Sad Endings: Valkyrie & Doubt & Let the Right One In & Quantum of Solace

Valkyrie joins a list of recent military movies where the hero dies or suffers trauma for a societal ideal. I start this list at 300 (death to protect Athens), next Casino Royale (torture to serve England), next The Dark Knight (Harvey Dent's disfigurement to protect Gotham), and end with Valkyrie (death to protect “sacred” Germany). Valkyrie is one of the last films released during the Bush administration. I posit that the films in my list connect to a conservative take on current American warfare, they create an analogy between a hero or heros who sacrifice themselves for their society or ideology and American soldiers, who sacrifice themselves abroad because the Bush Administration told them to do so. It disturbs me that in all of these films politics or politicians at best don't work, and at worst get in the way of the fighting man. Is this death-obsessed mythology really what we want to self-generate? On the other hand, perhaps there is some justice in eternally imprisoning Hitler, Göring and Goebbels as culture-myth demons, gargoyles whose mere appearance indicates we should hate them and their ideology.

Valkyrie is an efficient, well-crafted, likable film that directs the audience's sympathy to a projected military martyr. In this, and in its simplicity, it reminds me of nothing so much as The Song of Roland. It's interesting how much of the success of this film depends on Tom Cruise. Cruise brings a sleek intensity to the role of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg; he is at his best near the end, when the shadow of Fate crosses even his beautiful face. “No one escapes,” he tells us, black eye-patch filling the frame.

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Trying to see Waltz with Bashir, projection difficulties forced me into a showing of Doubt instead. Pleasantly round and classically beautiful, Philip Seymour Hoffman's paunch upstages both him and Meryl Streep. Third bill Amy Adams outshines them all, and not because the others aren't giving their best. I always forget Adams is Adams while watching her, instead I accept her as her character. This consumption by a part makes Adams one of the few true role-assuming actors of film, like Kirk Douglas, someone who is always a mask. This method is the exact opposite of actors like Humphrey Bogart, who never let us forget exactly who it was pulling on his own earlobe.

Self conscious use of low angles, canted angles, etc. by director/playwright John Patrick Shanley is interesting but mostly ineffective. This remains a filmed play, but an excellent one.

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The Swedish answer to George Romero's Martin, Let the Right One In continues the Vampire movie genre's fascination with ambiguous sexuality.

“What if I told you I was not a girl?”
“Do you want to go steady?”

Preteen self discovery, though, has rarely been more dark, and this film has a depth not easily plumbed. Is a film about 12 year old bloodsuckers a good idea? Or, by considering the justification for showing violence juxtaposed with children, am I asking the wrong question?

The visuals of this film contribute greatly to its success. Right One is refreshingly creative in framing and unafraid of the long take. The cold look of Fuji is the perfect format for a vampire movie set in the snow. The soft scattered light reflected off the snow occasionally gives actors and objects a halo, but, despite these occasional bright moments, this is a film that mostly lets things go completely black.

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Like a money vampire, the James Bond franchise just won't die. Quantum of Solace stars the humorless Daniel Craig, whose few jokes seem lost even on him. The plot is a politically confused mess where those who destroy the environment are threatened with rendition, and where Bond doesn't sleep with the “Bond girl” but another women is disposed of, sexually and violently, fast as ever. I liked it better when Bond tricked everyone and the ending was happy. The new Bond shoots everybody and the ending is sad.

The Dark Knight & Journey to the Center of the Earth

SF's IMAX theatre has been running 'round-the-clock sold out showings of The Dark Knight. When the 3 A.M. Monday-Tuesday show sells out, you know a movie is a hit. At last look, critics have ranked The Dark Knight at 95% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite all this approval, I say The Dark Knight is a mediocre piece of filmmaking.

It's just too hard to tell what's happening; information is often poorly presented to the viewer. Fast-cutting, ultra low lighting, and an out-of-focus camera make it hard to see anything, this is disorientating. For The Dark Knight, this is a problem because the movie feels like it doesn't make sense and the result is frustration. Ledger is really, really good in this movie, but we hardly ever get a good look at him. When we do, it's almost like a Jazz trumpet solo—brash, unique.

The IMAX version, worth the extra cash, has some neat tricks. Cityscapes are magnificent, and when Batman flies from one tall building to another, my head had to swivel to track him. But never is IMAX's huge frame used to anything close to it's full potential. The level of craftsmanship was better not only in the first two Batman movies (by Tim Burton), but also in Gangbusters, a TV show from the 1950s I've been watching a lot of lately. That's right, 1950s T.V. is better made than The Dark Knight.

It's been commented before that Rambo: First Blood Part II created a fantasy world where the Vietnam war could be won by the right man. Some of this conservative ideology / lone-wolf stuff is at work in The Dark Knight. To wit, multiple references to the Joker as a terrorist. How does Batman foil a Joker plot to bomb the populace? By getting information from everyones' phones. Harvey Dent, the hope of Gotham, is referred to as All-American. (Batman, referring to Dent, “Have you aver seen such an American face?”) Dent is so American that guns made in China can't kill him. According to Wikipedia, Christopher Nolan chose Aaron Eckhart to be Dent in part because of a “kind of chiseled American hero quality.”

But, the new darkness is how open The Dark Knight ends. Incorruptible American Dent is corrupted. Terroristic Joker is at large. I posit that this parallels current American political impasses, which is interesting, I guess, but what's fascinating is that Joker captures sympathy. Joker:

“You see, nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If I told people that a gangbanger was going to get shot, or a busload of soldiers was going to get blown up, nobody would panic. Because it's all part of the plan. But tell people on tiny little mayor is going to die and everyone loses their minds!”

Good point.

Copying down this quote, I can hear Ledger's delivery, word by word. Ledger's Joker is wildfire and Loki. The lack of origin story, bucking genre convention, emphasizes these aspects. Other Batman characters have been darkly virtuoso—Jack Nicholson's Joker, Pfeiffer's Catwoman, DeVito's Penguin. But never do these actors go that extra six feet under to deliver a performance as sinister as Ledger. Furthermore, Nicholson, Pfeiffer, and DeVito had director Tim Burton, whose style aided their performance. Christopher Nolan's filmmaking, however, often hamstrings his actors (what possible justification is there for the sound design on Batman's voice?) by making it hard to see the actor.

Presumably to get The Dark Knight a PG-13 rating, violence on the human body is only described and not shown. The inanimate is ripped apart and exploded with something like affection, but blood takes place off-screen; except, I'm uncertain whether whatever cut Ledger took place on-screen or off-.

Reading what I have written, I notice that Ledger has stolen the focus of this review, much like he did The Dark Knight.

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Big square Brendan Fraser and his big square head are often launched at obstacles physical and emotional, but, appealingly, he always manages to bust through unscathed. Gods and Monsters played on this quality of Fraser the best, but certainly Journey to the Center of the Earth is distinguished by having him in free fall the longest.

At certain theaters Journey to the Center of the Earth is presented in 3D, a gimmick that helps the film along. In response to the rise of T.V. in the 50s, Hollywood screens got bigger and productions grew more elaborate. Perhaps, with the rise of piracy, we are witnessing similar tactics with the upcoming group of films in IMAX or 3D. Of these strategies, IMAX is likely to be the more fruitful because 3D technology can't currently present objects as rounded, instead the image is composed of a sequence of planes at different distances from the viewer (i.e. foreground, middleground, background) reminding me of paper cutouts composing a diorama. On the other hand, only 3D startles with objects appearing immediately next to one's face.

Journey is a fabricated film, complete with a hook at the end a sequel can link onto. But, the film was good enough for the 10 year old sitting with her father in the row behind me, and it's good enough for me. Journey is a simple machine designed to be fun, and it is.

Wanted & Brideshead Revisited

In Action Speaks Louder, Eric Lichtenfeld points out that an action film can be about being fully alive. Anything good, Hollywood can ruin. Part self-help book pastiche, part action movie pastiche, Wanted tells the story of a boring man, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), recruited into a secret society of assassins. Unfortunately he remains boring. This society teaches Wesley to be a killer, instructing him in its secret ways. For example, he learns to curve bullets around objects by spinning in place really really fast, pistol arm outstretched, while firing. (No wonder my girlfriends high school physics students have trouble understanding centripetal force.) Whom the society assassinates is determined by a giant loom, The Loom of Fate. This handily avoids the problematic morality of a film like the The Matrix, where a disturbing number of innocent security guards are killed to save Morpheus. (I acknowledge that Fate plays a role, though less prominent, in The Matrix.) In Wanted, guns don't kill people, metaphysics does.

In between energy drink product placements and Matrix references, sleek sex-bot Angelina Jolie is the love interest of scruffy charmer James McAvoy. This seems to me an extraordinarily mismatched paring; imagining them having sex is like imagining a head on collision between a modern aerodynamic motorcycle (Jolie) and a stately elk (McAvoy)—awful messy and no one survives.

The comic book original of Wanted swims deeper into darker waters than the film. Actually, the two have almost nothing to do with each other. In the comic book Wanted, there are no heroes. Villains have taken over the earth. The comic book Wanted consists only of villains plotting villainy against other villains. The character of Wesley Gibson falls down, not up, from ordinary man to serial-killing super-villain. The comic infamously ends with Wesley Gibson addressing his readers, looking out of the page announcing "This is my face while fucking you in the ass." Post-modern self reference reaches a new low. The extremity of the original source is nowhere located in the film version of Wanted. No, Wanted has a different, more rare problem for an action film: it has too much plot. I would prefer a more minimalist version of the avenging angels mythology Wanted is trying to construct. This would bring Wanted more in line with a classic like Gun Crazy. In no way an intellectual film, Gun Crazy is a case where a director's instincts are right. Wanted, by contrast, fails by the criterion it implicitly establishes for itself—Wanted is boring. This is in extreme contrast to director Timur Bekmambetov's previous film, which was made on a far smaller budget, the extremely memorable Nochnoy Dozor (Night Watch). Do the teenaged owners of the identically worn sneakers (expensive? cheap?) propped up on the back of movie chairs everywhere really enjoy Wanted? Will they in ten years?

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Brideshead Revisited is so British it's sure to be reviewed by Anthony Lane. I think he will find a lot to like in this well constructed, quietly revolutionary film. Despite its across the pond mentality, Brideshead closely follows Hollywood stylistic norms, such that it feels of the very studios themselves. Brideshead uses familiar tactics: beauty of image sometimes substituting for beauty of language, a great score that knows when to be quiet, a script that takes much of its emotional depth and moral complexity from great literature as reinterpreted by a talented screenwriter, award deserving editing, and a director who appears to be at his best tying all of these talents together. Comparisons to Atonement and Barry Lyndon are instructive. All three films utilize isomorphic formulas and strategies developed by Hollywood, but only in one is the name of a director writ large in content and visuals—Kubrick in Barry Lyndon comes across as KUBRICK. Brideshead, instead, seems like Atonement. One moment in Brideshead breaks with tradition, two men kiss and the moment passes without comment from either.

That Brideshead seems to come out of Hollywood, sui generis, doesn't detract from its merit. Anthony Lane, perhaps recalling the accidental greatness of Casablanca, has mentioned that Hollywood most needs skilled crafts people, not self igniting geniuses. As a work of craft, at least, Brideshead is like Casablanca. Both also face a similar menace, a shrinking and alteration of color and light to conform to television. Instead, see them on the biggest screen possible.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull & Made of Honor

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has a high gloss, high lighting ratio look similar to many modern comic books—pulp, updated. Crystal Skull is built to be fast, too fast to be weighed down by encumbrances like a sensical plot or the laws of physics. Everything is subservient to speed, which is part of why this movie is so disarmingly weird: as far as I can tell, both good guys and bad guys want to accomplish the same goal, returning the title's crystal skull to its home, but must pointlessly squabble en route. Why? Because that's how these kind of films work, it is their formula. At least the camera doesn't shake so much as to make me nauseous, like the last two installments of the also formulaic Bourne Identity series. (Side track: how eerie is it that Joan Allen replaced Chris Cooper as the spying face of the U.S. government, and they look like male and female versions of exactly the same person?)

Another part of the Indiana Jones formula is a component of the mystical. Any mythology can be raided for this purpose, from the Old Testament refry of Raiders of the Lost Ark to the Sir Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi refry of Crystal Skull. Is belief in everything that different from belief in nothing? Maybe, as this is a film where the Ark of the Covenant is relegated to a cameo. Unfortunately we still can't seem to believe our way to a role of any import for a non-white actor and are instead stuck with the usual killer “native” tribes nonsense. Those falsely accused of Communist sympathies, perhaps in some kind of belated comment about the Hollywood Black List, are treated with plenty of sympathy, but persons of color are again a racial Other.

There will always be room for the entertainments Spielberg has shown himself a virtuoso of, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Cinema, with its taste for engaging image after engaging image, loves speed. But Crystal Skull is never as entertaining as Spielberg at his best. The primary fault, I believe, lies in an unwillingness to develop any situation whatsoever, instead relying on bigger explosions, bigger waterfalls, etc., to the point where the explosions (nuclear) and the waterfalls (Iguazu) are literally the biggest in the world. Spielberg might consider the advice Cate Blanchett gives while sword-fighting Shia LaBeouf, each on a speeding jeep. She tells him, “You fight like a young man, eager to start, quick to finish.” Then she punches him in the stomach. Classic.

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What Made of Honor (tagline: an unbridled comedy) really needs is more puns. Hipster super-crush Harmony Faith Lane of Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang) must choose between an annoying Manhattan playboy (Patrick Dempsey) and an annoying Scottish royal (Kevin McKidd). I would have been happier if she chose neither, but genre conventions force the expected coupling.

Like a pink tee-shirt with “it takes a real man to wear pink” printed on it, Made is obsessed with being a “real” man while assuming stereotypes of the feminine. At times this comes across as unintentional parody, like the odd moment where Patrick Dempsey competes in a caber toss while wearing a too short kilt. Or, when Patrick Dempsey's buddies come over to help him make bridal shower baskets one of his buddies can't handle it and leaves, saying, “See you ladies ... I'm going to a strip-club to drink a beer and eat a steak.” Who talks like this? Four credited writers and not one axed this line? Apparently, maintaining Dempsey's masculinity was enough of an issue to the makers of Made that they included a character, Tiny Shorts Guy, to point to as different—not a “real” man, a sissy. The audience is supposed to laugh at Tiny Shorts Guy and to deride him, excluding him just like he is excluded from full participation in the group of “real” men. This schtick is old and offensive, and anyone who thinks otherwise should read Vito Russo.

There's another connection between Made and Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang), cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts, who brings great visual depth to Made. All of Made is well shot, but Pierce-Roberts' camera really excels in the diffuse outdoor light of Scotland, and my favorite parts of Made are the shots of sheep hanging out in the glens. Comedic lighting is generally flat and bright, the one surprise about Made is how hard it strives for a beautiful image. Too bad these carefully constructed images are un-Made by the content.

Adventure

Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna) & 700IS

The Mexican film Under the Same Moon tells the story of Carlitos, a nine year-old boy who smuggles himself across the Mexico-United States border to find his mother Rosario, who is working as a housecleaner in the U.S. Moon is corny, nevertheless, it efficiently uses current Hollywood style to quickly establish characters and make political points. Often, in Moon, plot is subservient to exposition of issues, as it is when Carlitos enthusiastically asks to work picking a tomato crop, and that day, of all days, INS raids that particular tomato farm (one almost writes plantation). However, Moon never loses a warm humanity, and hence never becomes trite, or a film only about political problems. Much of this is because every actor (main to supporting) is well picked for their role. Kate del Castillo, as Rosario, is perfect, and her complicated, unresolved romantic entanglement with Eugenio Derbez, as Enrique, has the screen presence of famous couples from Hollywood's big studio era.

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There are few places better than SF to see experimental film, and Artists' Television Access, at Valencia and 21st, often manages to showcase what I would otherwise never know existed, like the recent showing of short work from the 2007 700IS Icelandic experimental film festival as part of the Global Undergrounds program. (ATA has an international partnership with 700IS. Should SF and Reindeerland be sister cities?) Many of the films I saw deserve praise. I'll single out:

• Fokus by Löffel. Consists entirely of slow-motion close-ups of women before, during, and after they fire a gun. The women range in response from enjoyment to reluctance, from fear to satisfaction. Like good portraiture.
• HOT AIR: Keep Yourself Alive by Ellsworth. A women without ovaries or breasts plays air guitar. She's “a one-woman all boy band!” announces HOT AIR. Pushes gender ID and proclaims performance. Moving in a way I would never have expected.
• Honey by Deinema. Honey drips out of a mouth onto a glass table. Erotic.
• Untitled by Boermans. A lineup of female nudes, echoing the nude in sculpture while reinterpreting/reclaiming the female form. Each women stays in front of the camera until she feels like leaving. Most don't stay very long; shortly there are only two remaining. Both, without shame, return the gaze of the camera, self-possessed, until one chooses to leave, and then the other.

The calendar of events at ATA is available at www.atasite.org.

The Counterfeiters & The Band's Visit

The face of The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is Karl Markovics, and he controls the film with expression ranging from sullen and dangerous, to sullen and passionate, to sullen and kind. Markovics plays Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch, a Jewish counterfeiter interned in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen and forced to participate in Operation Bernhard, a Nazi effort to counterfeit first the British pound, then the U.S. dollar. Based on a true story, Counterfeiters has the neatness of a piece of moral fiction. Virtuously, Counterfeiters never sermonizes. Instead, moral questions are developed through juxtaposition of Sally with other characters—Sally and an innocent, Sally and a hero, Sally and a villain. I use labels like “hero” and “villain”, but nobody in Counterfeiters is exactly good or exactly evil. To say this another way, each characters actions can be questioned yet each character can also be viewed with sympathy. This is not to say that the Nazis' actions are forgivable, but like Peter Lorre's pedophile in M, here the villain becomes human. The images of Counterfeiters support this point—few color films more make the world look composed of shades of gray.

I've made Counterfeiters seem cold and intellectual, but it is an engaging, even entertaining, movie. Counterfeiters shares this quality with American Psycho, which I saw at a midnight showing directly after. Counterfeiters is so noble in intent, and American Psycho loses itself so easily in blood-slick play, I panicked when I realized how much greater a work than Counterfeiters I consider American Psycho. How can this be?

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The musical soundtrack to The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) is unusually sparse, especially for a film featuring musicians, so that when music is played it seems like a miracle. The Band's Visit is about finding such miracles in sparseness, though the plot concerns an Egyptian police band (really something more like a chamber orchestra) lost in Israel—a mistake in pronunciation leads to the stranding of the band in a remote Israeli town for one night. A great hearted film, humanistic in politics and loving of its characters, the unusual and foreign setup becomes relatable to us in far away San Francisco. In the magnificent finale, when the band's conductor raises his hand, I believed. I've never heard classical Arab musical compositions before, those in this film are beautiful.