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)

The President’s Analyst

Hi Aki,

Yesterday I watched The President’s Analyst a 1967 picture written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, and the finest satire on postwar America I can think of.

Story has respected New York psychoanalyst Sydney Schaeffer (James Coburn) being recruited to be the President’s analyst. It seems the weight of the world (unspecified and thus presumably everything that was going on at the time, from riots to the Cold War to the Vietnam War to hippies and desegregation and Civil Rights) is just too much for any one man to bear. Sydney is checked out by the ‘CEA’ (CIA) and ‘FBR’ (FBI) and cleared, although the director of the FBR, a short humorless man, disapproves of Sydney sleeping with his girlfriend.

Sydney is whisked from New York to Washington and he and his girlfriend are set up in a handsome house in Georgetown. This house is of course thoroughly bugged and spied-upon. The President is too busy to schedule appointments, so he signals when he wants Sydney, and Sydney must go to the White House for counseling. This happens when Sydney is eating, sleeping, making love, in the toilet … soon Sydney is getting frazzled. ‘The President has me to talk to, but I can’t talk even to you,’ he complains to his girlfriend.

Sydney starts to acquire paranoid symptoms. He even begins to imagine his girlfriend is spying on him (and, of course – she is). He knows he’s going to crack, so he slips in with a tour group in the White House and talks a New Jersey family (played by William Daniels) into taking him home with them.

This leads to a sendup of the so-called ‘liberal’ family man with his obsession on the latest sound equipment, making good time on the freeways, and guns. ‘When the right-wingers disarm, we liberals will disarm!’

Word of Sydney’s escape immediately reaches all the secret services in the world. Africans, Russians, Chinese, British – everybody wants Sydney.

Sydney tries to call his own analyst in New York, but can’t get through. Meanwhile Jr. is tapping and recording Sydney’s phone conversation, and two FBR goons (all in suits, without humor, and short) come in with orders to kill Sydney on sight. But Sydney has gone with the parents to eat out in the city.

There he slips away from the couple, but the spies are after him and chase him through the streets. Sydney only makes his getaway by slipping into a minibus owned by a stoned rock band, who agree to take him with them back to Minnesota.

There Sydney, now garbed like a fashionable hippie, trips out and makes love to band groupie ‘Snow White’ in the middle of a green field while various spies kill one another competing to see who can capture him.

He is captured by a British-seeming rock band who turn out to be Canadian spies, and sail on a yacht across the Great Lakes. But the FBR goons take over the ship, murder the Canadians, and are about to kill Sydney – but they are out of bullets and must go reload. When they do, Kropotkin, the Russian spy, kills them and drugs Sydney. He intends to sail to the North Atlantic to meet a trawler.

But at last Sydney gets to use his psychoanalytical skills in self-defense. He succeeds in revealing Kropotkin’s hatred for his secret-service-commanding father. With three to seven years of treatment, Sydney promises to cure Kropotkin of his neuroses. Kropotkin says they will take Sydney back to Washington to carry on the treatment; first Sydney should phone the White House and tell the President to stop the FBR.

Sydney tries to call at a phone booth, but the operator is less than helpful. Kropotkin agrees that ‘the phone company’ is hated the world over, and goes back to town to get more change. Meanwhile Sydney finds himself locked into the phone booth beside the highway in the middle of nowhere. Along comes a large truck that scoops up the phone booth with Sydney in it, puts another in its place, and drives off. Kropotkin meets the CEA agent Dan (Godfrey Cambridge) at the site and are baffled at what could have happened to Sydney.

Sydney comes to in the bowels of an advanced underground lair suitable for a James Bond villain. There (still trapped in the phone booth) Sydney is made to watch a smiling, unctuous man’s pitch: he represents the Phone Company, and they have a breakthrough phone as small as the head of a pin. Surgically implanted in the brain, it will allow everyone to call anyone else just thinking of them; people will get the CC chips implanted before they are born, and all names will be replaced with numbers – their personal phone numbers. If Sydney will just convince the President to push through all the needed legislation…?

Sydney calls him nuts, but it doesn’t phase the Phone Company representative. Meanwhile Kropotkin and Dan break in; Kropotkin sabotages the phone lines so that service will be damaged for months, with the Phone Company getting all the blame, and Sydney, the man of peace, finds he enjoys wielding the automatic weapon and killing all the service technicians who arrive to repair the damage. And the ‘representative’ turns out to be a robot, wired to a plug in the floor.

Later on, at Christmas, Sydney is happily installed at his Georgetown home. Since his girlfriend is CEA and has just as high a security clearance as he does, he can confide in her. Kropotkin and Dan come by for a Christmas party, and on the news they see that the Phone Company, blamed for incompetence for the bad service of recent weeks, has agreed to be nicer, and lower rates.

As the four friends celebrate, the camera pulls back: they are being watched on a large monitor by a group of shadowy figures. And behind them are rows of men in suits and vapid expressions, sitting in chairs and wired to plugs in the floor…

This is a very funny movie. Shot in Panavision in bright colors, it had a big budget even though this was only Flicker’s second feature (Flicker had a long career as writer and director, almost all of it on television). The action is staged at a nice balance between seriousness and cartoonishness.

Flicker stages things very well. In one hilarious scene, when the Director of the FBR is giving the order to kill Sydney to a room full of suited, humorless agents just as short as the Director, a man walks in from the back of the room – a very tall man. He weaves his way in and out of the agents, head and shoulders above them, deposits a paper on the Director’s desk, and retreats. The contrast in heights make for a great laugh, but Flicker shoots it all in one master shot, underplaying the gag.

My big question about the movie is casting Coburn. He was undoubtedly the coolest American actor in the period, and lends a hipness to the production. He also was a big star at the time, notably as the parodical American super-spy Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967), so his participation helped green light the picture. But part of the humor of Analyst lies in the prospect of a middle-aged, sober, serious Doctor coming up against the world of wacky spies, getting turned on, and ending up mowing down men. With this in mind it seems that William Daniels, Wally Cox, or Bob Newhart (or even Jonathan Winters) would have been funnier. On the other hand, audiences had shown they liked to laugh at the spy world with Coburn, and his hipness helped bring in younger viewers who wouldn’t have been so keen to go watch Wally Cox.

(21 April 2009)

(Adapting) The Osterman Weekend

Hi Aki,

This weekend we watched The Osterman Weekend a 1984 adaptation of the thriller by Robert Ludlum, directed by Sam Peckinpah in what turned out to be the last picture he made.

The story is preposterous so I’ll just give it brief: CIA agent Fassett (John Hurt) finds his wife murdered. She was killed by the KGB but what Fassett doesn’t know is that CIA head Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) greenlit the killing in a swap with the KGB, and Danforth’s men even videotaped the woman’s murder along with the lovemaking session between her and her husband moments before she was killed.

Now Fassett has come to Danforth with a proposal: he claims that in the course of tracking his wife’s killers he has uncovered ‘The Omega Organization’ a secret KGB cell of prominent wealthy Americans, all linked by their friendship from college. Every year these three men meet with a fourth, the crusading, ultra-patriotic TV interviewer, John Tanner (Rutger Hauer). Tanner has been attacking Danforth for some time, but Danforth thinks that if Fassett can use Tanner to uncover Omega it will further Danforth’s political ambitions.

Tanner is shocked at the idea his old friends might be traitors but goes along with it and Fassett fills his house (which is set in the wild hills of Oxnard far from anyone else) with cameras and microphones so Fassett and Tanner himself can spy on the three friends during their weekend visit. Fassett plays tapes designed to make the three nervous; they don’t know anything about Fassett, and think Tanner is the one behind it.

Tensions mount and the four are soon at one another’s throats. But when two of them try to escape Fassett has them murdered. This leaves Tanner with Bernie Osterman (Craig T. Nelson) as the only two left, at which point Fassett lets Tanner know it was all a setup – the three men were only involved with a tax dodge, not the Soviets.

Fassett orders his men to attack Tanner and Osterman, but between Tanner and his wife the spies are overcome. But Fassett kidnaps Mrs Tanner and the Tanner boy. He uses this to force Tanner to expose the truth about Danforth on his TV show – because Fassett has unearthed the tape the CIA made of his wife’s murder, and he knows that Danforth had agreed to it. Fassett’s whole plan has been to maneuver Danforth and Tanner to this point, so he can show the world what Danforth really is and be avenged for his wife’s murder.

Tanner seems to go along, but with Osterman’s help he records his part of the show in advance; Danforth and Fassett are both live, but Tanner is involved with somebody (who is never made clear) to track the video feed from Fassett’s secret location so he can confront Fassett. Fassett, his revenge complete, aims his pistol at Tanner, forcing Tanner to shoot and kill him. Tanner finds his wife, son, and dog bound and helpless but unharmed. Meanwhile the final summing-up Tanner pre-recorded plays on: a statement to the television audience that they are really to blame for all this, that television has made the country passive and unconnected with the realities of life, and challenging them to turn their televisions off – expecting that we won’t be able to do so.

That’s the end of the story. I don’t know what the plot of Ludlum’s novel was, but it has been apparently much changed here. One of the Peckinpah experts on the commentary track in fact suggested the possibility that this tale might have been a more mainstream story of the weekend gone wrong, which after achieving fame Ludlum retrieved from his trunk and overlaid with the frame of the espionage thriller in order to make a quick sale. In turn the producers were eager to get the Ludlum brand name on a production, so they got the rights to this one without having the slightest respect for the material.

So what I want to look at is how do you adapt a novel you don’t like?

In this case, your strongest asset is the Ludlum brand: political espionage thrillers in which nothing is as it seems, and the American government is no different from the Soviets. And so in order to maximize box-office, the producers give us that.

But the meat of the story, and the most interesting scenes, are set in the Tanner house during the weekend, as the old friends find old antagonisms resurfacing, lose trust in one another, and finally confront one another as enemies. So this is what you’d like to see made into the entire Act 2 if you can.

The solution arrived at (this movie) was one we can lay 90% at the doorstep of the producers screenwriters and studio. Ten percent or less would then go to Peckinpah who had not made a film in a number of years, had not had a hit in much longer, had made many enemies in Hollywood and was suffering from ill health. Peckinpah is said to have regarded Osterman not as a major work but only as a move back into the business. He wanted to prove he could shoot this in budget, on schedule, deliver solid entertainment even though the story was crap and preposterous – and then work this into his next deal, which might be closer to a picture he really wanted to make. For their part, the producers got a chance to get a ‘name’ director with a flair for action and cutting at a bargain price, a chastened wild man they hoped they might control. So Peckinpah mainly shot the script, he stayed in budget, didn’t get all the coverage he otherwise would have liked, and worked with the actors to get good performances all around. And then he managed to slip in a bit of his own views and style along the way, as much as he thought he could get away with.

So our first problem is the whole setup. The plot, as ridiculous as it is, bears also the sin of complexity. This is a major flaw since it means half an hour or 40 minutes are wasted just in talky scenes trying to sell us on a situation that is patently ludicrous: that an investment banker, a plastic surgeon, and a TV writer/producer, all successful, all rich, agree to work for the KGB to overthrow the government of the United States (in some way that is never specified). Then a successful network TV newsman who knows just how to manipulate video footage to make it say anything that you want, believes in some footage that he himself calls the ‘easiest sort of thing to fake’ and believes it so much that he now throws away 20 years of friendship and agrees to hand his friends over to the authorities.

Well, you aren’t going to convince anybody of any of this. So either come up with another solution, or cut this to the bone so you win some more time to examine the process of the friends’ falling-out.

What other solution could there be? Here we find a fatal flaw: what Tanner is told is a lie. Therefore we can’t offer him any true evidence. But maybe we could say that the four friends were involved with espionage in college. For that matter, why do they have to be friends from college? They could have been in the army together, or working abroad for some mutual company. This company might have been involved with what the friends thought was industrial espionage, only it turns out (or so Fassett can claim) to have been in truth political Cold War espionage.

This kind of solution is somewhat less preposterous. It lays the foundation for an honest suspicion on Tanner’s part as well as allowing any sort of secrets buried in the friends’ past operations they might not want to see brought to light. Giving the friends a past with some sort of violence in it would also make more believable whatever violence the men resort to when they fall out on the fatal weekend.

Now let’s talk about who’s to blame. The evil is the deception and crimes the government feels compelled to engage in during the Cold War. Danforth believes so easily in the fictitious Omega conspiracy simply because he sees Reds under every bed, he want to distrust everybody he can’t directly control, and he wants to launch some sort of criminal expose to advance his political career to the next step, presumably the White House. (Peckinpah was quoted as saying he modeled Danforth on Alexander Haig ‘as exactly as I though I could get away with.’)

The evil isn’t television per se, which is only a tool or technology the spies use in their work. This makes the final lines, spoken by a man whose career has been based in TV, and who has just used the medium to expose a dangerous man and now tries to blame television for all the evil in the world, seem not only laughable but not supported by anything else in the picture. It may be true, it may be laudable, but it is tacked-on to this picture, and it’s out of place in a suspense thriller. Peckinpah is not Pakula and this movie is not The Parallax View.

The movie makes a game effort to detail and sell the conspiracy, but I think it’d be better to go the exact opposite way: since you’re never going to get us to buy this whole thing, don’t give us any exposition of it. Leave it surreal, abstract. Suggest without saying. Indulge in the sin of obscurity whenever clarity leads to preposterousness.

So here’s my suggestion: open with the death of Fassett’s wife. But show us Fassett screening it over and over in some dark room. Then the titles over the Tanners on a hunting trip (they are good bow-hunters, which figures in the resolution of the siege of the house later on). The Tanners come home to find their house taken over by Fassett and his men. He has already installed all his surveillance gear and gives a bare-bones explanation of this Omega business, then introduces Danforth via video. Danforth agrees to be on Tanner’s show providing Tanner goes along with Fassett this weekend. Tanner is still making up his mind when his friends drive up.

One of the principles in getting us in the audience past what can’t be explained, or what we’ll never believe, is to move quickly through the scenes, while distracting us with eye-candy: violence or sex or gags or stars. In the end maybe we’ll walk out of the theater shaking our heads in disbelief, but we won’t mind so long as we feel we’ve had enough enjoyable sights and stunts along the way.

Maybe the biggest sin of this movie is that with the great cast it had (Chris Sarandon and Dennis Hopper round out the four friends; their wives include Meg Foster, Cassie Yates, and Helen Shaver) it doesn’t make the most of them. The growing suspicions, doubts, distrust among the friends could have played out (in another world) like The Big Chill meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Rather than short-change the exposition, the movie instead short-changes the dramatic rupturing of the friendships. And this was done in the name of making sense out of the nonsense of the setup which turns out to be not only nonsense, but false.

(20 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)

Temptress Moon

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Temptress Moon a 1996 film from Chen Kaige, starring Leslie Cheung and Gong Li.

I’m sure you saw it, right? So here’s just a capsule storyline: in 1911 young Zhongliang is a student, and a minor relative of the powerful house of Pang. As a special ‘honor’ he is allowed to enter the Pang palace and serve to prepare the Young Master’s opium pipe (Young Master is married to Z’s sister). Meanwhile young Ruyi, the Young Master’s sister, is a hellion, a wild kid who’s been raised from the cradle smoking dope by the Old Master, her father. One fateful night, Young Master, crazy doped up, forces little Z to sleep with his own sister. The result of this is that little Z hates Pang and the whole lot of them, and runs away. He tries to go to Beijing to study, but is set upon by thieves at the railyard.

Ten years pass. Z is now living in Shanghai. He’s been raised by the triad gangs, and loves the Boss as a father; in turn the Boss loves Z like a son. Z’s ‘job’ involves making married women fall in love with him; then the gang blackmail the married woman.

He doesn’t seem too happy about his life, though.

Meanwhile the Old Master of the Pangs dies, and Young Master succeeds; but for ten years Young Master has been a vegetable. So Ruyi is chosen to be head of the house, but since she’s only a woman, a distant cousin is her ‘helper’ – really the old guys intend to go on ruling. What they don’t know yet is that Duanwon, the ‘helper’ has always been in love with Ruyi, so he backs whatever she says – she turns out to be the real head of the house.

In Shanghai, the Boss hears of this, and sends Z to seduce Ruyi and bring her back; the fortune of the Pangs is immense and he wants it. Z asks Boss not to send him back, but Z is sent all the same. He plays hot and cold with Ruyi, who is interested in him right away. Oddly enough, Ruyi as a woman is a totally different character from Ruyi as a child – not spoiled, not headstrong, never seen to smoke dope, and innocent. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this movie is about style, not logic.

But Z’s sister is crazy in love with him, too. She’s been so lonely without him, as her husband is only a vegetable, and in ten years Z hasn’t even written once. But he repulses her and tells her he hates her and everybody in the palace.

All the same, Z finds himself touched by Ruyi’s innocence, her frankness, her beauty. Who knows, maybe there is some trace of love for her from when they were kids? He gets her to agree to go away with him, but then he can’t go through with it. He goes to Shanghai and confesses his treachery to the Boss. The Boss turns out to love Z more than the loot, and forgives the betrayal. Instead he arranges for Ruyi to be brought to Shanghai so she can see Z in action; this will cure Z of his heartsickness when Ruyi scorns him, and everything can go back the way it was before.

It doesn’t quite work out the way the Boss intended though. Ruyi is still interested in Z despite how he’s been living, provided he does indeed love her. But he can’t say the phrase – Leslie Cheung is playing the cold bastard yet again just like in Days of Being Wild, the one all the women want, who doesn’t love women back. Sick at heart, Ruyi goes back home, and accepts another man’s marriage proposal. But Z goes back after her, breaking from the triads once and for all. He finally gains courage to tell Ruyi he loves her. But it’s too late. In despair Z determines to go to complete his studies in Beijing after all, but in a final act of madness, he prepares Ruyi’s opium pipe, just the way he did for Young Master on that fateful night ten years back – spiking the opium with arsenic.

Halfway out of the estate grounds, Z has a change of heart. He rushes back to save Ruyi, to warn her – too late again! She has smoked the fatal pipe. From now on Duanwon will be the head of the Pang house, speaking for the brain-dead Ruyi; the triads catch up to Z on the docks and shoot him, and there’s the end to our happy little love story.

Chen Kaige and DP Christopher Doyle try to splash color everywhere on the screen. This is Chen Kaige’s version of Wong Kar Wai, with the emotions always hyped and pushed and exaggerated, characters stylized, narrative stripped of connections and logic until it pushes up against the edge of incoherence. Every character is passionate to the extreme – you could call them crazy. Mirrors are everywhere for shooting things frontward then reversed. Steadicam shots follow people running through the mazes of the palace; wide angle lenses are used to distortion; diffusion filters over a lot of the shots, with frames allowed to go completely out of focus at times. Light is splashed across faces so one part blows out – it’s just that kind of movie.

I didn’t like it much, but I respected it, and I’m glad I watched it. It strikes me that Chinese film is now like Hollywood in the 30s or French films in early 60s. People aren’t afraid to try stunts like this, and can get huge budgets to shoot sweeping period epics like this one, anchored on major stars. It really makes Hollywood films of the past 20 years or so look like timid piles of steaming cliches. Temptress Moon is like a Jean Jacques Beineix film, just delirous, or crazy. I guess if you’re really into Leslie Cheung, you might go for this, and it’s a woman’s picture, so it’s not a knock on the film if I don’t like it much.

(26 March 2009)

Trainspotting

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched Trainspotting – oddly enough I’d never seen it before. I suppose Steve’s description of the notorious ‘toilet’ scene turned me off. I liked it though.

This is the kind of movie where story is less important than style. The writer, director, set designer, and editor just put together a flashy, fun, smorgsabrod of strange cuts, weird subjective sets and shots, camera lenses that distort without being obvious about it, garish colors. The actors join the writer with cartoonish performances of over-the-top characters.

Mostly what the movie does is give me a view into a world I’d never been in. This is one of the wonders of movies, to take us where we’ve never been. The book was a sort of underground cult classic, but mostly a series of incidents and snippets rather than a story. The script tries to salvage a semi-story out of this, but it remains more of a portrait of a kind of life, that of the poor, disaffected, heroin junkies of a dying Scottish city, rather than any sort of story. There is an attempt in the writing to give us a sort of redemption along classical lines, undermined with a bit of a sarcastic twist.

This has to do with taking a speech, ‘Choose life! Choose marriage and a job and kids and washing machine and a car and CD player…’ and moving it to the opening of the movie, over a scene where the junkies are running away from a store where they’ve stolen some goods to sell for cash for heroin, and plays very ironically. At the movie’s end, the hero, having just ripped off his mates for the proceeds of a big sale of 2 kilos of heroin, walks away blithely, while the VO gives us the same speech – this time as though he is going to embrace this lifestyle (on the basis of the stolen drug-deal money) which further undermines it. And yet the film leaves us wondering if this guy Renton is really through with smack or not; as his VO says when he takes his last onscreen hit, ‘There are final hits, and final hits … which one was this going to end up being?’

Along the way a baby, seen crawling around happily amidst needles and the remains and other trash of the junkies’ life in their main hangout, dies from neglect; one of the kids gets sent to prison; another OD’s and is put into cold turkey where we get the classic (since Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend in the 1940s) montage of the DT’s; the only one of them who is healthy and never does drugs loses his girlfriend (because our hero has stolen the sex-tape he and his girlfriend made of themselves) and takes up smack, only to contract AIDS and die of toxoplasmosis when the kitten he got to win his girlfriend back is sent back to him; the fiercest anti-drug pal (a totaly sociopath played by Robert Carlyle, the guy from The Full Monty here with dark hair and mustache) sends more than a few folks to hospital; and the hero dives into ‘the worst toilet in Scotland’ in that famous scene. And yet it’s given to us from the viewpoint of the junkies, and tries to convey some of the pleasure and crazy-wild fun they experience. It’s a comedy believe it or not. This is very refreshing, although I doubt many censors saw this as a good thing.

(25 March 2009)

PS — to read Aki's translation of this post in Japanese, click here.