Turkish delight

Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul 2005 Germany (90 minutes) written, directed and filmed by Fatih Akin.

A German musician intrigued by Turkish music visited Istanbul in 2004 with Turkish-German film director Fatih Akin behind a movie camera to explore the city’s music scene.

The result is this lively and interesting 90-minute documentary. It reveals a diverse and sophisticated music community with broad influences and deep roots, from legends like an 86-year-old salon chanteuse to folkies, rockers and a rapper who could cut verbal capers around most auctioneers. 

Alexander Hacke, the German musician, is bassist for Einstürzende Neubauten, a Berlin-based ‘industrial’ band. Hacke said his interest in Turkish music stems from his work on Akin’s 2004 feature film Gegen die Wand [Head On]. He is an earnest and open xenophile.

Akin’s films range from serious drama to light comedy; his work succeeds because he knows how to make a camera tell a story. His narratives feel inspired by an enlightened curiosity about people and the world, and infused with a spirit of fun.

What Akin and Hacke have accomplished here is to engage a variety of Turkish musicians in a conversation about their lives and work. The documentary provides a wealth of information on a topic little-known in the West, without becoming a lecture.

It opens with an apt though likely apocryphal Confucian ‘saying’: ‘In order to understand the culture of a place, you have to listen to the music they make. Music can tell you everything about a place.’

Akin brings us into Istanbul and takes us out at the end with Sertab Erener’s pop cover of Madonna’s Music. Next—and next to last, with recurring appearances and comments throughout—we hear Baba Zula, a rock/jazz band that plays Turkish-inflected psychedelic music on electric Western and traditional instruments, what it calls ‘Psychebelly Dance Music.’

At first, the beat trots freely in the streets of the formerly tough, currently hip and gentrifying Beyoğlu section of the city, sampling everything from a violin in a sidewalk café to a tenor saxophone, drunks in doorways, moons on trees.

Hacke and Akin get an intimate reception into Istanbul’s music community. Several of their subjects even invite Hacke to sit in at bass; though by the end of the movie, Hacke admits that as far as ‘figuring out’ Istanbul and its music, he ‘managed only to scratch the surface.’

The rockers Duman (Smoke) and Replikas, the street musicians of Siya Siyabend, and rappers Ceza and his sister, Ayben, are among a score of musical groups, individual artists and record label producers with whom the filmmakers meet and record impromptu sessions.

They also speak with women vocalists Aynur Doğan, a Kurdish folk singer-songwriter, and Brenna MacCrimmon, a Canadian folk singer fluent in Turkish who has released three albums of Turkish and Balkans folk music. MacCrimmon appears with Baba Zula as well as with master clarinetist Selin Sesler, with whom she has toured.

The versatile Sesler is from Keşan, a town about 40 miles from the Greek border in Thrace, with a large Roma (Gypsy) population. He took Akin and Hacke with him to his home town where they filmed him playing a fasıl—a musical narrative that sounds like klezmer—at a Roma drinking party in a tavern. Sesler later played a local wedding.

The crew also meets several of Turkey’s musical legends: singer-songwriter and film star Orhan Gencebay, diva Sezen Aksu, and Erkin Koray, the country’s first rocker.

The octogenarian is Müzeyyen Senar, who sang ‘Haydar Haydar’ (translated ‘Outrageous Outrageous’ in the subtitle), a traditional drinking song, with an orchestra and half a glass of raki. Akin added film footage of Senar, Gencebay, Aksu and Koray in their salad days (all four are still going strong). 

There is a temptation to try to match Turkish musicians with roughly analogous American performers, but these artists arise and draw their forms and inspiration from their own very different sources.

And though American popular music is an important influence, the musicians interviewed here take it more as a point of departure than an objective.

Hacke and Akin encourage viewers to listen closely to each of the artists in their sampling for his or her unique voice.

One way to gain perspective on these voices is to consider the origin of American surfing music, which took its fast scales from some of the same kind of music that has inspired Turkish musicians in different directions.

Gencebay said that while Western octaves exist in Turkish music, what Turks call a ‘Turkish accent’ is a beat succession that goes 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2-3 (the Turkish numbers, bir-iki, bir-iki-ooch, bir-iki, bir-iki-ooch, sound more euphonic said quickly).

Sesler later concurred, quickly fingering an imaginary clarinet as he counted: ‘1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3: you split them up into ninths.’

Dick Dale used the same ‘accent’ to create the distinctive sound of surfing music in Southern California in the late 1950s. His Misirlou, first recorded in 1962 and revived thirty years later as the blazing opening theme of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), is based on a melody created by an Anatolian Greek band and first performed in Athens in 1927.

Dale’s guitar mimics the sound of the bağlama, a traditional, long-necked, stringed instrument also known by its Persian name, ‘saz’ (ساز). The documentary credits Gencebay, a master bağlama player, with having ‘brought the instrument to the city’ in the 1960s, sophisticating a sound which before had been region- and even town-specific.

This music became known in Turkey as ‘arabesque,’ but Gencebay said this is a misnomer. What he did was to update and refine ‘a certain technique from Egyptian music similar to our own, originally from the West, that was not very common in Turkish music,’ he told Hacke. 

‘We wanted to enrich our music and we experimented,’ Gencebay said, despite the resistance of ‘conservatives’ who accused him and other young musicians at the time of wanting to ‘destroy’ the tradition. ‘We didn’t destroy anything, we protected it.’

Run Sammy Run

À bout portant [Point Blank] 2010 France Gaumont (84 minutes) directed and cowritten by Fred Cavayé.

A wounded, unarmed man fleeing two armed pursuers is knocked off his feet by a motorcyclist in a city traffic tunnel. Later, a nurse-trainee acts quickly to save this unidentified man’s life after someone tries to kill him in an intensive care unit.

Nurse-trainee Samuel Pierret’s (Gilles Lellouche) momentary glimpse of a violent, secret world makes him a part of it. The next thing Pierret knows, he comes to in the Paris apartment he shares with his pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya) with a bloody gash on his head.

A ringing telephone stirs him from the blow he took. Nadia is a hostage of those who tried to kill the intensive care patient, Hugo Sartet (Roschdy Zem). Her abductors tell Pierret that they will kill Nadia if he does not bring them Sartet, now under police custody in the hospital, within three hours, or if he contacts the police.

A race against time becomes a chase across Paris, mostly on foot, through the Metro. For this peaceful, law-abiding, expectant father, all of a sudden everyone has guns they are ready to use and the line blurs between who are good guys and bad guys. Pierret knows only that he must save his wife.

In a sense, the story is similar to Peter Weir’s Witness (1985), in which a small Amish boy travelling with his mother in Philadelphia happens to witness a brutal murder in a train station restroom and becomes the target of extremely violent and dangerous people.

The less said about this nail-biter the better: the thrills and chills should all be the viewer’s. This taut, action-packed thriller harks back to the French and American B-pictures of the 1940s and 1950s that delivered ripping yarns in less than 90 minutes.

As in the old movies, the action in this film is character- rather than technology-driven.

In an interview, Lellouche referred to director Fred Cavayé’s process of making the film, in which Lellouche and his colleagues did their own bone-crunching, welt-raising stunts, as ‘un espèce de bordel organisé’—a controlled chaos.

To the credit of Cavayé, his editor Benjamin Weill, actors and crew, the chaos—and the film’s artistry—moves too quickly and smoothly to notice.

Rio Serpico

Tropa de Elite 2-O Inimigo Ahora É Outro (Elite Squad 2-The Enemy Within) 2010 Brazil (115 minutes) directed by José ‘Zé’ Padilha; written by Padilha and Bráulio Mantovani; editing and second-unit direction by Daniel Rezende; cinematography by Lula Carvalho.

Enormously popular in Brazil, this police action thriller sequel unfolds with dynamic camera work, editing and sound into an entertaining and incisive commentary on public safety and political corruption in Rio de Janiero.

The film’s dénouement is along the lines of New York Police Detective Frank Serpico’s appearance in 1971 before the Knapp Commission which exposed systemic departmental corruption.

Director and cowriter Jose ‘Zé’ Padilha based the first film, Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad, 2007), on a controversial nonfiction book of the same title and actual events related to how BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), a semi-autonomous Police Special Operations Battalion, eradicated chronically dangerous, armed drug gangs from Rio de Janiero’s shantytown slums, known as favelas.

Decried by human rights groups, BOPE gained a reputation for being a clean, committed and effective unit of the Rio state police, PMERJ (Polícia Militar do Estado de Rio de Janiero), also known as the ‘militia’.

BOPE’s members, in the unit’s distinctive black fatigues, are known as ‘caveirãos’, or ‘skulls’, because of its ‘Faca na Caveira’ (‘Knife in the Skull’) motto and logo. The unit’s heavy-handed tactics generally were welcomed by law-and-order politicians and citizens in a city long plagued by street crime, violent drug dealing and PMERJ beat cops on the take.

This film, the sequel, Tropa de Elite 2—O Inimigo Ahora É Outro (Elite Squad 2—The Enemy Within) considers the outcome of BOPE’s achievement.

It stars the fictional Lieutenant Colonel Roberto ‘Beto’ Nascimento (Wagner Moura) as BOPE’s commander. Nascimento is a squeaky clean, committed, well respected career policeman who loves his work and is good at what he does: in his words, ‘a mission given is a mission accomplished.’ [missão dada é missão cumprida]

However, Nascimento, whose broken marriage is a casualty of his career, lives with a rock in his shoe. His ex-wife Rosane (Maria Ribéiro) remarried Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos), a left-wing professor and president of a nongovernmental organization for human rights. Fraga despises BOPE, and he and Rosane are raising Nascimento’s son, Rafael.

A prison melee which sets this story in motion shows that these diametrically-opposed adversaries respect each other for what each of them does because he lives his belief through his work and actions. Each also is convinced that the other is utterly misled.

The short and bloody work BOPE makes of the prison uprising gets international media attention and inspires Fraga to run for political office. Scared politicians immediately relieve Nascimento of command of BOPE, but his huge local popularity obliges them instead to ‘promote’ him to a desk job as a state undersecretary of public security.

Ironically, the politicians’ idea of getting Nascimento out of the way is putting him in charge of Rio de Janeiro’s police wiretaps.

From these vantages, Fraga and Nascimento each begin to piece together a much clearer picture of how ‘the system’ really works. The heart of the story is that each develops as a character and in his own way becomes an ‘enemy within’ this system.

The story is exciting, but also complex. It involves the governor’s office, the state and national legislature, the public safety bureaucracy and its operations, the news media, and a complicated family dynamic. Padilha shuffles all these moving parts on the board that is Rio.

BOPE’s mission arose in part from the belief that aggressively containing the drug trade would dry up dirty militia cops’ illicit cash flow, and thus clean up the Rio state police force.

Cameras in two helicopters and shots from cranes and handheld cameras closely following the action on the ground show BOPE move against gun-toting ‘vagabondos’ (an all-purpose term translated as ‘scumbags’ used for people associated with the drug trade) in a densely populated urban area.     

However, according to the movie, four years of this energetic, high-morale assault force’s hard-hitting ‘war on drugs’ served mainly to make Rio’s formerly ungovernable poor neighborhoods safe for dirty militia cops and their political sponsors to take over and exploit.

When the drug dealers’ cash flow from drugs began to dry up, they found other ways to extort money from people in the favelas. This made dirty cops realize that the slums are huge marketplaces. So, rather than simply shake down vagabondos, they made it look like they were protecting residents from them, when all they really did was cut out the ‘middle man’.

The dirty cops, in effect, ‘reorganized’ crime. They made a lot more money much more safely by loan-sharking and collecting ‘fees’ every time money changed hands for basic goods and services like cable television, Internet access, and bottled gas and water, for example.

The militia then was able in turn to ‘deliver’ these pacified areas electorally to local politicians, who could pull strings to use the willing—and unwitting—BOPE to do the dirty work of eliminating any armed and dangerous residual opposition.

Among the movie’s deft touches is its cast of politicians, public officials and policemen, none of whom would be out of place in a major American city.

Of these, Governor Gelino (Julio Adrião), the governor of the state of Rio de Janiero, is a classic bandwagon jumper more interested in how things look in the news media than how they are on the street. Fortunato (André Mattos) is a trilling latin edition of a plus-sized right-wing television bloviator in love with the sound of his own booming voice who, along with Fraga, subsequently becomes a state legislator.

Fortunato guffaws at his legislative colleague Fraga’s assertion that the formerly gang-infested favelas are run by a ‘policemen’s mafia’, saying that ‘the mafia’ is a bunch of Italians, ‘like macaroni, rondelli and gnocchi.’ Yet for all his joshing, people—and cops—in Fortunato’s legislative district call him ‘padrinho’—‘godfather.’

And indeed, the dirty militia officers—overbearing, middle-aged, bronzed latins with gold chains, accessorized with bimbos and a luxury powerboat and led by Major Mário Rocha (Sandro Rocha), a mid-level officer with ties to the governor—differ little in their behavior and appearance from HBO’s notorious Sopranos.

When investigative newspaper reporter Clara Vidal (Tainá Müller) gets a hot lead on their activities, it does not take long for this motley crew to overstep its ambit. There is a reckoning, because there are rules.

As in life, though, the worst people more often than not land on their feet. This will allow Padilha another opportunity to revisit an older and wiser Nascimento and Fraga in the next chapter of their story.

A charming, alarming blonde woman

Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) 1930 UFA Germany (German version, 106 minutes; English version, 94 minutes) directed by Josef von Sternberg; based on Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrath.

This early UFA sound classic couples Emil Jannings, one of silent film’s greatest stars, with the ‘charming, alarming blonde’ Marlene Dietrich on her way to make a mark as a Hollywood legend.

Jannings plays a middle aged pedant with little experience of women who falls head over heels in love with Dietrich’s Lola Lola, flashing her shapely gams to lusty effect at The Blue Angel, a cabaret in a port’s red light district.  

It is a fairy tale that could not possibly come to a good end. Director Josef von Sternberg and his compatriots Ernst Lubitsch and Georg W. Pabst titillated audiences with the theme of the older ‘sugar daddy’ and the ‘fallen’ ingénue.

Despite their subsequent history reflected in the available trailer, Jannings is the star of this picture. Dietrich, whom the Weimar—and later Nazi—film powerhouse Universum Film AG, or UFA, had declined to offer an acting contract, was on a ship to the United States when this movie came out in Germany.

The film’s expressionist sets contrast the right angles and straight lines of the day lit world of the academy and carved medieval saints’ orderly, hourly parade around the clock of the town’s cathedral with the crooked, shadier corners of the German life and psyche. It was from those darker corners that graphic artists such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Grosz captured the spirit of the times in their work.

Many of the actors, especially those in roles such as the fat cabaret owner (Karl Huszar-Puffy), troupe director Zauberkunstler [magician] Kiepart (Kurt Gerron) and his wife Guste (Rosa Valetti), their ‘girls,’ and extras such as black seamen in the club, would come from the same source.

A black negroid kewpie doll the professor finds in Lola’s bed when he awakes after spending his first night with her underlines this; the doll plays a romantic tune when he lifts its arm. One easily can imagine this image in a contemporary etching, which the emerging, light-loving Nazis would deride as ‘degenerate art’ [entartete kunst].

However, the most remarkable thing about this classic German film is the great silent acting performance by Jannings at the head of this competent cast of silent actors.

Coming from an era in which all film acting was done in mime—an art closer to dance than theater—it is a wonder to watch the qualities and depth Jannings mines to animate his Herr Professor Dr. Immanuel Rath. His work is equal to his tour-de-force performance in F. W. Murnau’s classic Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924).

David Denby provides noteworthy and concise insights on the art of silent film acting in his essay The Artists, published last month [Feb. 27, 2012] in The New Yorker, with reference to the success of last year’s much ballyhooed ‘silent film’.

One of Der blaue Engel’s many great scenes shows an august Rath pacing on one side of swaying sheer silk curtains with the silhouette of his new wife, Lola Lola (Dietrich), in various stages of undress moving in opposite directions on the other side.

Lola disappears to the right: Rath moves to take a quick, prurient peek through the curtains after her, and then sits down. Lola pops her head out from where he had peeked and asks for a suitcase. Quick to comply, Rath fumbles the case, it falls to the floor and springs open, spilling a set of Lola Lola ‘French postcards’ sold to audiences during her show. When Rath objects to them, Lola teasingly scolds him less with words than her body wrapped in the sheer silk curtain.

It was a Lola Lola image that first piqued Rath’s interest when he confiscated several of these cards from his gymnasium students in the beginning of the film. One card shows Dietrich in dark stockings and garters, with feathers appliquéd at her waist like a skirt which, lightly blown upon, reveal her silk bloomered thighs.

It is fascinating to watch Jannings work, but the story is easy to read in each actor’s face and gestures. One gets a good sense of the art of silent acting by comparing this film’s German and English versions, produced simultaneously for domestic and foreign release. The Kino International Inc. DVD set provides a copy of both versions.

The use of English gives the story a slightly different flavor, but the dialog makes little difference because both versions are essentially the same silent film in which the actors physically do what they say in German.

The German version is an early talkie with all the virtues of good silent cinema; it relies on mime and visuals cues, with a garnish of spoken dialog. For the English version, von Sternberg reshot Jannings and Dietrich doing their dialogs in English. Dietrich’s English is better than Jannings’ (in the latter film, she actually plays an English-speaking actress). Jannings’ German-accented English serves his character, though he comes off more a negative ethnic stereotype in the English version than in the original.

The key comes with the other roles. In the English version, an assortment of the other actors also redoes their lines in English with varying degrees of fluency. But von Sternberg reuses the shots and scenes in which non-English-speaking secondary characters such as the professor’s landlady and other women in the cabaret appear alone speaking German without subtitles.

As a singer, Dietrich has less range than an average rock vocalist. Yet she has a otherworldly screen presence (the DVD set includes German and English screen tests she did for von Sternberg)—so commanding, one can only surmise, that UFA let her go because they did not think they could handle her.  

Nimm dich in acht vor blonden Frauen,
die haben so etwas gewisses!

Welcome to Kinshasa!

Viva Riva! 2010 Democratic Republic of the Congo (96 minutes) written, directed and produced by Djo Tunda Wa Munga.

A protagonist pursued by a ruthless out-of-town mobster, with a femme fatale and corrupt or toothless civil authority, against the backdrop of a city which is a character in its own right sounds like pure film noir.

But this is not Los Angeles, New York or San Francisco in the 1940s; it is Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in our own era.

Congolese director Djo Tunda Wa Munga has taken a cue from what the German Expressionist directors behind film noir did in Hollywood. Rather than copy and quote classic American movies to tell his ‘gangster story,’ he uses his art to tell a good story to an unsophisticated audience.

This is not to say an unintelligent audience. Munga aims for moviegoers more like those in Depression-era America, in contrast to Americans nowadays whom directors expect to bring with them a sophisticated vocabulary of details from American film and television of the last 80 years. He also avoids the didactic tone that can make African feature films tedious to watch.

Here in his first feature film, he starts from scratch. The result is fresh and eye-opening. In the eyes of a native, this sprawling ‘poubelle’ of more than eight million souls flickers to life as a place with its own distinct flavor, its own beat, its own logic.

In this sense, Munga meets the creators of the HBO television series The Wire. Like The Wire’s David Simon and Ed Burns, Munga tells a believable story in a place he knows well, in which real people go about their lives and where the city itself becomes a character. 

It is not a pretty story. This is the land that Belgian Emperor Leopold II made, where Joseph Conrad found his ‘heart of darkness’. It has been racked with war and civil strife since its independence 60 years ago. It is a tough, unforgiving place.

Riva (Patsha Bay) is a Kinshasan who has spent a decade working in neighboring Angola. He has managed literally to siphon off a truckload of gasoline that he takes back to gas-starved Kinshasa to sell through his partner, G.O. (Romain Ndomba), a black market broker. They have roughly 10,000 liters of gasoline—about four dozen 55-gallon barrels—to sell for as much as ten American dollars per liter.

Back in Kinshasa, Riva hooks up with childhood friend J.M. (Alex Hérabo) with a fistful of American hundred-dollar bills looking for a good time. The night life has a lively, sexual pulse. The club scene would not be out of place in the U.S. or Europe; there also are public and private places where dancers follow more traditional country practices brought to town by workers from Congo’s backlands.

Dancing seems to be what Kinshasans enjoy best. Removed from their tribal settings, the drumming and dancing, especially as performed by women in brothels in body paint and masks, suggest an intermediate step between the source and so-called ‘voodoo’ rituals in the New World.

However, for those who may watch with a delicate constitution or hardy children, there is a lot of explicit sex and violence in this movie. 

The free-wheeling sexuality has a desperate, dysfunctional feel to it. With the exception of Riva’s brief liaison with the femme fatale Nora (Manie Malone), which would not be out of place in an American movie, the sex portrayed is performed more between unequals than a shared pleasure. Connected with this is the gratuitous slapping, beating and kicking around administered to women and people of lower status. 

The use of language also is of note. In general, Congolese use the local French, ranging from a demotic street patter to more conventional forms used to impress or intimidate. For Angolans, French is a lingua franca secondary to their native Portuguese. Swahili and tribal languages such as Lingala are used informally between friendly familiars, but also to disrespect people or to put down those of lower status.

Riva sets his sights on Nora whom he sees dancing at one of the traditional venues. Nora turns out to be the moll of Azor (Diplôme Amekindra), a local heavy touted the ‘Strongman of Kinshasa.’

Azor does not take this upstart seriously; he has enough problems of his own.

Meanwhile, César (Hoji Fortuna), Riva’s former Angolan boss, arrives in the city in an immaculate white linen suit with his enforcers, looking for the employee who stole a small fortune in gasoline from him. César extorts La Commandante (Marlène Longage), a Congolese army post commander with whom he has a history, to help him find Riva.

César and his men look down on the Congolese as being hopelessly backward. They pay for this dim view when they are held up briefly by country-proud officials, but César brutally overcomes this obstacle more determined than ever to catch Riva.

G.O. warned Riva at outset against discussing their scheme with anyone—‘After all, this is Kinshasa,’ he said. But word of Riva’s purported bounty hits the city grapevine, fueling an imagination that fires the greed of everyone from Azor to Père Gaston (Bavon Diana Landa), a crooked Roman Catholic priest. Everyone is after the booty. Though, as Nora tells Riva, ‘Money is like poison: in the end, it always kills you.’

True to the code of film noir, the story, which takes place in the space of a just a few short days, screws down to a matter of time—Night and the City time. 

Winner take nothing

Animal Kingdom 2010 Australia (113 minutes) written and directed by David Michôd.

This Australian film has been compared to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), but it has none of the snappy dialog and humor, style and situations that make the criminal life look like a good lark.

If anything, Animal Kingdom has a documentary feel, beginning with a teenager sitting on a couch next to a dozing woman, watching a daytime television game show. When two uniformed paramedics arrive, we find out that the dozing woman is the boy’s mother overdosed on heroin.

The full shock of this scene is best left to the viewer.

The broader context of this story is that a family of violent career criminals is pursued aggressively by a rogue police unit that would just as soon kill as capture them.

The unstable, depressive Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody (Ben Mendelsohn) and cocaine-fortified Craig Cody (Sullivan Stapleton) are especially on edge after their associate Barry ‘Baz’ Brown (Joel Edgerton) is gunned down unarmed by police in broad daylight.

The ‘boys’ hang at the house of their widowed mother, Janine ‘Grandma Smurf’ Cody (Jacki Weaver), with their younger brother Darren (Luke Ford). Weaver does a grand turn as an iron middle finger inside the Smurf doll she plays: a heartless sentimentalist who seems to enjoy ‘being around her boys’ a smooch too much.

Into this mix comes 17-year-old Joshua ‘J’ Cody (17-year-old James Frecheville in his first billed role). Joshua does not realize at the time that the reason he does not know his mother’s family is because they scared her and she tried to keep him away from them.

Unlike Goodfellas’ Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) who moons at becoming one of the respected and cool ‘made guys’ in the neighborhood, Joshua follows along like the teenager he is, getting involved in the life around him without appearing to be especially interested in it. He speaks of his earlier life in a voiceover:

‘Kids just are wherever they are and they just do whatever they’re doing, you know? This is where I was and this is what I was doing.’

There is no gratuitous violence and sex in this movie. Rather, it is a dark, gut-wrenching family drama that shows what real people—some sociopathic—do with blood on their minds and weapons in their hands.

It also is one of the more realistic cinematic portrayals of the criminal justice system: a tough game, where ‘good and bad’ and ‘winning and losing’ are all relative.  

What helps make this portrayal work well is a subdued turn by Guy Pearce as Detective Senior Sergeant Nathan Leckie trying to get Joshua to turn state’s evidence against his uncles, and the uncles’ lawyers, Ezra White (Dan Wyllie) and his colleague Justine Hopper (Anna Lise Phillips), the barrister, or lawyer who represents them at trial.

 ‘Good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ operate in the same environment and often come from the same place. The police are not necessarily the good guys, but both good and dirty cops are backed by the full power of the state. The bad guys make their living on the wrong side of the law. The game has its own set of rules apart from the criminal code. Despite police frustration at the fancy footwork of the bad guys’ pricey and clever lawyers, the rules and the law are stacked heavily in their favor.

The bad guys’ ‘wins’ in this game are as short-term as their ill-gotten gains. The news media, not to mention many movies, make much of the big scores and seemingly unconscionable acquittals of the ‘guilty’ at trial.

At best, the bad guys and their self-serving lawyers only win heavily publicized small battles in a much larger war of attrition that they know they never can win, against an adversary that deals the game with comparably unlimited resources—not to mention time and the law of averages in its favor.

When Leckie puts pressure on the family to break his investigation, the uncles realize that this boy they really do not know—and in whom Leckie seems interested—has been hanging around the house a lot with his girlfriend Nicole (Laura Wheelwright). They have no idea what these kids know and might tell police, despite their lawyer’s instruction to Joshua to say nothing. Things start to undo.

In a scene early in the story reminiscent of Goodfellas, Joshua expresses his uncles’ fear in a retrospective voiceover spoken in a stage whisper during a deft edit of the fatherly Baz returning to his suburban home from a run. Baz drops off cash, kisses his wife, and then checks police surveillance in front of the house:

‘[T]hey were all scared, even if they didn’t show it. Even if they didn’t know it exactly. Even if they were having to do what crooks do all the time, which is block out the thing they must know. They must know it. Which is, that crooks always come undone. Always. One way or another.’

Joshua is justifiably as scared of Leckie and the police as he is of his uncles and their lawyers (but unfortunately not Grandma Smurf). What he draws from his exchanges with each of them is that their primary interests and concerns are not in his best interests.

He is forced to be as clear and honest as he can with himself about the true nature of his situation. His coming of age is that he must exercise grownup judgment in order to save his life. 

Paper vagina

Tabloid 2010 (88 minutes) directed by Errol Morris.

A manacled Mormon sex slave and a vagina dentata; magic underwear, bondage, blow jobs, hot cinnamon oil massages; international fugitives in fat suits, dark glasses and a wig named Matilda; cloned Boogers: What the devil is Errol Morris up to here?

Tabloids—or the heart and essence of the tabloid story.

But rather than the usual Branjelina and alien fare one might expect while idling at a supermarket checkout, Morris found a celebrity- and alien-in-one in an Everywoman for whom one easily could imagine these stories are told: a self-absorbed, irony-proof bundle of sentimentality, folk mysticism and old wives’ tales informed by a vivid imagination:

Joyce McKinney.

McKinney calls herself an ‘incurable romantic’. Originally from North Carolina, she characterizes herself as a ‘small-town girl’ raised on beauty pageants. She said she had little interest in or experience with men and sex before she met Kirk Anderson, ‘the love of her life,’ at age 19 while she was attending college in Utah.

During a brief, evidently sexless ‘affair’, McKinney claims that the couple made plans to get married and start a family. Then, without a word to her, Anderson suddenly disappeared. McKinney later determined that he left her under pressure from his mother and the Mormon church of which he was a member. Morris tells us Anderson ‘refused’ to talk with him.  

After Anderson disappeared, McKinney ‘went to Los Angeles and worked three jobs trying to save enough money to hire a private investigator to find out what happened to him,’ she said. She discovered that he had been sent to do Mormon missionary work in England. She hired a ‘team’ to accompany her to England to ‘rescue’ Anderson from ‘the cult’.

Her half-baked attempt to spring Anderson smacks of the jumbled plots of bad romance and adventure movies—not to mention nutty tabloid stories. McKinney and an accomplice allegedly kidnapped the 6’3”, 300-pound Anderson at gunpoint and took him on a ‘honeymoon’ getaway to the Devon countryside, where he was chained ‘spread eagled’ on a bed and ‘forced’ to have sex with her all weekend long.

‘Do you think a woman can rape a man?’ Morris’ voice asks behind the camera.

‘No. I think that’s like puttin’ a marshmallow in a parking meter,’ McKinney says.

The story hit the British tabloids like a bomb. It took on a life of its own once law enforcement officials decided that the bizarre allegations under the ‘Manacled Mormon’ banner headlines demanded their action. But the case left the British legal establishment scratching its head.

The Daily Mirror’s Kent Gavin struck gold when his paper sent him to Los Angeles to look into McKinney’s background. The Real McKinney, according to The Daily Mirror, turned out to be something of a Roller Girl dominatrix operating under Bill Clinton’s definition of what constitutes ‘sex’…

But despite all the tease and titillation, there seems to have been little actual sex going on. It is doubtful that McKinney, who claimed to be a virgin, ever got more than Anderson’s guilt-ridden marshmallow in her meter in Devon. Her helpers and admirers claimed they never had sex with her, and she said that she has been celibate after her ‘relationship’ with Anderson ended in England.

The purported vagina dentata seems to have been a paper vagina.

Peter Tory, whose stories for The Daily Express portrayed ‘an innocent, sweet-natured woman…who was a victim of cruel circumstance’—the official line McKinney wanted publicized—said that ‘there was something in that story for everyone. It was the perfect tabloid story.’ 

Morris has fun recreating it with an unironic McKinney and a wry Jackson Shaw, one of the men she had hired to be a part of her team, tabloid reporters Gavin and Tory, and a lot of visual pizzazz suitable to his subject. The story ran in the tabloid press from 1977 when it first broke until 1984, when a distraught McKinney ‘fled’ an Atlanta hotel ‘in her nightie,’ eventually ‘disappearing’ across a busy freeway.

But that’s not all: the McKinney story has a second act. 

A dozen years later, Joyce ‘Bernann’ McKinney came into the media spotlight once more when she had ‘Booger’, her faithful pit bull, successfully cloned by Dr. Lee Byeong Chun in South Korea. The tabloid media frothed with malicious glee with its ‘Manacled Mormon’ woman back in the spotlight.

‘I don’t see any connection between cloned puppies and a 32-year-old sex-in-chains story,’ maintained the petulantly unironic McKinney, nonplused by the attention.

‘She’s not an evil person,’ Tory said. ‘I mean, she’s just a bit crazy, eccentric, self-obsessed, self-involved and manipulative, and barking mad, probably, basically, but, um—’

‘Barking mad?’ Morris’ question comes from behind the camera.

‘Yeah.’

“I wish we had that expression over here,’ Morris said.

‘You can have it,’ Tory said, smiling.

McKinney gets the last word, reading from the book she says that she is writing about her life and one great unrequited love:

‘Joyce is now a lonely old woman. Like Narcissus, she is pining to death, dying of a broken heart. That’s the conclusion of my book, but the love has never ended.’