Dogs From Hell

Bukowski: Born Into This (2003, d. John Dullaghan)

If, like me, you're a child of the seventies and eighties, you probably got into the writing of Charles Bukowski at one point or another--at college, or if, like me, you were especially precocious (and by that I mean "artsy-fartsy wannabe") in high school. For those of us forced to fight through "Brobdignag" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn," Bukowski's verse was a breath of fresh air: plainspoken, direct, unembellished. It also spoke to our fantasies of the creative life, filled as it is with accounts of boozing, whoring, and gutter high life. In point of fact, the first thing I ever read by Bukowski was a spectacularly filthy short story in a purloined Hustler magazine stashed at a friend's tree house at age ten or so. Years later, it came as a shock to realize that the poet I was reading was the same guy from the porn mag, yet nothing better exemplifies Bukowski's commitment to his art. Bukowski was a writer, plain and simple; he wrote because he had to; had to do it every day, and it didn't matter where it was published, just so that it was published. At one point in Dullaghan's film, he's asked, "When did you first know you were a writer?" To which he gives perhaps the most honest answer I've ever heard to this hoary interview staple: "Nobody knows they're a writer. You just think you're a writer."

Many of us missed the point. We tried to emulate the lifestyle without understanding the work ethic. Friends and classmates proceeded to wreck their lives, while Bukowski improbably lived to a ripe old age, still publishing regularly up until the end. This is what's made explicitly clear in Dullaghan's documentary, released this year on DVD: yes, Bukowski was a too-heavy drinker, brawler, and bed-hopper who lived what he wrote and then some, but more than that he was a worker who lived in terror of what might happen if he didn't write every day.

Bukowski: Born Into This contains a treasure trove of rare archival Bukowski footage, interspersed with interviews of his wives, associates, and celebrity admirers like Bono, Sean Penn, and Tom Waits. There's a fair sampling of his writing, and some good insight into the biographical details that informed it (at one point, Bukowski says he's grateful that his father beat him regularly with a razor strop, because "it taught me pain without reason.") It can perhaps be faulted for preaching to the choir a bit overmuch; there's no attempt by the filmmaker to argue for Bukowski's inclusion in the canon, no voices who might dare question his literary merit. In a way, though, that's fitting: though he was clearly gratified that his work gained wider acceptance, Bukowski wasn't the kind of guy who would want to be anthologized in the Norton and dissected in college lecture halls. This is an appreciation of the man, such as he was, and it presents a fairly balanced portrait without shying away from his shortcomings. If nothing else, it proves Barbet Schroeder's Barfly (which many of us took to be an accurate portrayal at the time it came out) to be a fatuous, Hollywood oversimplification of a complex man. Mickey Rourke, at the height of his stardom, playing the insecure, much older, physically ugly Bukowski! Ironic, then, that Rourke has achieved a second career now that his battered face more closely resembles the "ravaged lion" he played in his youth.

Magnolia's DVD release presents the film in a nice, sharp transfer (though of course the quality of the source material varies greatly). A nice set of extras includes the full interviews with several of the subjects, readings of Bukowski poems by Bono and Tom Waits, a behind-the-scenes featurette, Bukowski's final home movie footage, a deleted scene, and a "sneak peek" at some previously unpublished poems and "Dinosauria, We," the poem from which the name of the film derives.

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The Price of Oil

Syriana (2005, d. Stephen Gaghan)

"Show, don't tell," goes the maxim that's drummed into every young writer from their first intro-level class. It's amazing, then, how many of them seem to forget that rule when they land a Hollywood gig. That's the main reason I didn't like Soderbergh's much-lauded Traffic: the characters engaged in seemingly endless expository speechifying that made the movie's themes mind-numbingly obvious. Admittedly, one of the reasons I procrastinated in watching Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan's directorial debut (from his own screenplay) Syriana was due to the advance word that it was essentially Traffic refitted for the world of Big Oil?not a bad thing at all in most reviewers' minds, but borderline painful for me. I shouldn't have paid attention, for though it shares formal similarities (ensemble cast, hot-button issue, disparate plotlines which converge at the end), Syriana is a much better film.

The story, loosely adapted from a nonfiction book by former CIA operative Robert Baer, examines the effects of America's unabated lust for oil from a number of perspectives?a corporate lawyer (Geoffrey Wright) working to ensure that a big oil company merger survives government scrutiny; a young energy trader (Matt Damon) whose personal tragedy connects him with the family of a powerful emir; a migrant worker (Mazhar Munir), whose terrible living conditions bring him under the sway of militant clerics; and the Baer surrogate Bob Barnes (George Clooney), a "good soldier" who falls out of favor with his handlers and is left to twist in the proverbial wind. All of the plotlines connect, though not in obvious ways, and Gaghan seems to go out of his way to remove any sort of exposition. More than once, viewers may feel as if they've missed something, but that's because we've been conditioned to expect our movies to spell everything out for us.

Credit to Gaghan, then, for sticking to his guns. It must have been difficult for a first-time director to sell this approach to the Hollywood suits, even with the moviemaking might of Clooney and Soderbergh's production company behind him. Gaghan's direction is assured (helped along by Robert Elswit's fine cinematography and a cast of what seems like hundreds of character actor pros like Christopher Plummer and Chris Cooper) and fittingly understated for a film which is essentially about the unspoken ways in which power and influence are utilized. Admirably, he mostly avoids big emotional beats and lets suspense build organically. It's not a perfect movie; Gaghan attempts to humanize his characters by inserting scenes of interaction with family?Wright's character and his alcoholic father; Clooney's and his college-bound son?that seem simply superfluous. There are, of course, credibility-straining contrivances to bring the plot threads together (the inciting event that connects Damon's character with the emir's son is singularly unbelievable). Yet despite these minor detours, Syriana remains engaging throughout and nicely evenhanded in its treatment of its characters. For a "message movie," the sense of futility it imparts puts it more in league with the paranoia cinema of the 1970's than Soderberghian activist films like Traffic and Erin Brockovich. And it bears noting that Clooney gives yet another great performance in what is becoming quite a formidable streak.

Warner's DVD of Syriana includes a selection of deleted scenes, mostly dealing with Barnes' interactions with his wife, which seem properly excised from the film. Also included are two featurettes, the misnamed "A Conversation with George Clooney," which appears to be edited together from EPK footage of the actor talking about the film; and "Take a Stand, Make a Difference," a fairly interesting collection of sound bites from the cast, Gaghan, and the film's producers, including Jeff Skoll, the billionaire-turned-social entrepreneurship activist-turned-movie producer. The film's trailer rounds out the platter.

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Another ridiculous list--because I want to!

So here are a few things that are rocking my world of late. I envision this as a semi-regular feature, kind of like Greil Marcus used to do for Salon (although, unlike Marcus, I'm going to restrict myself to tangible items).

PFL Top Ten for week of June 4, 2006

10. Kush Griffith, "Kush and His Blues Meet Funk Mediocre" (Uncut Musical Products)
09. Jacob's Battlestar Galactica recaps on TV Without Pity
08. The Best Recipes in the World - Mark Bittman
07. Keane DVD (Magnolia)
06. Prince, "3121" (Arista)
05. Carnitas Baja Burrito at Baja Fresh
04. DangerDoom, "Occult Hymn EP" (free download from AdultSwim.com)
03. Deadwood: Season 2 DVD (HBO)
02. Dazed and Confused - The Criterion Collection DVD (Criterion)
01. The Venture Bros. Season 1 DVD (Warner)

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Heroes of Youth Revisited

Things got crazed at the day job, preventing any sort of posting for a couple of weeks. That, and there hasn't been much in the way of movies to get excited about. Did see X-Men: The Last Stand opening weekend. Color me meh. I can't even really bring myself to write a full review, but I'll agree with many in the critical community who feel that most of the film's problems can't be laid at the feet of hack-for-hire Brett Ratner, who does the expected workmanlike job, producing on an extremely limited schedule something that feels of a piece with (if inferior to) the other two entries in the series. I blame the studio, for their mad rush to one-up comic franchise defector Bryan Singer, and the writers, who clearly have no respect for the characters as they've been developed in the films. Whose idea was it to cut this thing to 90 minutes, anyway? There's no space for anything to resonate--it's just bang! and off to the next thing. The bright spots are few and far between: Ellen Page gets Kitty Pryde just right with a minimum of screen time, good old MacKellan bringing a tiny bit of pathos to his queeny Magneto, an opening scene where the young Warren Worthington III is discovered trying to clip his own wings. I'll say for Ratner that he seems to get big-time superhero action better than Singer (Kelsey Grammer's lamentable makeup and wirework excepted), and there are a few moments where action on a comic-book scale successfully translates to the big screen--my favorite was Pyro igniting cars held aloft by Magneto's power which are then used as antipersonnel weapons. That's the kind of big-scale superhero cooperation we expect. Anyway, it all signifies nothing, and even the character deaths (throwaway moments in the film that they are) are undercut. If you were hoping that the film would tank and teach those suits at Fox a thing or two about how to make comic book properties, you're out of luck, however. The thing is making a bundle, so get ready for more of the same for your beloved mutants, fanboys! Maybe the next one will feature Dazzler and Alpha Flight.

Now on to a source of unbridled joy. The first season of Adult Swim's great The Venture Bros. is finally out on DVD and has been in seriously heavy rotation at PFL headquarters. If you're a dude of a certain age (grew up in the 70's and 80's) and don't absolutely love Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's riffing on Jonny Quest, the Hardy Boys, classic Marvel superheroes, The Six Million Dollar Man, Disney, etc., then I'm afraid we have no common ground and can never be friends. A description of the series might make it sound like one of those overly precious catalogs of Gen-X pop culture references (Hello, Robot Chicken!) or even facile parody. But while there are a great many laughs from these sources, there's much more going on than that. There's an intelligence in the writing and respect for the source material that's rare in any TV show, let alone the animated ones. The art (and even the animation) is much better than a show on an Adult Swim budget has any right to expect. The voice work is spot on. Most of all, it's readily apparent (and confirmed in the commentary) that the creators love their characters and really enjoy writing them. Take note, X3 scribblers!

The 2-disc DVD set is extra-fantastic, with a slipcover that comes off to reveal a triptych by none other than Bill Sienkiewicz (one of my very favorite comic book artists--more proof that these guys connect with me on a very deep level, but don't worry, I'm not a freaky stalker or anything...I think.) The transfers look great, and the sound is quite well-done (I recommend the full-length composition by series composer JG Thirlwell (Foetus!) that plays on the Bonus Features menu). There's some pretty extensive bonus material, including the show's pilot, the Christmas special, deleted scenes in storyboard form, cast interviews from an imaginary live action Venture Bros. movie (not as funny as it could/should have been, but kind of cool nonetheless to see the voice actors dressed up as their characters), and an "animating Hank" featurette. There are commentaries by the creators on several episodes--Jackson and Doc are quite interesting and fun to listen to--although they occasionally digress into complaints about the finished art--and it's clear why the two work well together. They actually start arguing like siblings at one point over the title sequence (on the episode "Midlife Chrysalis," I think) and it's a great moment, something you don't really ever hear in a commentary. One relatively minor complaint for the Williams Street DVD Whores (their name, not mine): it's really hard to tell who is on the commentaries. If you are going to include a screen that prompts us to turn the commentary on or off before playing an episode, would it kill you to list the people speaking? It's kind of hard to tell Jackson and Doc apart sometimes, and I could swear that there are occasionally others on the track. At any rate, I don't want to look the gift horse in its slobbery, faintly sweet-smelling mouth. This is a wonderful DVD set--if you're already a fan, more than enough to tide you over until the season 2 premiere later this month; if not, buy it immediately and I bet you'll be staying up late with the rest of us on June 25. Go Team Venture!

Tags: DVD, film reviews, movies, Xmen, Venture Bros, Adult Swim Powered by Qumana

Attack of the Queue: Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, and...Bacon & Firth?!

Where the Truth Lies (2005, d. Atom Egoyan)

Canada-based auteur Atom Egoyan first caught my attention back in 1992 with Exotica, an ensemble drama centered on a Toronto strip club that defied expectations at every turn. With little initial exposition, the film tempted the audience to create backstories for the characters which, if they followed the standard template for characters in a drama set in a strip club, were proven wrong in the course of the film's intricate plot. Egoyan explored many of these same themes in his fine adaptation of Russell Banks' novel The Sweet Hereafter, in which an insurance investigator attempts to uncover the cause of a school bus accident by sifting thorough the accounts provided by the residents of the small town where the tragedy took place. In the end, he discovers that there are different "truths" to the story, and finally engages the question of whether, in the wake of tragedy, the truth is simply that which we choose to believe in order to keep on living.

Perhaps the ham-handed title of Egoyan's most recent film, Where The Truth Lies, should serve as notice that he's gone to this particular well one too many times. Yes, we get the double meanings. Yes, they're both obvious. The film's bluntness, obvious plotting, and bad acting seem like a parody of his previous work. Where once was nuance, now there is only misdirection. Gone is the subtlety and lyricism of his previous work, replaced with cheap plot twists that wouldn't seem out of place in a bad TV movie. Worst of all, the film (unlike the two I mentioned above) utterly fails to engage the viewer on any level other than a need to see how the mystery plays out, and when it does, the only satisfaction (if you can call it that) is that you saw it coming a mile away.

The mystery, such as it is, concerns a famous comedy team of the 50's and 60's, Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon). The main narrative takes place in the 1970's and concerns young celebrity reporter Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) who has been given a book deal for a biography of Collins, who split with his partner some years earlier. Collins has agreed to cooperate in exchange for a fee of $1 million, but balks when it comes to discussing the thing that everyone wants to know: the circumstances surrounding a young woman who was found dead in the team's hotel suite. Our intrepid reporter's journey toward the truth involves the sordid sex lives of everyone involved, misguided hero-worship, credibility-straining revelations (the reporter as a young girl appeared on a Collins and Morris telethon the day of the girl's death), drugs, fear of shellfish, and other patent nonsense. Eventually, of course, the truth is uncovered (cue serious-sounding music) but at what cost?!?

After the screenplay, the film's biggest mistake is the casting. The comedy team is clearly supposed to evoke Martin and Lewis, but here we get dry British reserve and Kevin Bacon, whose "wacky" shtick wouldn't have played at a Borscht-belt brunch. Seriously, folks: Colin Firth, a regular fixture (more like a coat rack, nyuck!) of "serious" British costume dramas, as a famous comedian? Anyone who knows anything about comedy knows that the straight man's job is perhaps hardest of all, requiring perfect timing and a great sense of humor. Here, Firth evinces absolutely nothing that would endear him to millions. Nor does Bacon, who in typical fashion gives the material a game try, but can't quite pull it off. Egoyan doesn't seem to "get" comedy; even if you (like me) don't like Martin and Lewis, you can observe their skill and understand their popularity. From what we see, these guys couldn't make it on open-mike night in Duluth, let alone headline in Vegas. Fine, you say, it's not really a film about comedy anyway. Perhaps not, but Egoyan's clear lack of understanding of the plot's given circumstances is a major hindrance. Besides that, it is a film about a reporter, and Lohman fails to convince in that regard even for a moment.

The cast is bad, but the execution is even worse. Too often, Egoyan relies on the old "unreliable narrator" warhorse, giving us flashbacks that prove to be fabrications. This technique might have been cutting edge fifty years ago, but now it's tired, especially when used as a screenwriting crutch. The plot relies far too much on credibility-straining coincidences, and as I pointed out earlier, there are much more subtle and effective ways of shaping audience perception than the dreaded plot twist. The "detective work" is on the order of the Scooby Doo gang--reliant upon authorial revelation rather than organic sources. There's not much of a period feel in either decade in which the film is set. Even the music cues don't work: people blocks away must have heard me groan when the reporter is drawn deeper into the mystery to the tune of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," a song that should have been banned from use in movies at least ten years ago.

The bones of a good movie are here. Played as dark comedy, it could have been a romp through the seamy underbelly of 50's showbiz. Egoyan is not that kind of filmmaker, to be sure, but he doesn't even play to his own strengths here. Playing up the thriller and period aspects only highlight his weaknesses, while stripping the film of the intricacy and lyricism of Egoyan's previous work.


Tags: movies, DVD, movie reviews, film criticism

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Three...Extremes (2005, d. Fruit Chan, Chanwook Park, Takashi Miike)

The horror anthology film has been a guilty pleasure genre for me ever since I first saw Night Gallery on TV one rainy Saturday afternoon as a kid of nine or so. There are many entries in the genre, but surprisingly few good ones--one would think that short films would be well suited to horror stories, as some of the best written horror is in short story form. No, the horror anthology film is more often like the album you buy because you liked the single?a few good moments swimming in a sea of mediocrity.

Given the growing popularity of "J-horror" and "Asian Extreme" films, this tripartite pairing of three of the hottest directors from those genres was inevitable. And although, Three...Extremes (Why the ellipsis? I have no idea) offers more good moments than mediocrity, it doesn't completely buck the trend. As with most films of this kind, it's a decidedly uneven affair. The producers, thankfully, didn't see fit to impose a silly narrative framework, but if there are thematic resonances between the three, they were lost on me.

Part of the problem is the order of the stories. The DVD (I've read the order is different here than in the theatrical release) starts with a bang: Fruit Chan's "Dumplings," and moves through "Cut," a Chanwook Park moral puzzler, to Miike's surprisingly sedate and dreamlike "Box." "Dumplings" is easily the strongest of the three and is spiked with a sense of wicked black humor missing from the others--I would have placed it last for maximum impact.

"Dumplings" seems at first to be a satire of women's willing enslavement to the beauty industry (not to mention men's part in the equation), but also engages themes of class conflict, traditionalism vs. modernity, female empowerment, and probably a whole host of other issues not readily apparent to this western viewer. The gorgeous Bai Ling stars as Mei, an ageless woman from northern China who has a secret folk cure for aging which she serves to wealthy clients as a filling in dumplings. I'm not going to tell you what it is, though it's not a surprise reveal--the audience and characters know what's going on from the get-go. Suffice to say it is extremely transgressive and positively stomach-churning. A wealthy former actress (Meme Tian) whose husband has lost interest comes to Mei's apartment cafe to take the cure, but balks a bit when she's confronted with the ingredients. There's no arguing with results, however, and soon she's demanding more potent stuff for radical results. That's basically it, but despite its brevity, the film succeeds on every level. As a horror film, it takes appropriate delight in shocking us the right way. Though there are impressive gore effects, the true shocks come from things only glimpsed, the hyper-real sound effects, and our knowledge of what's going on. It works as black comedy, too, thanks to the strong performances by the female leads--they seem to be having a good deal of fun with this disturbing material, and Tian's transformation from reluctant customer to willing accomplice is a blast to behold. It doesn't hurt that the package comes wrapped in the beautiful cinematography of Hong Kong ace Christopher Doyle, either. "Dumplings" is the real deal, and will linger uncomfortably in your mind long after it's over, the hallmark of any good horror fiction.

Would that the other two films were as strong. Though both are pretty good, they suffer a bit in comparison. As with all of his recent works, Chanwook Park's "Cut" delightedly puts its characters in untenable moral quandaries and confounds our expectations for the protagonists when they are forced to act. Nobody puts their characters through the emotional wringer like Park, and this segment is no exception. A popular director comes home one night to find home has been invaded by an insane former extra who has bound and gagged his pianist wife. The invader's demands are simple: he cannot believe that such an all-around nice guy like the director can have achieved wealth and popularity without sacrificing his humanity, so the director must murder an innocent child with his bare hands, or he will cut off the wife's fingers one by one, every ten minutes. It's a suitably horrifying premise, and Park works it well, building the tension expertly. Park has a philosopher's love of exploring moral "what ifs," and the elaborate machinations he cooks up for his field tests are wonderfully baroque (see also: Oldboy) That doesn't seem to be enough for him here, though, as he pulls a series of bizarre and incomprehensible twists. For example, early on in the invasion, the director's house is revealed to be a movie set exactly like the one on which the director is shooting as the story begins. This doesn't really figure into the plot at all, so I was forced to conclude that either Park was trying to make a point that I missed, or was engaging in theatricality for theatricality's sake. Ditto other reveals regarding the young victim and the wife. It's all extremely disorienting, but to what end? As with many of the recent Asian horror films, I was left wondering if all the misdirection and disorientation was in service of a larger point, or if it was just empty aestheticism (or worse, laziness) on the part of the filmmaker.

Miike's "Box" seems to continue the dream logic style of much of his recent work. It's almost as if he's decided he has gone as far down the "shock cinema" road as he can (I'd probably agree), and is now more interested in crafting an aesthetic that is at once symbolic and impenetrable--as I noted in my review of Gozu elsewhere on this blog, he's like Samuel Beckett filtered through pomo Japanese culture. There is a dreamlike (and, indeed, much of the action is in dreams and flashbacks) lyricism to this story of incest, jealousy, and murder, and there's more than one moment where I wondered if I had missed something along the way, but at its core, this is the most traditional story of the three, a fairly simple ghost story where the shocks come from the backstory as it is gradually revealed. It's well done, but Miike can do this kind of thing in his sleep (and, to judge by his prolific output, probably does), and it doesn't really offer anything in the way of a lasting effect. Placed at the beginning of the anthology, it might have been a nice mood-setting piece, but at the end, it leaves the viewer with that ambivalent feeling Internet message board posters express with the one syllable review: "Meh."

Still, the beauty of DVD is that we can play producer and shuffle the order if we want. I'll recommend Three...Extremes to genre fans for "Dumplings" (there's also the feature length version on the bonus disc), with a less enthusiastic recommendation for the other two films. "Dumplings," though...I can still hear that over-the-top crunching sound and it's creeping me out...
Tags: movies, cinema, films, reviews, asian+horror, film+criticism, DVD

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And Now For Something Completely Different
Now Playing: A Shameless Plug
I know the 12 or so people that visit this blog each year are looking for incisive film criticism, not music suggestions, but this is my space, so tough. In addition to my day job and pecking out movie reviews, my other passion is music, and today I'm here to shill on behalf of my most recent project.

Last night, we put the finishing touches on "Kush and His Blues Meet Funk Mediocre," the new CD from Kush Griffith. Unless you're a hardcore funk fan, you probably don't know the name, but I'll bet you've heard of some of the bands and artists Kush has played with: James Brown, Parliament/Funkadelic, Bootsy's Rubber Band, Motown Horns, Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley's Horny Horns, to name just a few. Name a seminal funk/R&B outfit from the 60's and 70's, and there's a pretty good chance Kush was connected to it.

Like many musicians from that period, Kush didn't make anywhere near the money he should have, and after developing some pretty serious health problems, he moved out here to Colorado about six years ago. Not a guy to feel sorry for himself, Kush, who's now blind and in a wheelchair, decided to put out as many of the many songs he's written as possible. My band at the time was lucky enough to connect with Kush through mutual friends, and we backed him up on a number of gigs and contributed in a fairly small way to his first album ("Blues & Rhythm Vol. 1," available from Dutch-based Funk to the Max Records.

The new album contains a wide variety of songs and styles, from straight blues to what I can only describe as the future of the funk. They're all tied together by Kush's unique voice and vision, and to a lesser degree by the music and production by myself and Neal "Real Deal" Landauer. Recorded on a shoestring budget at our held-together-by-duct-tape-and-prayers studio, there's a rawness to it that you won't find on, say, Pink's latest album (although I'm pretty sure that if you like that album, this won't be your cup of tea anyway). That's not to say it sounds like it was recorded on a casette tape in a garage. We got horns, congas, strings--pretty lush arrangements. I'm really proud of the way it turned out, and I can pretty much guarantee that if you're a fan of The Funk, you will be tapping your feet if not out of your chair dancing.

"Kush and His Blues Meet Funk Mediocre" will be available at the end of April, and you can preorder it from Kush's website, or drop me an email and I'll reserve a copy for you. It's selling for the low low price of $15, and unless it goes mega-platinum (hey, a guy can dream), I'm not making any money off of it. Kush will make a much-deserved nominal amount, but it's not really about that. It's about getting this music into the ears of the people that want it--a slightly easier chore these days thanks to the magic of the Interweb. If you love funk, blues, R & B; if you support independent music; if you're at all curious after reading this entry, give this album a try. You won't be disappointed.

Vaunted Vendetta: Valedictory or Villainous?
Now Playing: V for Vendetta (2006, d. James McTeigue)
OK, you may now officially revoke my comic book geek credentials. I have only skimmed Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. Not for lack of interest; it was just one of those books that I missed when it came out, and when I had time and means, I never got around to reading it because I already knew all the major plot points. I will read it now that I’ve seen the movie…but enough. The mea culpa is basically to explain why I won’t be assessing the movie as a translation of the book.

Or will I? Much has been made in the press over Moore’s removal of his name from the film’s credits, but that’s a standard practice for Moore, and probably a good one given the cinematic crimes that have been perpetrated in his name (From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Yet James McTeigue’s—-and, despite the rumors that it was ghost directed by the Wachowski Brothers, I’m going to refer to it as his movie because his name is on the credits—-V for Vendetta does a better job at nailing the vibe of Moore’s dystopian visions than any of the previous attempts. Much of Moore’s work is dedicated to examining and subverting the concept of the superhero, and the script (credited to the Wachowskis) gets that. The film adopts the vocabulary of the superhero action flick for its own ends, and does it more or less successfully. McTeigue nails the tone (somewhere between arch seriousness and mordant parody) and look of a Moore-penned graphic novel, and doesn’t feel the need to dumb the story down for the audience.

Of course, V for Vendetta’s plot is rather simple compared to Moore’s later works. In the not-too-distant future, America has collapsed under the strain of disease, war, and economic disaster. Britain has once again assumed the mantle of superpower, but at the price of freedom. Dictator Adam Sutler (John Hurt doing a Big Brother to complement his turn as Winston Smith in 1984) and his five “fingers” (ministers who control different aspects of the government: propaganda, secret police, etc.) keep the country in a constant state of fear and repression. A lone vigilante in a Guy Fawkes mask, known only as V (Hugo Weaving, though we never see his face) is wreaking havoc by exploding buildings and murdering members of the government. When he rescues a young girl, Evey (Natalie Portman, doing a pretty decent English accent), from an assault by government-sanctioned thugs, she gradually becomes involved in his plot to bring down the government. V’s motive for the murders is gradually revealed through a dogged police inspector’s (Stephen Rea) investigation.

Not surprisingly, the film is a bit of a mishmash of ideas, some of which work better than others. The notion that words both spoken and written have power beyond their literal meaning is nicely played up throughout. More problematic is the idea that blowing up buildings is an appropriate form of social protest. When asked by Evey what is to be gained by blowing up Parliament, V answers (I’m paraphrasing) that the act represents a way of bringing an idea forcefully into the public consciousness. Part of me thinks that this is tired radical polemic that should have been discarded after the rads blew up the University of Wisconsin’s Sterling Hall back in 1970. On the other hand, relatively recent events have demonstrated the power such acts can have on the psyche of a nation. V is intended to be a bit of a cipher: we are supposed to be conflicted about the fact that we’re rooting for a murderous terrorist. The film (and, of course, the story on which it’s based) engages in a moral cop-out, though, by creating a cartoonishly fascist opponent for V. It’s easy to root for a vigilante that’s taking out the equivalent of the Third Reich; less so when the government bears a closer resemblance to the ones we have in the west today. The terrorist sees things in black and white; everyone else has to view things in shades of gray.

Moral queasiness aside, there’s a lot to recommend about V. The film has a great visual style, made bittersweet by the fact that it was the last film that DP Adrian Biddle completed before his untimely death last year. The script, as I noted above, is a cut above the average Hollywood claptrap and doesn’t feel the need to explain every single thing right away. We get a very solid turn by Portman, who’s always an appealing presence (well, as long as George Lucas isn’t directing) but has had difficulty finding parts that allow her to live up to the promise of her first screen role in Besson’s Leon. Weaving does great voice work, and is excellent physically, though it’s impossible to know how much of that was provided by James Purefoy, who was originally cast as V but fired after filming began. Rea, so droopy it seems his cheeks are on the verge of melting right off his face, is sympathetic and projects enough competence to be believable as the Chief Inspector. The rest of the largely British cast, including Stephen Fry as a closeted TV host and Hurt, who seems to be channeling Ian MacKellan’s Richard III, are quite good as well.

But the million-pound question remains. Is the setting of the film meant to be an allegory for present-day America? Obviously, the original story was written in Thatcherite England, so that can’t have been Moore’s original intent. Yet it’s eerily resonant for a contemporary American audience. Is this because of the prescience of the source material, or does the Wachowskis’ script cleverly tilt us in that direction? I suspect a little of both, but I’ll have to read the graphic novel to know for sure.

Et tu, Netflix?
Now Playing: The Throttling Controversy
Ever since the piss-poor selection at my local video stores (which had long since stopped being Mom-and-Pop operations; I was dealing with the twin monsters Blockbuster and Hollywood) finally drove me to try Netflix about two years ago, I have been singing its praises to anyone who’ll listen. There’s a local distribution center, and there’s hardly ever more than a day’s wait between arrivals. The selection is excellent; they have had every title I’ve ever searched, with very few exceptions: foreign discs without official US releases (understandable), and Lukas Moodysson’s 2gether (I don’t get this, as I’ve seen the disc in Best Buy, but one out of thousands ain’t bad). Netflix’ policy of stocking discs that are uncensored and presented in widescreen set them apart from the lowest-common-Christian- right-denominator policies of Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, and others. Sure, I’ve had to wait for popular new releases, but these generally aren’t the ones at the top of my list anyway. I don’t buy a DVD unless I’m pretty sure it’s one I’m going to watch over and over. Netflix gives me the opportunity to preview before I buy. And, while I’d buy the entire Criterion Collection sight unseen if I could afford it, Netflix has made it easy for me to watch their beautifully transferred films at a reasonable cost (they don’t have Pasolini’s Salo, but I don’t think I really want to watch that one anyway).

Now we find out that they’ve been engaging in a process called throttling, slowing down the delivery times for those who rent frequently (a good discussion of the practice can be found at www.hackingnetflix.com. That explains why The 40 Year Old Virgin has been sitting atop my queue with “Very Long Wait” status since before it was released. On the one hand, it’s understandable why they engage in this practice. Their business model depends on most renters receiving movies less frequently—on the order of five a month or so. If everyone maxes out their movie rentals, Netflix will be hemorrhaging cash in the form of postage fees. In the past, this has worked fairly well—-the company has even reduced fees since I’ve been a member. However, they seem to have not counted on the advent of cheap DVD burners and geeks who continually request titles to burn them without watching them.

On the other hand, and this is why people are upset, this policy hurts the very people who made Netflix the undisputed champion of the rental-by-mail world. The rabid film buffs, those who want more than the latest big-budget claptrap to pop in on Saturday night, those who don’t live in a city with a bunch of revival houses and want to see the lesser known and foreign films they’ve been reading about—hell, even parents with kids, who have a lot more disposable time for watching DVDs since every late-model SUV now apparently comes equipped with convenient electronic pacifiers for the kiddos. Why not post a clearly-worded explanation of how throttling works and a list of things people can do to avoid being throttled? I wouldn’t even be averse to the idea of a subscription upgrade which would un-throttle your account. Maybe this is already in place, but there’s no way of knowing, because the legalese of the policies section of Netflix’ site is so vague it sounds like something crafted by a team of bureaucrats, which it probably was.

The real thing that sticks in the craw is, I suspect, something that has happened time and time again since the Internet boom of the ‘90’s—-we allow ourselves to buy into the myth that the Internet has somehow changed the nature of business. It hasn’t. It has revolutionized many aspects of business, to be sure, but the fundamental nature of business will never change. It’s about margins, profits, overhead, supply, and demand. We consumers can and do delude ourselves into thinking that companies really care about us, that successful companies can be built by doing business the way we would if we were tycoons in a perfect world, that there is more to business than the bottom line. We can do that, but we’re just setting ourselves up for disappointment. Ben and Jerry care more about making money more than they care about saving the planet with ice cream, and Netflix is a corporation, not a super-cool local video store that figured out how to fight back against Blockbuster on the Internet.

In the end, I figure that you can’t be angry at the scorpion for stinging you as you help it cross the river. Because my queue is mainly made up of old, unknown, and foreign films, throttling really hasn’t slowed down my movie watching noticeably. Hey, Netflix, I thought you were cool, but you’re really just a square in a grey flannel suit. It’s not your fault. But I have to wonder: this practice is obviously intended to ensure that copies of new releases are on hand for potential subscribers using free trial memberships. Once they sign up and their queues start getting throttled, how many will drop their subscriptions because, lacking a clear explanation of the policy, they figure they’re just getting bad service? And how many loyal subscribers will you have driven away because of your opaque policies and evasive responses to complaints? I shudder at the thought of a return to the dark days of the big-box rental behemoths or, even worse, a mail-based system dominated by Wal-Mart. But I can’t think about that too much. I have to get home and see if 40 Year Old Virgin is in my mailbox yet.

Bride of It Came From the Queue!
Now Playing: Chopper
In the interest of keeping the blog (somewhat) current, I’m going to start posting capsule reviews of recent arrivals from my Netflix queue when I don’t have any big-screen reviews for this space. We kick off with:

Chopper (2000, Andrew Domanik) The film that launched Eric Bana’s career as an international star, this low-budget Australian production has style to spare and gives Bana a better role than any he’s had since (sorry, Ang Lee). Based on the “autobiography” by famous (to Australians, anyway) criminal Mark “Chopper” Read, the film does a nice job of showing us how this psychopath became something of a folk hero in his native country—through his personality, sheer audacity, and adherence to a (twisted though it may be) moral code. Perhaps Read’s best asset, though, is his skill as a storyteller, casting himself as the anti-hero in tall tales of prison and crime. Exactly how much of the story is fact and how much is embellished is left unexamined, though we do see reenactments of some of the events in the film spun by Chopper to his own advantage, casting doubt upon the veracity of some of Chopper’s other exploits. Other than the storytelling subtext, there’s really not much going on under the surface of the film, but it’s well made and well acted (especially by Bana), and provides a nice fat-free 90 minutes of entertainment. There’s some subtext here about the nature of our tendency to elevate criminals to celebrity status (a cultural trope shared by Australians and Americans), but in the end, the movie is simply seduced by Chopper--just like the reporter in the film’s framing narrative, it knows its subject is a monster, but chooses to look the other way. Domanik doesn’t shy away from depicting Chopper’s mindless brutality, but in the absence of deeper examination, we’re left with a vivid portrait of a somewhat likable thug and little else. I found it interesting that though the film clearly means to criticize Read’s hunger for celebrity, it ends up bolstering the self-spun legend perpetuated by the man himself.

Some of this may be due to the participation of Chopper himself on the project. According to the IMDb, Chopper himself picked Bana to play him after seeing him on an episode of the comedy show Full Frontal. The screenplay is attributed to Domanik and based on Read’s bestselling books, but a series of video segments in the Image DVD’s bonus features (collected under the heading “Weekend With Chopper” illuminate some of his contributions while putting to rest any dispute about the veracity of the scene in which Chopper has another inmate cut his ears off. These segments, which were apparently culled from the director’s home movies of interviews with Read, show Read at home, drinking beers and spinning tales, many of which appear verbatim in the film. Watching the real Chopper, it becomes apparent how well Bana nailed the character, an imposing physical presence who can switch between jovial raconteur and bloodthirsty hooligan in the blink of an eye. Whatever you think of Read, you have to give him his props as a casting agent. Other extras include a feature-length commentary with Domanik and Read, as well as deleted scenes and the film’s original trailer.

In the queue: The Ballad of Cable Hogue Casque d’Or Samurai Champloo, Vol. 5