ONG BAK 2: THE BEGINNING

I was asked a few weeks ago by the Chicago Reader's J.R. Jones if I'd like to submit a capsule review of Ong Bak 2: The Beginning to the paper. Here is a link to the piece, which was published on the Reader's website on Tuesday and in print on Wednesday (11/18):

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning

I hope to publish a more detailed piece on the film here in the coming weeks. It's enjoyable as a whole, but eschews most of its predecessor's strengths.

Though not of the same analytical rigor as the essays published here, this opportunity was especially gratifying for three reasons: It simultaneously marked the first time I've been paid for writing and my first appearance in print, and it was an honor to submit a piece to the paper that published most of Jonathan Rosenbaum's output for the past quarter century.

To return briefly to the issue of print publications, I'd like to say that, for what it's worth, my heart still beats for printed media. While my experience with much of the writing by critics upon whom I've modeled my own approach has been on the internet (beginning with Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose print publications were unavailable in my home town), I still quixotically aspire to publish in print. It seems a foolish, antiquated ambition, but a print version of The Pensive Spectator would be an incredibly satisfying culmination, even if the cost of such an operation is prohibitive and its likelihood close to nil. The internet has given me an outlet that I'd otherwise lack, but its qualities as a medium fail to replicate the virtues of a printed journal, newspaper or magazine. Eyestrain and hyperlink fatigue have never marred the page-turning experience.

APOLOGY

The recent period of inactivity at the site has been due to personal and professional obligations that prohibited the kind of care I prefer to take in writing these essays. I'm happy to report that these temporary issues have been resolved and regular updates should once again be the order of the day.

Thanks,
Patrick

IMAGE 1

Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires*


This is among the final images of the first episode (the translated title amounts to The Severed Head) of Feuillade's delirious, nearly absurdist 1915 silent epic, Les Vampires.

An assassin dispatched by the criminal society known as The Vampires absconds across the rooftops of Paris after a gruesome murder in a magistrate's antechamber. The sleek, slinky bodies of The Vampires (all clad in form-fitting black ensembles during their criminal exploits) ballet across the screen in marked contrast to frantic clodhopping of the journalists and authorities pursuing them. His prone stance embodies both stasis and action, and the stilled image leaves the speed of his movements ambiguous. The Vampires' violent, if aesthetically thrilling, disruption of bourgeois society is encapsulated in this image of a purely black, cat-like figure stalking across and against a strict geometry.

*Though I'm sure others have done it, I first came across a feature such as this at Glenn Kenny's blog, Some Came Running, and I'd like to give credit where it's due. I think it's a useful way of looking at films. It's admittedly a narrowed perspective, but worthwhile nonetheless, as a carefully selected, isolated image (one not selected by a distributor's marketing department) can speak volumes about a filmmaker and/or a film.

GONE BABY GONE

Family Planning as Farce in Sam Mendes’ Away We Go

As Roger Ebert begins his Great Movies essay on Hayao Miyazaki’s brilliant fantasy My Neighbor Totoro: “Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign.” He finishes by summarizing the film’s appeal: “It is a little sad, a little scary, a little surprising and a little informative, just like life itself. It depends on a situation instead of a plot, and suggests that the wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.“ (1)

Sam Mendes’ Away We Go manages a similar trick for a certain demographic of adults by largely portraying a conflict-free relationship between two thirtysomethings on the cusp of first-time parenthood. Mendes follows his Totoros (large, mythical cats in Miyazaki’s film, here an insurance salesman and medical illustrator), named Burt and Verona, as they episodically trek across the United States to find the ideal spot for bringing up a little one and settling down. Verona has a bit of baggage stemming from the premature death of her parents, but for the most part the couple lives in a hermetically sealed, dorky hipster-harmony. Conflict arises only as their bubble runs against the sharp misery of friends and extended families. "Nobody's in love like us, right?" asks Verona in a rare moment of doubt, and there's no doubt about the answer. They are engaged in a safe, passionate partnership, of which we'd all like to be a part, but rarely see borne out in films. Is this relationship any less realistic than your average romantic comedy? Not really, unless your definition of realism is aligned with the exhausted formula of beautiful, savage monodimensionals programmatically fighting and fucking and marrying and procreating.

However, for nearly an hour, Away We Go is itself an insufferably obnoxious, flat and irritatingly hip mess of a feel-bad-then-good movie. In this way it mirrors the couple (played by the The Office’s John Krasinski and Saturday Night Live alumnus Maya Rudolph) at its center: embarrassingly earnest, quirky, navel-gazing and lazily idealized. As a parade of Flagrant All-American Misery crosses the bushy-tailed couple’s path in the form of Faux-Eastern Spiritualism, Suburban Vulgarities and Narcissistic Former Hippies, Burt and Verona cling to each other against the hideous menagerie, their primary concern avoiding a similar fate for their fledgling family unit. But once the film escapes this self-imposed purgatory of misguided and deadening farce, it evolves into a near masterpiece during its final twenty minutes, leaving attentive audiences bewildered and glad they'd resisted temptation to jump ship. It’s no understatement to call this film’s first half nearly unbearable, a failure on almost every level. Its late resurrection (what sports junkies know as a “second-half adjustment”) is so glaring as to give off the appearance of an elaborate joke, though Away We Go’s finale wears a message of sincerity so brilliantly it shames the previous 70 minutes out of memory.

Narcissistic yet uncomplicated, beautiful yet average-looking, worldly yet innocent, Burt and Verona serve as the ideal for the This American Life crowd. Their unironic embrace of irony-drenched objects, activities and fashions (tube socks, aviator goggles, mittens, beards, whittling, Buddy Holly specs) would be the envy of every hipster unable to be appear so effortless in his or her appropriation of yesterday’s ephemera. Even the contrast in their names, the exotic and ethnic Verona, the prosaic Burt, projects a graceful intermarriage between the poles of hipsterdom. They are who’d you like to be, or, at the very least, who you’d like to know. The fantasy is that these people might exist, and you could befriend them, and maybe they'd rub off on you. They exist for MFA’s and graphic design grunts as Totoro does for kiddies. Which is not to criticize either the portrait or the aim, because both fantasies are ultimately harmless, equally capable of expanding one’s horizons and indulging the prospect of a better self. If one is to take umbrage with an idealizing fantasy, there are far more toxic, larger targets.

During his relatively brief career in Hollywood so far, Sam Mendes has made one vastly overrated film (the eventual kitsch-classic, Oscar Winning American Beauty in 1999), two vastly underrated films (the near-masterpiece Jarhead [2005] and 2002's enjoyable Road to Perdition), along with what is perhaps the most offensively grandiose work of Oscar-bait this decade (last year's slimy Revolutionary Road), so any film with his name on it could go either way. Cursed with the inability to transcend mediocre or vague source material, Mendes is natural visual stylist without much in the way of subtlety or originality. He has failed at sober-eyed critique and farce alike, resembling a blunt-toothed shark circling the American Dream, laboriously nibbling at it, but unable to bring it down. That he is British, yet all of his films concern Americana in its most grotesque forms, does little to propel him to the upper ranks of Hollywood Artists, his clear aim. Consequently, over the course of his first five films there has risen a consistent equation detailing the relationship between the grandness of his vision vis-à-vis The American Character and his effectiveness as a dramatist: as his ambition soars, his films sink in an equal and opposite reaction.

A great relief it is that Away We Go is much less extravagant in its sweep of the American Dream than previous efforts, especially in its splendid final reel. Aided by the brilliant director of photography Ellen Kuras, who admirably dampens his penchant for visual excess, Mendes starts off charting the revulsion Burt and Verona experience as they visit a series of friends and family that offer horrifying visions of family life. As the successive exemplars of maturity grow muted in behavior during the picture’s second half, the story’s, and Mendes’ own, better qualities emerge. Burt and Verona come across as hopelessly narcissistic and righteous when placed early on in sharp contrast to the aging slut and her basket case husband, or the anti-stroller Eastern Spiritualists. Their humanity emerges later on, when a visit to a set of ostensibly happy, Toronto-dwelling friends reveals, with utmost subtlety, unseen traumas that are neither exploited for shameless emotional punch nor parlayed into numbing farce. Similarly, the film’s final chapter, an unexpected emergency visit to Burt’s bereaved brother (played by the always-brilliant Paul Schneider) digs at deeper truths with a deft, sober humanity. The schematic of a film’s ending unintentionally humiliating the rest of its running time is a novel concept for a quirky indie comedy, even if it’s more or less expected from most quirky indie thrillers boasting lame shock endings. But the final leg of Away We Go more than justifies the price of admission. Accordingly, skipping all but this graceful stretch wouldn’t amount to tragedy. There's plenty one can do with seventy extra minutes of free time.

In a career-first, Mendes’ weaknesses and those of the script (by the presumably real-life Burt&Verona, novelists/journalists/activists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida) are complementary, and a modest dialectic emerges: the heaviness of his hand, and the self-involved, breezy flow of the script conspire to create a middle-ground synthesis that settles into a warmly restrained portrait of capital-A American Adulthood without forsaking the capital-I Idiosyncrasies of its central characters. The story of love between Burt and Verona predates and outlasts the film, as we slowly begin to feel as though we’re not witnessing their best years, a notion as refreshing as it is unfortunately unique. Essential to the veracity of Totoro, as well as Away We Go, or even Star Wars, for that matter, is the completeness of a world that doesn’t cease to exist as the film closes. Vida and Eggers should be applauded for their aversion to screenwriting contrivances, having breathed life into a humble, if initially muddled, fantasy.

Away We Go / USA, UK / 2009 / Color / 98 min. / Directed by Sam Mendes / Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida / Starring John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Carmen Ejogo, Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan, Samantha Pryor, Conor Carroll, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Paul Schneider

Notes:

1 – Ebert’s discussion of Totoro, also a very good, concise explanation of Miyazaki’s overall appeal, can be accessed here:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011223/REVIEWS08/112230301/1023

STAYIN' ALIVE

Pablo Larrain’s Unnerving, Brilliant Tony Manero

A stark counterpoint to Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s utopian fantasia of messianic cinephilia, this bit of Chilean miserablism (hopefully no longer a pejorative descriptor) burrows underneath the intersection of motion picture idolatry and fascist art making. What emerges is a harrowing masterpiece.

In a watch-and-follow handheld aesthetic – shot on Super16mm with a color palette reduced to a pasty shade of mortar – sophomore director Pablo Larrain’s camera stays closely behind Raul (co-writer Alfredo Castro, who from the three quarter view recalls a Panic in Needle Park-era Al Pacino, all eye sockets and fierce Latin angularity. Shot straight on, he’s Lou Reed at his most disconcertingly blank), as he pursues the monomaniacal quest to become Augusto Pinochet-era Chile’s foremost Tony Manero (John Travolta's iconic character from Saturday Night Fever) impersonator in the waning days of disco.

A local television station holds weekly contests to determine the Chilean equivalent of a rotating cast of American celebrities – at the outset of the film Raul mistakenly shows up at the Chuck Norris lookalike contest – which gives Raul a way of parlaying his Saturday Night Fever fixation into national notoriety and artistic legitimacy. Concurrently, he’s been managing a group of amateur dancers in a series of painfully mechanical reiterations of Fever’s key sequences for paltry, drunken crowds. The Manero character’s effect on Raul’s world is total, bringing him to tears at its tender moments while also inspiring him to commit a string of impulsive, remorseless killings.

Devoutly, studiously attending screenings of the film (his plastic-wrapped imitation of Fever’s iconic white suit takes up the adjoining seat), Raul sets about internalizing each detail and nuance of Travolta’s performance in an effort to assimilate the character entirely. Accurate impersonation is no cheap endeavor, and the jobless Raul shows no mercy in brutally slaughtering innocents who can provide him with the gold chains, television sets and dance floor panels capable of legitimizing his apery. Nor is his masquerade profitable: the television’s grand prize is a scant sum that would scarcely cover the cost of the accoutrements required for Raul’s ardent verisimilitude. There is no benefit to this charade but the opportunity for control.

Lest we entertain the notion that the obsession is with Travolta himself, as a performer, the local theater swaps out Fever for Grease one afternoon (with an uptick in attendance), provoking Raul to throttle the owner against the projector and thieve the cash register. To the aging Raul, Manero represents the immortal, an attainable, perpetual youth. When the permanence of his idol’s grace is threatened by the theater’s crass acquiescence to fickle popular demand, that is, when the constituents of his own identity are exposed as mere pop culture artifacts, Raul can only compensate with violence in an effort to keep his carefully composed self from disintegrating.

“How the financially pinched 70s generation that grew up on TV attempt[ed] to find its own forms of beauty and release,” was how Pauline Kael perceptively described Manero’s original appeal to American audiences (1). In Chile, however, Manero’s pursuit of release and freedom becomes Raul’s template for merciless control and two-bit fascism. Twentieth century despots are famous for their cinephilia, and Raul, underneath the umbrella of Pinochet, parlays his cinematic fantasies into fascistic impulses on the grandest stages available to him, first a decrepit theater, then, briefly, a claustrophobic soundstage (2). Pinochet is the lion and Raul is the termite, but the film makes explicit the mutuality of their gluttonous ambition. Both Larrain’s photographic schema and Raul’s broken features recall cornerstones of Italian Neo-realism, and, most perversely, Tony Manero’s protagonist functions as the Fascist Everyman.

Paradoxically, the more avidly Raul consumes the film, the more carefully he notes the Saturday Night Fever’s most quotidian details, the more he’s unable to comprehend them accurately. A few running jokes have characters arguing with him about the number of buttons above Manero’s zipper or the color of the heroine’s dress in a key sequence. The pathetic equation of Raul’s life: the more firmly he impresses himself upon the film, the greater is his rejection from it, the distance between the two increasing upon every viewing. As he closely inspects a filched 35mm print of Fever, isolating each move and scrutinizing each successive image as a translatable code, the two younger members of his company intrude upon him and introduce an original number they propose to feature in the performance. Disinterested, Raul removes his eyes from the stilled Manero only once, to say that their efforts were wasted, as their steps are “not in the film,” that is, not fit for inclusion because their genesis lay outside of the sanctioned fantasy. Susan Sontag defined the fascist aesthetic as one that “… flows from (and justifies) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.” (3) Fittingly, Raul’s life is one of performance – embodiment is his art – and his servitude to the idea of Tony Manero and his total control of others encapsulates Sontag’s conception of a binary fascist aesthetic, which in Raul’s case is noxiously based on a misguided ideal of freedom and grace.

Impossibly reticent, the only sound he emits is the shuffle of his footsteps as he ambles through depopulated slums, occasionally stooping to avoid the eye of patrolling military goons. The famous opening of Saturday Night Fever has Travolta’s boots strutting down a Brooklyn sidewalk with The Bee Gees' disco anthem “Stayin’ Alive” on the soundtrack. Tony Manero is without non-source music; consequently, Travolta’s silenced footsteps are translated to the hard grind of Raul’s shoes against gravel roads. Music dominates all the dance sequences of Fever, eliminating all sonic evidence of labor or strain, but Larrain never forgets Raul’s feet and muscles. The ersatz Manero’s attempt at providing the appropriate disco soundtrack to his company’s performances is undermined by the blaring, graceless clapping of their feet against the splintered wooden floor. In keeping with a fascist preoccupation with tightly organized (controlled) bodies, the dancers’ rote memorization of Travolta’s steps renders each performance a perfunctory march.

Pinochet’s coup was CIA-sponsored, and the film contains the implication that Saturday Night Fever itself is also exemplary of American meddling and imperialism. The murderous fascism of both the dictator and the dancer is propped up by the monolithic United States, but Larrain is careful not to suggest that U.S. hegemony manufactures such tyranny outright, at least in this instance. The relationship is instead one of facilitation, not construction, and a less nuanced film (and certainly one by an American filmmaker) would not have realized this. Larrain thus creates a narrative successful at both the interpersonal and political levels while tangibly, though subtly, articulating the interplay between. In fact, the film’s calmest moment – fleeting as it is – features the troupe relaxing after a performance by listening to traditional Chilean music. The sequence quickly devolves into a sex scene of Tarr-ian alienation in which would-be lovers are reduced to masturbating side-by-side and passing out, but the respite of Chilean culture registers with the characters strongly, if only for a moment and followed quickly by further misery wrought by their leader.

The respective realms of lion and termite eventually converge as the two insolent dancers bent on inserting original passages into the performance become budding anti-Pinochet activists, simultaneously wrenching themselves away from two forms of concomitant fascism, the artistic and the political. Raul’s nervousness around the authorities (always crouching, always ducking, always avoiding scrutiny) is never fully explained, but it’s worth asserting that the lion need never fear the termite, but the termite would be advised always to fear the lion, regardless of their commonality. The film ends as the authorities descend upon the theater to interrogate (and presumably execute) the young lovers for the subversive behavior – they’d been finked on by the girl’s mother, who was jealous of Raul’s attraction to her daughter. Blessed with a rat’s sense of impending trouble, Raul slips out the back door in his Travolta garb, headed for the television station.


Tony Manero / Chile, Brazil / Color / 98 min. / Directed by Pablo Larrain / Written by Alfredo Castro, Mateo Iribarren and Mr. Larrain / Starring: Alfredo Castro, Paola Lattus, Hector Morales, Amparo Noguera and Elsa Poblete


Notes:

1 - Collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies. New York: Henry Holt, 1985

2 - Despots seem particularly enamored with movies (or at least we’re enamored with the connection). Kim Jong-Il’s fetish for James Bond is well documented, as was Stalin’s fondness for musicals. Hitler preferred Chaplin until The Great Dictator. The connection between artistic fantasy and political fantasy must be tempting, and these dictators being at the helm of state film industries must make those two arenas less distinguishable. An interesting, cursory overview of Stalin’s command of state cinema (certainly the most prolonged and strongest of a tyrant over a major film industry) can be found at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3618310/Why-Stalin-loved-Tarzan-and-wanted-John-Wayne-shot.html.

3 – Sontag’s essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” from which these quotes were taken and which is more than anything a far-reaching discussion of Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl’s work and legacy, appears in her collection:

Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Vintage, 1981

NEXT-GEN MAD MEN

Ad Execs Self-Congratulate in Doug Pray's Art & Copy

“I like to think that [with my advertisements] I’m entertaining people, using my client’s products.”

- Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners.

"You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll-call forever. End of story. You're another corporate shill, you're another whore at the capitalist gang-bang... there's a price on your head, everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink."

- Bill Hicks, comedian

The most gorgeous, riveting span of cinema released in the past few months reveals at its close that it has an explicit purpose: it wants you to buy blue jeans. Blue Jeans from Levi’s, specifically, the American Institution. If you’ve gone to a multiplex for a movie recently, you’re probably familiar with the Levi’s Ad Campaign that bears the name “Go Forth.” It’s been on television, and it’s effective there, and stilled images of a similar quality grace billboards and posters on subway walls. Seen on the big screen, however, it is simply wondrous in its budget of sound and image. It is a more rapturous use of theatrical motion picture technology than any of the summer blockbusters released this year, with images made for a massive screen and a crackling soundtrack that begs high, immersive volume. In a series of slow, crisp black and white images, the texture of which recalls Robert Frank and Bela Tarr, the pace and content Terrence Malick, we see the American landscape and its denizens cascade proudly, unpretentiously before us. There are fireworks, muggy ponds, slums, trains, flags, corporate suits, rolling hills, interracial kisses, high rises, young muscles flexing and even some horseback riding. May sound kitschy, but these images have an undeniable power. On the soundtrack: the only known recording of Uncle Walt Whitman reading a particularly rousing passage from the poem "America" (1). Taken together, the images and sounds soar. All of this creates a yearning, a palpable emotion, and the Levi’s logo being stamped onto the image unceremoniously at the end inspires either a jarring emotional plummet or self-conscious laughter (“how could I have been so stupid?”). It’s the greatest short film that doesn’t really exist; it’s a trailer for a long-lost abandoned David Gordon Green film. What it is, really, is an attempt to associate these images of fantastic beauty and the most brilliant of American poets, and the sentiment constructed via their simultaneity, with a brand of pants. It’s an advertisement. And to those still sensitive to such things’ intrusiveness and cynicism, a beautiful, absorbing ad is still just a wolf in sheep’s clothing, definitely not to be trusted, and to be admired at one’s own peril. The director, Cary Fukunaga, has also released a well-regarded feature, Sin Nombre, released about the same time as the Levi’s campaign (2). It’s doubtless that he and his stunningly talented director of photography, Darren Lew, will go onto brilliant careers. But what will it have taken to get them there? (3)

The clip comes courtesy of the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, and both Dan Wieden and David Kennedy appear in Doug Pray’s new documentary on the advertising industry’s innovations of the last 60 years, Art & Copy. Considering the surging popularity of AMC’s drama Mad Men and with television commercials now uploaded by the millions on Youtube (that is to say, the willful consumption of advertisements), there has never been a better time to discuss the aesthetics and practices of marketing and the extent of its effect on our culture. Pray’s film, through its rosy-colored glasses, may embody contemporary attitudes on the ad men (and women) who provide us with much of our favorite (and inescapable) sounds and images, but he does his viewership no service with such an unthinking, uncritical portrait of the process.

Appallingly, though understandably, there aren’t any but massive, clear consciences and earnest smiles on display in Art & Copy. Each interview participant (all advertising bigwigs responsible for such indomitable memes as "got milk?" and “Just Do It”) offers a unique variation of Silverstein’s dubious justification and self-satisfaction, making them the most deluded, cynical group of documentary subjects since the Friedman family or Fred A. Leuchter, depending on one’s point-of-view (4). These tycoons have convinced themselves that they’ve only followed a calling, performing a useful, indeed, necessary, function in a society with the desperate need for market-place clarification. None offers any sort of meaningful self-awareness in admitting they’re essentially charged with manipulating consumers and promulgating corporate lies (about running faster, feeling better, looking better, eating better). In a society of seemingly infinite capitalistic choice, the public’s attention must be controlled, their manifesto goes. These are the individuals who’ve proven capable at directing the consuming populace at the behest of the highest bidder, but this relationship is curiously not portrayed as being problematic in the slightest. One surfer-turned-Ad Exec claims that his dog food commercials not only make you love his client’s dog food, but also make you love your dog more. The hubris runs rampant, and Pray struggles to keep up.

This puzzling effort from Doug Pray, most notably the director of two near-brilliant documentaries (the semi-obscure 1996 music movie Hype! and 2008’s acclaimed Surfwise) and a mediocre one sandwiched between (Scratch from 2001), broadly concerns the world of advertising in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In fact, the broad regard Art & Copy has for its subject may be the film’s greatest weakness, as it keeps the film from developing any sort of engaging through-line. One can stomach a film boasting offensive ideals and politics (and Errol Morris has made of career out of providing a forum to nauseating interview subjects) if the filmmaker manages a worthwhile form of execution or compelling argument. But this is a mixture of talking head interviews organized around no discernible narrative constraint, accompanied by frustratingly tangential urban tableaux with common-knowledge statistics pasted over them (ones concerning how much advertising the average American is exposed to in a given day, the cost of Super Bowl ads, etc.). The film bores on a narrative level and infuriates thematically.

Pray’s admiration for these soulless hucksters is alarming for a director whose first (and still best) film Hype! hilariously mulled the countless transgressions of corporate media and ad agencies while they disrupted and poisoned the once-vibrant Seattle music scene during Grunge Mania in the early 1990’s. Almost two decades removed from that debut, Pray has since evolved a dispiritingly amorous relationship with the very mechanisms he’d already convincingly dismantled with nothing more than a genial wit and a keen ear for his subjects’ emblematic commentary. All of that’s gone now, he’s sided definitively with Goliath, and it’s a bit ironic that this, his least appealing film, both visually and structurally, should focus on a business intent upon using images and tight narrative patterns successfully and aggressively in pursuit of profit.

In its strained-smile awkwardness, Art & Copy often resembles a touchy-feely corporate training video wherein ad execs promote a “creative/corporate lifestyle” that their graphic design flunkies can hope to obtain eventually, should their desperate salesmanship and unscrupulousness never falter. The attempts by the executives (several former longhairs) to masquerade their contradictory vocation as mere paradox are laughable, and the human interest subsections of the film in which they share the moments in which great ads occurred to them, or bureaucratic obstacles were overcome (casting themselves, the creatives, as puny Davids against the gray flannel Goliath) are reprehensible. Advertising junkies may swoon over the discourse, but those infuriated by the constant erosion of public space in favor of mega-budgeted ad campaigns will experience little but insult after insult.

The notion of advertising’s inherent “creativity” is proposed again and again, and the figures (with no objection from the doe-eyed Pray) each fancy him- or herself equal parts artist and entertainer. That each truly works as glorified salesmen is a fact buried deep within insipid personal narratives but never manages to reach the surface. Midway through the film we are privy to commentary on the transition from utilitarian advertising through the 1950s, which told audiences what the thing was and what it did, to a modern, smarter, graphics-infused form that sought to show and not tell, and thus inspire consumers to emotion response. The first half of the twentieth century’s ad men needn’t be celebrated either, but their craft was a little less shrill and definitely less pervasive than that of their progeny. The implication here is that selling things is so natural an endeavor that it hardly needs to be named in this context, thus its exclusion from the proceedings. The illusion of modern advertising is that it’s not selling, it’s providing. Providing entertainment, motivation, beauty, emotional stimulus, visions of celebrities, music, a sense of community and inspiration.

With such a promising resume, it’s flabbergasting that Pray would dedicate an entire film to the veneration of what’s become a social menace. We’re meant to wait, sweating it out with bated breath, as they unspool the story of our most famous television clips, as though such backstage intrigue is somehow informative, inspiring or interesting. Detailing the process behind any industry or operation can generate interest (Georges Franju captured the beauty and terror of slaughterhouses in Le Sang des Bêtes, the Canadian documentary series How It’s Made turns syrup making into riveting spectacle, and the legendary Frederick Wiseman is apt to dedicate four or more hours to public housing offices or state legislatures), but the tenor of Art & Copy’s wonk narratives is disconcertingly grandiose. A similarly pitched documentary concerning the herculean effort to construct a similarly offensive product, like gasoline or shotguns, would be met with fierce resistance and accusations of corporate collusion on the part of the filmmakers. Speaking of which, sapping the film of its objectivity and independence of thought is the fact that the “original concept” for the film is credited to Gregory Beauchamp and Kirk Souder, the two founders of an advertising firm called Ground Zero (they also serve as executive producers). In light of this involvement, what else could one expect but a sterling portrait of the industry, Mad Men on Mad Men? How have we come to view advertising so innocuously? (5)

Pray offers us pristine examples of what we’re really talking about when we talk about an emergent “creative class”: mediocre art school alumni, sell-outs, burnouts and opportunists, who now design pretty methods of psychological manipulation on a mass scale and call it art. Pray cursorily opens up an ethical debate at picture’s end, but with no outside interference, the lunatics are left to police themselves at the asylum. The few times any of the myriad ill-effects of their vocation are voiced, any marketing malfeasance is quickly deemed “bad advertising,” and the conversation continues without a missed beat. “Bad advertising,” they all seem to be saying, is like pornography: they know it when they see it, and its distinguishing feature is a paucity of creativity when compared to the good guys providing us with the good advertisements. The thinking here goes: the business of selling and marketing is not itself crass, the corruption of public spaces isn’t a lamentable loss and tampering with children's education (all tangible effects of ad culture) is not itself a bad thing, but they become so in the hands of those lacking proper decorum. To treat an ethical and social question entirely in terms of aesthetics feeds an industry-wide delusion that’s spread beyond marketing boardrooms and into the mindset of a good chunk of the American people.

Art & Copy / USA / 2009 / Color / 89 min. / Directed by Doug Pray / “Original Concept” by Gregory Beauchamp and Kirk Souder, “Narrative Consultant” Timothy J. Sexton / Interview Subjects: Lee Clow, Jim Durfee, Cliff Freeman, Jeff Goodby, David Kennedy, George Lois, Hal Riney, Mary Wells, Phyllis K. Robinson and Dan Wieden

Notes:

1 - To further illustrate the lack of artistic wherewithal of the Levi’s campaign, Whitman’s poem was itself written “in opposition to the commercial and material culture of America and the aggressively capitalist spirit of the time,” according to Betsy Erkkila in her book:

Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989

The power of Whitman’s invocation arises from his belief in an America whose future lay outside corporate strictures. This power is unsurprisingly, unforgivably utilized to commercial ends, and the head spins at the dialectic possibilities therein.

2 - A similar commercial, in color, features Whitmans “O Pioneers!” on its soundtrack. It lacks the startling beauty and wistfulness of the “America” spot, but it suffers from the same problems still. That the tone and imagery are strikingly similar despite a change in directors (the “O Pioneers” spot was helmed by M. Blash, whose debut feature was 2006’s Lying) would indicate that the true author of both pieces is Wieden + Kennedy as a firm, not either filmmaker as an artist.

3 - The fact that many of our premiere filmmakers (David Fincher, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Errol Morris, Wes Anderson and even David Lynch) have either gotten their start in advertising (the three former) or used it to pay the bills or as an outlet for short filmmaking (the three latter) ought to be upsetting, though it doesn’t seem to offend most. There is no real distribution of short films in this country, and the use of short films on television and in cinemas (as is done in other countries), might alleviate some of the pressure filmmakers experience to make advertisements. Possibly in the future we can look to OnDemand and Internet distribution as a way for filmmakers to create short work (a viable art form when not under the influence of multinationals) and not starve.

4 - This refers to the denial-plagued family combating charges of child molestation in Andrew Jarecki’s gripping Capturing the Friedmans (2003), and the execution-equipment engineer turned holocaust-denial poster child in Errol Morris’ Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr (1999).

5 - Pray confusingly states his own ambivalence about advertising practices in an odd, contradictory interview at: http://blog.spout.com/2009/01/22/doug-pray-interview-art-copy-sundance-2009/. His ambivalence could have benefited the film, had he taken it with him into the editing room.

VISIONARILY

Zach Galifianakis plays a Visioneer in Visioneers

People across the United States are exploding at ever alarming numbers. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. Dreaming and weight gain are symptoms. Best to be a good, productive employee in order to avoid stress-induced combustion. Also have lots of sex (occasionally with giant stuffed teddy bears, but mostly with your spouse) and eat lots of fried chicken. So goes society’s best advice for leading a long, happy and healthy life in Jared Drake’s Visioneers.

A laudable effort at lo-fi sci-fi, this cheapo jet black comedy is about 5/7ths hilariously morose, and 2/7th overripe, New Age mush, ultimately not a bad proportion for first time filmmakers Jared and Brandon Drake (director and writer, respectively). Granted a last-minute DVD release after the success of this summer’s The Hangover made star Zach Galifianakis nearly a household name, Visioneers sports the standard dystopian sci-fi line about a horizonless corpo-governmental bureaucracy stifling the life force of its drone employees until one man decides he’s not going to take it anymore.

Visioneers’ addition to the canon of futuristic office drone cautionary tales is the absurdist sense of humor it utilizes while installing what is among the ugliest futures yet contrived in contemporary science fiction. These United States, date undetermined, as conjured by the brothers Drake, seem to have taken two steps backward and three steps sideways. Remember how Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow purported a future as projected from the 1930’s? Visioneers offers us a vision of a dystopian future as suburban teenagers might have imagined it in 1993. This tack by no means hinders the effectiveness of the Drake’s vision, as it easily could have. Instead, the oddball humor and anachronistic non-sequiturs liven up the whole thing. George Washington Winsterhammerman (Galifianakis) drives, despite only having one child, a boxy early 90s minivan, lives in a garish McMansion, wears track suits sporting his company’s logo, employs a personal trainer/life coach in the mold of both Tony Robbins and Jake Steinfeld (Body by Jake) and his office contains no computers or electronic gizmos. This is naked, unplugged misery, and it definitely smarts worse than the whizzing and whirring malaise of technocratic masterpieces like Blade Runner and A.I. Fittingly, when the evil institution rotting the American Dream from the belly out wants to corral its citizens into less emotional behavior and increase productivity, it attaches a gaudy, pager-looking device to the jugular. There’s no virtual reality, robotic maids, retinal scans, or techno-wizardry of any kind, as if the human race grew so emotionally stunted and unimaginative that the will to create distractions from the numbing cosmos had withered altogether. Television alone persists, and there isn’t much on it but vapid self-helpers (1000 Ways to be Happy), explosion cure telethons, sadistic cop shows (Mack Luster, in which the police pry the fingernails from an uncooperative geriatric) and newscasts manufacturing fear of spontaneous combustion. If all that sounds a bit obvious, the understated execution is nearly flawless, elevating the material beyond its satirical brethren.

Perhaps the brothers had the screenplay and art design lying around the house for a few years while gathering financing. Regardless, this vision is all the more horrifying in its post-modern chaos of life. A running joke is the widespread fear of chaos (pronounced CHAY-ohss by all character in the film), without any acknowledgment of the current maelstrom of products, pacification and ugliness that surrounds them already. There is no center to this universe, no organizing principal or isolatable point where humanity went astray. This world’s relationship to our own is entirely nonlinear. We didn’t evolve or devolve toward this destination; the Drakes present it as radial explosion of twenty years worth of junk culture and capitalistic excess.

Galifianakis is mesmerizing. Toned down tremendously from his turn in The Hangover and his standup act, he shows remarkable range as George, and the Drakes wisely linger over his expressions, which are never cheap or easy to read. The emotionless sad sack is practically mute, and the film’s most biting, hilarious and wrenching stretches occur watching Galifianakis as a single word spends minutes being visibly generated in his neck and on his face before limply slipping out. He wears the weight of a forsaken society on his broad face better than any of his deprogrammed forebears. The tension he generates after failing to speak when prompted is reason enough to take in this fantastically bizarre and admirably cheap sci-fi romp. Of particular brilliance is an extended scene where he flings himself through his property in a saccadic, pre-explosive fit, his gesticulations tight spasms punctuated by uncontrolled flailing. It’s a bit of pantomime that’s unique to Galifianakis, and it, along with his droll line readings and sly facial tics, signals a significant comedic performer emerging into his own.

Not as dramatically together as Idiocracy, but far funnier. Not as brilliant as Brazil, but far more intimate a portrait of the little man’s suffering in a futuristic wasteland. Mentioning it in league with those two films should give a clear indication of its merits, while stirring up anticipation for the future work of both Galifianakis and the Drake brothers.

Visioneers / USA / 2008 / Color / 95 min. / Directed by Jared Drake / Written by Brandon Drake / Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Judy Greer, James Le Gros, Mia Maestro and Missi Pyle

HISTORY, BASTERDIZED

Considering Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

 

Note: It’s impossible to discuss this film in any meaningful fashion without a detail-saturated recapitulation of its shock ending. The more incredible aspects of the finale are likely common knowledge by now, given that they’re among the most important and intriguing facets of the film. Those who wish to remain innocent of Inglourious Basterds’ climax, however, should turn away from this essay altogether until they’ve seen the film.

Restraint, which has been largely absent from the Tarantino canon for the past decade, is graciously – though only partially – restored in the World War II adventure yarn, Inglourious Basterds, making this his most rewarding picture since 1997’s Jackie Brown. Finally, those fearing the prospect of QT having permanently marooned himself in the copious, cartoonish bloodletting of the two Kill Bill pictures or, worst yet, the aimless, jabbering menace of Death Proof can exhale a sigh of relief, even if those same connoisseurs of high-brow vulgarity like Jackie and Pulp Fiction won’t be able to ferret out much resembling “maturity” (the word that continues to dog the video store maestro more than any other) in his latest.

The restraint in question manifests itself as a renewed sense of dramatic balance and carefully construed tension; effortlessly juxtaposed (and commensurately thrilling) virtuoso dialogue sequences and action set pieces abound, servicing the story rather than diverting it. His focus restored, Tarantino proves himself again able to tell an engaging cinematic story, clearly and well, an ability he’d seemingly forsaken as he attempted to isolate his polar strengths (meandering conversation in Proof, comic violence in Bill) rather than organize coherence between them.

Basterds’ story is divided between two plot lines: The first focuses on French cinematheque owner Shosanna’s (Melanie Laurent) attempt to disrupt the premiere of Goebbels’s latest propaganda effort starring the “German Sergeant York” Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who happens to be courting the comely projectionist; the second arc details a Dirty Dozen-type band of Jewish American soldiers, “The Basterds” led by the “part-injun” gentile Lt. Aldo Raine (Hollywood’s favorite accented uber-ham, Brad Pitt), as they’re dropped behind enemy lines with the sole objective of each man collecting, as Pitt’s iron-jawed hick shouts, “One….Hunnert….Nazi….Scalps.” Graphically depicted, but not often and never garishly so, the scalping amounts to psychological warfare: It's not enough for the Basterds to hunt and kill Nazis, they aim instead to breed vulnerability into the Third Reich via brutal Native American war tactics.

That Shosanna is the sole survivor of her Jewish family’s massacre at the hands of the evil Nazi Col. Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa (the brilliant Christoph Waltz, in what may be the best Tarantino-directed performance since Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield) makes both strands revenge stories of a kind, perfectly keeping with QT’s post-Jackie obsession. The split between the plots effectively bisects the holocaust and our postwar outrage into the personal and historical: Shosanna’s tale personifies revenge in the particular, as she’s spurred to retribution as the result of personal tragedy, whereas the Basterds represent the necessity for Jewish revenge in the abstract. No single Basterd is given a personal history or motivation; their need to kill is based more on a post-WWII historical reckoning of Nazi atrocity, and audiences are expected to walk into the theater armed with a preconceived understanding of and appreciation for the mission’s urgency and righteousness.

Two-pronged Jewish vengeance against Nazi atrocity provides Tarantino with a doubly fortified podium for commemorating an alternate history in which the consummate bad guy gets a more thorough comeuppance administered by his victims directly. The picture culminates in the Fuhrer himself attending Goebbels’s premiere at Shosanna’s theater, and dying simultaneously at the hands of Shosanna (who locks her theater doors when the Nazi aristocracy has been seated and sets a pile of explosive silver nitrate film aflame), and the Basterds (who bombard his private booth with machine guns), presumably ending the war in the European theater months before the Battle of the Bulge. In the movies, in Tarantino’s movies, Hitler is deprived the privilege of poisoning himself in a dank bunker, thus affording justice (depicted as recoiled holocaust in the literal sense) a second chance at the ultimate prize in Inglourious Basterds.

Is this historical do-over problematic? Most definitely, primarily because Tarantino skirts all discussion of morality, historiography, justice and ethics, situating his film on the ostensible stability of Western culture’s staunchest Manichean division between good and evil. In an embarrassing comparison, the recent Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie (about a real-life plot by SS officers to assassinate Hitler) can certainly claim a more nuanced approach to Nazis culture, though it was hardly Tarantino’s approach to do so (1). This dichotomized morality has bred nothing but a pious laziness in film artists such as Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg and Roberto Benini. Does Tarantino, like these saints of recent Serious Historical Cinema, here exploit Jewish suffering to legitimize his pre-fabricated compulsions? Yes, without a doubt, but it’s arguable, and surprising, that he does so to a much lesser extent than his contemporaries. In this sense he is (somewhat disingenuously) casting himself as Tarantino the Innocent, incapable of offense and operating under the belief that he’s providing the world a shattering catharsis it had never considered or was too embarrassed to propose or pursue with such grand scale (2). This is in tremendous contrast to the pale, grandiose suffering offered by Spielberg and co., who obnoxiously mine survivor’s guilt in the service of schmaltz. Tarantino’s taking up of arms against the 20th century’s bogeyman is, while often loathsome and never completely unimpeachable, certainly preferable to the feebleness (mistakenly defined as “stark realism”) of the aforementioned. But that's faint praise, indeed.

While Pitt’s redneck gunner and Laurent’s scarred vixen hack admirably at the Nazi regime, the cinema itself emerges as the 20th century’s true avenging angel. The institution of cinema is given the most complex treatment in the film: it is variably seen as propagandistic muscle (3); the key to an intellectual resistance (Clouzot's occupation-era, anti-fascist masterpiece Le Corbeau is showing at Shosanna’s cinema), a tactical maneuver (a double agent’s intelligence qualifications arise out of a knowledge of prewar German cinema), recorder of history, entertainment alternative to the killing (Lt. Raine claims that their ultra-violence is “the closest thing to movies” his men see), and finally rectifier of the historical record. Cinema prevails, Tarantino claims, by embodying our hopes and fears, offering a chance at both fact and fiction, each a branch of Great Truth in essence. It’s not insignificant that the Basterd played by filmmaker Eli Roth is the supplier of the Hitler killshot. The potency of the director is remarked upon several times, and Roth (in a hollering, grating performance) is, in his last scene, the most literal manifestation of that, next to Shoshanna’s auteurist interruption of Goebbels’s screening (shortly before blowing the place up, she projects a short film in which she addresses the audience, informing them of their forthcoming demise.)

Her brief, climactic moment as auteur occurs a few hours after Shosanna states, in a semi-cordial argument with a German private/film buff: “This is France, we respect our directors,” and fittingly the film contains more conversational references to the cinema and filmmakers (King Kong, G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl, David O. Selznick, Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Max Linder, and Weimar cinema among others, are all given significant mention) than any other in recent memory (4). Inglourious Basterds not only boasts the most film-centric storyline of recent memory, it also marks the most overt fawning directed at the movies in Tarantino’s oeuvre. Past references in his films have been obscure and tucked away into the corners of the frame, never confronting their target audience with any sense of history or theory. While there are certainly instances of the same in this picture, it’s refreshing to see the consummate cineaste profess his love of the cinema as strongly as he does his fondness for women’s feet. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Tarantino could potentially spark more of an interest in film history with this film than all of the previous century’s countless television documentaries extolling the virtues of classic cinema combined. Such is Tarantino’s popularity worldwide, and such is his feverish devotion to his craft, now finally at the forefront of his work.

From a technical standpoint, the most attentive of cinema’s students simply knows where to put the camera and what to do with it, just as he always has. His tracks, pans and beats are, as ever, completely without flaw. The entirety of the film is pure cinema, with nary an errant angle or cut, as if it were assembled effortlessly. If there is a director for whom a concept of “cinema” is itself a style of direction, an attainable ideal or hygienic distillation of the medium’s past masters and hacks, it is Tarantino, whose images often lack idiosyncrasy and sweat despite perfect, efficacious execution. Similarly, DP Robert Richardson’s colors and textures are characteristically brilliant; this ongoing collaboration (their third film together) is proving more even-handed and fruitful than the teaming between Richardson and Scorsese, which is tilted decidedly toward the genius of the former. It’s relieving to see an action film made with tripods and dollies, concentrating and focusing kinetic activity rather than spilling it across an unstable image as in the Jason Bourne pictures and that series’ disciples. The soundtrack is often annoyingly filled with Morricone trots and inexplicably anachronistic pop tunes, but it’s largely effective in mounting tension, and it’s not hard to say that music in general has a more relaxed presence than in either Kill Bill film. As a technician, there is no uncertainty to Tarantino’s master status. If only his thematic preoccupations could claim the advancement of his visual and narrative prowess.

As the film closes on Lt. Raine committing one last act of mayhem (carving, as he's been in the habit of doing with prisoners, a swastika into the forehead of Waltz' Nazi so he'll never assimilate to a postwar society) Pitt utters the film's final line, “this might just be my masterpiece” before the camera cuts to black with Tarantino’s writing and directing credit. It’s easy to interpret this as Tarantino’s message to his audience (the self-mythologizing actually begins at the outset, with the succession of quite identifiable fonts that had introduced his previous films used to present the cast and crew of his latest), but, unfortunately, it looks like his masterpieces – those first few works of unnerving intensity, bereft of too much generic specificity and posturing – are behind him.


Inglourious Basterds / USA / 2009 / Color / 153 min. / Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino / Starring: Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Til Schweiger, Daniel Bruhl and Jacky Ido.


Notes:

1 - If there ever was an actor who could benefit from a creative revivification at the hands of Tarantino, it would be Cruise, who sports more charisma and bravura than the previously Tarantino-resurrected John Travolta, Robert Forster or Pam Grier, and seems headed for a similar rock bottom in popularity that all three experienced before starring in QT pictures.

2 - I’m aware that “what-if” scenarios, commonly labeled “Uchronia” (though Wikipedia disputes this usage, preferring “alternate history”) involving the expedited demise (or victory) of the Third Reich have played out in popular culture since war’s end, but they’ve certainly never been so operatic in scope or widely seen and/or discussed, making this the most visible variation on the concept, and should thus be held to a higher standard. Also, the fact that most of such fiction is literary is worth considering, as the potency of the cinematic vis-a-vis our conception of history is far greater than literary fiction's influence, but that's a topic for another day. An interesting bibliography of uchronic fiction (most of it unrelated to Nazism) can be found at www.uchronia.net.

3 - The propaganda film-within-the-film was directed by Eli Roth, who claims Battleship Potemkin as its partial inspiration, apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s work, seemingly unaware or unconcerned with how this may register with audiences knowledgeable of political and film history. An interview with Roth concerning the sequence can be accessed at http://www.avclub.com/articles/eli-roth,31811/

4 - The website Scarecrow Video has attempted an itemized account of Tarantino’s references in the film. This has become a natural occurrence when a new Tarantino film is released, and such lists inevitably expand as audiences digest the film over time. The list (the best one I came across during a brief search) can be found at http://www.scarecrow.com/2009/08/27/before-they-were-basterds/

PLASMA RIFLE ENVY

Humanity Covets Alien Firepower in Neill Blomkamp's District 9

As the faux-documentary footage near the beginning of District 9 reveals, years ago a race of large, insect-like aliens visited earth only to be quarantined -- after a failed stint a living amongst humans -- in a Johannesburg shantytown. Unable to return to their mothership, which ominously hovers over the decrepit slum, the “prawns,” as they’re known, are eventually placed under the jurisdiction of a large weapons conglomerate known as MNU. The plot details the moral reawakening of corporate wonk Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, oddly resembling filmmaker Spike Jonze), who is nepotistically placed in charge of relocating the troublesome shantytown residents to a tent-city concentration camp further removed from human civilization.

Following this set up is a messy social allegory in which Van De Merwe is accidentally infected by a serum that slowly transforms him into a prawn. Forced thereafter to live amongst The Other, he conspires with a scientist prawn (the only intelligent member of the race that the film offers us) to steal back the confiscated serum, which also, most conveniently, is capable of powering the aliens’ mother ship back to their home planet – where that is exactly, or what it might have been like, the film doesn’t say. And gradually, after so promising a start, we arrive at the standard paradigm for the racially-charged action picture: abusive white man is forced to live among The Other, realizes his host's humanity, and through his own heroism manages to facilitate his former foil’s emancipation. It’s a tired formula, more than a little offensive, and the innovations to it that this film offers only underscore the cliché’s insensitivity and lack of historical perspective.

The film’s most obnoxious problems rest in its dramatic treatment of the alien race: the film argues that our inhumane treatment of the aliens has led to their barbarism, yet also holds that same barbarism up for laughs, as the poverty-stricken prawns are viewed with derision, save for the aforementioned scientist, more or less the archetypal noble savage. So, which came first: human atrocity or the aliens’ own coarse nature? Neglecting the history of the prawns – or, more precisely, communicating it entirely through munitions – leaves the question frustratingly stunted.

Most problematically, the filmmakers (this is Neill Blomkamp's first feature) and MNU's nefarious corporate suits have a parallel interest in the subjugated aliens, namely their superior weaponry, which, through complex biotechnology, can only be operated by prawns themselves. Thus, within the story, there are black and gray markets for prawn flesh, which criminal gangs seek to ingest and MNU hopes to synthesize with human DNA, both with the goal of facilitating the use of the alien weaponry by human hands. Similarly, the filmmakers covet the extraordinary (and extraordinarily stylish) firepower of the prawns; as Wikus’ left hand becomes entirely prawn, he’s able to gun down corporate mercenaries and warlords with extreme prejudice. The candy-colored laser guns and pulsating explosives in the prawn arsenal clearly resemble the imaginative cavalcade featured in first-person-shooter video games, which boasts increasingly sadistic means of eliminating enemies (1). Human bodies (those of the evil bad guys) are shredded, exploded and lacerated with this firepower, dwarfing the effects of the shotguns and sniper rifles sported by the human baddies. The quest for brutal alien technology would easily make for great science fiction, but the filmmakers’ helpless indulgence in fetishized weaponry deflates any higher thematic ambition, leaving the film with a blown opportunity at its core. Even Tarantino’s most recent self-professed death-trip Inglourious Bastards can’t claim but half of District 9’s body count.

Both the faux-documentary approach (persistent, yet violated as narrative convenience dictates) and the shaky, hand-held camerawork strike against the film, the former amounting to lazy exposition, the latter, ostensibly reinforcing verisimilitude, achieving a confused mis-en-scene. Still, there are occasional bits of well-choreographed, adrenaline-pumping action, but they are rare in the film and scarcely compensate for the objectionable narrative development.

Lastly, the highlight of the film must be the digital rendering of the prawns themselves, which appear as lifelike and textured as any computer-generated creature has ever looked. The seamless situation of these finely wrought beings within a grainy documentary image makes the achievement of Peter Jackson’s Weta workshop all the more impressive. But while Weta held up their end up the bargain in creating a wholly realistic (light years beyond the computer constructs populating Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series) alien race, Blomkamp has ultimately failed in injecting these creations with a commensurate humanity, not realizing that his would-be allegory depends on it.

District 9 / USA, New Zealand / 2009 / Color / 112 min. / Directed by Neill Blomkamp / Written by Mr. Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell / Starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope and Sylvaine Strike

Notes:

1 - It’s worth noting that there is a tracking shot late in the film which resembles the camera angle of FPS games – gun perched firmly in the bottom of the screen, as the background skirts by wildly – a shot not entirely uncommon in contemporary action pictures, a truly depressing cliché that shows no sign of fading away. Fitting, though, that it would show up in this picture considering Blomkamp was Producer Peter Jackson’s pick to helm the abandoned big screen adaptation of the uber-popular FPS Halo.

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES (TURN AND FACE THE STRAIN)

Body Modification as Spiritual/Aesthetic Renewal in Jason Gary and Greg Jacobson’s documentary, Modify

Modify is a compelling, if one-sided, expose on the increasingly extreme nature of body augmentation and the lifestyles that have sprung up around the practice. Unfortunately for those seeking a worthy narrative (though fortunately for those accustomed to the Youtube Shuffle), it’s more interesting as a gallery of harrowing surgical procedures, liberated self-hood, performance footage and archival curios than as a coherent history of the movement or libertarian argument against those who’d police or disparage it. Interview subjects include a man transforming himself (as far as current technological ingenuity allows) into a tiger via an artificial cleft lip and metal studs in place of whiskers, as well as a handful of industry pioneers who’ve innovated techniques for implants (horns, studs, and various geometric shapes submerged underneath the skin in various locations around the body) and genital piercings. Segments explaining these complex (often ingenious) procedures are of greatest interest: the image of a man splayed across an examination chair, inserting tiny metal balls into his own shaft is not easily forgotten. While it’s nice for those normally offered as colorful extras in film and television to be given a platform for public self-definition, there isn’t much in the way of balance; the filmmakers continually swat at an oppressive status quo that registers as far too distant to create genuine tension. It’s the film’s glaring weakness that its earnest philosophical and aesthetic claims lack polemical depth.

Modify / USA / 2005 / Color / 85 min. / Directed by Jason Gary and Greg Jacobson/ Interview Subjects: Dr. Gary Alter, Allen Falkner, Dr. Julio Garcia, Steve Haworth, Masuimi Max, Fakir Musafar and Erik ‘The Lizard Man’ Sprague