7/4/14: Moonshine Over My Hammy

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bad cops, based on a book, based on a true story, Benoit Delhomme, bootleggers, brothers, Chris McGarry, cinema, corrupt law enforcement, Dane DeHaan, film reviews, films, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, John Hillcoat, Lawless, Mia Wasikowska, moonshine, Movies, Nick Cave, period-piece, romance, set in the 1930s, Shia LeBeouf, the Great Depression, The Proposition, The Road, Tom Hardy, voice-over narration

There are some writer/director relationships that end up bearing more interesting fruit than others and the pairing of Australian director John Hillcoat and post-punk savant Nick Cave is certainly one of those. Beginning with the brutal Ghosts…of the Civil Dead (1988) and continuing on into the equally raw The Proposition (2005), Hillcoat and Cave have proved a formidable team: Hillcoat is a masterful director who’s able to wring genuine pathos out of Cave’s often unpleasant, animalistic but eternally vital characters. Stylistically, Cave’s voice approximates Cormac McCarthy’s tales of moral decay, explosive violence and doomed fatalism, which are only complimented by Hillcoat’s panoramic, sweeping visuals. When it was revealed that Hillcoat and Cave’s next pairing would be an adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s novel about his bootlegging family, The Wettest County in the World, I was interested to see how the two native Australians would be able to bring their particular vision to bear on Prohibition-era rural Virginia. Turns out, there’s still plenty of brutality to go around, although Lawless (2012) ends up feeling like a much different beast than either Ghosts…of the Civil Dead or The Proposition.

Lawless involves the various machinations of the Bondurant family: brothers Jack (Shia LaBeouf), Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Howard (Jason Clarke). The brothers run one of the biggest, most impressive bootlegging operations in rural Virginia and are something of local gods, particularly when one factors in the local legend about the Bondurant’s invincibility (an interesting hint of magical realism that also informed bits of The Proposition). Brutish, laconic Forrest is the defacto leader, although youngest brother, Jack, is our entry point into the story. He’s the “new generation,” as it were, and constantly strains at the restraints that he feels are placed by his more cautious older brothers. Jack also idolizes urban gangster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman), a flashy, tommy-gun-wielding hothead who bears more than a passing resemblance to the legendary “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Forrest, for his part, just wants life to keep going as it has been: the family has managed to carve out their own piece of happiness and success amid the turmoil of the Great Depression and Forrest will do anything to protect their way of life.

Trouble, as it often does, ends up riding into town in the person of sleazy G-man Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce). Rakes, all ash-white complexion, plucked eyebrows and fastidious dislike of dirt and germs, is a mealy-mouthed monster and just about as far from “law and order” as a lawman can get. Together with corrupt Virgina Commonwealth Attorney, Mason Wardell (Tim Tolin), Rakes is more interested in shaking the Bondurants down and taking a cut of their profits than he is in eliminating the run of moonshine from Franklin County out to the rest of the bone-dry state. Hard-headed Forrest won’t budge, however, initiating a war between the bootleggers of Franklin County and Rakes. As the casualties build up on both sides, the polar ends of the Bondurant clan must deal with their own issues: Forrest begins a halting, tentative relationship with Maggie (Jessica Chastain), a waitress at the Bondurants’ “bar,” while Jack tries to court Bertha Minnix (Mia Wasikowska), the virginal daughter of a local fundamentalist preacher. When Forrest is ambushed and injured during a liquor delivery that Jack was supposed to back him up on, Jack decides to strike a deal with Floyd Banner, which irks Forrest and creates a division in the family. As the corrupt feds close in and their fellow bootleggers either fall in line or are outright killed, the Bondurants must make a desperate last stand to preserve their way of life. Will Forrest be able to pulverize the problem into submission or has his luck (and invincibility) finally run out?

While Lawless has moments of abject brutality that nearly rival anything in Hillcoat and Cave’s previous films (the scene where Forrest beats ten shades of red out of a pair of barroom louts with some brass knuckles manages to be both immensely horrifying and primally satisfying, while the scene where Rakes’ men tar and feather a bootlegger is just horrifying), this is a much “softer” film than either Ghosts…or The Proposition. For one thing, Hillcoat and Cave break up the brutality with the twin romance angles, which bring some delicate balance to the proceedings: while the relationship between Jack and Bertha often feels a bit silly and clichéd, there’s some genuine pathos to the tender, wounded courtship between the formerly big-city Maggie and the resolutely grim Forrest. While neither romance ever really takes center stage, they both serve as decent enough ways to break up the near constant stream of beatings (poor Jack gets wailed on at least three separate times, including once by his own brother), shootings and stabbings, along with the odd rape and tar-and-feathering here and there.

While Lawless looks absolutely gorgeous (veteran French cinematographer Benoit Delhomme provides us with some truly striking, beautiful images, as well as a really evocative way with hard shadows and dark areas), the whole film is let-down by the often out-of-place acting. Hardy, in particular, is frequently kind of awful but there isn’t a single performance in the film that feels genuine or rings true. Perhaps the award here must go Guy Pearce, however, who plays Rakes right to the cheap seats and comes up with something akin to a mustache-twirling Bond villain. LaBeouf (who can be decent-enough, given the right role) feels severely light-weight as Jack and Jason Clarke gets so little to do as “other brother” Howard that I kept wondering if most of his character arc got left on the cutting-room floor. Only Chastain (who’s always been hit-or-miss for me) acquits herself admirably as Maggie: there’s genuine pain in her performance but there’s also some steel there, too, a fighting impulse that somehow seems both more real and more feral than the one ascribed to Hardy’s character.

With more fine-tuned, realistic performances, Lawless would be a much better film, although it’s still decidedly lightweight when compared to Hillcoat and Cave’s other collaborations. There were several points during the film, not least of which during a thoroughly unnecessary closing tag, where it felt like Hillcoat lets the material get away from him and the tone had a tendency to flop violently between breezy, musical montage action scenes and moments such as the one where a character is “reverse-gutted” from tailbone to neckbone. This back-and-forth was also evident, to a much smaller degree, in The Proposition but Lawless’ tone feels less structured and more haphazard. When the film works, it works spectacularly well: the combination of the Depression-era setting, extreme violence and a rousing bluegrass-ish score never cease to get the blood-pumping. When one steps back to examine the film as a whole, however, it seems to come up a bit short. It’s a pity, really: there seems to be a really intense, gritty story locked inside but the constant overacting took me out so often that I ended up viewing events in a much more clinical manner than I would have liked. The greatest criticism that I can level against Lawless is that, for the first time, Hillcoat and Cave appear to have created something that feels disposable rather than essential. Here’s to hoping that their next partnership bears better fruit than this one.

5/13/14: The Gary and Harrison Show

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Amber Heard, Angela Sarafyan, auteur theory, based on a book, cinema, Con Air, corporate intrigue, David Tattersall, Die Another Day, Embeth Davidtz, evil corporations, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, Gary Oldman, Harrison Ford, industrial espionage, Jock Goddard, Josh Holloway, Junkie XL, Kevin Kilner, Killers, Legally Blonde, Liam Hemsworth, Lucas Till, Monster-in-Law, movie, Nicolas Wyatt, paranoia, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Luketic, spies, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, tech-thriller, technology, voice-over narration, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton

Ever gotten the faint idea that you’ve already heard or seen something even if you’re pretty sure you haven’t? Similar to deja vu, I’ll often get the nagging notion that I’ve already watched a particular film, even to the point where I’ll begin to “remember” scenes. I tend to have a very strange memory: it preserves some things in amber and tosses out quite a bit without hesitation. As such, I frequently find myself asking: have I already seen this before? It happened with John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005), a film which I ended up watching “for the first time” at least twice, if not three times: it’s a great film, don’t get me wrong, it just managed to pass unimpeded through the sieve of my mind on multiple occasions. As I watched Robert Luketic’s most recent film, Paranoia (2013), I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d already seen this before. Turns out I hadn’t but I had, in a way: I’d never seen this particular iteration of the formula before but I’ve seen plenty of soulless, created-by-committee, commercial product in my time. If there’s one thing that can be said about Paranoia, it’s that it features Harrison Ford…and he seems mostly awake, for a change.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a young, principled and ambitious go-getter gets tangled in the messy webs of corporate intrigue, leading him/her further down the rabbit hole as temptation, double-crosses and ulterior motives begin to fly fast and furious. Yeah, me too. It’s almost a tale as old as time…or at least as old as stories about the avarice and evil of the corporate world. Handsome, principled and ambitious young go-getter Adam (Liam Hemsworth) works at Wyatt Corp., doing the kind of vague tech stuff that everyone in tech-related films seem to do. He runs afoul of head ogre, Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman, shoveling scenery down his gullet as fast as it’ll go) when he can’t come with a cool, innovative new idea: “You have everything at your disposal and come up with social networking on a TV?” Be nice, Wyatt: the filmmakers had quite a bit at their disposal, too and yet: here we are.

Adam and his “quirky” friends, Kevin (Lucas Til) and Allison (Angela Sarafyan) get canned but Adam’s still got the company credit card: who wants to par-tay? $16K (and one drunken hook-up with a mysterious blonde, played by Amber Heard) later and Adam’s up shit-creek with Wyatt. Good ol’ Nicolas, of course, has something up his sleeve: he’s Gary Oldman, after all, and that dude is just untrustworthy. He wants Adam to infiltrate the tech company, Eikon, run by his former partner, and current bitter rival, Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford). Adam is to insinuate himself in the group and steal the plans for Goddard’s newest “genius” invention, some sort of a spiffy new iPhone. When Adam balks, because he’s got principles and stuff, Wyatt reminds him of his position: “Are you a horse or a dog, Adam? Horses are motivated by fear, dogs by hunger.” Since Adam needs to pay $40K in medical bills for his ailing father (an utterly, absolutely, completely wasted Richard Dreyfuss), he doesn’t have a lot of choices: Cue up “Who Let the Dogs Out,” cuz Adam’s on the payroll.

After meeting with Goddard’s hiring agent, Tom Lungren (Kevin Kilner), Adam also gets to meet his assistant: if you guessed Amber Heard, reward yourself by tagging out of the film. His former bed-partner, Emma, is super suspicious of Adam but, then again, the film is called Paranoia…whatcha gonna do? Adam gets a job and ends up wowing Goddard with his ability to take other people’s ideas and repackage them: he’s the perfect corporate guy! As Adam gets deeper and deeper under cover, things begin to get more dangerous: Wyatt’s sinister right-hand man, Miles (Julian McMahon), is always lurking in the shadows, Goddard seems to be on to something and Emma is falling hard for Adam (who wouldn’t? Guy’s got abs for miles.). When FBI agent Gamble (Josh Holloway) enters the picture and lets Adam know that the feds have Wyatt in their cross-hairs and need Adam’s help to snare him, what’s a young, principled and ambitious go-getter to do? Many double-crosses and needlessly complex back-and-forth later, we find out.

Folks, unless this is one of the first films you’ve ever seen (which is entirely possible, what do I know?), there is absolutely, positively nothing here that you haven’t seen before, probably in much more interesting ways. The story is moldy and features so many gaping holes that I’m guessing they were on purpose: if you thought the “heroic” T-rex in Jurassic Park was a deus ex machina, wait until you get to the part in Paranoia where the whole success of Adam’s plan hinges on the fact that his cellphone won’t be fried after getting dunked in a pitcher of water. There’s no reason it should keep working but it has to, to further the plot, and so it does. The final doublecross is equally ludicrous, requiring so much suspension of disbelief that we’re pretty much in Space Jam land: I believed everything Bugs did in that movie way more than I believe anything that these idiots do in this film.

The acting is what it is: Hemsworth is handsome and bland; Oldman is both ridiculously over-the-top and strangely deflated, as if he were coming down from a week-long crack bender; Ford, as mentioned earlier, actually seems awake and aware, for a change. I’m not saying that anything in his performance will make people forget his iconic roles (or even forget the fact that, nowadays, he seems higher than Doug Benson whenever he makes public appearances) but he definitely seems aware and there’s a tiny (a minuscule, smaller-than-a-pinprick) bit of his old chutzpah here. Watching Paranoia strictly for Ford’s performance would be a fool’s errand, of course, but he’s definitely not the worst thing in the film.

Director Luketic is something of a middle-of-the-road, paint-by-numbers auteur, since he was also responsible for Legally Blonde (2001), Win a Date with Tad Hamilton (2004), Monster-in-Law (2005), 21 (2008), The Ugly Truth (2009) and Killers (2010). The one common thread in Luketic’s canon is his polished, bland style, so airbrushed that everything looks like it was poured from a mold. Veteran cinematographer David Tattersall handles the camera for this one: his previous films included the Star Wars prequels, Con Air (1997), Die Another Day (2002), XXX: State of the Union (2005) and Speed Racer (2008). Tattersall specializes in big, glossy productions and Paranoia is no exception, albeit a much shallower one than even State of the Union. Paranoia is technically proficient, sure, but it’s also hollow.

Basically, you have a director and cinematographer that specialize in big, empty images; a cast that phones the whole thing in; copious slo-mo and pounding techno music (courtesy of Junkie XL) to show how badass the whole thing is; a vague, unsatisfying message about bringing down “the man” while lining your own pockets; and enough dumb coincidence to drive any other film into the ground. Even as a time-waster on a lazy Sunday afternoon, Paranoia comes up short. I can almost guarantee that this isn’t the worst film you’ll see this year: it can’t even make that commitment. Instead, Paranoia is just another lazy example of how truly artless modern action films can be. There’s nothing here to offend but there’s also not much to remember, either.

2/9/14: A Place of One’s Own

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absurdist, Alex Cox, American imperialism, anachronisms, anachronistic, auteur theory, bio-pic, biopic, cinema, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ed Harris, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, Gary Oldman, historical drama, Honduras, Iran-Contra scandal, Joe Strummer, liberation, Manifest Destiny, Marlee Matlin, Movies, Nicaragua, Oliver North, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Peter Boyle, Repo Man, Richard Masur, Ronald Reagan, Rudy Wurlitzer, Sid & Nancy, Straight to Hell, surreal, Walker, William Walker

We now finish up the Sunday double-feature with Alex Cox’s kind-of/sort-of biopic, Walker.

There are, quite possibly, as many different ways to film and present a biopic as there are people to make them about. Filmmakers can approach the subject as dry, historical fact, presenting only the information widely accepted as true. The subject can be approached from a bias, either for or against, with the entire film making a case for this particular reading. The film might even co-mingle elements of fact and fiction, using real people but playing up non-existent emotional quandaries in order to get to the psychological core of the characters. Any of these approaches are valid, depending on the overall intent of the filmmakers, but there’s usually an attempt to delineate (at least to some extent) what sort of biopic we’re watching. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter did not, for example, purport to be anything other than the goof it was: there certainly were no pretensions towards telling “the definitive” version of Lincoln’s life, as it were, just the part where he (apparently) fought vampires. All well and good, as it were.

What if, however, the overall slant of a particular biopic wasn’t quite so obvious? What if the line between real and fictional were blurred, leading the audience to wonder not only what the subject may have really been like but what actual events may have really been like? Depending on the particular director, this tactic could result in a severely disorienting experience, akin to being plagued by an internal unreliable narrator. When the director is Alex Cox, this is all but guaranteed.

Cox is the visionary behind one of the strangest films ever made (and one of my favorite films of all time), Repo Man (1984). He was also responsible for another biopic, Sid and Nancy (1986), which had the effect of unleashing Gary Oldman upon the world at large. Completing Cox’s trifecta was Straight to Hell (1987), perhaps the most bat-shit insane “Western” ever made, other than El Topo. Walker, Cox’s biopic of William Walker, was released the same year as Straight to Hell, and marks the end of Cox’s ’80s hot-streak. Falling somewhere in-between the nearly hallucinogenic insanity of Straight to Hell and the biopic stylings of Sid and Nancy, Walker is a constantly fascinating, if occasionally frustrating, experience, anchored by one massive performance by master thespian Ed Harris.

Walker purports to tell the story of William Walker (Ed Harris), an American “adventurer” who undertook several military incursions into Mexico and South America during the mid-part of the 1800’s. Walker took control of several territories in Mexico before finally being driven out by the government and arrested, tried and acquitted by the U.S. He (briefly) became Commander of the Armed Forces and, later, President, of Nicaragua before being deposed and executed by Honduran forces. These, as they say, are the basic facts. Cox and writer Randy Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid), however, have a few more tricks up their sleeve than just presenting us with a colorful historic figure. Their minds aren’t on Nicaragua’s past: they’re very much on the Nicaragua of the late ’80s, the one embroiled in that era’s Iran-Contra scandal.

More than anything, Walker is about U.S. imperialism and the dangerous effect it often has on other countries, particularly those we attempt to “liberate.” As a British expatriate remarks when Walker explains his plans to liberate the country: “How peculiar: you must be Americans.” We’ve already seen how Walker’s attempted conquest of Mexico is viewed, if not altogether favorably, as completely understandable and, in a way, desirable: his proclamation of Manifest Destiny earns him a pretty quick acquittal, after all. Walker is allowed to get as far as he does (and he gets pretty far, relatively speaking, for someone with absolutely no actual authority) because, inherently, the American system places high priority on both conquest and “liberation,” often seeing both as opposing sides of the same coin.

While the government might have been a bit “on-the-fence” regarding Walker’s activities, it becomes obvious rather quickly what side Cox takes. Practically from the jump, we’re introduced to that most subtly powerful of filmmaking tricks: the unreliable narrator. In a move that explicitly recalls the grand Michael Caine romp Pulp (1972), Harris narrates the film with an authority that can best be described as “questionable.” At one point, Walker describes how the Nicaraguan people “rejoice” when he has their President executed and takes his place: the image we actually see of the same event doesn’t resemble anything close to rejoicing, however. Rather, we see the people solemnly mourn their murdered leader, covering his body in white roses. This schism is reinforced when the local paper repeats the same sentiment as a headline: it’s pretty obvious who wrote that particular press-release.

Cox stacks the deck against Walker in a number of other, more subtle ways. There’s the oddly messianic way that Walker seems to stride through massive gunfights while obtaining nary a scratch, battles that lay waste to everyone else (friend or foe) that surrounds him, perhaps symbolic of the way in which American foreign policies often set up scenarios in which we emerge unscathed but our enemies (and allies) are obliterated. There are the ways in which none of Walker’s proclamations seem to be taken seriously: he makes a point to say that no excessive “drinking, whoring, carousing or fighting” will be tolerated from his men, even as we see all of this (plus some implied bestiality, to boot) taking place in the background. Walker can’t speak the local language, despite considering himself the leader, and, therefore, can’t actually comprehend what any of the native Nicaraguans are saying (hint: none of it’s nice). Walker spends most of the film dressed like the Tall Man from Phantasm, a get-up which constantly recalls fire-and-brimstone evangelical preachers (which Walker partakes in).

One of Cox’s greatest (and strangest) coups, however, is the subtle, almost subliminal, way that he weaves historical anachronisms into the film. It begins when you catch what appears to be the corner of a computer in one shot: a little strange, since computer’s weren’t exactly around in the 1850’s. Later on, there’s a soldier drinking from a modern (1980’s, at least) Coke bottle and someone else reading a copy of Time magazine that wouldn’t exist for about 70 more years. This all comes to a head in the film’s finale, when an ’80s-era military team, complete with helicopter, swoops in to rescue the Americans from a burning Grenada. While certainly different, the intent seems pretty clear: Cox isn’t so much telling the story of William Walker as he is setting the Iran-Contra scandal in the past. While the times may have changed, he seems to be saying, the scam remains the same.

As a film, Walker is consistently entertaining but falls short of Cox’s magnum opus (that would be Repo Man, in case you dozed off). The acting is always top-notch but I never expect less from Ed Harris. For my money, Harris is one of the most gifted, chameleonic actors in the business and is never less than a joy to watch. He seems to have a blast with the role and provides Walker with some truly interesting quirks and tics. Peter Boyle shows up as Cornelius Vanderbilt and is always larger than life: he punctuates the line “I’m entitled to do anything I want” with the single loudest cinematic fart since Blazing Saddles and nearly steals every scene he’s in. Marlee Matlin has an odd bit part as Walker’s doomed fiancée, Ellen, and Richard Masur shows up as Ephraim Squire, one of Vanderbilt’s lackeys.

Aesthetically, Walker recalls Straight to Hell more than either Repo Man or Sid & Nancy, lacking the grime of the others in favor of Hell’s more colorful palette. There isn’t much in the film that could legitimately be called “beautiful,” although the burning of Granada is conducted in a very dream-like, surreal way that features quite a few astounding images. Other than that, however, the film serves more as a showcase for Cox (and Wurlitzer’s) ideas than for David Bridges’ completely serviceable cinematography. Joe Strummer did the score which, to be honest, is less than noteworthy: I mostly recall the oddly inappropriate ’80s-era smooth sax that kept popping up everywhere more than I do any of Strummer’s contributions…unless he was actually playing the sax, at which point I’ll keep my mouth shut.

Ultimately, Walker is a fascinating, quick-paced curiosity, an attempt by a genuinely head-scratching auteur to fold, spindle and mutilate history, proving the old adage that there really is nothing new under the sun, a fact made even clearer by the closing-credit newsreel footage of then-president Ronald Reagan discussing the Iran-Contra affair. As the poster states: Before Rambo…before Oliver North…there was Walker. Cox posits a bizzaro-world scenario where all three were not only contemporaries but the same individual.