Friday, November 1, 2013

There's something about Malkina

The Counselor 2013 U.S. (117 minutes) directed by Ridley Scott; written by Cormac McCarthy; cinematography by Dariusz Wolski; editing by Pietro Scalia; music by Daniel Pemberton; dedicated to Tony Scott.

Is there a tougher job than being a protagonist in a Cormac McCarthy story?

The Counselor is an incredibly watchable film that is just as incredibly difficult to watch. It’s a taut, tough gut-wrencher by a writer known for taut, tough gut-wrenchers, set in the dry wastes of the United States’ southern border with Mexico.

McCarthy’s first produced original screenplay is a neo-film noir about a lawyer with large ideas of living larger. The lawyer’s greed inserts him into a relentless sequence of events for which his ambition and success in the straight world have ill prepared him.

The movie has been criticized for being more literary than filmic, and there is lots of talk and many moving parts. McCarthy fans probably will love it. Five big stars, some well-cut cameos, and Ridley Scott’s directorial pizzazz make it a fittingly lavish B film.  

There is also over-the-top sex and violence, though less by documentation than appeal to a viewer’s imagination. A head is shaken from a motorcycle helmet at night after a high-speed beheading. A decomposing body turns up in a 55-gallon steel drum, a ‘joke’ sent from one drug lord to another. And an ‘automatic garrote’ mentioned in act one turns up in act three.

As for the sex, there are two vaginal dialogues—a couple engaged in cunnilingus, mostly hidden by white sheets, and a former exotic dancer who in her own words ‘fucks’ her boyfriend’s Ferrari by rubbing her bikini-waxed sex on the windshield before his stunned eyes. He later compares what only he saw to the mouth of a ‘catfish’ against aquarium glass—‘too gynecological to be sexy,’ he assures his interlocutor.

MP will do no more than set the table.

Michael Fassbender as the Counselor in Ridley Scott's The Counselor (2013).
The Counselor of the title, the James Bond-dashing Michael Fassbender, is a criminal defense attorney in a solo practice in El Paso, Texas. We never learn his name, we never see his office; his work involves travel, and he does not discuss his work with his girlfriend Laura (Penélope Cruz), also a well-to-do working professional.

Apart from establishing the Counselor’s idea about the high life, a trip he takes to ‘Dateline: Amsterdam’ seems to be a Hitchcockian MacGuffin. The sole purpose of this trip is the purchase of a diamond not quite the size of the Ritz with which to propose to Laura. Austrian star Bruno Ganz does a nice cameo as the Dutch diamond dealer.        

One of the Counselor’s clients is Reiner (Javier Bardem), a charming and amusing night club operator who owns a pair of cheetahs, and also a septic tank business. Starched and spit-shined Anglo law enforcement want as little as possible to do with sweaty, greasy Mexicans driving beat-up honey-dippers. This makes the latter an ideal conveyance for industrial quantities of Columbian cocaine. 

Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz and pet cheetah in The Counselor (2013) 
Reiner consumes conspicuously; he shares his exotic tastes with his girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz), a sleek, tawny feline cipher with showy, expensive clothes and jewelry and a spray of cheetah spots tattooed across her back. He tells the Counselor that he has no idea what she knows about his business—‘probably everything,’ he admits.

Reiner tells the Counselor that Malkina was an exotic dancer. Malkina tells Laura that she is from Barbados, and that both her parents were thrown into the ocean from a helicopter when she was three years old. We later find out that Malkina has a long-term professional relationship with a private banker in London.

Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz with cheetah spots in The Counselor (2013)
In fact, no one really knows the least thing about Malkina. She gives indications of being a psychopath along the lines of clinical descriptions in Hervey Cleckley’s classic The Mask of Sanity: a calculating, dispassionate seductress as though joyously devoid of empathy, who engages in off-putting, outrageous behavior, particularly sexual (e.g., the ‘catfish’).

The Counselor and Reiner are preparing to open a new night club as partners. The question at outset is whether the Counselor will put up money as a partner in a one-time Colombia-to-Chicago cocaine shipment via Reiner’s septic tank business: 625 kilos of cocaine worth $20 million.

The return on his investment would be excessively beyond what straight money would bring. It’s the border; people do this all the time, the Counselor reasons. It’s what made Reiner and others rich. He’ll be able to put his share down on the night club and get his girl the big rock.  

Reiner and Westray (Brad Pitt), another underground contact in the deal, each caution the Counselor of the dire risks this enterprise entails. As a canny and experienced criminal defense lawyer who thinks he’s hip to the street and on top of his game, the Counselor figures himself equal to the challenge.

Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender in The Counselor (2013).
Aye, there’s the rub. There’s more at stake here than fudging legal ethics and breaking the law. When certain people start telling you how smart you are, chances are they think they’ve got your number and they’re working on your wallet and watch.

The part the Counselor does not get until it is too late is that this business world operates by its own customs, rules, and logic. It has to. The stakes are high because the ‘cartels’ are at war. Things that happen in this world have specific meanings. There are no coincidences. And when things go wrong—as they do here—draconian consequences have to be automatic, swift and sure. It’s just business, made intensely personal.

Once the Counselor ‘crossed the border’ from his life that was, his career and lovely wife, ‘life is not going to take you back,’ an anonymous ‘jefe’ (Reubén Blades) tells him.

‘There’s no choosing, there’s only accepting,’ the jefe says. ‘The choosing was done a long time ago.’

Friday, August 23, 2013

The Law Is a Ass

Bir zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) 2011 Turkey (157 minutes) directed and co-written by Nuri Bilge Ceylan; editor, Bora Göksingöl.
It was a dark and stormy night…
Before the title, a camera keeps its wary distance like a cat. It peeks through a dirty window to watch three men share food, drink, and friendly conversation after hours in a roadside tire repair shop. The road is an unlined two-laner in central Anatolia about 100 miles southeast of Ankara, Turkey.
After the title, one of these three men turns up haggard and unshaven in the back of a car between a police officer and the district coroner. The police commissioner and a driver are in the front seats. It is sunset, apparently several days after the opening scene.
The haggard man, Kenan (Firat Taniş), is a murder suspect. He is supposed to lead a detail of law enforcement officials to the roadside site where he buried a victim he has confessed to killing. The officials want to wrap up a long day and get home to dinner.
Police Commissioner Naci (Yilmaz Erdoğan), suspect Kenan (Firat Taniş) and Police Officer Izzet (Murat Kiliç) in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).
Kenan’s younger brother Ramazan (Burhan Yildiz), who had been with Kenan in the tire repair shop, is under guard in another vehicle in the detail. He is Kenan’s alleged accomplice. Throughout the film the third man, Yaşar Toprak (Erol Erarslan), the victim, reappears to the guilt-haunted Kenan like Banquo’s ghost.
As ‘police procedurals’ go, this movie is an outlier. It starts out as a cut-and-dried murder case; but the murder turns out to be peripheral to the atmosphere created by details of the main characters’ lives and what their stories and attitudes say about society, its laws and procedures.
Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan tells his story in the standing-around time investigations inevitably entail, which moviegoers and television viewers seldom see. The men’s back-and-forth is reminiscent of the banter in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), though less arty and with fewer pop culture references: ‘Like a Virgin’ becomes ‘like a fairy tale.’
‘Like a Virgin’ becomes ‘like a fairy tale’: Yilmaz Erdoğan, Muhammet Uzuner, Firat Taniş, Murat Kiliç and Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).
Central to the story are men’s difficult relationships with women. A wife’s affair may be behind the murder under investigation. The narrative carefully picks its way through details of the main characters’ fraught marital stories; it gets at the truth through conversation as this works in life, in told and admitted and inadvertent bits and pieces. The henpecked police commissioner’s ringtone from the theme of the film Love Story is a nice touch.
In the end, a carefully thought through, stylized script achieves the naturalness of what feels like ‘the real thing.’ The result is a subtle and beautifully rendered slice-of-life from the heartland of Turkey.
Dr. Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), the coroner, provides Ceylan’s main narrative point of view. [In Turkish, c is pronounced like English j.] In the car with Dr. Cemal and the prime suspect Kenan are Police Commissioner Naci (Yilmaz Erdoğan), Police Officer Izzet (Murat Kiliç), and Police Officer Arab Ali (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), the commissioner’s driver.
Savcı Nusret (Taner Birsel), the public prosecutor and ranking official, leads the investigation. Nusret apparently came from Ankara at Naci’s request to handle the case. He is in the ‘courthouse’ car with a driver and two laborers with shovels detailed to disinter the buried corpse. Suspect Ramazan is in the gendarmerie jeep taking up the rear with a flashing roof light.
This three-vehicle detail of law enforcement officials tying up the loose ends of a murder case turns into three sets of headlights in the badlands in a night-long anabasis through the sleep-deprived memory of a less and less convincing suspect and the personal lives of the main characters.
A key scene takes place in the middle of the film, in the middle of the night, when the team, frustrated by the suspect’s dodgy memory but all drawing overtime pay, pulls into a rural village for an unplanned meal break.
The Muhtar (Ercan Kesal), or elected village elder, welcomes the team with open arms. The visit gives him a chance to lobby Nusret for public funds for the mortuary he says the village needs. During a brief power outage, the Muhtar’s lovely daughter Cemile (Cansu Demirci) appears to several of the men, lit by a kerosene lamp like a subject in a Georges de la Tour painting.
Before the meal break, the commissioner had been at the point of beating Kenan out of sheer exasperation. The suspect promised to take the team to where the body was buried, but he seems to have lost track of where that is. Naci suspects that Kenan is just another ‘cheap hood’ leading police on a wild sheep chase. But near the end of the break, Naci gets new information that changes his appreciation of the suspect and the case.
The tidy dimensions of the initial incident bleed slowly into a genuine tragedy that becomes impossible to fit within the four corners of published police procedure or reporting, charging documentation or an autopsy report. We see this at the end of the film when the doctor makes a judgment call in the autopsy room after watching the victim's wife and son leave the hospital after identifying the body.
The viewer watches Yaşar’s autopsy performed in the words and faces of Dr. Cemal, Sakir (Kubilay Tunçer) the autopsy technician, and the courthouse clerk Abidin (Safak Karali). The camera does not show the body; we see only the men’s facial expressions as Dr. Cemal directs Sakir and dictates his report. We hear Sakir’s cutting and the squish-squish. A drop of brown bodily fluid splashes on the doctor’s cheek.
The law may well be the ass Charles Dickens’s Mr. Bumble derides in Oliver Twist when its officers force its stubborn logic on humanity’s idiosyncrasies to achieve justice. At the same time, it becomes society’s beast of burden when charged with this ungainly task.
Despite the two-and-a-half hour runtime, there is no dead space—the shots tell a story without trying to impress us that THIS IS AN ART FILM. The story they tell engages one’s interest and bears more than one viewing because it does so much so well. The words and images are textured with a wealth of information: there is a lot to look at and take in, seamlessly knit together by Bora Göksingöl’s deft, rhythmic editing.
The title comes from a comment Arab Ali makes to Dr. Cemal as they stretch their legs outside the car at one of the several night stops:
‘Maybe you’re bored to death now. But one day you may get a kick out of the stuff going on here. When you have a family, you’ll have a story to tell. Is that so bad? You can say, “Once upon a time in Anatolia, when I was out in the sticks, I remember this one night which began like this.” You can tell it like a fairy tale.’
Muhammet Uzuner and Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Hanging on to a dream

Die Innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) 2000 Germany (106 minutes) directed by Christian Petzold; written by Petzold and Harun Farocki.
A German couple living twenty years on the run from their leftist terrorist past in West Germany is undone by their teenage daughter’s desire for an ordinary life.
This compelling, fast-moving tale is a family drama told from the point of view of fifteen-year-old Jeanne (Julia Hummer) raised abroad on the fly and home-schooled in isolation by educated and mysterious parents whom the viewer knows only as Hans (Richy Müller) and Clara (Barbara Auer).
Jeanne (Julia Hummer), Clara (Barbara Auer), and Hans (Richy Müller)
in Christian Petzold's 
Die Innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) 2000 .
One of the hallmarks of a Christian Petzold film is its clean, spare architecture. Each detail introduced will reappear, often in ways one least should expect it.
In this story there are no politics, no history, and very little character backstory; there are only Jeanne’s feelings and impressions as the world rushes relentlessly at her and her parents, and Hans and Clara fight to hold it back.
Trained to be wary of strangers and watchful of her surroundings, Jeanne is at the same time childishly innocent of this world. Her age magnifies her conflicting feelings. As she tries later to explain to Heinrich (Bilge Bingül), her first boyfriend and likely the only person beside her parents, and close to her in age, with whom she has had personal contact, ‘My parents and I belong to a cult. It is very strict, and it’s difficult for me.’
The story opens on one of Portugal’s unspoiled beaches during an off season. Jeanne, taking a study break, is having a soft drink and sneaking a smoke at a seaside bar. She eyes a group of surfers. This is one of several scenes in which Jeanne watches young people her age socializing as though she were fantasizing what it would be like to be among them.
Heinrich, one of the surfers, notices Jeanne and comes over to meet her. She cuts short their chat without explanation when she sees her father at a distance; she knows it is time to leave.
Jeanne (Julia Hammer) and Heinrich (Bilge Bingül) in Christian Petzold's Die Innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) 2000
The family domestic routine—the German title of the film, Die Innere Sicherheit, translates literally as domestic or internal security—is an orderly and disciplined idyll. Hans and Clara are in love; they care deeply for Jeanne, whom Clara tutors in calculus and foreign languages. The family appears to lead the discreet life of affluent expatriates. Their ultimate destination seems to be a comfortable exile in the Third World.
But first they must get out of Portugal. Hans’s trips during the day appear to involve meeting shady contacts to arrange their passage. The irony of the piece is that the family’s sublime and wary isolation is willfully blind to Jeanne’s becoming an adult in the image of her gifted, rebellious and idealistic parents.
Jeanne sees Heinrich again. She goes on a first date with him one evening while her parents are having noisy sex. When Heinrich talks about himself, Petzold literally transports the two hand-in-hand to a house in Hamburg that the boy describes in detail, the house he says his wealthy father bought, where his mother killed herself. Since that time it has been abandoned, he tells her.
A day earlier, an overfriendly, chatty middle-aged local (Rogério Jacques) had engaged Jeanne at the bar, purportedly to correct the German on his menu. The man apparently confirmed that Jeanne and her parents are well-to-do German expatriates living in a nearby apartment building. The family’s apartment is burgled several days later.
The burglary propels the narrative into high gear. Hans and Clara are cleaned out. They must risk returning to Germany to recover money hidden in old drops and contact former associates for the funds to escape abroad.
But the money drops are not productive. Nor are their old contacts especially thrilled to see Hans and Clara suddenly reappear, relieved to have moved on from their shared past. The police are seldom far behind them. It is clear that the authorities consider the couple to be extremely dangerous. The family ends up in Hamburg in the abandoned house Heinrich had described on his date with Jeanne.
Sent out one afternoon to do the household marketing, Jeanne does the entirely natural teenage act of shoplifting clothes and music cds—things she thinks will make her more like the kids she sees and get boys’ attention better than the anonymous duds her parents provide.
She crashes a film shown to a local high school class with a pupil (Inka Löwendorf) she meets in the street. She also discovers that Heinrich is in Hamburg and lives close to where she and her parents are hiding out. 
When Hans finds out that Jeanne shoplifted the clothes and cds, he is upset because of the wildly unnecessary risk to which she exposed them. He makes Jeanne promise not to shoplift or see any boys before they leave Hamburg.
Meanwhile, the only way Hans and Clara see to raise the money they need to get out of Europe quickly is a bank robbery like the kind they apparently did for the cause back in the day…
The film bears a ready comparison to Running on Empty, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 classic, in which River Phoenix starred as the teenage son of parents on the run from the FBI for having blown up a napalm lab in 1971 to protest the Vietnam War.
But what Petzold has done here is closer in nature to film noir: flawed but sympathetic protagonists operate at the whim of a femme fatale—here a teenage girl—to survive in an unjust world. By necessity of their flaw, they must find ways to achieve their end outside the institutions society provides to maintain order and serve justice.
In avoiding the politics and history, Petzold gives his characters more room to grow and develop relationships with each other. His is a highly unusual group of people in extreme circumstances; at the same time, it is a family going through things fathers, mothers and teenagers everywhere experience. 


Wednesday, August 7, 2013

A boy's best friend

마더 [Madeo] (Mother) 2009 South Korea (128 minutes) directed and co-written by Bong Joon-ho
A schoolgirl is discovered murdered and left ‘on display’ over a railing on the roof of a vacant building of a provincial town in southern South Korea.
The girl’s skull is broken; yet despite a farrago of salacious rumors, she is fully clothed and sexually untouched. Circumstantial witnesses put a 27-year-old man with the mentality and judgment of a small child at the crime scene. Police find a golf ball near the girl’s body on which earlier we saw the man inscribe his name. The suspect signs a confession.
Moon Ah-jeong (Moon Hee-ra) ‘Rice Cake Girl’ hanging over a roof railing
in Bong Joon-ho’s Madeo 2009.
The viewer saw this man follow the girl to the crime scene on the night in question. He had had a lot to drink, and he aimlessly was throwing golf balls he had in his pockets. A brief exchange ensued; the girl appeared to run him off. And then the man shambled away as though he forgot what he was doing there, returning home to his mother.
The signed confession makes this an open-and-shut murder case for the police. Nor does the suspect’s identity surprise the victim’s family or town’s residents.
But Mother (Kim Hye-ja), the boy’s mother—she is not referred to by name (another character once calls her ‘Mrs. Kim’)—knows that her sweet, simple-minded son Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) could not possibly have murdered anyone. She decides to get to the bottom of what happened on her own.
Mother raised Do-joon alone in the intimate private space they still inhabit; the life of the town has eddied around their domestic narrative. Mother is a traditional ‘wise woman’: she sells medicinal herbs in a shop and practices unlicensed acupuncture.
Do-joon is a traditional village idiot: a good-natured imbecile who never worked a day in his life and is the butt of the townspeople’s rough humor. He tags along like a puppy after Jin-tae (Jin Goo), a ne’er-do-well his age whose antics often get Do-joon in trouble—and cost Mother money.
The acting that makes the mother and son roles work is remarkable. Kim Hye-ja’s Mother talks to Do-joon throughout the film like the five-year-old he always has been. One occasionally catches a gleam in her eye that reveals how intensely she works to sustain their domestic narrative. Won Bin’s Do-Joon conveys through doe-like eyes a look of mild curiosity convincingly several beats off the usual pace.
Detectives Nam Je-moon (Yoon Je-moon) and ‘Sepak Takraw’ (Song Sae-beauk) with Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) at the police station in Bong Joon-ho’s Madeo 2009.
The murder mystery evokes a David Lynch drama: an eccentric protagonist enters the looking glass of a provincial city’s normal life seeking answers and discovers unsettling distortions of the town’s placid conventionality—and in this instance, her own story.
The distortions stem in large part from the low status of women and girls. Beneath a thin veneer of propriety, women are treated as though a lower order of being; teenage girls are sex objects.
Nam Je-moon (Yoon Je-moon), lead police detective on the case, knows the family and feels for them, but he is busy. He tries to humor Mother, but the case was over for him when Do-joon confessed to the crime and signed a statement. There is no call for Je-moon further to investigate or to try to find Ah-jeong’s cell phone, for instance. 
Mother turns to Kong Seok-ho (Yeo Moo-yeong), ‘the most expensive lawyer in the county,’ to take her son’s case. It does not take her long to see that the only thing the campily supercilious Lawyer Kong—a great piece of character acting—takes seriously about the case is Mother’s hard-earned money. Her final ‘meeting’ with Lawyer Kong exceeds the bounds of poor taste in any culture, not to mention legal ethics. 
After an embarrassing initial misadventure as her own private eye, Mother is inspired by the passion of her number one suspect to find out what really happened to the murdered schoolgirl Moon Ah-jeong (Moon Hee-ra).
Ah-jeong lived with and took care of her alcoholic grandmother (Kim Gin-goo). Stories went around that ‘Rice Cake Girl’ had sex with anyone who gave her food. Mother also finds out from talking to schoolchildren that Ah-jeong enlisted another schoolgirl’s electronic wizardry to make a ‘pervert phone’ to try to turn the tables on male sex bullies.
However, the old saw that ‘things are rarely what they seem’ is true at least as often as the notion that people miss or willfully ignore details in plain sight which belie their comfortable or conditioned assumptions.
The story sustains its quick pace and intensity throughout with odd characters, tense moments, and hairpin plot turns. Telling details ring true when they come back in a variety of ways, often inadvertent, through different characters as the story progresses.
And evidence depends on who is doing the reading. Unlike letting the proverbial falling chips tell their own tale through a Sherlock Holmesian process of deduction, people tend to start with a fact or two and fill in missing parts with their own ideas, motivations and prejudices to tie up the loose ends. Therein lies the tale.
As in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, Madeo’s ending wraps up the story but leaves a viewer with the uneasy sense that the larger evil is still very much abroad. The last casualty may be Mother’s cherished personal narrative.
By the end, Mother would agree with Ecclesiastes’ Preacher that the knowledge and understanding which bring wisdom, especially of oneself, are not bought cheap, For in much wisdom is much grief: and she that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
According to director Bong Joon-ho, the title Madeo (마더) is a Korean trope on the English words ‘mother’ and ‘murder.’ These words make the same sound to a Korean speaker: Korean phonetics renders both English words as ‘madeo’ in transliteration. The two most common Korean words for ‘mother’ are omoni (어머니) or, more familiarly, umma (엄마); ‘murder’ in Korean is sarin (살인).


Thursday, August 1, 2013

Hollow Men

Fat City 1972 U.S. (100 minutes) directed by John Huston; screenplay by Leonard Gardner, based on Gardner’s 1969 novel of the same title; cinematography by Conrad L. Hall; editing by Walter Thompson.
This is a beautiful, gutsy boxing picture made with a documentary touch at a moment when the chattering classes predicted the sunset of the American Dream and the imminent decline of Great America.
No, not last week.
Set in Stockton, California, in the hot, flat depressed inland from the Bay Area, John Huston’s classic Fat City takes place early in the economically painful 1970s in a country waking up in the rust belt to the cream sherry hangover of the 1960s, an unwinnable Asian war, and an ‘imperial presidency’ about to implode in disgrace.
The film’s overture is an opening series of shots that make for a photo essay of Stockton’s former Depression-era skid row, a human-scale yesterday of old storefronts and phantom advertising on brick walls slowly being bulldozed to make way for a modern freeway. The human subjects are mostly middle-aged or elderly black and Latino residents going about their lives, here and there a derelict. 
Several minutes of well-composed shots roll by to the sound of Kris Kristofferson strumming his hit ‘Help Me Make It through the Night.’ The camera finds a man waking up in his bed in a single room occupancy hotel, hungover and rooting around his empty pints for a cigarette. Kristofferson’s voice picks up his plaintive lyrics as the opening credits begin.
The man is Billy Tully (Stacy Keach). Billy is a has-been 29-year-old boxer who tells himself he is going to quit drinking, get back into shape, give his stalled ring career a fresh shot. To paraphrase a popular slogan of the day, today is the first day of the rest of his life.
We eventually find out that after promising beginnings and a taste of the big time, Billy got married; the ‘good life’ led to drinking, and drinking ended up losing Billy his career and his wife.
Step one is to get himself to a gym.
At a YMCA, Billy meets and spars with a nice-looking, energetic younger guy who has good moves and, Billy says, might have a shot at the big time. Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) tells Billy he never boxed before; Billy encourages Ernie to look up his former manager Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colasanto) at the Lido Gym where Billy once worked out.
‘I know I saw you fight before,’ Ernie says, going out the door.
‘Did I win?’                                                                                   
‘Naw,’ Ernie admits.
What follows is a classic boxing story based on Leonard Gardner’s 1969 novel of the same title with the screenplay by the author.
John Huston’s direction and Conrad L. Hall’s cinematography go a long way to make this a great movie.
Huston’s work, beginning with his first film, The Maltese Falcon (1941), is well known. Hall shot 1967’s Cool Hand Luke and In Cold Blood; he won an Academy Award for his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He later picked up Oscars for his cinematography in American Beauty (1999) and Road to Perdition (2002).
But what really holds together this well-made boxing story is its diverse and terrific cast. Keach carries the picture. He makes a compelling portrait of a friendless, unlikable, self-destructive, hard-luck bastard. The likable Bridges is Keach’s natural foil as ‘the kid,’ though a kid who just as well could end up like Billy.
Two music selections nicely dovetail Billy’s and Ernie’s characters with the characters of the women in their lives in the period mood and atmosphere.
Billy first meets Susan Tyrrell’s Oma in a bar with her boyfriend Earl. Billy later runs into Oma alone in the same place to Dusty Springfield’s cover of Burt Bacharach’s popular ‘The Look of Love’ after Earl goes to jail for assault. Oma is ‘single’ again and their boozy back-and-forth both captures and parodies the feeling of the song.
The young Tyrrell does an entertaining and remarkable job as a saucy, self-destructive barfly who proves to be an irresistible magnet for Billy. Her work earned her an Academy Award nomination for a Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1973. (This was the year of The Godfather.)
Elsewhere, and as though a million miles away, Ernie’s Faye (Candy Clark) moodily intimates that they need to discuss Something Important one rainy night when they are out alone together in his car. An instrumental cover of Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ plays softly on the radio in the background. When Ernie figures out what Faye is trying to tell him, he says he thought they had ‘been pretty careful.’
‘If I was careful, I wouldn’t have come out here in the first place,’ Faye replies.
The movie is filled with beautifully written, well-played small moments that give it a steady pulse of authenticity, such as Ruben sitting up in bed at night, telling his wife about the new kid at gym, and then realizing she is already asleep.
Huston notably gave the picture a natural grain by putting then-current and former boxers in the secondary roles. He portrays professional boxing as a tough way to make a living, but without editorializing; he appreciates that men choose this profession and often remain in boxing as trainers and managers. Huston’s boxers seem in many cases to be natural actors.
Among the actual boxers is Oma’s non-boxer boyfriend Earl, played by Curtis Cokes, a world welterweight champion in the late 1960s. When Oma first introduces them at the bar, she tells Earl that Billy is ‘a fighter.’ ‘Oh really,’ is all Earl replies.
Ruben’s assistant Babe is Art Aragon, a professional lightweight boxer in the post-World War II era known as ‘The Golden Boy.’ Billy and Ernie’s teammates in Ruben’s stable, Wes (Billy Walker), Buford (Wayne Mahan), and Fuentes (Ruben Navarro), all were current fighters at the time.
The light heavyweight professional boxer Sixto Rodriguez played Arcadio Lucero, the ailing Mexican fighter whom Billy beats in a key comeback bout. According to Keach, Rodriguez actually knocked him out on the shoot and his knock-out punch appears in the film.
Huston also used ‘real people’ when he put Billy, and later, Billy and Ernie, in fields harvesting onions and gathering walnuts to earn extra money. Billy struggles to keep up with workers methodically digging, trimming and bagging onions a handful at a time and rhythmically hoeing weeds; Huston gets good mileage out of the workers’ backchat and stories.
The final scene is a lyrical passage similar to the coda of HBO’s The Sopranos. As with Tony Soprano, it is not hard to tell that Billy is probably not headed for a good end—though not with a bang, but a whimper.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Silent gem

The Patsy 1928 U.S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (77 minutes) directed by King Vidor; produced by Vidor, Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst; cinematography, John F. Seitz; based on a story and play by Barry Connors; adaptation and continuity, Agnes Christine Johnston; titles, Ralph Spence; editor, Hugh Wynn.
This antic silent comedy displays comic timing at its best as Hollywood puts funny faces on class issues and domestic life in a ‘typical’ American middle class home in the 1920s.
The ‘patsy’ at the center of this film is Patricia ‘Pat’ Harrington (Marion Davies), the younger daughter in a family of four who has a crush on her sister’s boyfriend. The film showcases Davies’ superb talents as comedienne and mimic.
Silent film acting is mime, a step between the spoken word and stylized conventions of dance. The vocabulary is readily accessible, taken live from the every day. What actors do with their bodies and their eyes, and the pace at which they do this is how this medium ‘speaks.’
Jane Winton, Marie Dressler, Dell Henderson and Marion Davies in  King Vidor's The Patsy 1928
Mime makes silent film ideal for physical comedy, though modern viewers can get too much of a good thing. Davies and this cast work well together as an ensemble, they have terrific timing, and their abilities are skillfully choreographed within the frame. The result is easy to read and fun to watch.
In a classic scene in this movie—a ‘must see’ for film buffs—Davies parodies three well-known film stars of the day, Mae Murray, Lillian Gish, and Pola Negri, as she tries to get the attention of a drink-dazed young ‘sheik.’ The sense of wicked fun Davies brings to these impressions makes them funny regardless of whether one knows anything about these actresses, all of whom were her friends.
Marion Davies as Mae Murray
Marion Davies as Lillian Gish
Marion Davies as Pola Negri
In addition, when Davies’ pairs her middle and index fingers to dance on the table cloth during an evening out, she quotes Charlie Chaplin’s famous tabletop dance with dinner rolls known as ‘Oceana Roll’ in The Gold Rush (1925).
Pat’s mother, Ma Harrington (Marie Dressler) is a post-Victorian middle class snob with social pretensions. She rules her roost from a stoutly girdled balcony like one of James Thurber’s overwives. Dressler, clearly having a good time, is an ideal foil for Davies
Pat’s sister Grace (Jane Winton) takes after her mother. Grace is going out with Tony Anderson (Orville Caldwell), an earnest developer who is designing a subdivision. Grace also leaves her options open; she thinks she knows her way around men. While Pat moons at Tony and hangs on his every word, Grace cannot conceive that anyone possibly could be interested in her ditsy little sister.
Tony Anderson (Orville Caldwell) charms the Harringtons in The Patsy 1928.
Pa Hen-ry! Harrington (Dell Henderson), a doctor, patiently abides. He and Pat are natural allies and share a healthy sense of humor.
Pa’s relationship with Ma is established in an early scene in their front room. Pa has settled himself on the couch after Sunday dinner to put up his feet, smoke his pipe and read a newspaper.  Ma enters the room complaining of her ‘health’; she makes Pa put out the pipe, give up the couch to her, and then give her his newspaper to read.
Pat (Marion Davies) and Pa (Dell Henderson): natural allies in The Patsy 1928.
Throughout the movie Ma complains ‘about everything from a bum vertebrae to exclamatory rheumatism,’ as Pa later remonstrates with her, though the things ‘ruining her health’ generally come down to anything unpleasant to her or contrary to her peremptory wishes.
For the small emphasis silent film puts on words, the title cards in this movie often are succinctly humorous.
‘Maybe you don’t believe it, but I’ve had a pain in the neck ever since we married,’ Pa says, less to Ma than the audience.
‘Imagination!’ Ma scoffs, impervious to irony. ‘The idea of a big, strapping brute like you having a pain anywhere!’
Ma’s social pretenses are shown up in an amusing sketch at The Yacht Club (where, a title says, ‘if Mary had a little lamb it would cost $4.50 per order’—the rough equivalent of a $60 entrée today). Billy Caldwell (Lawrence Gray), a merry prankster and scion of a leading family, pilots himself to the club in a snazzy motor launch and pretends to be a waiter to get Grace’s attention.
First, Billy unnerves Ma by clowning around her chair. He appalls her by pointing to and taking from her hand the spoon she is using for soup and giving her the proper soup spoon from her place setting.
The title card then has him ask Ma, in French: ‘Viens-tu de la campagne, grande vache?’ Pat breaks out in peals of laughter: ‘He said something about a big cow.’
Incensed, Ma turns her lantern jaw to Pa to insist that he ‘Do something!’ about this rapscallion. When it turns out that Billy is not an upstart waiter but ‘the right sort of people,’ the merest breath of insult instantly evaporates.
Billy at first succeeds with Grace, skimming off across the water with her in his launch. Pat ends up in a rowboat with her dreamboat. But this is just the beginning of a kooky romantic comedy that bobs and weaves through high jinks to a happy ending, with Pat puckered up for a kiss on the threshold, peeking with one eye to see where Tony is.
Ready for a closeup.
There is a modern soundtrack by Vivek Maddala added to the original film, but MP found it too busy and distracting and preferred to watch the film without.
Davies’ role as the long-term mistress and hostess of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst overshadowed and curtailed her acting career. Orson Welles based his newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane of Citizen Kane (1941) partly on Hearst, but insisted that Davies was not the model for the modestly-talented singer who became Kane’s wife in the film. Hearst and Davies never married.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Fratricide

Brudermord (Fratricide) 2005 Luxembourg/Germany/France (94 minutes) written, directed and produced by Yılmaz Arslan; cinematographer, Jean-François Hensgens; editor, André Bendocchi-Alves; music, Evgueni Galperine; sound, Laurent Benaïm.
This fast-paced drama shows ages-old ethnic enmities and cultural practices gussied up with urban hip-hop culture that bleed into the developed world along with globalization’s cheap labor, goods and services.
Director and writer Yılmaz Arslan starts with strong impressions that tie in the characters’ backgrounds with the end of his story. This catches a viewer’s attention right away. It also gives insights into his characters such that once the story gets rolling he doesn’t have to brake his narrative pace with distracting exposition.
The violent scenes are effective because they are edited in series of shots that let a viewer know what is happening and suggest how it feels, but leave the most lurid images to the viewer’s imagination.  
The result makes for a well-designed mosaic: all the pieces come into clear focus by the end of Arslan’s telling. The young Kurdish-German director dedicated his film to Italian great Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The plot goes something like this.
Ibrahim ‘Ibo’ Denizli (Xewat Geçtan), a young ethnic Kurd, witnesses his parents’ deaths in a massacre in rural Turkey at the hands of government troops.
The Kurds are an Indo-Iranian people whose traditional tribal areas are in adjacent parts of southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq and northwestern Iran. Historically, they were a force for Turks, Persians and Arabs to reckon with. The region’s twentieth century governments reduced them to resentful minorities in modern Turkey, Iraq and Iran.
Ibo arrives in a home for refugee minors in an unidentified, German-speaking, European city, sustained by folktales he learned from his parents and grandfather.
At the refugee home Ibo meets Azad Karaman (Erdal Celik), a Kurdish teenager of similar background. Azad’s immigrant older brother Şemsettin ‘Şemo’ Karaman (Nurettin Celik) had sent for Azad to join him in the Promised Land.
We first see Azad herding sheep alone on a vast Anatolian prairie. The prosperous Şemo, who supports his parents in rural southeastern Turkey (and may also be on the run from Turkish authorities for political activities in Turkish Kurdistan), turns out to be a pimp running Russian prostitutes.
Shamed by his older brother’s ‘business,’ Azad stays in the refugee home. He shaves Turkish immigrants in the men’s room of a tavern in an immigrant quarter—a technically illegal but honorable activity to provide extra income. The younger Ibo becomes his assistant.
The film opens with people mourning a young man and preparing his body for burial. This turns out to be Ahmet (Oral Uyan), a second-generation Turkish resident of the same European city, in which his immigrant parents own and operate a grocery store. 
Ahmet and his brother Zeki (Bülent Büyükasık), in their early 20s, work in the family grocery by day. Away from their conservative parents’ home and business, they strike the attitudes of the guns ‘n’ pit bulls urban hip-hop lifestyle.
The street clichés of Power and Violence are little more than style accessories in the hands of bullies against the business edge of a knife or straight razor. Though in the end, a hip-hop style ‘sideways shooter’ manages a wildly fired hit home.
Ibo and Azad cross paths with the older Ahmet and Zeki in a ‘respect’ incident on an urban railway car. This leads later to a knifing that escalates to a blood feud, the ‘fratricide’ of the title.
And a body on the pavement brings in European law enforcement with its due process, interpreters, social workers and ethnic Turkish officers. True to form, a German-speaking police official raises his voice as he loses his patience, but the police do not abuse or beat any prisoner. European instrumental authority is more like a pale shadow.
In fact, most of the action takes place in an as though immigrant inner space or parallel universe within and yet far removed from the everyday life of this generic European city.
Apart from the grocery, young non-Europeans in this story do not display the least desire or illusion about integration into European life or society. Life comes down to acquiring money, Şemo tells his brother: ‘Europeans’ figured this out and immigrants must learn how to master it.
Being in ‘democratic’ Europe also gives minorities a voice unthinkable in their home countries. When a Kurd dies in police custody, Zilan (Taies Farzan), an émigrée Kurdish activist, bull-horns in to exploit the tragedy for her own political ends. Zilan tries to inflame the local population against officialdom’s purported ‘racism.’
Erdal Celik resembles a young Al Pacino, but his Azad is a character more like James Dean’s Jim Stark in Rebel without a Cause (1955).
Like Jim, Azad knows little about the world. What he sees, what adults tell him and how they act don’t add up. He just wants to do the right thing. Azad’s situation is the more difficult because he speaks a language understood by few outside the Kurdish community; his accented Turkish marks him as a Kurd, and he speaks and understands practically no German. Azad can rely on no one but himself.
In his almost inevitably ill-fated end, Azad, like Jim Stark, tries to right the world and make his own little family with Ibo and Mirka (Xhiljona Ndoja), an Albanian girl his age from the refugee home.
Most of the action takes place in the spring, from shortly before Kurdish Nevruz, or New Year, celebrated at the spring equinox, to after Easter. Mirka first approached Azad after a Christian Easter service in the refugee center.
No animals were mistreated in the making of this film, though the squeamish should be warned that the most graphic scene occurs after a character is gutted in a knife fight. As the victim groans to contain his exposed entrails, his leashed pit bull gets the idea that he is offering her a treat.


Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Naked among Wolves


Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves) 1963 German Democratic Republic DEFA (119 minutes) directed by Frank Beyer; cowritten by Beyer and Bruno Apitz, based on Apitz’s novel of the same title; cinematography by Günter Marczinkowsky; editor, Hildegard Conrad.
It is April 1945. The organized madness that had been the Third Reich’s ‘security state’ is unraveling, among which its immense internment and slave labor system.
Nazi officials fearing war crimes prosecution for their treatment of the Third Reich’s ‘undesirables’ work to hide evidence of their misdeeds as they evacuate prison populations ahead of advancing Allied troops.
In the midst of this chaos, a small boy turns up in a suitcase in Buchenwald concentration camp.
When inmates find the boy, the largely self-governing prisoner administration must decide whether to jeopardize prisoners’ lives and their underground organization by hiding him in the camp, to keep him moving through the system to an uncertain fate, or to turn him over to the Nazis.
This beautifully shot, superbly acted 1963 East German tour de force set at Buchenwald in the final weeks of the war was the first German film to take on the subject. It is said to have captured prison camp life as well as Billy Wilder’s popular Stalag 17 (1953) about Allied prisoners of war in Nazi Germany.
DEFA director Frank Beyer filmed the movie on the actual location from a novel by Bruno Apitz, a former Buchenwald political inmate. A number of the actors, including Erwin Geschonneck, one of the leads, also were former prisoners.
Erwin Geschonneck and Armin Mueller-Stahl in Frank Beyer's Nackt unter Wolfen.
The film sketches personalities and relationships among the diverse inmate population and Nazi camp personnel, as well as interactions between the inmates and their Nazi overseers. (Notes at the end provide details concerning the variety of ranks, duties and badges of the SS personnel and inmates which appear in the film.)
The Nazis constructed Buchenwald in the mid-1930s in virgin forest near Weimar, the heart of classic German romanticism. The camp held mainly political prisoners; chief among these were German Communists.
Many of the inmates had been in the system since the mid- to late-1930s. There were professionals and academics, tradesmen, technicians, and artists of all skill levels and ability; Jews and Gypsies, suspected political and religious opponents of the regime, and a full complement of criminals and ne’er-do-wells.
In short, the Nazi SS [Schutzstaffel] which ran the camps warehoused the Reich’s undesirables and left it to the inmates to organize their own survival through self-government.
The SS appointed a hierarchy of inmate trusties to administer prisoner needs, though generally the inmates first picked or recommended them. Communist party members vied with criminals for control of the inmate administration. The SS reportedly preferred to work with criminals—many of its members shared the same lumpen background and outlook—but the well-organized, disciplined party won out in the long run.
Inmates also maintained an intelligence network which kept tabs on camp authorities and monitored international news broadcasts, particularly the Allied advance, on contraband radios. In addition, they collected arms and trained personnel anticipating their takeover of the camp.
At the center of this story is Walter Krämer (Erwin Geschonneck), the Lagerälteste, or senior camp inmate whom SS camp authorities put in charge of the inmates’ administration. (This fictional character may be based on a heroic Buchenwald inmate of the same name who was not a lagerälteste.)
The story opens with Krämer crossing the empty, nearly four-acre Appellplatz, Buchenwald’s actual mustering area. Behind Krämer is the camp’s distinctive tower with its motto below on the main gate, Jedem das Seine, ‘To each his own.’ The crematorium chimney belches ominous black smoke off to his right—and throughout the film.
Krämer, a German Communist party member with a decade in the system, must balance his fellow inmates’ best interests against the SS camp authorities’ requirements and the instructions of the Communist party apparatus within the camp. 
SS personnel ranged from cynical bureaucrats to fanatic ‘chicken hawks’ dodging dangerous line duty, to uniformed criminals looking to enrich themselves and bullies and sadists who enjoyed abusing defenseless inmates.
Standartenführer Schwahl (Heinz Peter Scholz) is the SS bureaucrat in overall command of the camp. The splenetic Hauptsturmführer Kluttig (Herbert Köfer) is Lagerführer, or officer-in-charge of the prisoners. Untersturmführer Reineboth (Erik S. Klein) is Kluttig’s cynical right hand as the Rapportsturmführer, or roll call officer.
Erik S. Klein, foreground, and Herbert Koefor, background, search for 'das judiche Kind' in Nackt unter Wolfen.
In the movie, once the inmate population of Buchenwald’s main camp assembles for morning roll call, Reineboth orders them several times to remove and replace their caps en masse. This typically was done at the whim of the rapportsturmführer until he was satisfied that the inmates had executed his order with the proper respect. 
German officials characteristically raise their voices as they lose patience. Along similar lines, at several key moments in the film, inmates are more focused on the toes of the SS officers’ highly polished boots than their faces.
André Höfel (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Kapo, or inmate work detail foreman, here in charge of the personal effects intake depot, and coworkers Rudi Pippig (Fred Delmare) and Marian Kropinski (Krystyn Wójcik), find the child (Jürgen Strauch) among the personal effects of prisoners force-marched from Auschwitz in western Poland.
Fred Dalmare and Armin Mueller-Stahl in Nackt unter Wolfen.
Zbigniew Jankowsky (Boleslaw Plotnicki), the Pole who brought the boy in the suitcase, tells them that the boy came with his parents to Auschwitz from the Warsaw Ghetto at the age of four months. His father and others concealed him in the camp. Jankowsky looked after him after both parents went to the gas chamber.
Jankowsky tells this tale after a reverent pause over a piece of bread they have given him, a poignant detail that would not have been lost on camp survivors.
The three Communists decide to hide the boy. (Jankowsky subsequently is evacuated to Dachau.) Their SS overseer, the venal Hauptsharführer Zweiling (Wolfram Handel), catches them red-handed, but they give Zweiling a morsel for thought.
Later at home, Zweiling boasts to his wife Hortense (Angela Brunner) that saving ‘das jüdische Kind’ will put them in the good graces of the approaching American forces. Hortense, busily packing the Zweiling household beneath the portrait of SS commander Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and expecting the order—or last-minute necessity—to flee, dismisses this as nonsense. They hatch another plot.
Meanwhile, Herbert Bochow (Gerry Wolff), a Communist party official, orders Krämer to get rid of the boy so as not to jeopardize inmates’ lives and the underground network. 
The SS tries to find the child. The inmates’ self-government, brought about by Nazi disdain for lesser orders of humanity, and Communist party discipline, has rendered the population nearly inscrutable to them.
The prisoners keep the boy one step beyond SS reach. The search for the boy becomes a desperate, ruthless hunt to expose the suspected—and feared—armed resistance network and the names of its leaders.
The inmates also stall to resist evacuation as Allied planes roar overhead and the U.S. Third Army draws closer. Kluttig wants to liquidate the ‘troublemakers’—if not the whole camp population; many of his colleagues anxiously work out their own exit strategies. And some inmates burn to avenge years of unanswered indignities. 

Background notes on Buchenwald concentration camp and the ranks, duties and badges of its officials and inmates which appear in the film:
The Third Reich’s concentration camps were operated by the Schutzstaffel, or SS, a military and police formation under Himmler’s command. The SS Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Units), an independent formation within the SS, oversaw the camps.
The Nazis established the camp system with the intent to ‘purify’ German Aryan society by isolating all political and moral opponents, criminals, homosexuals, and so-called ‘asocial elements,’ as well as ‘inferior’ ethnic groups such as Jews and the Roma. Many prisoners had been in the system going back to the mid- to late-1930s.
In general, inmates had not undergone a judicial process nor received a sentence. The ultimate aim of the camp system was to eliminate the Third Reich’s undesirables by attrition or extermination.
Each category of prisoner wore an identifying triangular ‘badge.’ The best known now of these badges are the superimposed yellow triangles which made the Star of David which Jews wore in all Nazi-ruled areas inside and outside the camps, and the inverted pink triangle worn in the camps by homosexual internees.
Buchenwald held mostly political detainees. ‘Politicals’ wore an inverted red triangle and a prisoner identification number. Single letters inscribed on the triangles indicated an inmate’s country of origin, such as a ‘P’ for Poles. A number across a red triangle indicated a person arrested in a round-up of suspicious people. Criminals wore an inverted green triangle. A line sewn above a triangle indicated a repeat offender.
The camp command designated a hierarchy of trusties to administer the inmates’ daily needs and to help insure order, beginning with the Lagerälteste or senior camp inmate. Under the Lagerälteste were Blockältestes or senior block inmates in charge of barracks, Kapos, inmate foremen in charge of work details, and Lagerschutz, inmate police, among others who wore black armbands with their designation in white lettering.
The SS was an ideological military and police organization separate from the German armed forces, though both organizations carried out the Third Reich’s policies. The SS wore the same rank insignia as German army personnel, but their ranks had different, ideological names, like the ‘dragons’ and ‘wizards’ of the Ku Klux Klan, but with a lot of sturms [storms] and führers [leaders].
Thus the film’s Standartenführer Schwahl, the installation commandant, wears the rank of an army oberst (colonel). Schwahl has a pair of subordinate sturmbannführers, or majors. Below them is Hauptsturmführer Kluttig, with the rank of an army hauptmann (captain). Kluttig also is called Lagerführer, ‘camp leader,’ the officer directly in charge of the prisoners.
Untersturmführer Reineboth has the rank of an army leutnant (second lieutenant) and also is called Rapportsturmführer, or ‘roll call officer.’ This officer conducted roll calls and personnel training and oversaw the disciplining of prisoners.
In the film, Kluttig commands the inmate population; Reineboth is his right-hand.
Under Kluttig is Hauptsharführer Zweiling with the army rank of oberfeldwebel, or master sergeant. Zweiling is a Blockführer, or block leader, an SS official in charge of a block, or unit of barracks. Oberscharführer Mandrill, the torturer, wears the army rank of feldwebel (sergeant first class).
MP consulted Eugen Kogon’s classic The Theory and Practice of Hell: the German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them (Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager) to compile these notes. Kogon, an anti-Nazi Roman Catholic, survived six years in Buchenwald.