War (part 2)

Aki:

Nobody really found the original Rogue’s body, right? That should be used in the plot. So Rogue vs Rogue II. No, it’s a comedy.

Aki

I should have been clearer. Rogue, the original, is dead. John Lone killed him, shot the rest of his face away, put his own wedding ring on Rogue’s finger, then burned down his house, so that Rogue’s bones would be taken for John Lone’s body.

Ok, here’s what I missed, and it wasn’t long:

Statham gets a call from new-Rogue. I was wrong in thinking Statham had figured it out, he still thinks Rogue is Rogue. Jet Li tells him to meet ‘Where we first met’ so that part was right in my guess: the movie ends in the warehouse by the docks where it began.

Statham and Jet Li have a terrific fight. Jet Li is not wounded; even having his arm half cut off makes no difference to him! Corey Yuen directed the fight scenes, and they are up to his usual standard of excellence.

At the climax of the fight comes a moment of pause and Jet Li reveals who he is. At first Statham can’t believe it but then he does. ‘Look into my eyes, John. They’re the only thing the surgeon can’t change!’

One more flashback, of when Lone set fire to his cabin. Out on the road he finds Rogue’s car, in the trunk is a suitcase with money, guns, passports and presumably everything he needs to take Rogue’s place.

‘Jesus, Tom, is it really you? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It was the only way I could get at Shira. But why did you betray us?’

‘They said they just wanted to rough you up for shooting Rogue in the face. I tried to stop working for him so many times. I couldn’t. Can’t you forgive me, Tom?’

‘Tom Lone is dead. There’s only Rogue now.’

Jet Li aims his gun at Statham. There is no forgiveness in him.

But Statham knows he has stationed a sharpshooter with rifle back there. When Jet Li stands up so the shooter gets a clear shot, Statham leaps up between them. Jet Li fires, but the sharpshooter holds his fire so as not to hit Statham; Statham crumples to the ground. The sharpshooter looks through his scope for another shot but Jet Li, Rogue, Tom Lone, is gone.

A final set of shots show Jet Li getting into his sports car, driving off, and driving away across the Golden Gate Bridge.

…

So I was wrong that he had nothing to live for. The sequel is going to feature Jet Li as Rogue (if there is a sequel) but since we only saw Statham’s body on the ground, he might still be alive. I think they cheated there a little bit, and instead of what I guessed (Jet Li would die but not-die) they did the other way, and Statham died, but they can say in the sequel he was just wounded.

I must say seeing Jet Li drive away was not satisfying.

But one other thing I never made clear: we never see the original Rogue’s face. In the warehouse prologue, before he’s shot in the face, his face is in shadows or offscreen. When he comes to kill Tom Lone and family, he wears a mask; probably to cover the half-shot-up face.

So, the only scenes where we see Jet Li and know it’s Jet Li, he is a good guy, though we think he’s a bad guy.

Ah!

So you got the ending right, almost. You liked the movie, though?

The movie is crap! But I like Jet Li, I like Jason Statham, the stunts are good. Moreover, they use a flashy jump-cut music-video style that usually I hate, but I found it worked for me in this movie. I wish I could tell you why or how it worked. Partly I think it worked because the jump-cuts were not in there only to be flashy, but they sped up the storytelling, moving the story along faster. But I think it goes beyond that.

(5 May 2009)

War (part 1)

Hi Aki,

A couple nights ago I watched War which stars Jason Statham and Jet Li. Statham basically plays a cop in San Francisco. Jet Li plays a professional assassin who is playing the Yakuza against the triads to start a war. And Statham is obsessed with this ‘Rogue’ assassin because ‘Rogue’ killed Statham’s partner (John Lone) 3 years ago.

Nobody has ever seen Rogue, there are no pictures of him.

He has had plastic surgery several times, changing his face.

He was trained by the CIA but years ago he rebelled against them and went to serve the Yakuza (one specific clan) as an assassin.

He is known only by the very particular bullets he uses (yeah, right!).

Statham is one of those tough cops who know it all, can speak Japanese at least, maybe Mandarin as well. He lives for his job, which caused his wife to divorce him years ago, shortly after his partner was killed, with all his family, by Rogue (after a raid they show as the movie prologue, Statham and Lone break into a smuggling operation where Rogue is killing people, a fact Statham and Lone learn when they find the special spent cartridges only Rogue uses, on the floor. Lone manages to shoot Rogue in the face, Rogue falls into the water of San Francisco bay, presumed drowned, though no body is found. A few days later, Statham is driving to Lone’s cabin in the hills for barbecue, when Rogue breaks into Lone’s house, shoots Lone in the face, and then shoots Lone’s wife and kid in front of him. By the time Statham arrives, the house is a burned down, smoking ruin, the police and fire department are there, only bones of the bodies – but Statham does find one of the special bullet cartridges there.

It’s suggested that this even tore up even Statham, leading to his wife divorcing him.

Now Rogue is back, and he seems to be playing Statham against the Yakuza, the Yakuza and triad against each other.

The climax comes when Rogue kills the triad boss, but lets his wife (improbably, a Latina!) and little girl go, contrary to the orders of the Yakuza leader. The Yakuza leader learns of this betrayal, and orders Rogue killed – but nobody can kill Jet Li. Even when the Yakuza boss wounds him horribly, Rogue has the upper hand, and is about to kill the Yakuza. ‘Why are you doing this? Why?’

Rogue answers, ‘Because 3 years ago, you ordered a hit.’

‘I order many hits!’

‘This one … was different!!!’

So flashback: we learn that after Rogue killed Lone’s wife and daughter, Lone got free, turned the tables, killed Rogue.

In the three years since, Lone has masqueraded as Rogue, having plastic surgery to look like what Rogue would have looked like (remember both of them have just been shot in the face). And all this time he has worked to create this war and lure the Yakuza boss to San Francisco (the clan boss of this Yakuza group has always stayed in Tokyo for some reason too complicated to get into. And for some reason Lone finds it easier to engineer this 3-year campaign to set triad against Yakuza instead of doing what you or I would do and buying a plane ticket to Tokyo!!!)

In response, the Yakuza guy tells Rogue/Lone: it was your partner. He was working for me. he’s the one who’s really responsible!

Cut to Statham in the park, looking mournful. He is not only the kind of cop who knows the underworld, he’s smart to boot: he has been asking, ‘Why would Rogue start a war between the triads and Yakuza?’ Now, it seems, he has his answer: it seems as though he knows who ‘Rogue’ really is.

The showdown is all set up, when…

…when the cable box changed channels! We have the recorder set to record a comedy show every Thursday night at 9.30.

So I didn’t see the end!!!

Now, how does it end? This is another puzzle like Gossip (remember that one?).

We know everything going up to the climax. It looks like the toughest cop is up against the toughest bad guy (who is not a bad guy after all, but who has done horrible things, though only to criminals, for revenge).

Who will win?

• Will both survive and make peace? (No – not in a violent movie like this!)
• Will both die? (maybe, but isn’t that a downer?)
• Will Statham defeat Jet Li /Lone and find some sort of redemption? Does he have some sort of explanation for what he did? Something that Lone/Jet Li might forgive? (I don’t know about this one. It really doesn’t look like anybody could beat Jet Li, but he’s had one arm just about hacked off by the Yakuza boss, so he’s not 100 percent here)
• Will Jet Li / Lone defeat and kill Statham? But then what’s left for Lone? This is the sort of character arc that ends only in death.

(This is how you tell about that: if along the path of vengeance the guy meets a girl, or a child, or an animal – something to save, something to give him a personal relationship, a reason to live – then he can live on after achieving vengeance. But if he finds nobody, then he will die, always, 100 percent of the time. The only people who fit this bill are the triad widow and child. But Jet Li has had no real relationship to them; he is his usual cold, distant self with the little girl.)

So I don’t see how Jet Li can live at the end of this.

I don’t see how Statham can survive either.

What’s your prediction, if you didn’t see it yet? I got to record the end tonight, and I’ll watch it first thing tomorrow morning.

I really don’t know what I predict. Statham has to pay for what he did. Lone has nothing to live for. And yet I don’t see them both dead and the audience looking at two corpses when the credits roll, do you?

Hey, I know your solution! They start kissing in the middle of fighting, and end up going to some state that allows gay marriage!

Haha!

I had another thought as I was walking home: here’s how I would do it.

Big fight between Statham and Jet Li. Reveal that Rogue is Lone.

Statham explains. Wife sick, kid with cancer – something that needed money and the family required he sell out.

Jet Li exacts revenge. But he leaves Statham alive – just maybe shoots him in the face.

Then a sniper Statham’s pal shoots Jet Li. Jet Li falls into the bay just like Rogue did (all this should happen on the scene of the prologue). They are sure Jet Li is dead, but no body is found.

Statham, wounded, leaves flowers on the grave of Lone/wife/child and walks, limps, away.

– this makes Statham pay, makes Jet Li pay, but leaves both men, potentially, alive so we can have War 2 sequel.

I will tell you what really happened when I hear your prediction.

(5 May 2009)

We Own The Night

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched We Own the Night a picture written and directed by James Gray.

The story is set in New York in 1988. Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) is on top of the world, the manager of a glamorous nightclub with a gorgeous girlfriend (Eva Mendez) who loves him intensely. Bobby also has the great trust and love of the club’s owner, a Russian immigrant who makes most of his money importing furs and who treats Bobby like a son.

But Bobby has another family, and he takes his girlfriend to meet them on the occasion of his brother’s promotion to captain of the police force. These are the Gruzinskys, and Bobby is so alienated from his brother Joe (Mark Wahlberg) and father, Chief Al (Robert Duvall) that he has taken his mother’s name of Green and keeps it a shameful secret that he has cops in his family. Joe and the Chief take Bobby apart from the celebration and tell him they are hot on the trail of a Russian drug dealer and importer, Vadim Nijinsky. Vadim is using Bobby’s club as his dealing HQ, and Joe is about to come down hard on him. Bobby can’t believe it. And he won’t help them, which wins him the contempt of brother and father.

Bobby carries on with his wild, fun, partying, wealthy life with girlfriend and best pal Jumbo. But one night the cops bust into the club, led by Joe. They shake down everybody, grab a couple of Vadim’s lieutenants, and really give Bobby the business. The result is Bobby is in the tank overnight, and Joe gets shot in the head outside his home.

Bobby, in spite of his arguments and heated words with Joe, takes the news hard. Even worse is that his father and other top cops believe Bobby himself had a hand in ordering Joe’s attack. Joe is alive, luckily, but is in critical condition – it will be 4 months before he can get out of the hospital and return to work.

Meanwhile Bobby is approached by Vadim himself. Vadim is the club owner’s ‘crazy nephew’ and there are rumors that Vadim only gets to operate out of the club because he has his uncle’s blessing. But the chief and other cops have checked out the owner for months, and have found no evidence that he’s involved in anything illegal. Just a nice old guy who loves his grandchildren and may not even know the full extent of Vadim’s dealing. Now Vadim admits to Bobby that he is a big-time dealer, and will have a huge shipment coming in soon. He trusts Bobby because his uncle loves him, and he offers Bobby a chance to help distribute the drugs. Bobby asks if it isn’t dangerous now that the cops have busted the club, but Vadim is unconcerned: he dismisses the cops and says he put the hit on Joe, and has a contract out on Chief Al and some others there.

Bobby ‘Green’ goes straight to his old man and tells him all of this. The chief doesn’t have a real plan. So Bobby proposes to take Vadim up on his offer and lead the cops to Vadim’s stash house.

Bobby is taken by the Russians to the house, but he gives himself away. The cops are only just in time to save his life, and they manage to capture Vadim, but Vadim learns who Bobby really is now, and vows revenge. Bobby is put with his girlfriend under witness protection, a miserable life of motels and hotels and hiding out, watched over all the time by cop bodyguards.

Vadim later escapes. Bobby watches his father shot and killed in a car accompanying Bobby to a new hideout. Bobby decides to join the cops to fight Vadim and avenge his dad. But his girlfriend can’t stand the life and leaves him. Then Bobby finds out that his best friend Jumbo gave away the secret of where Bobby was, and the person he told was – the old Russian furrier. The man who was like a father to Bobby.

They lay siege to the old man when he tries to unload the big shipment of drugs. Vadim escapes and Bobby tracks him into a bank of river reeds. Bobby shoots and kills Vadim, but feels no great release or satisfaction in it. Bobby has lost every part of his old life.

The final scene shows the graduation ceremony of the Police Academy where Bobby is the salutatorian. For a moment Bobby thinks he sees his girlfriend in the audience but it isn’t her. He is left with his brother and a cop’s life.

There are a few things I find interesting in this one. On the whole I found it well-mounted and shot; the car chase in the rain was an excellent scene, concentrating on Bobby in his car, only cutting outside for brief shots when it was needed to make sense of the action. The acting is quite good, and yet I didn’t believe the ending. And I was left unsatisfied.

James Gray on the commentary says that he looked on the story as one of destiny, of fate. Of course the audience will know from the third scene that Bobby will end up in uniform, and so Gray isn’t interested in what will happen so much as how it will happen. He wasn’t at all expecting the audience not to believe that Bobby would join the cops – the way I didn’t. I fully expected Bobby to use his temporary status with the force only to avenge his father on Vadim and maybe the old furrier as well, then (like Will Kane in High Noon and Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry) throw down his badge and walk away. So Gray is constructing his screenplay with a major misapprehension when it comes to viewers like me.

He also says that he didn’t want to make a ‘rah, rah, go cops’ kind of movie, but to follow in the track of 1970s movies which end on a mixed note. But I was struck by how closely Bobby Green’s story follows Michael Corleone’s in the original The Godfather – both stories have a son who leaves the family business, but who is drawn back in when his father is threatened, and who ends up a better and more ruthless exemplar than his formerly-respected brother. The idea that the cops are like the mob put me into thinking Bobby’s end was almost entirely negative; combine this with my disbelief that Bobby would even want to be a cop, and it seems like a total loss. Gray did too good a job portraying the glamor and appeal of the nightclub manager’s life; who in the audience would think he ended up better off as a lowly rookie cop in the cold, dirty, police precincts after lording over a huge nightclub as its king with a super-hot princess at his side?

The third point that interested me concerns my reactions to Joaquin Phoenix as Bobby. Bobby has to draw me through the story. It isn’t enough that the character be well-drawn or well-acted. It isn’t enough that he be believable (he wasn’t believable for me, anyhow). But he also has to be likable. I have to like Bobby and want to identify with him, to empathize with him, to root for him. If Gray can manage to get me to do this, then he can count on Bobby pulling me through the story even if I don’t entirely believe it.

Now, there are two ways to get us to like a character.

1. Likability can be built into the script, or
2. The character can be played by an inherently likable actor.

Way No 1 needs scenes, lines, actions. It’s easy enough to pull off, but it takes valuable screen time in something that is like exposition but not quite. There are two things that happen in the First Act of a movie:

1. We learn how the predicament is built. This happens inside the story.
2. We learn how we are supposed to respond to the movie. This happens between us and the movie: are we supposed to laugh or cry? Does it engage our feelings or our intellect? Are we supposed to like what happens, or get good and mad at it? What genre of movie is it we’re watching, anyhow?

Adding scenes and lines and bits of business to manage our feelings toward the hero is part of the second item there. They can and should be interwoven with other actions and scenes, but no matter what, they do take up running time, and there’s a shortcut to doing it, that involves casting.

Cast Kirk Douglas in the role, we will expect one kind of movie, and respond, and expect to respond, in one way. Cast Jim Carrey, or Lee Marvin, or Joaquin Phoenix, or Charlie Chaplin, and we will expect something else.

Gray doesn’t do anything to make us like Bobby Green, other than to portray him as living a life we would all enjoy (but this implies that we will feel unhappy when he loses this life, and we won’t like it when he becomes a mere cop). This means the movie depends almost entirely on Joaquin Phoenix to make us like Bobby enough to carry us through the changes in his life.

This ‘likability’ is a mysterious, undefinable, unmeasurable thing. In television, they just call it Q instead of anything tangible. It’s the rarest thing. It isn’t just charisma, though charisma helps. It isn’t just sex appeal, although that helps too. It isn’t strength of character or anything racial or generic.

And Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t have it – for me, anyway. Which makes me wonder how I would have reacted to the same movie if a more likable actor starred in it.

(30 April 2009)

Payback Straight Up – Director’s Recut version

Hi Aki,

A couple of days ago I watched Payback: Straight Up the director Brian Helgeland’s recut version. (Helgeland had to deal with two studios, Paramount and Warners, in making the movie; Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions was also the producer of record. And even though everybody had read the script, when they saw the movie, which was just what the script had advertised, they didn’t like it. They wanted more fun, apparently, and two days after Helgeland won the Oscar for Best Direction of LA Confidential he was fired from Payback and they shot a new opening scene and scenes that replaced all the third act. Seven years later Helgeland got a chance to recut the picture closer to the script; this version is not quite the cut he and editor Kevin Stitt delivered to the studios, but it is closer to a fine cut, finessed version of that.)

The story is based on a Donald Westlake pulp-paperback crime novel which he wrote under his Richard Stark pen-name. The book was The Hunter about a guy name of Parker who was double-crossed in a heist and now, a few months later, comes back from the dead to get the money that was his share. He has to wade through about a dozen bodies and go up against the now-corporate crime organization ‘The Outfit’ to get it; but Parker gets it and goes on to feature in many other books. The 1961 or so book was made into the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (as ‘Walker’ not ‘Parker’) which stressed the story’s more existentialist aspects and made other changes as well, and is at the top of most everybody’s lists as one of the greatest crime tough-guy movies of all time. So Helgeland did himself no favors when he tried for the remake here. Helgeland loves pulp and genre and he wanted to get closer to the Westlake novel. Mel Gibson was a perfect star for the project, and everything looked good at the start.

Story shows Mel Gibson’s ‘Hunter’ (not ‘Walker’ or ‘Parker’) walking back over a bridge into the city (in the story it was New York, but this version shot in Chicago and never named the city) just like in the book. He hasn’t a penny to his pocket and proceeds to rack up very easily a few thousand dollars by theft and fraud. (This establishes that Hunter doesn’t really need to go after the money he was cheated out of; indeed this is a violation of the original ‘Parker’s’ commandment of never getting tangled up with the big criminal organizations, but he does it in the book too.)

Next stop is his wife’s apartment. She (Deborah Kara Unger) stumbles home late at night, and he busts in on her. She’s alone and he’s disgusted by the needle marks on her arm. They get into a knock-down fight in the kitchen, and he carries her into the bedroom where he takes away her heroin and shooting works and locks her in. She has told him she’s getting a couple thousand bucks a month from Val Resnick as ‘payoff’ though it’s not yet explained just what has happened. Hunter showers and sleeps on the couch. When he wakes up in the morning he finds his wife dead in bed – she has gotten hold of another shooting works and has overdosed. (This convenient exit is the same in the book as I recall. It’s left unclear whether the OD was accidental or if she has deliberately suicided.)

Now Hunter lies alongside his wife’s corpse and recalls how he got into this mess. He hooked up with Val who put him onto a money-laundering operation by the Chows, a Chinese crime bunch. Every day around noon they drive off with a suitcase full of cash. Hunter arranges to hit them on Friday, and they get away with the money after a particularly brutal assault on the Chows (Helgeland talks in the commentary of liking stories and heroes with a certain ‘balls to brain ratio’ and seems to like Hunter having more balls than brains, but in the original story, and here too as you’ll see, the hero is quite resourceful). But in the split between Hunter, Val, and Hunter’s wife Lynn, there isn’t enough money for Val. He needs $130,000 to buy back into the good graces of the Outfit and get a job with them. And the Chow heist only brought in $140,000. Lynn shoots Hunter twice in the back, Val leaves a picture of Hunter with another girl which Val has used to play on Lynn’s jealousy, and the two drive off, leaving Hunter for dead. (But nothing kills Hunter!)

A messenger comes to the apartment on the appointed day with Lynn’s cash, and Hunter ambushes him and starts on a trail that leads him to Val, and Hunter’s $70,000 demands. But Val and everybody else have no intention of just giving Hunter the cash, even though to the Outfit such money is petty change. Instead Hunter has to kill Val, then Carter, one of the upper echelon, then ambush Fairfax, before Mrs Bronson, who’s a voice on the phone and seems to be as high up as anybody, agrees to send the money to the drop where Hunter tells them. Of course she double-crosses him and sends instead an army of killers, and he expects it. So Hunter (in the third act which is totally different from the 1999 theatrical studio version) kills or knocks down all the killers at the train station. But even as he puts his hands on the blue backpack with the money, he’s shot down by a woman assassin (Helgeland said he liked having Hunter’s weak spot be women, which is why he made Bronson a woman, and had the coup de grâce delivered by a woman.) He staggers down the steps to the street, where three more hit men are waiting; manages to kill them by skill and dumb accident before he collapses in the gutter and passes out, seeming to die. But the woman from the photograph (Maria Bello), a hooker Hunter used to drive and bodyguard (in a nod to Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa apparently) appears – she’s been protecting Hunter and protected by him throughout the story – and slaps him back awake, revived from the dead again.

She drives him across the bridge he walked in on, and he lies there bleeding to death, the cash under his hand holding her hand. ‘Where to now?’ she asks and he answers, ‘Just drive, baby.’ (He’s mentioned a doctor who might save him, presumably the same one who saved him before, but Helgeland said he shaped this ending to be like that of Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman’s Luke ends up dying, and smiling, in the car at the end – only we don’t see him die there, and here too Helgeland wants to leave us able to choose our own ending.)

The movie is very hard-edged with a dry, laconic sense of humor. There isn’t any humor in the original story, as I recall, and in Point Blank the only moment of humor is when Walker reacts to the corporate Outfit’s executives when they seem to belittle what he’s asking them for. The humor here adds a very nice touch. One point that embarrasses me to watch is Lucy Liu’s turn as a dominant tough-broad hooker who beats up Val and is beaten by him. The whole concept is a bit ridiculous, doesn’t give me any chuckles, and could only work as referring to Val’s lack of manhood. And yet Hunter himself is unmanned by his feelings for women and the only ones to hit him are his wife and the hitwoman in sneakers at the station. But I’m sure all the teen boys loved seeing Lucy Liu in leather chaps using the whip on Val.

Point Blank is one of my favorites, and I like the original pulp novel too. The idea of the guy who has one focus and doesn’t let anything stand in the way of getting it, appeals a lot to me. It also has something of the flavor of the later Don Siegel movie Charlie Varrick, Last of the Independents when all the other members of the criminal underworld are employed by, or trying to be employed by, the Outfit, which is nothing but a white-collar corporation now, far from the notions of Puzo’s The Godfather or the gangster gangs of the 1930s. The lone operator, surviving by balls and brains – but mostly by brains, because balls alone just won’t plausibly make a dent in the Outfit – it’s something of an American ideal, something out of Westerns and movies as diverse as Tucker An American Dream.

(25 April 2009)

Lonely Hearts

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Lonely Hearts written and directed by Todd Robinson.

The story involves a notorious murder case in New York in 1949. A con man (Jared Leto) who preys on widows and spinsters hooks up with a femme fatale (Salma Hayek) to prey on widows and spinsters and murder them.

The film structure has a flash-forward, flashback structure, but mostly proceeds in parallel between the pathological relationship between the killers, and the investigation, focusing on the lead detective (John Travolta) who is troubled in his own way.

Credits run over a montage of shots of the period, ending with a scene of a woman who shoots herself in the head over a bathtub. Then we jump forward 3 years, as two detectives Robinson (John Travolta) and his partner (James Gandolfini) arrive at Sing Sing prison to witness an electrocution. Gandolfini’s voiceover narration then brings us back in time and carries us through the rest of the story.

The suicide, he tells us, was Robinson’s wife. After that Robinson, a tough, hard-boiled detective, confines himself to desk duty and won’t go out on cases. Until by accident he is called in on a suicide scene of a woman who slit her wrists in a bathtub. Robinson finds it troubling, and he covers the case. He knows it’s a ‘Lonely Hearts’ case and suspects murder.

Meanwhile Gandolfini’s narration also introduces us to Ray Martin Fernandez (Jared Leto), a con man and swindler who writes letters to lonely widows and spinsters. He gives them his line, takes their money, and leaves. But one time he meets in this way a real beauty Martha Beck (Hayek) who is a real psycho. She falls in love with him but is never fooled by him, and together they embark on their crime spree.

The detectives try to get a line on Raymond and his next victim. And we also see how the couple do it: Raymond sweet-talks the women, Martha pretends to be his sister, but she is driven to jealous fury when she seen him romancing another woman, and ends up murdering the girl. Raymond participates in the killing and disposal of the corpse, and they go on to their next woman.

Robinson, the detective, is troubled. He has a new girlfriend (Laura Dern) but tries to hide it. He can’t move on, he can’t face his son with a new love. His son Eddie is 15 and maybe troubled himself; neither one has fully grieved or come to terms with the wife and mother’s suicide. Because of that memory, Robinson drives himself all the harder to solve the Lonely Hearts murder cases.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan Ray and Martha find a new victim, a young widow with small girl living on a farm. It begins to look like Ray wants to ditch Martha and start over; he’s getting along so well with the widow, and when she gets pregnant he tells her to keep it a secret from Martha. But the widow confides in Martha, who promptly poisons her. The poison is still slowly working when Ray gets back with the groceries. Ray isn’t sure who to shoot, Martha or the widow; Martha challenges him to shoot her or the widow. ‘If I don’t have you I don’t want to live,’ Martha tells him. ‘So shoot, Ray, but do it out of love.’ He puts the gun to Martha’s head, but kills the widow instead.

Then he rushes to bring back quicklime to dispose of the body and is pulled over. He murders the cop who pulls him over, but the cop has radioed in Raymond’s name already. The couple go on to kill a farmer for his dog in a mixed-up effort to appease the little girl. But the girl won’t cotton to Martha, and she ends up dead and slaughtered as well.

Robinson and his partner arrive in Grand Rapids and they help the local cops track the couple to the farm. There they take them alive, and get Martha to confess. She almost brags about it. And so, in the end, Robinson and partner witness the electrocution of both the Lonely Hearts killers – and then he resigns from the force.

The voiceover tells us that Robinson takes his son and the boat he had built for his wife, and moved upstate, married his girlfriend, and took up a normal life again.

The first of the end titles tells us that the writer/director is the grandson of the detective, and dedicates the movie to the detective’s son, the writer’s father.

The movie is well made, a good recreation of the period. It moves rather slowly, and seems lugubrious. Travolta’s performance is quite melancholy, repressing his rage and grief. The only time the movie really comes alive is when Hayek and Leto are playing their games. There’s no joy there either, but Hayek really gives oomph to her insane jealousy, and when she does her sex thing, it’s funny in a sick, sick way. The movie really should have just told the killers’ story, and the domestic difficulties of the detective are a bit beside the point, though Robinson makes a game effort of connecting the two causally. He wanted to pay tribute to a famous story his family was connected with, but the real story here is not the investigation so much as the weird, sick love triangles between con man, victim, and lover.

But the chief problem is lack of any joy (or much vitality) and much suspense. The picture only comes alive when following the twisted lovers in their horrible crimes and ghastly-funny declarations of romantic love. Martha is particularly loopy in this regard. As for suspense, the flashback structure lets us know the bad guys were caught, and the only suspense we really are left with is whether the cops can prevent the killers from killing the little girl on the Grand Rapids farm.

(26 April 2009)

The Brave One

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Brave One a new take on Michael Winner’s Death Wish from so long ago – must be 30 years ago. This new one stars Jodie Foster as the vigilante, directed by Neil Jordan (though he doesn’t have any script or story credits) and was produced in part by Joel Silver.

The story: Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) has a radio show in which she does personal stories about New York city. She is happy and on top of the world. Her show is popular and they want to make a TV version. Her boss loves her. She has a fiancé who’s a doctor and they are so so so haaaaaaapy together that you know it will soon take a bad turn. Her friend even tells her, ‘you are too happy.’

Yep – they are attacked in the park, and brutally beaten. Fiancé ends up dead, Erica is in hospital 3 weeks recovering. She tries to get her life back together but is too upset. In constant fear – for her job entails walking all over the city – she tries to get a pistol, but the 30-day permit period seems too long for her so she buys an illegal gun.

Then one day in a convenience store she sees a murder. The killer knows she is in the store. To protect herself she kills him and runs away. Some days later, on the subway, she is threatened by some punks. She shoots both of them.

Now meanwhile we follow the parallel story of a police detective (Terence Howard) who ends up in charge of the investigation into the ‘vigilante killings’ as they come to be known. Erica kills again, but she also starts interviewing the detective. He used to listen to her show, so he talks to her when he won’t talk to the other media. They become friends.

She goes so far as to kill a wife-killer the detective tells her he wishes he could bring to justice. But this brings the detective to suspect her. He as much as tells her that he won’t let their friendship stand in the way of arresting her if he has enough evidence. But she is so distraught about the whole thing – she already tried to give herself up – that she doesn’t flinch.

Now just at the point when she swears she won’t do it any more (an artificial second curtain ‘bright moment’ insufficiently motivated to believe in) she gets a lead on the three guys who killed her fiancé and beat her up. She goes to kill them after they mail her video to her cell phone of the attack (one had a video camera while they were beating her). She forwards the video to the detective and goes to meet them. The detective is frantically trying to get there before anything can happen.

She finds the punks and kills one. She kills the second. But the third one gets the drop on her and is killing her with an iron bar when the detective comes in. She points her gun at the punk, detective points his gun at her. Standoff. Then she hands over her gun.

Then the detective hands her his own gun. Tells her to go ahead and shoot. She kills the third punk. Detective has it all figured out: it was these three punks who had the gun all along, they were just on a killing spree, there was no ‘vigilante’ after all. He makes her shoot him in the forearm with her gun (the ‘vigilante’ gun) so that he can report that the punk got in a fight with his partners and killed them all, and when the detective came the punk shot him, and the detective had to fire back in self-defense.

Erica walks away. She even gets her dog back (the punks took it after they beat her up – now this is impossible, say some guys attacked you and beat you up in front of Jack, would Jack be their pet for the next couple of months? Doubt it!). But her voiceover tells us there is no going back, she isn’t the woman she was before, she is that stranger – the killer.

There are a few visual riffs on Death Wish. But here are a couple problems: Bronson who starred in Death Wish was already an action star, had been in a leone western. The gun he gets is a colt 6-shooter. So Death Wish becomes a wrinkle on Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry: the ghost of the old Western justice come to visit the modern metropolis. We don’t really believe Charles Bronson as an architect, but when he gets that gun, we do – it’s as if Bronson is now becoming himself.

Contrast this to Jodie Foster who does not have that persona. The closest her film roles come to this is Taxi Driver and the real-life ugly incidents that followed it. it’s odd that she would be in this movie. And it twists my head to think of those three images – her now here, her in Taxi Driver, and her as an image in the assassination attempt. Of course she gives us her usual well-thought out, researched, skillful performance.

But what we have are three contrasting points of view wrestling for mastery in the picture: jodie wants to do a riveting psychological portrayal. Joel Silver and the Warners brass want a female Death Wish series. And Neil Jordan wants, it seems, to show that he can deliver a visually interesting picture as director, that he’s not just a writer.

So Jordan gives us beautiful visuals, and does all these fancy tricks with the camera that are completely inappropriate to the subject matter. This is a story that you either shoot flat, very matter-of-factly, gritty, realistically, naturalistically – or else you make it into a surreal nightmare (which Warners and Silver are NOT going to accept).

And Foster cries and tries to act beyond what the material will allow. I say ‘beyond it’ because if this woman is really so distraught, I can’t see her succeeding in what she does. She might be repressing everything in order to survive, and her control might come out of that, but then you doubly don’t want to shoot it in this hyper-real way that Jordan and Philippe Rousselot, the DP, use. You want to desaturate colors and aim at near black and white, you want to keep the camera eye-level, at a medium shot most of the time, an invisible camera style, and you want to emphasize control as she does. The camera has to be as repressive as she is, or else where is all the emotion in the camera moves coming from? From the woman who she is not letting out?

The finale is pure Joel Silver wish-fantasy garbage. I just can’t believe the detective doing what he did. For one thing, this detective is smart. He would know that if he lets erica go, she will kill again and go on killing until she gets herself killed. To protect others, to protect her, the detective can do her no better favor than to arrest her and see she is locked away.

But then, you see, you don’t get sequels!

(24 April 2009)

Changeling

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched Changeling the Clint Eastwood movie.

The story is ‘a true story’ based on a famous case in Los Angeles from the 1920s. In 1928 single mom Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), having promised her son they would go to the movies, instead has to work. When she gets home that night, her son is gone. She looks everywhere but he’s gone. The police try to find him, no good. But Collins is persistent, and her case attracts the attention of Reverend Gebleit (I probably spelled that wrong – John Malkovitch plays him) who is a crusader against the violent, corrupt LAPD. And he uses the case to ridicule the LAPD for incompetence along with violence and corruption.

Five months after she loses her son, Collins is told by the police that her boy Walter has been found in Iowa. They will meet him at the train station. There the Police Captain Jones and a gaggle of reporters are on hand to make the most of the publicity – the LAPD reuniting mother and missing child. But when she sees the kid, Collins says it’s not her son. The Captain, faced with the reporters, talks her into taking the kid home on a ‘trial basis’ for a couple weeks; the ordeal has changed him, he looks different, and if she doesn’t take care of him nobody will. Reluctantly Collins agrees, and the reporters all swarm around to take pictures of the happy family.

Collins grows more and more sure that this is not her son. She tries to tell this to Captain Jones, bringing evidence – the new kid is shorter, he is circumcised and her son wasn’t, the teacher knows he’s not the same, the dentist confirms it too. But the cops won’t listen, and even threaten her. At this point Collins lets the Reverend talk her into going to the press, but Captain Jones has her picked up and commits her in secret to a mental hospital.

There Collins is a prisoner, drugged, abused, and threatened. The doctor in charge is no more helpful or sympathetic than the cops, and uses double-talk to make her seem paranoid and unbalanced.

Meanwhile though, a detective finds up in a farm town outside LA (now called Mira Loma) evidence of a serial killer. Northcott, a Canadian, has forced his nephew to help him drive into LA, pick up boys, and bring them back to the farm, where Northcott cages them in the chicken coop before he chops them up with axes. Northcott has fled to Vancouver, but the nephew identifies Collins’s son Walter as one of the children he and Northcott abducted.

Collins is freed, and sues the city. Northcott is caught and brought back to trial. The two trials are held at the same time. As a result of the civil suit, Captain Jones is dismissed, the Chief made to resign, and the Mayor doesn’t run for re-election.

Two years later, just before he is hanged, Northcott telegrams Collins to tell her the truth about her son and how he killed him. Collins has refused to give up trying to find him, because maybe the nephew didn’t remember Walter right, and maybe Walter was one of the two or three kids who escaped. So she goes up to San Quentin penitentiary to meet Northcott. But he refuses to talk, and goes to the grave telling nothing.

Five years later (now it’s 1935) one of the missing boys turns up. He tells of the night he escaped. Two boys broke out, and he tried to follow, but got hung up on the chicken coop wire; one of the boys came back to help him – it was Walter Collins. The boy was separated from the other two, Walter and the other, as Northcott chased them. Since then the boy has been in hiding, afraid he might be accused of complicity.

Collins gains new hope from this news, and continues trying to find her son. She will spend the rest of her life in doing so, without success.

That’s the end of the movie. It’s a good period reconstruction, and Jolie is pretty good, taking at last a more mainstream, non-genre role. The guy playing Captain Jones, and the hospital doctor, are both great: Eastwood wants us to hate them and I sure did. The serial killer aspect of the story is downplayed, and emphasis centers on Christine Collins.

Here’s something interesting: this was a hot script that Brian Grazer and Ron Howard optioned for their Imagine company. Howard was supposed to direct, but he had two other pictures he wanted to do first, and so Grazer brought in Eastwood to do this; Eastwood says he likes to shoot pictures set in the Depression when he grew up. And his libertarian streak would lend himself to liking this story of how bad the cops and authorities can be. But Grazer and Howard had the screenwriter to a couple more drafts of the script, and Eastwood when he came on board went back to the first draft! He thought it had more heart and directness.

The problem I had with the script is – it covers too much ground. J. Michael Stracynzki (I probably spelled that wrong too – he’s most famous as the creator/producer of the TV show Babylon 5) just found too much in the real life stories that he liked, and was unable to let any of it go. In fact he did claim to let some of it go (for one thing, Northcott was aided in his crimes by his mother, but the mother is dropped) but once we leave Collins in the mental hospital and follow the investigation into the murders, the movie seems to be telling a different story. And then we have the two trials. And then we have the scenes of the hanging in San Quentin. And then we have the scenes from 5 years later. At some point it starts to feel as though this movie intends to tell the story of Los Angeles County for the next 80 years. It just doesn’t know when to stop.

Eastwood’s pace as usual is on the slow side. Well, old men make old men’s movies of course. But I wish they had concentrated just on the abuse of Collins and left it at that. Sam Fuller would have maybe left Collins in the psycho ward with the cops triumphant, and left it at that.

(22 April 2009)

In Bruges

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched In Bruges a ‘dramedy’ about a couple of irish thugs in Belgium.

Story involves the Laurel and Hardy of Irish hit men, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) who, after their latest murder, are ordered to go to the Belgium city of Bruges to lie low for a couple weeks.

Ken is older, an experienced, veteran killer. He enjoys sight-seeing in the town, which has preserved its medieval character. Ray is a young punk who is bored, doesn’t like history, and considers the city a shit-hole. Plus it’s coming onto Yule and the weather is just cold freezing fog all the time – pretty, but not pleasant. He only gets excited when he sees a movie production going on, crashes craft services, and chats up a pretty local girl who’s an extra. Though she’s a bit put off at his crass stupidity and insults to her town, for no obvious reason she drops her card, and Ray gets a date with her next night.

But Harry, their boss, called while they were out, and was very mad. Every other word in the message he leaves begins with the letter ‘f’ and he tells them in no uncertain terms to be there next night for his call. Ray still wants to go out on his date, so he bargains with Ken: if Ray will put up with another morning and afternoon of sight-seeing, then he can go on his date and Ken will stay home at night to take the boss’s call.

That day they visit an ancient church that is said to have a relic of Christ’s own dried blood which every now and then miraculously turns liquid before drying again. Ken wants to climb up to see the relic, and he does, but Ray leaves. On his own, Ray remembers the killing they did in London before they got sent to Bruges. The target was a priest, and Ray shot him over and over and killed him, but one of the bullets by accident killed a little boy at the altar. For this killing Ray still feels a heavy guilt and is moved to tears.

Ray gets his date at night, dresses up, and has various comic misadventures along the way, including meeting an American dwarf from the movie and beating a man and woman sitting at the next table in the restaurant. Just as he’s about to score with the girl, lying on her on her bed, and she’s stripped down to her slip, Ray feels a gun at the back of his head. It’s a guy threatening to kill him unless he hands over all his cash. Ray’s a tough guy and doesn’t take this too seriously; he easily gets the gun from the guy, but the girl tells him the gun only has blanks. Sure enough it does, but the guy is still threatening, so Ray shoots him in the eye, blinding him. Turns out the guy is the girl’s boyfriend – maybe former boyfriend – and the two of them had a little side business of luring tourists to her rooms and robbing them. ‘Christ! I knew it was too good to be true, that a nice girl like you would shag a guy like me!’ Ray exclaims. This profession of true love softens the girl’s heart, and though she has to take her boyfriend to hospital to see about his eye, she promises to see Ray again.

Meanwhile Ken gets the call from Harry, and it turns out the reason Harry sent them to Bruges was to give Ray a nice treat at the end of his life. Harry now orders Ken to murder Ray for killing the boy.

When Ray gets back in, the two lie about their evenings. Since Ray has stolen all the drugs from the girl’s stash, along with some live rounds for the boyfriend’s pistol, the two go out on the town, snorting coke with the dwarf and a couple of local whores before heading back to the hotel.

Ken says Harry didn’t call. But next morning he goes out to meet the local guy and get the gun to kill Ray. The local guy tells him the best place to kill Ray is in the park. When he gets back to the hotel, Ken finds that Ray has also gotten up early, and has gone to the park. There Ken watches Ray from a distance, makes up his mind, takes out the gun, and marches up behind Ray … to see that Ray is putting his own gun to his head to kill himself. Ken without thinking stops Ray from killing himself.

The two now have a heart-to-heart talk and reveal all. Ken takes Ray’s gun to save his life. He tells Ray to get on a train and go someplace else, and he’ll square things with Harry. Ray gets on the train and heads out and Ken calls Harry and tells him he didn’t kill Ray and if Harry wants to punish Ken for disobeying, he should come over to Bruges and do it.

But on the train the police stop Ray because the guy Ray beat up at the restaurant is pressing charges. Ray is put in jail and has to call the girl to bail him out. Ray promises to pay her back bail money as well as for the gun and the drugs he stole; the girl seems glad to see him.

Harry (Ralph Fiennes) is a cockney mob boss with a temper. He swears at his wife in a fit of rage when he gets the phone call from Ken, and heads out to Bruges himself. There he picks up a gun from the same gun dealer, and meets the half-blind boyfriend. He goes out to meet up with Ken. Together they go up top the famous bell tower to sort things out. But Ken knows he owes everything to Harry and tells him he doesn’t want to fight him, that whatever Harry has to do, he can do; he expresses his obligations and love for Harry, since years ago Harry killed the man who murdered Ken’s beloved wife, and has employed Ken in all the years since.

Meanwhile on the square below, Ray and the girl are having a fine time at an outdoor bar. The dwarf comes up dressed in a boy’s school uniform and tells them the shoot tonight is like a hell scene out of Hieronymus Bosch and they should come see it. They laugh and say they are going to go fuck instead. It looks like love.

In fact when Harry says he can’t kill Ken and starts down the bell tower stairs with him, it looks like everything will come out all right for all our heroes.

This is the second curtain, and the balance of comedy and drama were at this point upping the suspense for me. See, if a movie like this seems like it’s a tough gangster morality play (with a few laughs) then I figure it’s going to end in death. But if it’s a comedy about a couple stupid bumbling gangsters like fish out of water acting like tourists in a pretty ancient town (with a few dark tones) then I figure everybody is going to get away with whatever crimes and violence they’ve done, and there’s a possibility of redemption, or even of not taking anything seriously.

But then…

But then the boyfriend sees Ray and the girl laughing it up at the cafe, and he goes up the bell tower stairs and tells Harry he’s seen Ray, he’s alive, he’s just outside in the square. Immediately Harry and Ken engage in a struggle; Harry shoots Ken in the throat and leaves him to go kill Ray. Ken drags himself up to the top of the tower, attracts a crowd, and leaps to his death. This brings Ray who has a few last words with Ken – Ken warns him Harry is in town.

Ray runs off, chased by Harry. It almost looks like Ray has made a getaway, too far off for Harry to hit him, but Harry’s aim is true and Ray gets blasted right through the chest. All the same he still manages to stumble on through the town, right in the middle of the movie shoot where actors are dressed up like visions out of the Last Judgment painting by Hieronymus Bosch that Ken and Ray saw while sight-seeing. Harry relentlessly follows Ray and in front of the whole set blasts Ray through the chest several more times. Ray turns to him and says, ‘The little boy,’ and Harry answers, ‘Exactly – for the little boy.’ But then Harry sees that his bullets have killed a little fellow past Ray, dressed in a school uniform. True to his earlier word, Harry prepares to blow his brains out on the spot for having killed a child. Ray tries to tell him it was a dwarf not a child, but he can’t get all the words out, and Harry tells him it’s for his ‘principles’ and kills himself.

The last scene is shot from Ray’s point of view as he is taken into an ambulance. We see the girl weeping over him, the medical team putting the oxygen mask over the lens, but all we hear is Ray’s thoughts as he makes up his mind that if he lives he will go to the mother of the boy he killed and confess all and take whatever punishment, even if it’s death. ‘Only I really really hoped I wasn’t going to die.’

The script treads a fine line between comedy and tragedy. It’s this mixing of genres that provides most of the entertainment and suspense. (The acting is also damn good by the three leads, all veterans.) If the movie seems more like a comedy, we don’t expect to see everybody end up bloody dead; and even though there’s lots of fake blood, the script treats the violence like a cartoon – there is no way that Ray shot through the chest by a dumdum bullet would be able to walk a few blocks; he’d be dead on the spot. And Ken is shot through the throat and bleeds a few gallons but still is able to drag himself up to the top of the bell tower before Harry can race to the bottom.

But then there’s the killing of the little boy. And most of all, Ray breaks out into tears of anguish over having done this – twice he breaks down. Stan Laurel broke into tears plenty of times in his movies, but the tears were over trivialities and treated for laughs; not so with Ray’s tears.

So the success of the movie in convincing you, one way or the other, that it’s a comedy in the second curtain scene between Ken and Harry atop the bell tower, is what makes the suspense work. Will Harry walk away? Even though he shoots Ken, he shoots him in the leg and it’s treated for laughs; we wouldn’t believe it if Harry let Ken of scot-free, but a punishment like a shot in the foot or leg seems like it should be enough, and Harry even helps Ken down the stairs. Meanwhile Ray and the girl are enjoying each other’s company and it’s looking good all around. The boyfriend (here allegorically half-blind) must tip the balance over into tragedy. The boyfriend himself is a character who could be a buffoon in a comedy or a dangerous punk in a drama, and the seed that this will not be a comedy after all is planted when Harry meets the gun dealer and the boyfriend is there. Then the boyfriend tells Harry that he will never see out of that blind eye again.

In a comedy, all wounds are healed and no violence is permanent, and therefore all can be forgiven. In a drama, wounds linger and fester and there may be no forgiveness; everything has its consequences and its price and all bills must be totted up and paid before the final curtain.

(18 April 2009)

Willie Dynamite

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Willie Dynamite from the heyday of blaxploitation films.

The story chronicles the fall from heights of a pimp, Willie. As we first see Willie, he’s on top of the world, commanding the finest stable of hookers in the City, driving a pimped-out purple Cadillac with gold trim and fur-lined seats, wearing real fur. He sends his girls out to work, with especial orders for his newest, finest, Passion, who doesn’t seem to understand that she’s an independent businesswoman. Willie gives her a pep talk worthy of an Amway distributor; after all Willie is a capitalist, he is the finest example of the market’s entrepreneurs.

After this Willie meets up with the other top pimps of town. Bell, who seems to have a rivalry going on with Willie, proposes they all join forces, pooling their cop-bribes and divvying up the territories. Bell has big business in mind, a sort of pimps’ conglomerate. But though the others are all eager for it, Willie is determined to go it alone. ‘I like the competition!’ he exclaims. ‘It’s what capitalism is all about!’

But things quickly turn bad for Willie. The cops start hassling him every chance they get. His women get run in, especially Passion; his car is towed wherever he parks it. One salt-and-pepper cop team comprised of a Black Muslim exercise in self-righteousness and a tired old white cop who only wants to brutalize suspects on his way to retirement, seem to be on Willie’s ass everywhere he turns.

Passion meanwhile is being tempted to leave Willie’s employ by a social worker, the black DA’s girlfriend. Passion seems interested at first in a life of modeling and maybe acting, but she scoffs at the paltry sums involved. She knows she can make five times as much on her back for Willie.

The social worker takes this as a challenge. She busts into Willie’s girls’ apartment and start undermining his authority with them. Later she returns and finds his secret stash of bank books. She copies down all the amounts and accounts, feeds them through the DA to an IRS agent, and gets Willie’s accounts frozen.

Willie can only find solace at his mom’s home. His mom is not too well, but all the family gather there every week for Sunday dinner. They only know Willie is a musical impressario and his girls, they think, are a singing group. Willie lavishes gifts on his mom and doesn’t disabuse his relatives of their illusions.

But Bell makes moves to grab Willie’s girls; he also tries to kidnap Willie, but Willie turns the tables on him and leaves Bell naked under an overpass in the Bronx.

Without cash, Willie goes to a rundown neighborhood to get his secret stash of dope, to sell for cash. The pair of detectives are hot on his trail, and Willie has to do some fancy running through torn down buildings and vacant lots to escape, in what is the movie’s finest, most realistic, sequence.

But the end is near for Willie. Bell gets all his girls, and his thugs work Willie over; the cops drag him in for another petty bust, and in a final indignity, Willie must watch as the street punks strip his Caddy.

At his hearing, Willie knows he can beat the rap, because the cops had no warrant to enter his apartment. But his mom shows up in the courtroom and suffers a heart attack.

When he gets out of jail the next day, Willie goes wild. Doped up, he goes for Bell with an automatic, but only shoots up his car. Visions of Passion, who was scarred by the dykes in the jail, haunt him. When he gets back to his place, there’s his nemesis the social worker. She tells him his mother is in the hospital – he gets there and apologizes for himself to his mom, only to see her die.

He breaks down in his car. In the film’s best-acted scene, Willie and the social worker have their final confrontation back at his place. She doesn’t rejoice to see him brought down. She was a girl like Passion herself, she confesses. Willie gives her an envelope, ‘for Passion. Make her all right again.’ And he says, speaking perhaps of Passion or himself, ‘cut and bruises heal in time.’

He goes outside to find his Caddy being towed again. But he doesn’t seem to care now. When a young kid asks him if the car is his, Willie answers, ‘No – not any more.’

The movie has strong and weak points. The script is trying to touch on too many bases at once. Willie as the entrepreneur is a good satire on the success movements; this is then dropped for standard crime movie conflicts with rival pimps; then we move on to being hassled by the man (perhaps at Bell’s urging, though this is never made explicit; these cops are tough and almost lawless, but they are not shown to be corrupt). Then there is the more melodramatic side story of Passion and the social worker, action scenes like the chase through the tenements, a revenge bit against Bell, mom’s heart attack…

The direction is television level, just getting the camera to give basic coverage. Lighting is also adequate but not expressive. Costumes and makeup are all good (apart from the f/x for bruises, which are weak).

Acting is quite strong, all the cast is good for their roles. The general acting style is a little broad and over the top, but not out of line for a crime genre picture. And the intentions are all good.

Music is only so-so, very typical of the early 70s. But somebody had the idea they wanted to copy Superfly and its use of songs as a sort of Greek chorus. Though not up to Curtis Mayfield’s score, the three songs give us the opening – Willie on top – second curtain – Willie’s lowest point – and end, the hoped-for rise to come.

The weakness lies mostly in the movie’s lack of authenticity. Compared to Superfly, this seems like a typical Universal TV cop drama with some cusswords. Zanuck and Brown produced out of Universal, which enabled the production to have the money for decent costumes and shooting schedule, DP, and so on. But the drawback to having a couple of white Hollywood execs make a blaxploitation picture is that at the top of the production, there is no understanding of the black experience. Those two didn’t know their audience. So the result is rather like today with grandfathers shepherding pictures aimed at teens. ‘Give them some of this and some of that, the kids seem to go for that crap,’ you can imagine them saying, over and over again, in script notes and production meetings.

This was not all that different from what happened when just a couple years earlier Hollywood had tried to make hip drug movies about the counter-culture.

(14 April 2009)

True Romance

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched True Romance and I just can’t write about it yet. But I ought to say something to start with, anyway. I really like Quentin Tarantino’s writing on the surface level. I just wish he had written something about life. He reminds me of comic book illustrators who only learned how to draw from copying other comic book artists. They never learned how to draw a real person or building or anything from life. It’s just stylization of stylization. With Quentin Tarantino it’s even worse, because he’s honest enough to tell you in his script what are the movies he is stealing from. Yeah I know Kids who will go on and on about the ‘cool movies’ or comics they have seen or read. But when you make a movie which just has a Kid telling you about the cool movies he has seen, it seems beside the point. Why am I not watching those cool movies instead of this movie telling me that other movies are cooler?

Tony Scott directed, and it’s kind of a joke to see the dvd marked ‘director’s cut’ since there really is no personality to any entity called ‘Tony Scott’ – this is all Quentin Tarantino all over the place, and (to carry the comics illustration metaphor a little farther) this is just Tony Scott playing Mike Royer to Quentin Tarantino’s Jack Kirby. He’s just inking what Quentin Tarantino has drawn and trying to exactly duplicate the pencil lines. Though I will say that Scott knows how to shoot a scene better than Quentin Tarantino ever will.

The opening and closing voice over narration by Patricia Arquette gives you the poetry of Quentin Tarantino, and the scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper is just great dialogue delivered by two masters. A wonderful scene.

The story is just junk and teen boy fantasy. It plays out like a dream, and the embarrassing moments come when Tony Scott tries to pretend that he cares, or wants us to care, about somebody dying. The most ludicrous example of this is the cop who has about 3 lines, he gets shot at the climax and dies. And we have a long lingering shot of him dying. Like we care. Like anybody who would like this movie, or would like Quentin Tarantino’s arrant badassery, as tim calls it, would care about anybody dying. It’s just a movie quote after all.

Christian Slater plays a nerd name of Clarence Worley who loves Sonny Chiba movies and works for peanuts in a comic book store. Not unsurprisingly, this guy has no girlfriend! so his boss the store manager hires a hooker to ‘accidentally’ meet him at a Sonny Chiba triple feature and pretend to fall in love with him, and sleep with him. So they do that. Only she does begin to fall in love with him. And she confesses all this after the fact. He falls for her too – why wouldn’t he, she’s like a dream come true to him – and they get married.

Now casting Patricia Arquette as the girl, ‘4 days into a life as a call girl which is not a whore there’s a difference you know’ – is just perfect. But Christian Slater is not well cast as the Kid, because he’s not nerdy enough to be the geek at the opening, and he’s also not cool enough to be the master gangster of the end. I don’t really know who could have pulled it off. Brad Pitt has a small comedy role as a stoner, and he could have done it, but he would never be believable as the nerd who doesn’t have a girl friend.

So there’s a problem with the structure of the script. The lead can’t be cast. You have to go one way or the other: A real geek who won’t be believable as the guy who gets away with it at the end, or a badass mofo who’s unbelievable as the nerd. Scott goes with Slater as a badass type. But I think I would rather have seen the geek. This movie really should have toned the violence way down and the language as well, and gone comedy and satire all the way. Because the more satirical scenes are the ones that succeed best.

Now this Kid is also obsessed with Elvis, but not any Elvis you ever knew. Instead his Elvis is a badass. And in his fantasies Elvis tells him what to do. And Elvis tells him to go over to the pimp’s place, the pimp who owned Patricia, and kill him. This is not what any comic book store geek would have nerve to do, and he certainly would not be able to get away with it.

Anyway, Slater goes on over. The pimp is a sort of keystone to the movie and its notions. It’s a black pimp played by british actor Gary Oldman in his hollywood badass period. Oldman is quite watchable. But the scene is ridiculous. So the british actor is playing a black pimp wannabe. Who is totally scary and intimidating in that Gary Oldman way, and somehow Slater turns the tables on him and manages to kill him. This is presented as the Kid having the balls and guts to do it, but really it should be a total accident, just lucky – again, the scene would have worked better as a comedy rather than chilling and thrilling.

Oh yeah, in collecting his wife’s dresses from the pimp’s place, the Kid finds a suitcase full of cocaine, and he steals this.

Problem is, Gary Oldman had stolen that suitcase from ‘Blue Lou’ a bigtime gangster, and though the cops don’t care who killed a pimp, Blue Lou wants his coke back, and sends out Christopher Walken and his Sicilian boys to get it. Walken kills the Kid’s dad (Hopper) and learns that the Kid has gone from cold snowy Detroit to LA.

In LA, the Kid hooks up with a longtime buddy, who’s trying to be an actor. Through the actor they set up a deal to sell the cocaine to a big Hollywood producer. But the gangsters are after them, and the police get wind of the sale too.

It all comes together in a swanky luxury hotel suite, with cops and bodyguards and gangsters in a shootout, the Kid gets his eye shot out, but the cops and bad guys all kill one another, and the Girl gets the Kid out, and they make it with the money to Mexico, where all outlaws with money dream of going. And in Cancun they raise their little boy named Elvis.

Tarantino is trying here to marry abstraction and idealism with gritty ‘reality’ as real as he can manage. So what it is, is a mashup of romance movie with crime movie. Star vehicle with action genre flick. That is tough to do, and escapes Tony Scott, but I don’t think anybody could have pulled this off. Scott would later, I think, go on to direct Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers script, which covers a lot of the same ground, and there too the satirical scenes play pretty well, but the action and bloodletting just seem unexciting and overkill. Yes they can fire off a hundred rounds and blast sound around the theater, yes they can splash fake blood over the actors. But it ends up just an assault on the senses that leaves me stunned, exhausted. Which is why I didn’t want to write about it immediately, and I thought I didn’t have anything to say about it.

I wonder if Quentin Tarantino would have been a better writer or director if he had had to work in genre with low budgets for a decade before being feted as an a-picture star.

(14 April 2009)

Mr Brooks

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Mr Brooks a recent film that aspires to be the film that launches the careers of the new versions of the Coen Brothers. Coen Brothers launched on Blood Simple a twisty story of killing and revenge and guilt with many cool shots.

Mr Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a well-respected Oregon businessman, man of the year of his chamber of commerce, and a super-wealthy man who owns a box business. He also has a hobby of making pottery in his own studio with his own kiln which turns out to be a very convenient way of disposing of the evidence of his other hobby, which is killing people.

Mr Brooks, you see, is a serial killer. He is aided in this ‘addiction’ by his alter ego ‘Marshall’ (William Hurt) who is the one egging Mr Brooks on to kill and kill again. Mr Brooks does fight to control his addiction, but as our movie opens, after going without for a full 2 years, Mr Brooks – after enduring the awards banquet naming him Man of the Year – succumbs to Marshall’s temptation and kills a couple making love in their apartment.

Unfortunately, the couple liked to make love with the lights on and the drapes open, so all their neighbors could watch; and tonight one of those neighbors saw them killed. What’s more, he also was taking photographs.

Mr Brooks has his own problems with his daughter, who shows up at his office and declares she’s dropping out of school. But Mr Brooks and Marshall both know the daughter is lying, covering up something else, the real reason she left school.

But wait – ‘Mr Smith’ appears at Mr Brooks’s office the same afternoon, with pictures of Mr Brooks at the scene of the murder. He’s not a blackmailer though, all he wants to do is experience the thrill he felt when he saw the lovemaking couple killed, but again, and up close. All he wants is to be there when Mr Brooks kills again.

A pretty puzzle, that the scriptwriter/director delights in. Now I must ask, why is America so enamored of serial killers? I don’t know, but I trace it all back to The Silence of the Lambs and its sequels, and Anthony Hopkins’s charismatic performance as a serial killer.

Be that as it may, Mr Brooks starts taking ‘Mr Smith’ around cruising for a victim – Mr Brooks is very choosy about his victims – and at home, Mr Brooks finds out the reason why his daughter has quit school: she’s pregnant. Oh no, the daughter says that is not the real reason, and Marshall, Mr Brooks’s alter-ego, agrees that the girl is still hiding something, something really big. This we discover when a couple of cops from the college town arrive. There was a murder on campus, a bloody savage murder with a hatchet which was left on the scene, and daughter-Brooks is the prime suspect.

Yes, that’s right: we have not one serial killer, but a serial killer in training (‘Mr Smith’) and a fledgling serial killer, daughter Brooks. All we need now is for Mrs Brooks to be a serial killer, and pretty soon everybody in the cast will be killing, killing, killing! But Mrs Brooks doesn’t get anything interesting to do but be good wife.

While all this is going on – isn’t it enough? Not for our neo-Coens – we follow the detective who is on the case of the ‘Thumbprint Killer’ or as we know him, Mr Brooks. The detective is played by Demi Moore, and she is also, as it happens, fabulously wealthy. Her father was a very successful banker, but she works as a cop, and a good one. But her second marriage to a handsome younger jerk is ending, and the jerk is asking for millions of walk-away money.

But wait, there’s more! The detective is famous for sending yet another serial killer, Meeks, aka ‘The Hangman’ to jail. But Meeks has escaped and is looking for revenge against the detective. And, he has a tough as nails girl accomplice. So our scorecard is now up to five, yes, five serial killers in the story. Heavens, is everybody in Portland a serial killer or wannabe?

Mr Brooks debates what he should do. On the one hand it would be best to let his daughter be convicted and go to jail, because she is going to kill again unless she is stopped now. And Mr Brooks wants to die and end it all. On one level he is tired of all these games. But he loves his daughter, which prompts him to fly down to the college town, and kill somebody else using the same methods of the hatchet, to give his daughter an alibi and send the police looking for a serial killer who’s still down there.

That much taken care of, Mr Brooks turns his attentions to the problem of Mr Smith. This is very complicated, but in the end, to cut to the end, Mr Brooks has murdered ‘Mr Smith’ and convinced the police that ‘Smith’ was the ‘Thumbprint Killer’ and he has killed the detective’s ex-husband and his lawyer, and he has sent the detective to where Mr Brooks knows (by amazing coincidence) Meeks, the ‘Hangman’ is hiding out. The detective gets rid of her husband, she becomes a hero when she does away with Meeks and his girlfriend in a pitched gun battle which is staged, I suspect, for no other reason than to give us lots of cool shots of guns blazing and an exciting action scene for a climax.

Mr Brooks is left only with the problem of his daughter, future serial killer. There are a couple ways it could end. She might even decide to kill daddy. The neo-Coens solve this in an ingenious though well-worn method, showing daughter kill daddy in bloody savage attack, then twist and reverse and presto, it was a dream, a nightmare Mr Brooks was having.

Mr Brooks ends the movie just as he began it, reciting the Serenity Prayer in what we all know will be a useless effort to overcome his addiction.

The casting is interesting. For my money, reversing Costner and Hurt was the natural play: Costner is very good at playing footloose and feckless and charming, as he showed with his first breakthrough in Fandango and William Hurt is much better at showing tormented depths. It was perhaps a clever joke to put them in roles against the grain. On the other hand Costner is a bigger name, and he would probably jump at a chance to play against type, stretch himself, do something dark and very different. (The scenes in cars with Costner in front seat and Hurt in back reminded me a little of that Tom Cruise movie where he played a heartless hit man being driven around by Jamie Foxx. In fact I’m sure that hip people, who have seen and memorized Coen brothers films and other violent serial killer movies, could find many quotes and cribs here in Mr Brooks.)

I didn’t like it. I was about to turn it off. I kept watching, and in the end the intellectual puzzle had me hooked, despite many implausibilities and loopholes. The main tour de force here is in trying to get the audience to be rooting for a serial killer to kill again. They almost pulled it off with me; I can’t answer for anybody else.

Only I wonder, why should anybody spend millions of dollars to get people to root for a murderer? And why should audiences spend $10 for a ticket to watch killing after killing and enjoy it? We are all serial killers; maybe this is the point, maybe the movie is simply presenting us with evidence of our own depravity as proven by the fact that we paid money to watch and haven’t walked out. On the other hand, this movie, produced for a very small budget (as Kevin Costner vehicles go) was a flop.

Maybe Americans aren’t serial killers after all?

(9 April 2009)

Shanghai Triad

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Shanghai Triad a 1995 movie from Zhang Yimou with the exquisite Gong Li.

It’s a gangster movie set in the 1930s. Based on a book, Gang Rules. But credits say basically ‘loosely based on’ so they just took a couple situations, couple ideas, from the book. All the same, there are several references to ‘the rules’ which survive, obviously, from the book.

The basic story is a very old one: the head of the Tang family in Shanghai has a lovely young mistress who’s a showgirl at the city’s hottest nightclub. The boss only trusts other men from the Tang family; but this doesn’t prevent his right hand man Song from betraying him, first by fucking the mistress, then by dealing with a rival gangster to take over the Tang crime triad. The old boss, however, has kept watch on all his men, and knows all about this; he lets Song play his hand, then has Song killed, along with mistress Gong Li.

The interesting twist on this is seeing it all through the eyes of 14 year old Shengsui, a ‘country bumpkin’ Tang relative fresh from the country, who is given the job of being the mistress’s servant and gofer. This whole story is compressed into, the credits tell us, 7 days (although they show us at least 8 days; I guess the number 7 was important enough for them to cheat). Each day is counted off with titles: First Day, Second Day, … Fifth Day, Sixth Day, Seventh Day. The kid at first hates Gong Li’s ‘Miss’ because he sees how cruel and bitchy she is, and because she mocks him and calls him stupid. But when they all have to hide out on a small island, and the kid sees who ‘Miss’ really is – for she was once a country bumpkin herself, before the Boss pulled her into this life – he comes to like her and even love her. But she dies and there is nothing the kid can do about that; more, the kid sees that the cute little girl on the island will be the next ‘Miss’ in a few years, as the Boss takes her back to Shanghai.

As usual here with Yimou, the production is gorgeous and impeccable: costumes, props, sets, musical numbers, the reeds by the water along the banks of the island, the setting sun, the moon over the water. Colors are fully saturated, with an almost golden, orange yellow predominating – the usual ‘nostalgic past time’ color photographers pick. Also red, of course, from Gong Li’s mouth to blood on knives to dresses. He makes a big deal out of mirrors in the kid’s introduction to Shanghai Triad life too, then on the island of course the mirrors disappear. I guess this underscores the falseness and superficiality of the gangster lifestyle, and contrast it with the sincerity and reality of peasant life on the island.

By telling the tale through the kid’s eyes, Yimou also tells us a coming of age tale; even as the little girl is now planned to be the next ‘Miss’ so Shengsui is probably being planned to be the next Song – if he’s smart enough and ruthless enough.

One bit that let me down was an emphasis on long steadicam shots representing the kid’s point of view wandering up and down the stairs of a mansion, or through the paths on the island, without cutting back to seeing the kid walking. The bravura of the uninterrupted long steadicam take seems to predominate over good filmmaking, and in general the approach to anchoring us to the kid is weak. But since the story is constructed around his experiences, the film gets away with it.

A beautiful film, but in the end, beauty is not enough. And there is something lacking in the effects. There are shots to remember a long time, but they’re only shots. The film means less than those shots and the production design.

(01 April 2009)

Bad Day at Black Rock

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Bad Day at Black Rock made in 1955 at MGM and directed by John Sturges. Ice Station Zebra DVD had a trailer for this, so I watched it.

The story is set in 1946 or so. Just after the war ends. In a small town in the desert east of Los Angeles, by the mountains – maybe it’s in Nevada – the train pulls to a stop, and a man in black gets off. Spencer Tracy, a man with one crippled arm. The telegraph operator is shocked: train hasn’t stopped at Black Rock in over four years.

The townsfolk are suspicious of the stranger. Nobody wants to help him or answer any of his questions. Particularly when they learn he’s interested in going out of town to Adobe Flats to see a man named Kumoko.

A man named Smith (Robert Ryan) seems to be running the town in good old western bad man fashion. Tracy manages to get a girl to rent him her jeep, and he drives up to Adobe Flats, where he finds a well, and a burned down farmhouse, and a few wildflowers growing in the dust. He picks a couple and heads back to town.

On the way back he’s run off the road by one of Smith’s goons. In town it gets even worse: even though Tracy now only wants to leave, nobody will let him go. The next train doesn’t come through until tomorrow morning. The local sheriff is no good; the telegraph operator won’t send his telegrams to the police, and the telephone wires out of town are cut. The old doctor offers to lend him his hearse to drive out, but it’s too late, the goons have wrecked the motor. Tracy can’t even walk out; as soon as he leaves the confines of the town he’ll be killed.

After dark, he is promised, he will be murdered.

Finally he turns on one of the goons, and beats him up, though he’s only got one good arm. Tracy is a veteran, and lost the use of the arm in battles in Italy. Now in the hotel lobby he confesses he was all washed up, ready to give up living, when he came to town. He only stopped here because Kumoko’s son saved Tracy’s life in Italy and died in the battle; Tracy wanted to leave the kid’s medal with his father, then go on to Los Angeles and take a ship to someplace where he could just leave his life behind. But now that Smith has threatened his life, he’s come to realize how precious it is, and he wants to fight.

He manages to persuade the young hotel clerk to tell him what happened to Kumoko: just after Pearl Harbor, Smith went to LA to join the army, but was turned down on medical reasons. He came back to Black Rock sore and mad and got drunk with his buddies. Once they were mean drunk, they went up to Kumoko’s ranch. Smith hates Japs anyway, and he hates Kumoko even more, because Kumoko worked hard on the place at Adobe Flats that Smith leased to him, and dug a well and found water. Smith felt cheated and made a fool of, so he took his boys up there and taunted Kumoko. Kumoko locked himself in, and Smith set the place on fire and when Kumoko stumbled out, Smith shot him. They buried him up there where the wildflowers are growing. Tracy figured the wildflowers marked a grave, and guessed it was Kumoko’s.

Tracy manages to get help from the few decent folks left in the town, and he rides out; but he’s betrayed by the girl driving him – she takes him right up to where Smith is waiting. But Smith shoots the girl to do away with one witness, and comes after Tracy. Tracy rigs a molotov cocktail from the jeep and overcomes Smith.

In the morning Tracy drives Smith back to the jail. The sheriff has found his self-respect again. As the train pulls into the station, Tracy prepares to leave; the town’s doctor asks if he won’t leave Kumoko’s kid’s medal for the town, ‘Something for us to build on.’ Tracy agrees, and gets on the train, and rides out. 24 hours have passed since he came to town.

This is another widescreen picture from MGM. Dore Schary got Producer credits, it was shot in Cinemascope, and they built a nice convincing little town out in the scrub desert. All the outdoor shots are nice, they really emphasize the dryness and emptiness, but the skies are blue with white clouds and not blown out; colors are good, exposures are good all around. Sturges gives us a good feeling for being trapped and confined without any walls, just deadly desert all around.

The interiors don’t work quite so well. These were all shot on soundstages back in Culver City, and it shows. We can see out the windows the painted walls posing as the out of doors. The exposures are too dark inside, and through the windows the exposures are not blown out enough. The contrast between the realistic location footage and the interiors is too much for me.

Robert Ryan played this sort of sneering bigot in many films. He’s not given too much to work with here, so he just gives us another excellent portrayal. Nowhere near Ryan’s best, but Ryan was so good, he’s still good. Ernest Borgnine (13 years later to act for Sturges in Zebra) plays one of the goons – the one Tracy beats up. The other head goon is played by Lee Marvin, and Marvin is always a joy to watch. Marvin had a great physical gift; he really looks like a cowpoke here, lazy and coiled like a panther. He was one of the great physical actors. But this is early in his career, when he was playing mostly second-tier goons and hoods. Watching him in these early roles makes me wonder by what miracle he ever got to be a leading man.

For this movie, Sturges was nominated as Best Director at the Oscars. Shocking.

One thing I can see runs between this and Zebra is that Sturges likes longshots – at least in widescreen shooting. In Zebra this is a flaw, because it keeps us out of the emotions, out of the action, and is totally out of place when shooting the cramped confines of a submarine. In Black Rock though, the widescreen shots really help give us the landscape in the exteriors. The interiors are still longshots though, which is too bad. He just doesn’t build up the suspense, the sense of Tracy being trapped, his growing desperation.

(31 March 2009)

A World Without Thieves

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched A World Without Thieves a 2004 movie starring Andy Lau - same producers as The Banquet. Wow, really good. I have yet to see a movie with Andy Lau that was not a good story.

Andy and his girlfriend are thieves. They just heisted a BMW from an embassy or something, and drove it to Tibet to fence it (why Tibet? no reason except for plot as you’ll see). Along the way, girl gets second thoughts, she’s sick of their life and of Andy. Andy jokes with her. In Tibet she prays, ‘Just because I want to sincerely pray for once in my life.’ Meanwhile Andy is stealing cell phones and anything else his nimble fingers can get hold of. But at the same time, there’s a smart-looking babe who’s doing the same thing. Andy and babe bump shoulders, and he smiles and flirts with her.

Heading back (still in the car, or maybe it’s another one?) Andy and girlfriend get in a real fight. It ends up with her quitting him, and he leaves her stranded by the road in the middle of nowhere. There is no building or stream or tree within miles.

Now down this road comes a group of peasants on their beat-up bicycles. They are from a remote chinese village, and have been working to restore the temples – it’s a skill that is traditional to their village. One of them, a holy fool they call ‘Dumbo’ and who has no other name, wants to cash in his money to go back to the village to take a wife. As they pass the girl, Dumbo stops and gives her a ride to the next small town. They hit it off, and Dumbo gives her a talisman a lama gave him, that is said to quell the demons in one’s heart.

There Dumbo gets his money, a lot – 60,000 yuan. Now his boss tells him to wire the money back to home village, but Dumbo doesn’t want to, because the wire service will take 1% charge, and that’s enough to buy a donkey. ‘Better to give up 600 than lose all 60,000,’ the boss tells him. But Dumbo is stubborn and takes the cash. Dumbo that evening goes out in the fields to say good-bye to the wolves. Every new year’s the other workers have gone home, but Dumbo stayed, with only these wolves for company, and he talks to them.

They see him off at the train station, and Dumbo, still pissed, shouts, ‘Hey! who’s going to take my 60,000? Are any thieves here?’

Of course Andy and his girl are there – Andy has caught up to her and apologized in the station. The sharp looking babe thief is there too, along with her leader, Uncle Li, and his whole team of robbers.

The girl makes it her mission to protect Dumbo from all the ‘wolves’ on the train who would rob him. Andy tags along, mocking her, mocking Dumbo, too. Andy is no saint here.

So that’s act 1: Everybody is now on the train for a few days, Uncle Li’s crew out to steal the money, the girl to defend it, and Andy helping the girl, though he’d love to take the money too. The way Andy sees it, he’s only doing Dumbo a favor, it’s not right to be ignorant, Dumbo would be better off wiser and not so trusting.

Andy crosses swords (well not swords literally, more sleight-of-hand and small flashy moves like pickpockets use) with all the levels of Uncle Li’s crew. He beats them, at every level. The girl does her best to protect Dumbo, but it’s really Andy who is the one saving the money.

He does this mockingly, and finally he lets the sharp-looking babe take the money, then takes it from her. So he can say he didn’t take it from Dumbo. And Andy gets off the train at the next station. There he has a fight with his girl again, and they argue their philosophical positions as to Dumbo. ‘Why are you protecting him? what’s changed? Why? Why?’ Andy demands, and at last the girl answers, ‘I’m pregnant with your baby, and I want to do penance so he will have good karma when he’s born.’

Finally Uncle Li challenges Andy directly: Uncle Li will get the money, or he will leave Andy and Dumbo alone; But if Andy loses, Uncle Li will get Andy to join his gang. Andy does everything he can, but with a trick, one of Uncle Li’s gang fools him, and the money is lost.

Andy has lost. But wait! The packet of money has no money in it – just money for funerals, fake money. Uncle Li has lost! But wait! Andy didn’t switch the money either – so who did?

Turns out there’s an undercover cop on the train who’s been onto Andy and his girl from the beginning. He could have arrested them a long time ago, but he was curious why they were protecting Dumbo. Maybe he is also using Dumbo’s naivete to draw out any other thieves on the train.

The cop rounds up all the gang but Uncle Li and sharp-babe, but he gets them in the end when sharp-babe double-crosses Li. Andy and the girl the cop gets when they go to see Dumbo, who has given blood to another passenger and fainted; They stand over him, wishing that he might never have to wake up and so he could go right on dreaming he lives in a world without thieves. Then the cop comes in, and tells them he’s onto them. He switched the money eariler, and now he puts it back into Dumbo’s bag.

It all seems like it’s over, but … Not quite. As the train travels into town, slowing toward the station, Andy and his girl slip up into the ventilator compartment above the main cabins. And down the car, so does Uncle Li! Even as Andy is climbing onto the roof, the girl sees Uncle Li where he looks down through the opening into the compartment where Dumbo, and the money, are.

Andy pushes the girl up on the roof, ‘Wait for me,’ he says, and he confronts Uncle Li who has the money. The two face off, one final time, as the train slows into the station…

… In the station, Uncle Li’s gang members are rounded up in police cars. A blind begger – we recognize Uncle Li in disguise – tries to get off the platform, but is met by the cop, who sees through the disguise.

5 MONTHS LATER

The girl is pregnant, very much along. She is eating mu-shu ravenously. Someone comes up – it’s the cop. ‘Don’t wait for him, he’s not coming,’ the cop says. ‘Let me finish eating first,’ she answers. He tells her that his wife is also expecting, and also eating everything, just to make sure the baby gets enough nutrition.

A series of flash cuts to the past tells the tale of the final battle:

Andy won, he beat Uncle Li, and his bloody hand drops the bag with the money down beside the sleeping Dumbo. But Uncle Li has a hook on a string, and it catches Andy right on his neck. Li slips out as Andy lies there, bleeding to death, but pounding on the floor of the ventilation compartment, above the compartment where the detective is. The detective charges out, in time to scare Uncle Li off, so the money is secure by the sleeping Dumbo. When the detective finds Andy, dead, he also finds Andy’s cell phone in his hand, an unsent text message on it: ‘Wait for me. The Dumbo affair is resolved.’ The cop hits the ‘send’ button, and I guess that’s how he knows where to find the girl later on. Now he tells her, ‘When the baby is born, tell it the truth. Let it know what kind of a man its father really was.’

An epilogue wraps it all up: The girl is back in Tibet, praying outside a monastery. Women take her baby – I guess she is giving the baby to a holy life? I’m not sure about that.

Movie is shot widescreen, anamorphic. Lots of bright saturated colors. Most of the movie Andy has a long wig on, looking a little like a hippie. The battle of wits is very nicely scripted, with twist and counter-twist, some humor, some sex appeal, some wit, and even some meaning and sincere emotions. Just a great script, the sort of script they ought to option for Hollywood if they could.

The train location is wonderful. This falls into a line of movies set on trains or ocean liners, where a band of strangers can interact, but nobody can get off; nobody else can join them. The train however makes it tough to adapt for Hollywood, since nobody here rides trains (or ocean liners!) anymore.

Only thing I didn’t like about the movie is the stunts. Instead of real stunts shot in boring conventional manner, they chose to cover the stunts in flashy quick cuts of extreme closeups. The scene is basically an impression of what might be happening, or a puzzle or code that we must put together in our minds. It reminds me of how Fred Astaire insisted they photograph his dancing. He demanded that all his dance numbers be shot in long shot, with one take – or as few shots as possible. This was boring cinematically, but it showed off Astaire and his partner’s dance moves. When Hollywood had dancers who couldn’t dance all that well, they would cover the number with long shots, closeups, medium shots, and do lots of cutting – so the dancers had only to manage one good move at a time, then cut to another take of the following move; and going in close conceals how the feet are really doing.

That’s kind of what this film is like in the crucial, almost-magical theft moves, and the move and counter-moves of the thieves as they battle in the train corridors. There are just a bunch of flashy cuts, and it leaves the impression that the actors couldn’t handle the stunts themselves.

One final nice touch: At one point Andy is hanging off the side of the train as it speeds along an overpass. Uncle Li holds Andy’s wrist, and threatens to drop him. ‘Don’t kick your legs so much, die with some dignity,’ Uncle Li says. Andy answers, ‘Listen, I’m not Jackie Chan! I don’t want to die and I’m not going to go with any dignity if I can help it!’

(25 March 2009)

That sounds like a great movie! I’d love to watch it but...hey, I already know the story! Andy Law is a genius!

Yes, that’s the problem with doing this. I don’t always have to reveal the whole story, but sometimes I find something really right – or wrong – with the ending, and I want to talk about that.

Here I found the back-and-forth of the ending a little strange. Build up to the final showdown between Andy and Uncle Li, then, then ... train pulls in? What happened? We see Uncle Li got away, what about Andy?

The concept is good, but it really wasn’t done well for my taste. I think we should have seen the girl get the message: ‘wait for me. Dumbo case is resolved.’

Then we have to know what ‘wait for me’ means – it wasn’t clear in subtitles, but maybe in the dialogue it was that they have a certain place to meet if anything happens, and it should be in five months, or each month on the 14th day, or second Wednesday, or something like that. It seems odd that the cop should show up the same day the girl does, or has he come there every single day for 5 months?

But we absolutely need to have the suspense build up if the director is going to hide ‘what happened’ from us.

Also I wasn’t sure about the final shots, was she giving the baby to a monastery or not? If she’s giving it away, it kind of makes sense, she is tainted – or maybe even going to prison – and doesn’t want the child to be touched by the bad things she has done. But then, why not leave the kid with Dumbo and his wife in the village where everybody is so honest they won’t even steal cow shit from one another? And if she leaves the kid, then how will she ever tell the kid the true story of his father, the way the detective tells her to do? And why does the detective look so different in this last scene? I didn’t mention that to you, but he has shaved his mustache and beard, looks very different, I wasn’t sure it was him, even.