than a little paranoia. Just as in the best Fritz Lang melodramas (and many of the Coens’ films, for that matter), the overarching plot seems to have a malevolent life of its own yet in reality is motivated by nothing more cosmic than the participants’ collective, sometimes unrelated, human desires.

If there is any kind of conspiracy that fulfills the characters’ various paranoias, it’s the American culture of needless personal gain disguised as deservedly fulfilling a self-image (Harry and Osbourne’s Cold War-era views of themselves as at the center of things) as well as simply charging in when way over one’s head (“I’m just a good Samaritan…” Chad keeps moronically saying when blackmailing Cox). Even poor Ted (Richard Jenkins) has pitifully reinvented himself from a Greek Orthodox priest into a gym manager and deludes himself into pining for the undeserving Linda. That nobody realizes what an insignificantly small fish in a big pond he or she is comes best into focus when neither the Russians nor Americans particularly care about the various schemes. Burn After Reading’s crucial Greek chorus is composed of David Rasche and J.K. Simmons, CIA men struggling to make sense of it all. Their failure to grasp, and ultimate decision to simply scrap all trace of, the seeming randomness of the film’s Rube Goldberg-esque plot machinations sums up the Coens’ unsparing but bleakly affectionate view of human nature. We like to watch and experience life just to see what it does, but when we screw up and want to make sure we don’t screw up again, we’ll be damned if we could tell you what the hell we just did or why.

7 - Sparrow

Directed by: Johnnie To
Written by: Chan Kin-Chung, Fung Chih-Chiang, Milkyway Creative Team
Country: Hong Kong
Starring: Simon Yam, Kelly Lin, Lam Ka-Tung, Law Wing-Cheong, Kenneth Cheung

Shot during a three-year period between other Milkyway Image projects, Johnny To’s newest film, compared to his previous ones, is still a heady brew of male camaraderie, extravagant cinematography, and aesthetic violence, albeit with a decidedly different mixture of spices to top it all off. Defying easy categorization, Sparrow could be described as a quirky-romantic-action-crime-comedy. The always suave Simon Yam heads a motley team of “sparrows” (slang for “pickpockets”) who become embroiled with a beautiful young woman (Lin) out to seduce them into committing a crime for her. The sparrows are professionals like any other in To’s filmography, proud but knockabout, yet much less hardened criminals than skilled craftsmen plying their trade just enough to get by. Yam in particular gives a likeable, flowing performance, perfectly suited to the equally fluid, formidable direction by Johnnie To.

Sparrow is perhaps the perfect blend of To’s earnest crime pictures and frothy romances. With his absolutely mastery of the frame and editing, he narrows his focus down from the nature of crime and thievery to the literal mechanics of a pickpocket; hands, jackets, and wallets take the place of guns, bullets, and bodies so prominent in Election or Exiled, to name two of his recent genre works, except the stakes aren’t so high and intimacy trumps, or at least equals, bravado. The throwaway narrative leaves To a lot of room to indulge his formal chops, staging some hilarious and astonishing manipulations of space everywhere from a sidewalk to a rooftop to an elevator, akin to the various solutions to the dilemma of visualizing multiple personalities in Mad Detective. The final kicker, and perhaps one of the most satisfying sequences in all of this genre master’s films, is what I like to call “Pickpocketin’ in the Rain:” a dexterous, slow-motion contest of pickpocketing acumen within crowds of umbrella-wielding suited pedestrians moving along a crosswalk in the pouring rain. The near abstractness of water droplets, fingers, eye lines, and black and white suits converging is both comfortingly prosaic and acutely pleasurable, epitomizing To’s genius in mashing genre familiarity with continually inventive visual forms.

8 - Wendy and Lucy

Directed by: Kelly Reichardt
Written by: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt
Country: USA
Starring: Michelle Williams, Will Patton, John Robinson, Wally Dalton, Larry Fessenden

Kelly Reichardt’s brand of downbeat Americana, so manifest in the nostalgia and disconnectedness of the two men in Old Joy, fits well with Michelle Williams’s forlorn, destitute performance in Wendy and Lucy. Both the film and its predecessor are based on Jonathan Raymond’s short stories, giving each film a loose, miniaturist quality that makes each verge on character study without neglecting context. The eponymous Wendy (Williams) finds herself drifting to Alaska from Indiana with her companion pet dog Lucy when her car breaks down in a small town in Oregon. Thus begins the muted, poignant portrait of a destitute and resilient young woman unmoored from a stable socioeconomic status with only her dog and herself for steadiness. So desperately attached is Wendy to Lucy that the dog’s disappearance causes her strongest displays of emotion and most crucial decision at the end.

The always politically-minded Reichardt is less concerned with the whys than the hows of Wendy’s situation. She’s beset by petty parking laws, suspicious clerks, the general indifference held by those with a place against those without. She’s lost for the first time in her life between social strata, in the cracks currently plaguing so many in this economic downturn. And she’s far more anonymous than the high-minded, well planning protagonist of Into the Wild; lacking street smarts or a comfortable milieu, Wendy is vulnerable where she should be sneaky, sullen and self-contained when she should be gregarious with those in a similar plight. For all of the distress and despondency in Wendy and Lucy, there are still moments of bittersweetness and hope. Some incidental details, like Wally Dalton’s sympathetic security guard only being able to spare a few dollars for Wendy, feel true to life in their negotiations between ideals and reality. Like in Old Joy, such national iconography as the woods (and here, also the train) bring possibilities, escapes, and, yes, changes, to those willing to move. Doggedly independent, Reichardt’s modest film speaks for a wider set of vital, contemporary experiences that go generally underreported in American cinema.

9 - Splinter

Directed by: Toby Wilkins
Written by: Kai Barry, Ian Shorr, Toby Wilkins
Country: USA
Starring: Shea Whigham, Paulo Costanzo, Jill Wagner, Rachel Kerbs

Seen at an all-night horror-fest (along with 35mm prints of Psycho, Jaws, and Dead Alive, among others), Splinter is a refreshingly well-paced and effectively acted horror flick, punctuated with leavening humor and imaginative effects work. The film merges the escape-from-a-besieged-central-locale sub-genre (a la Night of the Living Dead or the recent Vacancy) with Carpenter/Cronenberg body horror without making a fuss out of either. In fact, after a teaser intro at a gas station promising infectious prickliness to come, the plot begins sedately: our young protagonist couple Seth and Polly (Costanzo and Wagner) arrive in the wilderness for a romantic camping trip only to find it pretty wanting. Suddenly on the way back to the roads, they’re jacked by convict Dennis and his drug-addled girlfriend (Whigham and Kerbs), infusing this early stretch of the film with Hitcher-like overtones even as the tenseness of the situation is heightened when the car blows a tire running over an animal infected with the mysterious titular parasite. Enter the gas station. The rest of the film follows a quite logical, ratcheting progression as the characters lose one of their own and gradually try to discover the nature of the creature barring them from leaving the station.

The splinter parasite’s original host seems to be a kind of grisly porcupine, its quills infecting other creatures and causing death and atrocious limb contortions that come to life thanks to Splinter’s inventive stop-motion animation and prosthetics. Akin to the tactile terrors of Carpenter’s The Thing or the reanimated dead of early Sam Raimi, Wilkins’s monster(s) elicits disgust and admiration equally. As resourceful as its makers are the film’s characters, flesh-and-blood emotional beings confronting terror with logic and levelheadedness. With a short running time and realistically escalating pressure, the movie easily prevents itself from getting stale without insulting one’s intelligence.

Le Beau Serge (1958, Claude Chabrol)

Equal parts overbearing Catholic allegory and interesting, visually unadorned on-location examination of the inhabitants of French village Sardent, Claude Chabrol’s debut Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge), considered one of the opening salvos of the French New Wave, starts out strong and richly textured but eventually succumbs to an overly schematic and redemptive conclusion. Jean-Claude Brialy portrays Francois, a theology student returning to his native town after years away to recover from a bout of tuberculosis. It isn’t exactly how he left it, especially his childhood friend Serge (Gérard Blain), now a drunk with a troubled past and marriage. With the town pastor having resigned to let the village spiritually crumble, Francois takes it upon himself to redeem his friend and oppose the corrosive and entangled influences of the other villagers. The bourgeois town hides an underbelly of mortal sins and squandered promise.

The film has an obvious narrative trajectory towards redemption, even if it is complicated by similarly religious stirrings of guilt and transference, modes that would play more decisive influences on Chabrol’s subsequent thrillers. Themes of incest, rape, and congenital deformity bring a sordid reality to bear on the film’s otherwise Catholic overtones, diluting the protagonist’s faith in human nature and transformation. Nineteen-year-old Bernadette Lafont played a two years younger sexpot, reflecting the distasteful possibilities that awaited Serge’s stillborn son and upcoming child, just as Serge and Francois are the same train running on separate, parallel tracks. This doubling, as well as some brutal violence between the former friends and a thorough investigation of the dark side of French village life, reveals Chabrol’s literary and cinematic debts to Hitchcock and such sturdy native genre directors as Clouzot and Duvivier.

What also separates this debut from the likes of Le Boucher or Les Biches ten years later is also what animates the other first films of Nouvelle Vague directors: a nod towards neorealism by respecting and utilizing personal, lived-in space and performers. Indeed, how less dynamic would The 400 Blows or Breathless be without their genuine locations? Serge’s bravura opening sequence of Francois’s arrival allows the viewer to effortless gain their bearings and to situate himself in the naturalistic milieu. Even if the narrative becomes overtly symbolic and a few of the performances are mannered, Chabrol stays true to the location’s obscuring simplicity and its constricting impact on the inhabitants’ worldviews.

Yet for all the efficient if superfluous camera movements, Le Beau Serge is resolutely a young novice’s film; wildly inappropriate music overtakes perfectly subtle moments, and the ending undeservedly concludes on a hopeful note, despite the undeniably nuanced and problematic interactions throughout the film, for the sake of bludgeoning thematic significance. Perhaps knowing what would come later forces me to underrate the work, for Chabrol would certainly develop as a screenwriter and filmmaker even if the technical skills were there. As it is, Serge remains a merely good film with great timing.

IMDb page

Spaghetti Madness: Alex Cox's "Straight to Hell" (1987)

Alex Cox’s 1987 flick Straight to Hell is an odd duck, to say the least. Cult fans know its bizarre history already, but for the rest of you, here’s the rundown from an interview with the director on his personal website: Producer Eric Fellner planned to expand a Brixton show featuring the Pogues, Joe Strummer, and Elvis Costello benefiting the leftist Sandinista Liberation Front into a full-blown tour of that organization’s home of Nicaragua. Politics came into play after the musicians agreed to hold off their own plans for August 1986, so Fellner convinced everyone to shoot a low-budget feature during that time instead. Hastily collaborating with co-star Dick Rude, Cox cobbled a screenplay together, and it was filmed in a few weeks in the expansive deserts of Almería, Spain, shooting location for many of the spaghetti Westerns that inform Straight to Hell. It was and always will be primarily a lark for the circle of friends who created it. But should it have ever been released to a wider audience?

Reviewers at the time certainly didn’t think so. Roger Ebert, having liked Cox’s previous films Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, described it as “a record of aimless behavior, of a crowd of pals asked to dress up like cowboys and mill about on a movie set.” Washington Post writer Hal Hinson jeered that Cox “never attempts anything other than antagonistically unfunny, home-movie-style gags.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin was more positive, merely dismissing it as “a mildly engrossing, instantly forgettable midnight movie,” although she also thought it was “[not] even halfway as amusing as it sounds.” Even contemporary reviews mostly write it off as the incomprehensible and indulgent equivalent of a cinematic vacation slideshow. The film did poorly in theaters but, like many of Cox’s features, has languished in cult status since.



I’m happy to report that twenty years have been good to this do-it-yourself, witty, sly little hodgepodge of a movie, and it’s time for a reevaluation. The ostensible plot involves three bungling but cool hit men (Sy Richardson, Clash frontman Joe Strummer, and co-writer Dick Rude) and their pregnant, whiny moll (a chubby, pre-plastic surgery Courtney Love) high-tailing it to Mexico when they over-sleep a job at a motel. They quickly rob a bank, the spoils of which are constantly being swept up by the wind or dropped by the inept crooks until they are finally buried, and find themselves in a ghost town run by a motley gang of coffee-addicted cowboys and Western stereotypes. As played by such punk luminaries as the Pogues, Elvis Costello, and Zander Schloss of the Circle Jerks, and near-respectable actors like Miguel Sandoval and Xander Berkeley, the townspeople are funny, unpredictable caricatures, as apt to sing a song as to fire a six-shooter. The strangers ingratiate themselves through droll comic vignettes, killing off the dominant gang’s enemies, unsuccessfully romancing the local chicks, but kept alive only so long as their loot is still hidden. Eventually the thieves’ boss, an incongruously growling Jim Jarmusch, makes an appearance and triggers a nihilistic bloodbath tempered by some fine visual gags and ellipses. The final credits promise to go “BACK TO HELL,” but there’s not much chance for that at this point.

The first thing to notice in Straight to Hell is its striking visual style. Obviously taking a cue from, among others, Corbucci and Leone (even aping that director’s signature extreme close-ups), as well as the jagged landscape of Spain, cinematographer Tom Richmond employs a sumptuous widescreen aesthetic that allows all kinds of interesting compositions and eye-popping colors. The empty, piercingly blue sky in particular (even if its shade of blueness shifts between shots) gets a wealth of deserving screen time, contrasting with the grungy, lovingly-detailed characters below it. Costumes, from the mariachi-style dress of the Pogues to Jarmusch’s crisp white suit, bring characters a distinct visual appeal quite beside their performers’ acting abilities. If this sounds like an apology to Ebert’s phrase “dress up like cowboys and mill about on a movie set,” so be it; I am merely commenting that time, effort, and artistry went into this throwaway excursion of a film, and it shows.

From a generic standpoint, the movie is surprisingly, radically glib, most obviously influencing the work of Tarantino. It’s no less in-jokey and violent than Reservoir Dogs, say, and Sy Richardson’s Jheri-curled badass Norwood may as well be getting royalty checks from Jules Winnfield; but it purposefully lacks the slick, transgressive language Tarantino is known for in favor of cliché and deadpan comic dialogue. Despite this, it somehow received an MPAA R rating for “strong language” when the saltiest thing said is “heck.” While being ahead of its time, for better or worse, in fusing bloodily comic irrationality with specific genre tropes, Straight to Hell has its own share of cinematic referents and direct homages, from sassing a classic quote from Shane (“A gun is just a tool, it ain’t no better or no worse than the man who uses it.” “Just like shoes.”) to staging Peckinpah-inspired massacres; it at times has the sun-drenched incoherence of a punk-rock movie nerd’s El Topo. Even when the film’s non-sequiturs become more absurd than funny, a few actors still manage engrossing presences; Joe Strummer in particular has an energetic nonchalance, whether idly smoking a cigarette or running a gasoline-coated comb through his hair, that also enlivened Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. The aforementioned Schloss, as an inexplicable hot dog vendor-cum-commercial jingle singer, gets a ridiculous performance scene than nonetheless binds the community like a campfire singalong in Hawks or a funeral dirge in Ford.



Which brings me to perhaps rightfully Straight to Hell’s most overlooked feature, its pretty unsubtle capitalist satire. To call the film a revolutionary comic attack on corporate imperialism is blowing its real but minor virtues out of proportion, yet such a group of dedicated, organized political figures could not have made anything but with a left-wing bent. Without giving too much away, a major if somewhat indistinct plot point involves the smiley cameo of Dennis Hopper (who made his own disastrous pseudo-Western, The Last Movie) as oil magnate I.G. Farben and his drilling operation in the middle of the town. Such incidental details as his name on a pump handle in the city and oil drill towers dotting the landscape belie the shoot-em-up going on within the town, and death may be just another step in someone’s business deal. Money is supposedly at the root of the crosses and double-crosses that punctuate the film’s second half, yet it turns out to be a slippery commodity in itself. Whether purposefully considered or merely a byproduct of Cox’s and Rude’s political feelings, this subtext is admittedly slight compared to its insistence at being a down-and-dirty paean to the Western, camaraderie, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Buoyed by a lively, earthy soundtrack by some of the musicians involved, Straight to Hell is a relatively obscure, worthwhile cult diversion. What it lacks in polish, dramatic heft, and multidimensional characterization it nearly makes up for in visual verve and good-natured, clever senselessness. It deftly mingles punk’s homegrown spirit of communal anarchy with the movies’ creative generic structures, to produce a fun, headlong romp that’s too short to overstay its welcome.



More images:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007)

Harry Potter has begun to truly grown up and with him the film series, for better or for worse, has outgrown the limiting drama of school life and childish make-believe into the realm of disenchantment. The awed faces of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his cohorts at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry have matured and become suspicious of adult authority, hardened by successively twisted Defense against the Dark Arts teachers and the full return of the big baddie, Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). At the conclusion of the previous installment, Goblet of Fire, Harry watched a fellow student die at the hands of the Dark Lord, a repetition of his earliest trauma of watching his parents die at the same hands. This Freudian complication also serves to further distance Harry from the reigning adult world when the Ministry of Magic deems the student’s death an accident and resolutely denies the return of Voldemort. In the opening scene of Order of the Phoenix, Harry practices his wizardry in a life-or-death situation against the wraithlike Dementors in the Muggle (non-magic) world, breaking the rules of the Ministry and in the process severing all ties to its bureaucratic regime. With an ultimate evil out there, practical application in the real world trumps theory in the classroom, and this is comically played out when the pink-suited iron fist of Dolores Umbridge (the sweetly sinister Imelda Staunton) rules over Hogwarts as an instrument of the Ministry. Magical standardized testing and overzealous punishments are her specialties, and the educational parallels with our current world become all too clear, as do surprisingly conservative jabs at contemporary politics; the Ordinary Wizarding Level (OWL) tests, although based on British secondary exams, could be called “No Wizard Left Behind,” and the Ministry’s collective head in the sand concerning the ultimate evil causes Harry to go it alone with his young “coalition of the witching.” But although Umbridge’s autocratic rule concerns much of the film’s plot, her fate and that of her administration are poorly handled, betraying a kind of weariness for Hogwarts hi-jinks and a stronger fascination for Harry’s psychological development.

Despite being the eponymous hero of the series, Harry has thus far had to share major screen time with his fellow students and teachers, and Daniel Radcliffe has been clearly overshadowed by various British acting heavyweights and modern luminaries including Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane, and Emma Thompson; Order of the Phoenix somewhat changes that. Fine supporting turns by Staunton and Evanna Lynch as the dotty, pale outsider Luna Lovegood are tempered by the unfortunate interchangeability of nearly everyone else but Radcliffe, with recognizable faces like David Thewlis and Helena Bonham Carter shown then discarded. However, this film is finally Harry’s showcase and provides Radcliffe an emotionally dark dimension that has been hardly hinted at. Already angered by the Ministry’s worthlessly stringent rules and its denial of Voldemort’s return, Harry is betrayed not once but thrice by his male authority figures: headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) disappears in a fiery puff in a vain attempt to distance himself and thus keep Harry safe; adoptive uncle Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), for all of his honesty and warmth in comforting young Potter’s confusion, is dispatched in slow-motion during a climatic battle; and, in a despairingly touching scene, Harry lashes out at the mind-reading Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) with a taste of his own medicine, discovering that Harry’s assumedly angelic father was really a bully while at Hogwarts. Sour disappointment at the duplicity of adulthood strikes much deeper than special effects, and Radcliffe makes the most of these crucial emotional low points, highlighted by quickly cut nightmares. But all hope is not lost, for Harry’s first kiss and burgeoning leadership skills offset his myriad disillusionments. The title thus makes sense as the beginning of a young man's rebirth from destruction by personal tragedy. As the only Hogwarts student with any experience in using magic outside school walls, he takes it upon himself to prepare his friends for the inevitable attack of the Dark Lord, gathering a force of young people against what has amounted to a betrayal by the adult world, whether symbolized by Umbridge’s management, Harry’s father figures, or the series’ literal cavalcade of teachers-turned-Voldemort pawns. Harry is now beginning to take up the burdensome mantle of responsibility for his world’s future, and Radcliffe’s portrayal is equally up to the task.

However, the force of his growth is diminished by the film’s leaden plot threads, chief among them the aforementioned Zero for Conduct-esque school revolt and a muddled quest for a prophesying object at the Ministry of Secrets. Overused narrative shorthand, like animated newspaper stories, weakens the already obviously compressed storyline’s flow and coherence. Even the titular Order of the Phoenix, an assemblage of wizards and witches out to defend Harry and oppose Voldemort, only serve as a climactic deus ex machina. Unlike the imaginative style of the so far high point of the series, Prisoner of Azkaban, everything here (except for the opening scene that almost feels like a different film) is treated with the same visual stasis that prevents momentum and vitality. The proceedings at times seem perfunctory, and the admittedly solid computer effects have become workmanlike and fail to impress any more. Magic is unfortunately now the norm, no longer brightening the eyes of Harry, his compatriots, or the audience, supplanted instead by the gloomy concerns of Harry’s young adulthood. If only the series could capture that same spark of heroic sorrow that momentarily flash in Daniel Radcliffe’s eyes when he realizes the illusory magic of growing up.

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)

David Cronenberg is not a director for everyone. His very frank explorations of biology in relation to the human psyche can sicken or confuse viewers and critics alike. Still, his forays into borderline SF and fantasy have garnered a massive cult following – but A History of Violence is something new altogether. It is closest in tone to his 1996 film Crash, which alienated all but his most diehard fans for its heady mix of anything-goes sex and arousing violence. History similarly touches upon the entanglement of sex and violence, as well as the pervasive nature of violence in our pop culture and society.

Viggo Mortensen is Tom Stall, small-town Everyman and Indiana diner owner. He has a lawyer wife, a high school-age son, and a little blonde daughter. Life seems stably idyllic until two robbers show up at his restaurant. Faced with mortal danger, Tom deftly executes both criminals with a pot of coffee and one of the thieves' own guns. He's a local and national hero, but shady figures suddenly show up at Tom's door. They swear that he's Joey, a former criminal who needs to repay old debts. Stall denies these accusations until he is forced to messily dispatch the messengers. It is revealed that Tom used to be a gangland figure, an infamous killer, but that he shunned that life for something more. He must confront his crime boss brother Richie in Philadelphia and face his past. Meanwhile, his son becomes aggressive and brutal toward harassing bullies, and his wife must come to accept what her husband was and, it appears, still is.

This synopsis does not do justice to the weighty philosophical and moral questions posed by the film. First of all, it questions the nature of the violence depicted, as no one escapes its ill effects. Fans of Cronenberg are used to the graphic nature of his productions like Videodrome and The Fly, yet by the end (especially during the climactic scene in Richie's mansion) he seems to be asking us why we enjoy bones shattering and faces bleeding. Only when Tom has been pushed to his breaking point does he shift into "killing mode," and Cronenberg holds back the graphic nature of his actions until the height of his triumph. Can the audience both cheer a character's victory and disdain the outright viciousness of it? This is the problem inherent in much action cinema, where even the merest accountability goes up in flames with the villain's exploded headquarters. William Hurt's brief performance is spot-on as a man living in the midst of violence and destruction. He couldn't care less about henchmen being slaughtered, their twisted bodies lying on the floor. So how different are we, as the audience, from this character in our enjoyment or indifference to bodily harm? The film’s lack of flippancy regarding death is indeed "anti-Tarantino," as one reviewer has called it, and the aftermath of bodily violence is the antithesis of the darkly humorous "Bonnie Situation" in Pulp Fiction.

Tom's children are interesting characters in their own rights. Ashton Holmes gives a strong debut as the son, realizing his potential for violent but righteous behavior after his father's actions. Is violence hereditary, or is it actually ingrained in our culture? The reason for the bully's anger is mostly preposterous, but it hints at our culture's entrenched confidence in Darwinian survival of the fittest at any age. School bullies in film are wholly cliche, so its inclusion is meant to show the violence underlying what we as filmgoers look for and expect. The scene had to end with somebody getting pounded in the face, right? But why can't diplomacy work in that situation? Why does violence always have to enter into it? The unexpected reversal in this scene serves to make these questions known. The daughter is almost too perfect, too oblivious to the swirling events around her. For someone so young, maybe that's the point. She is the innocent one, trusting in the family dynamic and the status quo without understanding that those concepts have been irrevocably damaged by her father's past.

Mario Bello gives a brave performance as Tom's wife Edie, alternately fearful and aroused by her husband's revelations. They seem to be a perfect couple until the diner incident occurs, forever shading Edie's view of Tom. She screams at him in the hospital but covers up for him to the sheriff. The complexities of love are made clear here, as she finds a total stranger walking around claiming that he's her husband. She allows her body to be taken by him, but keeps her emotions to herself. Recognizing that the family is more important than just her needs, she accepts Tom's past and present but does not forgive them. Viggo Mortensen proves more than able to take the demanding central role. His entire demeanor hides a dark past of violence that he can barely live with. Whether he recognizes the extent to which he has irreparably harmed his family is not fully clear, but he has a constant inner struggle throughout the film. He is soft-spoken even when enraged; yet his animal physicality reveals itself often. Cronenberg once again elicits a brilliant male lead performance, continuing in the line of Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken, James Woods, and Jeremy Irons.

All in all, this film is perhaps Cronenberg's most morally complex project to date. Gone are the SF trappings that can (to the viewer) cloud the issues within Videodrome or Naked Lunch; Violence is Cronenberg's attempt at realism to make his points more clearly known. Most of his other works can educe a kind of hushed fascination with the human body, or present viscerally intellectual questions regarding taboo subjects, but A History of Violence cleverly makes the viewer question their own motives and beliefs. Each instance of apparent comedy or heroic success brings along with it baggage of a sort that is no laughing matter. The bully makes a mountain out of a molehill in harassing the son, but the son's vicious response blows the high school cliche out of the water. Richie's nonplussed comments make us laugh even while we choke on Tom's unneeded physical cruelty. David Cronenberg has created a thought-provoking essay on violence in our society, in our brains, in our complete makeup. It raises questions that cannot be readily if ever answered but that should be brought up and examined, especially in today's age of pervasive sex and violence.

IMDb page

Camera Buff (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1979)

This is my contribution to Quiet Bubble's Kieslowski Blog-a-thon, and my first contribution to any -thon, for that matter.



To call Kieslowski’s Camera Buff simply a film about filmmaking would be to underestimate its elegant nuances and widespread artistic relevance. Without these added layers, the film would still be a solid portrait of a middle-class filmmaker’s evolution, but Kieslowski is far too intelligent and humanistic to ignore the social universality of his story. The film in turn also examines the tension between an artist and a simple craftsman, reality and fiction, objectivity and perspective, and truth and cinema. It is attributable to Kieslowski’s power as a filmmaker that these aspects are organic to the work rather than tacked on or seemingly irrelevant to the story’s themes.

The pudgy, nondescript Jerzy Stohr portrays Filip Mosz, a factory work who buys an 8mm camera to film his newborn daughter’s life. His wife Irka (Malgorzata Zabkowska) warms to the idea, until this simple hobby begins to change into something more. When Filip is eager to film the world around him, his company hires him to make a morale-boosting short about an anniversary party. He learns to use the camera as a new way of seeing, and the prestige of constructing a film based on his own perceptions becomes a consuming passion at the expense of his wife and child. Cinema engulfs Filip’s world, and his amateur but inspired editing wins the film a spot in a local festival. Kieslowski now gets his jabs at film criticism through the eyes of a genuine artist, free of guile or any intention other than presenting his own honest worldview. The festival refuses to give out a first prize due to the lack of a truly worthy film, but to deny homegrown documentaries on “artistic” grounds of quality is to ignore their purpose as record and as expression. Filip still wins third (actually second), which proves to be a double-edged prize. On one hand, validation is all of the fuel the budding filmmaker needs to keep working; however, this strains his marriage to the breaking point. Filip admits that cinema fills a void in his life so deep that even a loving family can’t penetrate it. This is the struggle of all artists: to be truthful to one’s inner being while balancing the expectations and restraints of society.

Luckily, Kieslowski gives each side their due. Irka is far from a harpy or art-hating philistine, and Filip is all enthusiasm and hopeless naivety. He is simply bitten by a bug beyond his control and must follow this new passion to its conclusion. The irony that his alienating film career started with a camera bought for his daughter’s benefit is not lost on the sympathetic but laughing Kieslowski. His later miniseries The Decalogue blows human foibles and incidents to the size of grand drama and in the context of morality and metaphysics; his Three Colors trilogy uses coincidence to shape everyday lives into something that appears designed. Camera Buff deftly does both. Filip is both Everyartist and a victim of fate.

Through Filip’s business connections with his company, Kieslowski pits the artist against the oppressive strictures hovering over a working-class filmmaker. The company subsidizes and wants final approval on his films, but Filip sneaks in subversive elements that amount to social commentary. Recognition through the festival and eventual TV work provides a way out from under the thumb of censorship. Filip learns to be a creator in his medium rather than just a technician to serve the company’s purpose. But even here, Kieslowski (whose hand and mind are present in every frame) hardly lets his protagonist off the hook. It is not enough to simply do what one thinks is right at the moment; one must look into a situation and examine all sides. When Filip decides to film a row of buildings that were only superficially repaired by the company for an upcoming public celebration, he thinks he is exposing a blatant hypocrisy. Instead, his supervisor reveals that the company used the remaining funds reserved for those fixes to make much more needed and important repairs, to a hospital and to a school. Just as Filip has learned to use a camera to create stories and impressions that may not literally exist at that moment, he has shown a hard lesson of perspective. A filmmaker must have a conscience in addition to an eye and a mind. As he grows as an artist, he grows as a person.

But Camera Buff is not merely an allegory for the place of the filmmaker in society, or even simply the story of one such example. As Filip grows excited and awestruck by the possibilities of cinematic creation, so the film becomes more and more in love with cinema itself. Filip’s camera swoops and follows anything that it fancies, and Kieslowski’s is along for the ride. The two frequently become one, as the viewer experiences the pure exhilaration of cinematic sight. And despite the loss of Filip’s wife and child due to his movie obsession, Camera Buff is one of the most optimistic works ever made about the medium. Where films like Peeping Tom and Man Bites Dog use murder, violence, and irony to essentially connect filmmaking with voyeurism and narcissism, Kieslowski’s film celebrates the creativity and personal fulfillment that can blossom from artistic expression. Filip discovers a unique and personal skill that leads to confidence, leadership, and recognition. Two of the most touching scenes in the film show the ability of film to keep memories and moments alive. Days after a coworker’s mother passes away, Filip shows the grieving driver a clip of him showing off for her. The coworker is tearfully grateful. Later, Filip makes a documentary on a near-retirement factory worker who is little. Where the higher-ups think he is exploiting the man, everyone else realizes the warmth and acknowledgment the film will bring. Both moments revel in the life-affirming qualities of cinema without ever seeming cloying or out of place. That Kieslowski can juggle each insightful thread of his film without seeming distant, academic, or convoluted, is a testament to the late Polish writer/director’s mastery of film grammar and, more importantly, his irreplaceable eye for humanity’s complexity.

IMDb page

1968 Double Feature

The strongest source of inspiration (theft?) for the plot of Tarantino’s Kill Bill, The Bride Wore Black is Truffaut’s Hitchcock homage starring a beautiful but coldly rampaging Jeanne Moreau. She methodically murders two young men before we realize the motive to her madness: on her wedding day, her new husband was accidentally gunned down by a party of bachelors cleaning a rifle in a nearby hotel, and somehow she has discovered their identities but not their appearances. With equal parts sex appeal, calculation, and improvisation, the bride uses her surroundings to trap and kill her unwitting prey. While aping the Master of Suspense in style and even music (with Bernard Hermann recycling some of his best Hitchcock riffs), he fails to maintain the carefully calibrated emotional tone so crucial to Hitchcock’s success. Truffaut may give us only the perfect amount of plot needed to keep us in the scene unfolding, but he also neglects the Master’s deft coloring of character, his trademark moral ambiguity.

I find Moreau’s undeniably pretty but fairly inexpressive face ideal for her destructively cerebral role, but her motivation and flashbacks are never fully dealt with. She remains little more than a kind of “superfeminized” cipher, a symbol of heartbreak run amok. While each of the bride’s victims turns out to be a sexist pig, they nonetheless become progressively more pathetic or even somehow likeable in the face of Moreau’s practical, cold omnipotence. No one ever stood a chance; even luck (witness the final moments) is on her side. Still, the former Cahiers critic utilizes some brilliantly suspenseful long takes and interesting performances from each male victim of Moreau’s web, especially Michael Lonsdale as a wannabe bureaucrat and Charles Denner as an artist thunderstruck by the bride’s beauty. There are hints that the murder of the bridegroom may not have been accidental (the criminal nature of the final “victim”), and that the bride’s crusade is not entirely justifiable (the confession scene, the bride’s callous use of the boy), but these subversions to the bride’s mission get steamrolled over by Truffaut’s nonetheless impressive attempt at Hitchcockian storytelling.

IMDb page




With hallucinatory imagery and a resonant, rebellious mentality, Lindsay Anderson’s nonconformist masterpiece remains a hip British landmark. An examination of a repressive boarding school (most likely standing in for the entire British class system, but accurately representing any number of social institutions) and the surreal revolt led by Mick Travis, who reappears in O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, the film balances political relevance with credible but not stringent realism. From his first appearance, clad in a scarf concealing his defiant moustache, Travis represents the only uncertainty facing uncaring schoolmasters and oppressive seniors; Anderson carefully chronicles the heartless regulations that govern the children and promise to graduate wave after wave of unimaginative, bourgeois citizens. In his debut as Travis, Malcolm McDowell displays the dangerous, youthful swagger that would make his Alex in A Clockwork Orange such a likeable antihero. His walls papered with images of world revolution, Travis imagines (the operative word) himself as a schoolyard Che Guevara, leading a violent if imaginary coup against the powers-that-be, an amalgam of authority figures: teacher, classmate, and priest. It plays like an acid trip through Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct.

If.... unfolds in a series of vignettes that loosely follow the school term. The longer the film goes on, the harsher the punishments for Travis and his two compatriots become, and the more surreal Travis’s youthful reactions are. An effective but uncomfortable long take accompanies their whippings by the Establishment seniors: as each of his friends walks into the closed-door gym for their punishment, we stay with Travis and bleakly imagine their pain by ourselves. Once it is Travis’s turn, we see the pain as the strikes connect, but his eyes reveal more defiance than agony. What exactly occurs in “reality” and what is just in Travis’s elaborate daydreams is a moot point against the energy of Anderson’s images, especially in the exhilaratingly unruly conclusion.

Stylistically, alternate scenes in B&W and color show the tedium of the school year but reveal brief possibilities of emotional and mental, if not physical, escape. In addition to the energetic if obvious us-versus-them plot points, there are fascinating moments of sexuality equated with control and domination. The privileged seniors argue over the morality of taking liberties with the new students, the “scum,” as they are called. Travis’s main enemy takes a distinct perverted pleasure in dealing out punishment. Only a possibly-imaginary café girlfriend (Christine Noonan) and the incongruous nude appearance by an attractive bureaucrat’s wife (Mary MacLeod) provide any kind of relief to the schoolboys’ sexual frustrations, even if they may be mostly symbolic. The film works equally well as a student’s daydream of destruction and escape, or a rallying cry for revolution against the social complacency. Unfortunately not yet available on DVD, it’s more than worth finding any way you can.

IMDb page

Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)

A dystopian thriller more in love with ideas than technology, Alfonso Cuarón’s viscerally impacting Children of Men posits a future worn down by harsh immigration laws and hopelessness stemming from nearly twenty years of female infertility. Set in a not-too-distant Britain, the film transforms from a carefully-composed excursion within a meticulously-designed world, into a sociopolitical allegory, into a harshly thrilling war picture, some sections being more successful than others. Throughout, the central conceit—a well-worn sci-fi premise—is played completely straight, leading to more questions than answers that, by the end, are mostly washed away by the powerful, “you are there” filmmaking. However, its realistic, long-take aesthetic eventually rubs up against its more abstract and metaphorical narrative, leading to an unsatisfactorily pat conclusion that fails to live up to what’s come before.

Director Cuarón’s crew of art directors and set designers craft a brutally lived-in vision of England, recognizable yet almost otherworldly, that he and his four co-writers cannot adequately fill with narrative or character. That the sins of the present bode badly for the future is evident, whether in a not-so-subtle “HOMELAND SECURITY” sign or in allusions to the West’s current immigration issues, but the weaving in of the central biological impossibility is never suitably achieved. The explanation of why infertility has occurred is not the issue; the question of its direct involvement in the state of things, except in causing a vague helplessness, is. The world is falling to pieces because of what we’re doing in the present, but a cataclysm of such proportions as worldwide infertility would have, one would think, more obvious and lasting effects. There are brief hints that animals may have become substitutes for children, but this line of thought takes a leap farther than the film actually shows. Very little, if any, is made of science’s attempts to address the problem. Except for a throwaway joke about a virgin birth, the sexual implications of infertility are never even cursorily addressed. If no woman could get pregnant, it would seem likely that even after eighteen years to let it sink in, there’d still be consequence-free fucking in the streets. It would be conceivable that lack of guaranteed wave after wave of young people would be catastrophic for the government and military, yet the ruling powers remain, for the most part, faceless entities symbolized by shopworn, Big Brother-esque billboards and slogans. Where films like George Romero’s Dead series take an unexplained, implausible calamity and explore it to its logical conclusions, Children of Men leaves it in the background, coyly refusing to address its obvious genre roots and instead shifting from initially a global disaster to a political and personal story of hope in a hopeless world.

Our guide in post-apocalyptic Britain is former activist-turned-civil servant Theo, played with initial grumpy and cynical malaise by Clive Owen. He barely bats an eye at the death of “Baby Diego,” the youngest person on the planet (wouldn’t there logically be many youngest people on the planet, or is it just Britain-centrism?), but there’s a devastating backstory of loss to be learned. His closest friend seems to be idealist hippie Jasper (a scene-stealing Michael Caine), although he’s close enough to his cousin Nigel (Danny Huston), proprietor of an “Ark of the Arts” that saves anything from Guernica to the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Theo is contacted (read: kidnapped) by a band of political rebels fighting against the government’s immigration restrictions, led by his former lover Julian, underplayed by the eminently watchable Julianne Moore. Perhaps because she knows through personal experience that he’ll fully grasp its implications, Julian asks Theo for help in securing passage for a young girl out of the country. She is Kee, a refugee (“‘fugee”) who has turned up pregnant and is played by newcomer Claire-Hope Ashitey. Conveniently, no one but the two people we know lost a child treat this incident as the miracle it is, and after a severe long-take car chase where Julian is unexpectedly killed by (we learn later) her own people, it becomes apparent that everyone else has political aspirations for the eventual newborn. The fate of the world rests in Theo’s hands, in a character arc that is clearly predicated on the death of his past (Julian) and the recognition of a possible future (Kee’s pregnancy). In addition to this effective one-two punch is the unnecessary shooting of loveable Jasper, that follows an extremely touching scene of assisting his paralyzed, invalid wife’s understandable suicide, and perhaps goes overkill in wiping Theo’s present slate clean to allow him to proceed in his mission.

It’s a race to the finish line with Theo caught in the inevitable clash between government and rebellion. Cuarón and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki drop you unapologetically into the middle of a war zone, utilizing long takes and handheld camera moves that are as dazzling in their virtuosity as anything in Saving Private Ryan or Hard Boiled (which even has an imperiled infant in common). The lengths to which realism and its breathtaking sensory assault are achieved are commendable and, for their durations, cause one to forget any lingering doubts as to the film’s cinematic impact. For his part, Owen spends much of the film running slightly in front of or next to the camera; and, despite his omnipresence his story takes a back seat to the dazzling thrill-ride that comprises the penultimate chunk of the film. It is here that Children of Men’s achingly realistic aesthetic overtakes every other aspect of the production, and the only real emotion to be wrenched for this segment is the natural wish for a child’s safety.

In the final moments, both sides cease fighting in dumbfounded deference to the presence of a crying child. If the film’s visually and thematically brutal realities had not precluded the existence of simple hope in the face of political backstabbing and cultural depression, this turn of events might have been acceptable. Sappy, hopeful vocal music in the background, when the majority of the brutal long take was only home to diegetic sound, hardly helps matters. As it is, it seems inexcusable that no one (besides the obvious parents who have lost a child and a cardboard nanny figure) immediately grasps the child’s implications for the future and takes efforts to secure her. Rather, the film’s Christian overtones (or perhaps “messianic” is the more apt term, which uses Christianity as its most obvious framework) take hold and allow the newborn and her “parents” safe passage from a brutal slaughter. Climaxing in a downbeat but redemptive finale for Theo, a character who seemed to need little redemption in the beginning, Children of Men pulls away from its bread-and-butter realism and rests finally in the realm of hopeful fantasy, as Kee and her daughter Dylan (of course named after Theo and Julian’s lost son) appear to be safely in the hands of the mythical and literally deus ex machina “Human Project.” The credits’ fade-out voices of children betray the pervasive hopelessness of the preceding duration, perhaps feeling unearned or unfittingly unambiguous. That all we need to do is respect the sanctity of life, or even just hope to do this, seems trite in comparison to the power and complexity of the images just witnessed.

Perhaps in highlighting negative thematic and narrative issues, I have underplayed the sheer visual grandeur of it all. Ultimately, the film succeeds on the whole due to this entirely visual storytelling. Yet “storytelling” is the key word here, and virtuosic filmmaking in service of inadequate plot and characters is effective but hollow.

IMDb page

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)

There are few clearer examples of the Cinema of Cruelty than Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Ostensibly a tense, intricately-designed home invasion thriller, wherein a German nuclear family is terrorized by two young men, the film pokes, prods, and provokes via several choice breakings of the fourth wall. The killers appear, banter, and amorally control the cinematic universe. Mocking the conventions of backstory, hope, and justice, Funny Games entices the viewer with the standard psychological fare but confounds and chides at every turn, making the film an understandably frustrating experience. It’s a definite director’s movie, with the killers existing as direct agents of Haneke as well as commentators on the diegetic space itself, but in any case they are ultimately puppets at the hands of the filmmaker. They wink and ask questions of the camera, goading the viewer into continuing to watch despite knowing full well that no happy ending is on the horizon.

For all of its intensity, it remains remarkably restrained, with Haneke employing long takes and moving the camera away from several scenes of violence to force the viewer to confront what’s off-screen. It’s also telling that the bloodiest moment occurs to one of the killers, who are not human in the least. They can explode in blood, because Haneke has shown them to not be real. The victims, on the other hand, for all intents and purposes, are living things at the mercy of something more powerful and bloodthirsty than themselves, and their deaths are cruel and unjustified. They suffer, and they die, but Haneke is too canny and controlling to allow the viewer to get their rocks off by showing it. The camera even prudishly stays above the wife’s shoulders as the killers force her to strip; but when they leave and she must change in order to escape and find help outside the house’s grounds, her see-through bra reveals what the audience was secretly hoping to see. Only now, terror and exhaustion have sapped any exploitive pleasure that could have been had. Perhaps not every viewer is motivated by a lust or cruelty of their own, but merely a morbid fascination in seeing something through to the end; but Haneke doesn’t care why you stayed until the finale, only the fact that you did. You had the power to turn it off, you had the power, like the killers, to rewind the tape to the beginning and leave it at that. Haneke has planted clues throughout as to the invincibility of the killers. But you stayed.

If all of this sounds like Haneke is the master smacking the collective audience’s canine nose with a newspaper, maybe that’s because that’s kinda like what it is. Haneke’s assured and audacious control, especially in the briefly-mentioned rewinding scene, may alienate as many as it provokes. The fact that we as viewers are always at the mercy of the filmmaker’s godlike status is a not-so-minor corollary to the main thesis of the watcher’s culturally-inculcated insensitivity to violence, so that afterwards we may think twice about handing ourselves over to a movie. Its reflexivity walks a tightrope between asking the viewer to not take media at face value, and to investigate and reassess the effects media may have already made on us. Haneke and the film laugh in our face for playing their own set of “funny games,” but secretly they hope that they’ll never be able to do so again.


IMDb page

Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s series Da Ali G Show is a masterwork of unscripted guerrilla comedy, featuring Baron Cohen, disguised as one of three stereotyped personalities, interviewing various individuals and exposing their ignorance or prejudices in the process. While the British hip hop/Afro-Caribbean parody Ali G and the flamboyantly homosexual Austrian Bruno are effective in pushing cultural buttons, it is the English-mangling, anti-Semitic Kazakh journalist Bruno Sagdiyev that provides the most cutting, subversive laughs that catch in one’s throat. His eagerness to explore American culture and infectiously innocent enthusiasm make his unstaged interviews with politicians, preachers, and ordinary Americans the show’s constant highlights. In this vein, Baron Cohen has combined unwitting participation by regular citizens and the most tenuous of plotlines to craft a vulgar, illuminating, subversive, audaciously funny mockumentary.

To dispense with the pretext, Borat concerns Mr. Sagdiyev and his producer Azamat embarking on a road trip across America to bring to Kazakhstan via documentary the wondrous world of the U.S. and A. Same shtick as Ali G with a connecting thread, basically. Each individual vignette is a thing of genius, though, sometimes pointing out the racist and bigoted views under the surface (a gun seller’s near-immediate answer to "Which gun would be best to defend from the Jews?") or the pure ignorance regarding a foreign culture (opening and closing segments set in Borat’s home village of “Kusek, Kazakhstan”). The “running of the Jew” and various gypsy epithets easily play into both a long-standing history of intolerance and stereotyped visions of Eastern European culture, but the examples are so blatant and skewed that to take them seriously is to play into them. In lesser hands, this social satire could have been dangerously misinterpreted as actual racism or cultural insensitivity (and indeed already has been by some uninformed or biased viewers), but one can imagine that a man with the education of Baron Cohen (whose thesis at Cambridge was on the Jewish presence within the American civil rights movement) knows exactly the political and social implications of what he says. Besides, the absurdity of Borat’s various interviews leaves no doubt as to the intentions. And despite the presence of Seinfeld writing alum Larry Charles as director, make no mistake that Baron Cohen is the comedic auteur behind Borat and the source of its intentions.

From the outset, Baron Cohen eschews the traditional realm of entirely joke-centric comedy for a relatively unexplored (and awkward, for the viewer as well as the victim) mix of miscommunication and revealing cultural conformity on the part of the interviewees. An early scene featuring Borat’s ruining of traditional joke forms while talking with some kind of “comedy consultant,” only puts forth Baron Cohen’s basic purpose of making the audience laugh in a new way, one that isn’t “clean” or “acceptable.” Not only is Borat’s misapprehension funny, but the consultant’s exasperation and, really, supposed authority in the subject are the real butts of the joke. Those who attempt to impart confident and dependable expertise in such freeform or, alternatively, socially-constricting areas as comedy, religion, or etiquette can become the most savaged targets of Cohen’s guerrilla tactics. Witness the cross-cutting between scenes of Borat being coached by an “etiquette advisor,” with the real fruits of the advisor’s teachings. After Borat is told to make honest compliments to fellow guests at an upscale Southern dinner, his insensitive (but “honest,” mind you) statements do nothing to endear him to his hosts. And yet the dinner continues to go on, leading to one of Baron Cohen’s most important and subversive satiric bullseyes: twofaced cultural “sensitivity” and conformity.

Upon researching the history of Baron Cohen’s use of Borat, it becomes apparent that, despite increased awareness by the public of Baron Cohen’s alter-ego, the method and success of these improvised comedy sketches has been amazingly consistent. Despite his modus operandi being unchanged over several years (obviously no real credentials, incredibly vague release forms), Baron Cohen has managed to fool a wide range of individuals without many serious repercussions. My hypothesis is that this stems from the paradoxically reactionary and tolerant mindset of modern America, the former providing the main artillery for Baron Cohen’s comedic assault and the latter effectively covering his retreat. Most of Borat’s interviewees feel this push-and-pull between indignity against his obviously narrow-minded statements, and leniency for his verbal “foreign” indiscretions. That a camera is present may help explain this phenomenon, as spontaneous street scenes reveal an American public scared of or openly hostile to odd foreigners; yet television personalities and interviewees usually forgive a great deal of intolerance by and awkwardness from the Kazakh interviewer until it becomes too much. In this light, Baron Cohen’s choosing of this country for his character’s home becomes ingenious. Mainstream America has no facts to draw up on regarding Kazakhstan, but it seems both vaguely Middle Eastern (this view is helped by Baron Cohen’s naturally-grown moustache) and culturally backward (thanks to Borat’s accent and customs) which feed into both sides of the aforementioned American mindset. As a catalyst for bringing out the worst in modern conservative and liberal attitudes, Borat is a carefully calculated and invaluable creation.

This all applies equally to Da Ali G Show and to Borat, so what can distinguish the two? As a narrative, the film’s road trip plotline enhances and detracts from the comedic thesis in turn. The driving action involves Borat trying to find Baywatch alum Pamela Anderson for “making sexy time” after watching her on a hotel television. Using such an obvious example of sexual objectification plays into Borat’s fascination with American culture while providing the pretext for two mordantly funny late scenes: having been dumped by his producer and left to hitchhiker, Borat finds a ride with three partying frat boys who show him Anderson’s infamous sex tape; and Borat stumbles upon a Pentecostal revival and is “shown the light.” Here again Cohen plays up the schizophrenic cultural values at work in American society by showing how muddled intentions and repercussions can be. Upon hearing Anderson’s name, the frat boys try to engage Borat in chauvinistic male bonding by popping in the sex tape, but they unwittingly deject him because he assumed she was a virgin. Likewise, the religious revival unknowingly provides Borat the boost to pick up his pursuit of sexual conquest. That the frat boys and church goers don’t care who you are on the inside as long as you're with them on the outside is their most damning quality. The masculine and religious mentalities convert and attempt to conform without imagining the internal consequences and Borat exploits this to the fullest.

The film’s comedic secret weapon is the character of Azamat, ably performed by the rotund and Armenian-American Ken Davitian. He has all of the vague “foreigner” baggage as Borat, but his presence amplifies his on-screen partner’s antics. It provides a potent counterpoint to Baron Cohen's tall, gangly frame, as evidence by already the most infamous and groundbreaking sequence in Borat: a protracted nude fight scene between the two in a posh hotel. As it spills from their single room to the hallway to an elevator to a crowded meeting in the ballroom, two things become clear: that Borat is transgressive as well as subversive, and that Baron Cohen, through Borat, can get away with anything. The image of Borat in flimsy spandex on the beach is common among the film’s advertising, but nothing preceding or on Da Ali G Show can prepare a viewer for the entwined, wrestling bodies of Baron Cohen and Davitian. It pushes the limits of traditional good taste while being so undeniably comical that an audience will probably be as awed as those watching two grown men in the nude, chasing each other down a hallway. For a mainstream studio film, let alone a comedy, to only provide unappealing male nudity to its viewers is, at the least, provocative and, at the most, firmly transgressive against the boundaries of audience expectations. The absurdity of the film’s situation reaches critical mass when the two men run through the hotel ballroom and interrupt a business meeting. Even if the hotel staff was in on the joke, it seems unlikely that every sitting businessperson knew what was going on, and in either case, Baron Cohen wields considerable power in his Borat persona. If security is not lax beyond belief, Borat can somehow convince the management to allow the scene to be filmed in public. The movie up to this point has only been goading its witting or unwitting participants; this sequence similarly unnerves (as well as entertains, which it has always done thus far) the audience. New viewers may find themselves watching through splayed fingers.

If the film goes wrong in any capacity, it is in its main conceit of being a “documentary.” Whereas someone watching This is Spinal Tap or Forgotten Silver without any prior knowledge of the cast or conceit could conceivably be swayed into mistaking it for the real thing, Borat has too many expansive shots of the two Kazakhs on the road or driving away from a scene to be misleading and possibly subversive to a first-time watcher. Whether certain scenes were staged or spontaneous in the end does not affect the comedic aesthetics of the film, but the narrative still suffers. Unlike someone such as, say, Andy Kaufman (to whom Baron Cohen is constantly compared), Baron Cohen lets his audience know they’re in on the joke and that there’s really a joke to be in on. This would seem to suggest that Baron Cohen could never reach the ultimate height of performance art that Kaufman ascended, but there’s hope in knowing that Baron Cohen always stays in character and that one is never sure if he’s taken a joke too far. But really, this lack of documentary realism is a mere quibble in comparison to the hilarious and inspiring whole that is Sacha Baron Cohen’s exploration of American values and cultural proclivities. While I have no doubt that audiences will find it funny as well as offensive, I fear that Americans will stop there and not realize that the joke is both for and on us.

IMDb page