Cube (1997)

Cube (1997), dir. Vincenzo Natali

** ½

It doesn’t take long to realize that Cube, in terms of its logistics, is a very cleverly conceived film—it’s built upon an intricate gimmick, and boasts some pretty intriguing interplay between a set of overtly stereotyped characters.  It is unfortunately a very superficial film, as there really isn’t much else to it aside from what I’ve already described.  Had I seen it closer to its date of release, I probably would have held a more favorable opinion of it.  But in the past decade or so, we’ve been inundated with films such as Cube—films that rest upon the belief that as long as there’s an original plot device it can be successfully carried to the fore.  A more recent example of what I’m describing would be Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which had the audacity to assume it could win its audience over with a single idea: dreams within dreams.  But nothing was ever really at stake in the film; so as it is with Cube.

    Cube is a simple escape story, set in complicated surroundings.  The film’s seven heroes are inexplicably cast into giant cube, consisting of countless small chambers, many of which contain deadly booby traps of the most diabolically gruesome nature.  Sound somewhat familiar?  I think the creators of the Saw series must have been inspired by this film.  It took some research, but I discovered that the seven prisoners are in fact named after seven real-life prisons, each one in turn exhibiting characteristics of those prisons.  There’s Quentin, the police detective (named after San Quentin in California, which is noted for its cruelty), Rennes, the escaped convict (named after a prison in France, known as a model of prison policy), Kazan, the autistic (named after a prison in Russia, noted for its disorganization), among others.  The presence of these characters add to the convoluted nature of the film, as each one has a special role to play in the navigation of the cube.  Another character, Leaven, who excels in mathematics, slowly learns the secret to the cube’s construction.  But it takes the autistic, whose mathematical abilities surpass even Leaven’s own to lead them to the way out.

    When I say that there’s nothing at stake in the film, it’s directly due to the superficiality of the characters.  They seem to exist merely to serve to the plot device of the film.  With that being so apparent it makes it impossible for the viewer to care for them.  There’s also an awful lot of bickering in this film, but it’s there mostly to exploit the stereotypical character traits each of the seven possess. In addition, there’s enough mathematical ruminating as they attempt to solve the cube to make one’s head explode.  Again, it’s all very cleverly done, but it left me feeling unfulfilled by the end.  I tend to be more interested in motives than logistics, and this film offers none of the former. 

      I can recommend the film on the strength of the performances, which despite the lack of depth the script provides, are effectively conveyed.  The art direction, which is quite fascinating, and even more impressive when you consider the film’s low budget.  And I can offer some praise to the film’s central plot device—that of the cube itself.  It was very carefully conceived, but alas to no end.   

Drunkboat (2010)

Drunkboat (2010), dir. Bob Meyer

 *

Drunkboat is an insipid little film that I had stumbled upon (although 'tripped over' may be a more accurate phrase) purely by chance.  I came across it at a bootleg DVD stand in Korea, and seeing that it had John Malkovich and John Goodman (two actors I greatly admire) in it, I thought I would give it a try.  What a waste of two very talented actors.  Despite the poorly written script and lackluster plot, both Malkovich and Goodman somehow still manage to deliver admirable performances, but it's something akin to listening to Vladimir Horowitz play on a Chinese-made piano.

Malkovich plays a recovering alcoholic/ex-writer who returns to his childhood home in the Chicago suburbs, occupied by his sister and adolescent nephew.  The nephew, along with a friend, are goaded by maritime stories, mostly passed down by the nephew's older brother, and have extravagant plans of procuring a sailboat in which to travel the world in.  John Goodman plays a scheming huckster, who in addition to dealing in bottles of ersatz Cutty Sark, also sells ramshackle boats.  The boys, with the mother away, need Malkovich to sign the bill of sale, as they are both underage.  Serving as 'bookends' to this simple story, is the boy's older brother, a drifter who has had run-ins with both Goodman's and Malkovich's characters.  And well, that's about it.

Drunkboat is an independent film, directed and co-written by Bob Meyer, a little-known actor.  It's his first and only attempt at directing/writing.  I've often been drawn to independent films because they often tread 'unsafe' territory, and by 'unsafe' I mean a financial gamble for the films' producers.  A well-made indie film can often present us with meaningful stories, offering insight into our own existence.  Many of which end up badly, culminating in a non-Hollywood ending, so to speak.  God forbid a movie should end sadly, so say the high priests of Hollywood.  But there are a lot of really bad indie films, as well.  These are usually the ones that seem satisfied with showing us the mundane parts of our own existence, that most of us know all too well, coupled with extraneous amounts of acoustic guitar music.  Drunkboat does have a pretty good musical score actually.  It's quirky and I liked it quite a bit.  The film tries to be quirky in other ways, and seems pretty pleased with its failed attempt at quirkiness.  The long, drawn out banter between Goodman and his business partner have a touch of writer's arrogance to it.  But it's neither funny nor clever.  And the camera's obsession with a highly disheveled Malkovich gets old very quickly.  Malkovich has a fascinating face, but nearly every filmmaker who has used him exploits that feature, so it has little effect here.

My main qualm with Drunkboat is that it has nothing to say.  At best, it makes attempts to comment on human struggles with alcohol, and dishonesty, but is very superficial in doing so.  We never get much deeper beyond the surface.  Combine that with a plot that is wholly uninteresting and it doesn't amount to much.  If you happen to come across this film as I did, I hope your footwork is a bit more nimble than mine.

   
 

Wolfen (1981)

Wolfen (1981), dir. Michael Wadleigh

**

While watching Wolfen the thought that kept running through my head was, ‘my, how dated this film is!’  This was probably because there really isn’t much going on for most it, and so you find yourself with little else to do but to make note of the little things: peoples’ hairstyles, the rotten shape New York City was in at that time, the film’s musical score, and so on.  Of course any film that is aged more than a decade could feel dated, but notice how we never say that about a great film.  That being said, Wolfen is not a great film.

      Directed by Michael Wadeigh, of Woodstock documentary fame, Wolfen is about a New York homicide detective, played by Albert Finney, who is investigating a strange group of murders that appears to have been done by a wild animal of some sort.  I had occasioned to read a few reviews of film written around the time of its release, all of which were positive, and was genuinely surprised after having viewed it myself.  The general consensus was that Wolfen is an intelligently made horror film.  If you placed Wolfen in the context of the time in which it was released, that’s probably a very fair statement, given that in the early ‘80s Hollywood was inundated with misogynist mad slasher films, most of which were deplorably bad.  As intelligent as it may be, Wolfen simply isn’t scary—not by today’s standards, or by the standards of thirty years ago.  This is regrettable, because by and large I find the horror genre to have been far more effective in achieving overall scariness thirty years ago than it is capable of doing today.  This is more of an aside, but I find that today’s horror films are far too over-produced, rendering them unable to create any sense of realism that allows the audience to relate to what it’s seeing.  In the horror genre, without realism, there’s no scaring anyone.  Wolfen, given when it was produced, has the advantage there; the cinematography is done entirely without effect (with the exception to the first-person camera shots from the killers’ perspectives), and the actors look like real, everyday people—they are not glossy models like the actors who populate today’s horror films.  Wolfen unfortunately has terrible pacing.  The story unfolds very slowly, with all of the murders being seen from the killers’ eyes, who incidentally are not human; therefore some very antiquated optical effects are used to illustrate this, along with sped-up tracking camera shots.  It all amounts to a very dizzying effect that creates very little impact, if any at all.

        Eighty minutes go by before we get our first glimpse of the murderous beasts responsible.  This I feel was the film’s largest blunder.  With such a significant delay the film needs to be padded with a few interesting plot points to compensate, but there aren’t any really.  There is a brief love affair between Albert Finney’s character and the female lead, but it is wholly uninspired and leads nowhere.  And Edward James Olmos is introduced as a possible suspect, but is eliminated as such with one of the most utterly humiliating scenes I can recollect ever having seen an actor endure in film.  It involves him entirely disrobing by the shore of what may be the East River in New York and having a manic werewolf moment.  It’s laughably bad, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that scene continues to haunt him to this day.

       There is a final showdown toward the end of the film that is somewhat riveting.  But it really only serves to illustrate how much better the film could have been had a scene such as that been introduced earlier on.

        I’m relatively new to the horror genre, but have seen a fair amount of both notable and obscure films in the past few years.  If it were up to me I wouldn’t categorize Wolfen in the horror genre at all.  It’s a thriller at best, but a vapid one.  If you’re looking for a good scare, then let me recommend one I saw about a month ago.  I embarrassed that it eluded me for so long, but it’s John Carpenter’s 1978 film, Halloween.  It scared the pants off me.           

Skyfall (2012)

Skyfall (2012), dir. Sam Mendes

**1/2

I’ve been a great fan of the James Bond series of films for as long I can remember.  When I think back to exactly what it was that drew me to them, I think it is their sense of fantasy—what with the marvelous gadgets, the diabolical villains and their absurdist schemes for world domination, and the indestructible figure of James Bond himself, moving both heaven and earth to save the day.  What had made the James Bond films so special and unique in the past is that they really had a monopoly on the genre.  There was the occasional copycat film released here and there, but none really had the propulsion to infiltrate Bond’s territory.  Nowadays however, Hollywood has been inundating us for more than a decade at least with some of the most gratuitous action films imaginable.  The Bond series as a whole, while each film had a modest collection of spectacular stunts, was never really thought of as a high action series, certainly not in the way that we regard high action today, i.e. the Die Hard films.  The series dabbled in this toward the end of Pierce Brosnan’s stint as Bond, and these were some of the absolute worst Bond films made, in my opinion.  When Daniel Craig was selected as the new Bond, it was obvious that they were attempting to give the franchise a makeover.  My recollection of 2006’s Casino Royale is somewhat cloudy, but I do remember thinking to myself, ‘Is this a Bond film I’m watching?’  Daniel Craig is by far the most athletic of the Bonds, possessing an equally as impressionable sense of rebelliousness.  But the most striking feature, and also the most difficult to accept, is the effort made to transform James Bond from what he was in the past, a caricature, into a character—feeling, perceiving, and expounding emotion.  This notion may have been a leap too far from the typical formula that made Bond what he is in the realm of pop culture.  Without the martinis “shaken, not stirred”, the wry one-liners, the fantastic gadgets, and Bond sleeping with an average of 2.36 women per film, Bond has become just yet another typical action hero.  Who cares if he’s now an affected individual?

           The latest Bond film, enigmatically titled, Skyfall, is a very slickly produced film.  And it does a good job of drawing you in, until you come to the realization that the typically overblown plot can actually be reduced down to the most banal of revenge stories.  Not only that, it recycles two plots already used in previous Bond films: one, that of an ex-MI6 grudge-bearing agent as the villain (1995’s Goldeneye); and two, “M” being the target of revenge (1999’s The World Is Not Enough).  I suppose that at some point the decision to develop the character of “M” from the avuncular, pipe-smoking bureaucrat, played by Bernard Lee (who would usually only appear at two points in most films: one, to debrief Bond in his mission at the beginning; and two, to approvingly pat Bond on the back at the end of each film, saying more or less, “a job well done.”), into the at-times highly antagonistic, ultra-feminist “M”, as played by Judi Dench, who at the same time has certain skeletons in her closet that come back to haunt her, seemed natural.  After twenty-three films, it seems inevitable that some effort must be made to expand on the characters, even if it does break the formula.  But then, is it still a Bond film that they’ve made?  Some efforts have been made in the past to give Bond a sense of humanity.  He was married at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, only to have his bride murdered by Blofeld, the quintessential Bond villain of the earlier films.  However, when Sean Connery took over once again in the following film, Diamonds Are Forever, only the opening sequence was devoted to Bond’s revenge, and after that it was back to business as usual. 

In Skyfall, it seems as though the producers are coming to a similar realization, that James Bond must remain a caricature.  The previous film, Quantum Of Solace, was a grave disappointment.  I saw it, but it was a completely vacuous experience, as I have nearly no memory of it.  In Skyfall we are starting to see remnants of the old Bond reemerge—the tuxedos, the martinis, and even Bond’s iconic Aston Martin is utilized.  Now, if they had only given us a story!  Javier Bardem plays what could have been an effective villain.  Sharing a highly provocative first encounter with Bond that made me think that we might be seeing the first homosexual villain in a Bond film (Kidd and Wint from 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever notwithstanding).  But when we learn that his highly elaborate scheme is merely intended to allow him to shoot “M” during a parliamentary hearing, we’re let down.  It really felt as though the film were building toward more.  There are a host of superb British acting talents in Skyfall, including Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney, but they too are not given much to do.  This really felt like a write-off from the screenwriters. 

The final minutes reminded me somewhat of the end of the most recent Star Wars film, The Revenge of the Sith, in which preparations are made to segue back to the first film.  At the end of Skyfall, preparations are made to revert back to the Connery days of Bond, it seems.  We’re given a new “M”, male once again, who maintains an office with a similar décor to Bernard Lee’s “M”, complete with a new Moneypenny and all.  The familiar Bond theme, which has been noticeably absent from the Daniel Craig films, is played with very retro orchestrations.  And the iconic opening with Bond shooting toward the camera, also absent from the film, is this time shown right before the credits.  They seem to be preparing us for more Bond films, and I wonder if these future films will be looking more backward than forward in their vision.  For a franchise that had been accused of running out of steam decades ago, I’m not sure if this is a good idea.  But they seem to have hit a brick wall otherwise, and at the same time are not quite willing to let the franchise die off just yet.                

Ikiru (1952)

Ikiru (1952), dir. Akira Kurosawa

***1/2

Much has been written about Akira Kurosawa.  He is undoubtedly one of most successful foreign filmmakers to ever emerge on the American market, and his directorial style has been widely emulated by many who came to follow.  With the success of his 1950 film, Rashomon, which took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, Kurosawa could very well be credited with introducing Japanese cinema to the West.  He developed a large number of followers, more notably George Lucas (who based the story for the original Star Wars on Kurosawa’s 1958 film, The Hidden Fortress) and Francis Ford Coppola, who together with Lucas convinced 20^th Century Fox to co-fund the 1980 film, Kagemusha.  A large number of Kurosawa’s films are period pieces, set in Imperial Japan and utilizing the samurai as his mode of storytelling.  A great admirer of 19^th Century Russian literature, Dostoevsky in particular, his stories often involve that of the human condition, usually exposing the darker side of which.  Ikiru is a brief excursion from the usual samurai backdrop he favors, and its message is an uplifting one—delivered in the face of great adversity, while supplying a darkly humorous commentary on the system of bureaucracy many of us have fallen prisoner to.

          Set in post-WWII Japan, the first image the audience is shown is an X-ray of a man’s stomach.  The narrator informs us that the person whose stomach this belongs to is stricken with terminal cancer.  We are then shown the pitiable man, Watanabe, who is chief officer of Public Affairs in the local governmental offices.  He is dutiful employee, a cog in the monstrous machine of bureaucracy, who quietly boasts that he has never missed a day of work in thirty years.  As we watch him mechanically apply his seal to a stack of documents the narrator tells us that, “It would be boring to talk of him now, for this man is barely alive”.  In this early scene is a delightful sequence showing us how ineffectively the local bureaucracy works: a group of women, concerned about an open sewer in their neighborhood, in which mosquitoes are transmitting disease to their children, come to complain.  They start in one department, it could be the Department of Health—I honestly don’t remember which, but are given the runaround and are referred to virtually every other department in the building, including the Deputy Mayor’s office.  At one point they file their complaint with Watanabe, who for the time being has more important matters on his mind: his own health.

        Watanabe does what he has never done, and takes a day off from work in order to see a doctor.  There he meets a fellow patient, who seems to dabble in the practice of diagnoses, and warns Watanabe of the perils of stomach cancer.  “It’s a death sentence,” he tells him.  Turns out stomach cancer is exactly what Watanabe has, though the doctors elect to not tell him and insist that it is merely a minor ulcer.  But Watanabe, guided either by paranoia or intuition can see through the doctors’ deception.  It’s this stunning realization that teaches Watanabe that he really hasn’t lived a day in his life.  He’s been a widower since his son, who appears to be in his mid-twenties, was a child.  And he purposefully neglected to remarry, relegating himself to his miserable existence for the sake of his son, who is terrible ingrate besides.

        Shortly after consulting with the doctors, Watanabe meets a man at a restaurant who takes great pity on him, but who subsequently helps to him have his carpe diem moment.  They have a wild night on the town: playing pinball, going to dance clubs, and even a striptease.  At a honky-tonk bar, Watanabe brings the boisterous action to a halt when he requests an old country song, “Life is Brief”, and transfixes the clientele into a state of bewilderment as he sings along eerily. 

        The following day Watanabe runs into a young girl from the office, whom he begins using most of his savings to show a good time.  He sees that she is capable of enjoying life.  While he is all too aware of the fact that he is unable to, he manages to take great pleasure in watching her enjoy herself.  Watanabe’s brother convinces his son that the change in his behavior is due to his pursuing a woman, and the son begins to get annoyed watching his father spend away the inheritance he and his young wife so desperately need.  The relationship is short lived however, and Watanabe returns to work after a two-week absence.   Realizing that he is short on time, he decides to valiantly undertake the task of addressing the sewage issue by having it cleaned up and constructing a park in its place.  Fighting against the great bureaucratic machine proves formidable, but in the end Watanabe triumphs, only however to have his efforts overlooked by the various government officials.

      Watanabe dies about five months following his diagnosis, and the final third of the film takes place at his funeral, with all of the government officials present, both to ‘mourn’ the loss of Watanabe, but also to celebrate the completion of the park.  The Deputy Mayor scoffs at the notion that Watanabe was largely responsible for the construction of the park, and the rest of the film plays as something of a detective story, culminating in the unified realization that it was indeed Watanabe who was responsible for the park’s construction.  “We would have done the same” in his position, they declare.  And with that they resolve to change their lives in a similar fashion.  It’s both sad and humorous when we find them in the office the next day, busy with work as usual as though nothing had happened.

      Ikiru, which means, “To live”, is a film with dual themes.  One promoting the carpe diem mentality, using the realization of one’s impending death as the means; and the other a somewhat humorous commentary on social bureaucracy, laden with the view that it shackles society with its extraneous and inefficient brand of protocol.  It’s an obvious lesson, but much like the complacent government officials at the end of the film, we all seem consigned to live under such an imperfect system.  Ikiru is a well-conceived film, but it lacks the bite of Kurosawa’s other pictures.  Takashi Shimura plays Watanabe like a man who is so overwhelmed by the weight of his condition that he is a total drag, but so is everyone else in the picture oddly enough, with the exception to the young girl he treats.  Also, with a running time of 143 minutes, the film itself tends to drag in certain places—the final third especially so.  This film lacks the really bright, memorable characters that Toshiro Mifune would often play in Kurosawa’s other films.  And for that reason, it makes it at times burdensome to watch.  Adding to this are closed-in backdrops, with dreary lighting.  With a protagonist who is dying of terminal cancer, I felt Kurosawa might have been laying it on too thick at times.  But the film’s messages are clear, and effectively communicated.  Coming from someone who is quite familiar with Kurosawa’s work, I had an enjoyable time for the most part, but I will admit to missing the samurai at times.    

Ted (2012)

Ted (2012), dir. Seth MacFarlane
**

Ted is a highly raunchy comedy centered on a 35-year old underachiever (played by Mark Wahlberg) and his childhood friend, a now perverse teddy bear, who by virtue of a wish had come alive.  It’s written and directed by Fox animation mogul, Seth MacFarlane, who is behind such popular shows as Family Guy, American Dad, and the Family Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show.  For those of you unfamiliar with MacFarlane’s prime time animated creations, these shows have made their mark by pushing the envelope in both anti-political correctness and various forms of vulgarity, ranging from musical numbers featuring aborted fetuses to every type of scatological and sexual humor imaginable.  Another feature of these shows is their constant referencing to Generation-X pop culture (MacFarlane was born in 1973), which seems to be a fad these days in more mediums than just film/television.  Watching Ted is something akin to reminiscing with an old friend about, to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, “the crap from their childhood”.  Usually, I consider this a very cheap shot, much in the same way as we regard individuals who casually drop names for affect.  In Family Guy, this sort of referencing actually works very well, because it’s presented in a manner as to where they are able to put a spin on it.  For example, in a certain scene in Family Guy, there is a reenactment from the shower scene in the 1982 film, Porky’s, in which one of the characters is viewing a group or young women taking a shower.  In the original film, a group of boys peek through a small hole in the wall to get their glimmer.  In Family Guy however, after we are given the same perspective as the original film, we see that Peter Griffin is merely standing in the shower room along with the girls, holding a small chunk a wood with a hole in it.  It’s this sort of unexpected whimsy that make these references successful, and virtually all of the pop culture references made in Family Guy are done in a similar spirit.  In Ted however, there’s no spin, just a blatant onslaught of casual references inserted ad nauseum.  It’s as though MacFarlane expected that at the mere mention of these, he were allowing the audience to share in a series of “in jokes”.  As I said earlier, it’s a cheap shot at best, but I’m at least grateful that the characters are of the correct age to be making such references, unlike the recent film, Juno, which did more or less the same thing, but with a protagonist who was born well after the pop culture items she constantly alluded to.

I make such a significant point of the pop culture infusion in Ted because it’s a major component of what Seth MacFarlane’s brand of humor rests on.  Unfortunately, where it has worked quite successfully in his animated shows, it doesn’t quite translate to live-action film.  Another significant facet of MacFarlane’s brand of humor is the raunchiness.  And oh boy, is this film raunchy.  I won’t go into details, but this film was given an “R” rating, and it deserved it.  Ted, while not a particularly funny film, gathers its biggest laughs from its most distasteful jokes.  There were numerous times where I had laughed uproariously, only to be ashamed of myself a few moments later for realizing what it was I had laughed at.  Such as it is with MacFarlane’s brand of humor.

Seth MacFarlane himself is something of an enigma.  An enormously multi-faceted talent, if you’ve seen him in interviews then you have learned that he actually possesses very refined tastes.  He’s a great admirer of such figures as Rex Harrison and Frank Sinatra.  A talented vocalist himself, he recently recorded an album of 1960s Sinatraesque big band arrangements.  So, it comes as quite a shock when you are exposed to the kind of jokes he employs in his animated shows, and in Ted.  But at the same time, there’s the guilty sensation of actually enjoying them.

         The jokes in Ted unfortunately are not enough to carry the film.  And as it happens, the only funny character in the film is Ted himself, who is voiced by MacFarlane.  There really isn’t much for the other characters to do.  They are just there to serve the film’s mundane plot, and most of them are very two-dimensional.  The story, which is uninspired, is also so formulaic that the audience can predict everything that is going to happen in the film within the first fifteen minutes.  I felt that had the film managed to be more zany and unpredictable, as Family Guy is, that it would have been more successful.  There’s a good concept here, what with the talking teddy bear, but it gets horribly diluted with the stale, rehashed story they chose to pursue.  If you watch Ted, you’ll get more than a few good laughs sporadically throughout the film, but the rest is a big yawn.      

Paul Thomas Anderson: One Shy Step From Greatness

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Paul Thomas Anderson: One Shy Step From Greatness

Films reviewed in this essay:

Boogie Nights (1997) ****

Magnolia (1999) ****

There Will Be Blood (2007) ****

Paul Thomas Anderson is widely considered to be one of the greatest currently working American filmmakers.  I would probably place myself in the camp that would agree with that statement, but that may be because the competition just isn’t what it used to be.  If it sounds as though I’m trying to belittle the man, I’m not.  He really is a superb director in many ways.  I’ve only been exposed to three of his films (which is quite a few, given his relatively small oeuvre): Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, all of which I will be offering partial reviews of in this essay.  I was profoundly impressed by all three films.  Each one of these is a miniature epic unto itself—epic in both length and cinematic vision.  Anderson is undoubtedly a director/writer of many gifts, yet I believe he is deeply flawed.  Before I elaborate, I must say that the level of engagement I experienced while watching all three of these films rival some of the irrefutably greatest films ever produced, yet somehow each one left me ultimately disappointed.  It’s a pity, because in my view he comes so close to sheer greatness.  If one were only to judge his talents only as a director, I would say he had already reached it.  But since he insists on writing his own material, he is entirely to blame for the disappointing perplexities one is faced with at the conclusion of his pictures.  It is that strange phenomenon that I wish to explore in this piece, because each of these three films forced me to analyze my reactions to them in a way I don’t often do.

         I happened to see the three prenominate films in the order in which they were released.  The first was Boogie Nights, which I saw slightly over a year ago.  Based very loosely on the life of pornographic actor John Holmes, Boogie Nights chronicles the rise, horrible decline, and so-called redemption of Dirk Diggler.  Initially set in the late 1970s, Diggler, who in the beginning of the film is in his late teens, works in a club frequented by the who’s who of the Los Angeles nightlife scene, including many of those involved in the highly lucrative porno industry.  It’s Diggler’s dream to one day star in porno films, and given his massive endowment and indefatigable stamina it’s more than a fair bet he could achieve it.  He manages to meet a porn mogul, played by Burt Reynolds, who gives him his big break.  Diggler is ditsy kind of guy, who nods enthusiastically when given the most inane direction, and is able to perform a given scene numerous times.  Add to that his greatest ‘asset’ and in no time he is able to rise to the top.  For a while everything comes up roses, but then the drugs and his inflated ego soon enter to antagonize him.  Once this happens, it isn’t long before he hits absolute rock bottom, in a way so blown out of proportion that perhaps someone loaned him a jackhammer so that he could burrow a few meters below rock bottom.  It all culminates in the now infamous botched drug deal scene with Alfred Molina, in which a bloody shootout ensues.  This scene is damn near perfect, with the wildly coked up and scantily clad Molina rocking out to “Sister Christian”, while his unexplained Chinese counterpart is throwing firecrackers around the room.  It’s hypnotic, and certainly the most memorable sequence in the film.  It’s this, plus some other terrible events, such as having to masturbate for closeted homosexuals in parked cars to earn money, only to be violently assaulted that should have taught Diggler a lesson.  Yet the so-called redemption the film has to offer is his resurgence into the porno industry—the same arena that got him into all the trouble in the first place.  Any sensible person would have seen that there’s a clear lesson to be learned here, but Dirk Diggler doesn’t.  So, ultimately Boogie Nights is about a stupid person.  But what is so unsettling about it is that the ending seems to glorify his stupidity.  If an audience is obliged to spend nearly three hours with a stupid person, some of us feel we should be allowed to see the repercussions of which.  Here we don’t.  Rather, we are required to simply accept Dirk Diggler for who he is, despite the harsh unlearned lessons that were thrown his way, and ponder the meaning of it all when he is allowed to start the whole destructive process again.  Some may argue that observing a person’s inability to recognize their own errors is a lesson in and of itself.  I would say that is true as well—for infants.  Isn’t this one of the first lessons we learn in life, to learn from our own mistakes?  As a side note: I noticed that the film, which ends in the early ‘80s, conveniently disregards the AIDS pandemic that occurred at that time, which is subsequently how Holmes died, and also shook the porno industry.  It seemed more obvious that Diggler should have met with a similar fate.  It would have certainly made for a more satisfying ending, I thought, but given the many comedic aspects of the film that perhaps would have been too much of a downer.  I also got the impression that Paul Thomas Anderson really cherished this Dirk Diggler creation of his, much in the same way a pet owner cherishes his/her brainless pet.  But I think onlookers wouldn’t share the same affection for another person’s brainless pet, and they would certainly not want to be subjected to watching hours of footage of the animal.  This is how I felt at the end of Boogie Nights, and I would like to emphasize only at the end.  I watched as an inherently stupid person, despite the harshest of lessons remained a stupid person.  It’s no mystery that these people exist, but after such a grand treatment as this film received; I had hoped that it would have more to say about them.

          Magnolia, for me, was probably the most engaging of the three films.  It contains a very curious prologue, using two anecdotes to illustrate how the world is capable of presenting us with bizarre anomalies to ponder.  I remember wondering to myself how this would relate to the film later, and it did so in the most unexpected way with the thousands, if not millions of frogs falling from the sky toward the end of the film.  I’m sure this is exactly what Paul Thomas Anderson had in mind by use of that prologue, only everything else that comes before it detracts from his message.  Magnolia is an omnibus of a film, with a vast array of highly affected characters, all interlinked through various connections, and each one gradually entering a state of crisis that grows with intensity until the great anomaly occurs.  I do not wish explore how these characters are interconnected, for it is so complex.  But what the reader should understand is that viewers of film will feel that it is constantly building toward something, and that somehow the people on the screen and their baggage are going to converge in some significant way, but instead we get the frogs.  It’s a shocking moment when that event does happen, but to what avail?  Like in Boogie Nights, Anderson again seems to be stating the obvious: yes, strange and unexplained things do happen in life.  But why does he feel he needs to illustrate it in what is ultimately one large pretense?  This is a very lengthy picture, and the viewer really feels it.  At the one point in the film, an orchestral score is introduced that remains with us until the frogs start dropping.  It’s a minimalist score that effectively adds to the hypnotic quality the film, and it adds significant amount of tension as the film develops.  Gradually, as we get deeper into the various characters we feel as though we’re meant to experience some great cataclysm between them and their respective stories, only it never happens.  And after the great anomaly, there really isn’t any closure in any one story—life simply goes on, and for other characters it doesn’t.

           I am hoping that the reader will see that I’m building toward a theme in my critiques of these films.  It has to do with Anderson’s use of simple, well-understood themes as the basis for these massive pictures of his, presenting them in such a way that we feel we are going to presented with a new profound commentary on them, only he never delivers.  I plan to discuss this in more depth, but before I do I want to briefly analyze the final film, There Will Be Blood. 

There Will Be Blood is the story of Daniel Plainview, a cold, heartless man, driven by his desire for wealth.  In the beginning of the film, he works tirelessly as a lone silver prospector only to strike oil one day.  Soon he is able to build a vast industry for himself, thus securing the wealth that is his raison d’etre.  He is a quiet, reserved man, with pent-up emotions who only speaks using various forms of chicanery when he has to swindle people out of use of their land to drill for oil.  Serving as prop to instill confidence in his unassuming victims is his young son at his side, who was actually an abandoned infant he happened to stumble upon.  Daniel forms no bond with the child, and uses him coldly to further his own agendas.  When the boy loses his hearing after an accident at one of Daniel’s drilling sites, Daniel sends him away—he’s outlived his usefulness.  And when the boy returns, intent on starting his own company, Daniel shuns him, regarding him as a potential competitor.  Daniel appears to be the sort of individual who needs no one, yet when a stranger appears one day claiming to be his brother, Daniel takes him in with apparent affection, offering him a privileged position in his company.  It is at this point that the man seems human after all, as he takes a profound interest in his own family, and even opens up somewhat to the man he thinks is his brother.  What he has to tell him is already made obvious to the audience, that he, Daniel, is a misanthrope, and wants to see no one else succeed but himself.  Aside from this very brief outpouring, we never really get see inside the character, nor do we ever get to learn what makes the man tick.

            Religion is a key component to this story as well, as one of the characters, a young evangelist and leader of a small cult of followers, is one of the people Daniel must swindle in his quest for oil.  Everyone should be able to see through the artificialities of this evangelist character.  He appears interested in converting Daniel to what he deems the path of righteousness, but really has an agenda of his own, similar to Daniel’s, in fact—power, only of a different kind.  In the film’s final scene we see the evangelist for the phony he really is, as he denounces himself as a prophet for a loan from Daniel.  And we finally get to see the first real moment of passion from Daniel as he unleashes violent waves of his own misanthropy upon the young man.

          There Will Be Blood, like the other two films is immaculately presented.  And this character of Daniel Plainview, fascinating as he is, is entirely an enigma.  His character shows no development whatsoever during the course of this film.  He is as corrupt as the poor man at the beginning of the film as he is the wealthy one at the end.  It begs the question if money and power is the root of all evil, or if men themselves are inherently evil.  It’s the chicken and the egg all over again.  Though we know for certain that it was man that came before money, but money certainly has the ability to corrupt pure and impressionable people.  There Will Be Blood is built on a pretense that it has some sort of commentary on this question, and Daniel Plainview is the key, only the box remains closed. 

I purposefully disregarded discussing the positive attributes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s work as a filmmaker.  I believe those to be obvious, and overly discussed in most circles.  He is very talented, and really knows how to tell a story, while at the same time creating visual imagery that thoroughly engages his audience.  He thinks in very large terms, and his films are conceived on a grand scale.  Everything is so lavish that it boggles the mind when by the end none of it stands for anything.  Perhaps this is his shtick.  There’s an existential nihilist quality to the stories of his films, saying something to the effect of ‘a lot of seemingly important and significant stuff happens in this world of ours, but none of it really means anything.  It only exists to fool us into thinking that it is something more.’  I don’t have any problem with this message, it’s an entirely legitimate one—it’s just the packaging that bothers me.  Certain novels come to mind that offer similar messages, such as The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist, which is about man’s inherent evils; The Trial by Franz Kafka, in which a man is persecuted for a crime in which neither he or the reader is told anything about; and The Stranger by Albert Camus, the ultimate existential nihilist novel.  These are all relatively short novels, very concise, with no pretense about what they are trying to convey, even though their message is a rudimentary one.  For this reason they are all very effective, and the reader is very willing to submit to their message.  Paul Thomas Anderson is guilty of leading us on, through grand storytelling and false pretenses.  We sit there, with his obvious message made clear to us within the first quarter of the film, expecting to be presented with insightful commentary that puts a different spin on it, but he lets us down each time.  The sensation is something akin to a child who receives a beautifully wrapped Christmas present in a grossly oversized box, large enough to where they think some truly wonderful gift must be inside (as I child I equated the size of the box to the quality of the gift) only to find something much smaller and ordinary within.  It’s a huge letdown, to say the least.

          I have felt letdown by each of these three films, because, the perceived weaknesses aside, they were remarkable film-going experiences, and I recommend them to everyone.  Paul Thomas Anderson, I feel is so close to being one of the timelessly great directors, if he would just construct his stories so that he had more to say about the various facets of our existence he chooses to explore.  Until he does, he will always remain flawed in my mind.                       

My Left Foot (1989)

My Left Foot (1989), dir. Jim Sheridan

****

Daniel Day-Lewis is probably one of the most lauded actors working in films today.  Since the release of There Will Be Blood in 2007 I've noticed a significant resurgence in his career, as he laid low for much of the '90s and the better part of the last decade.  There Will Be Blood was the first film of his I had seen, though I've often heard of his performance in My Left Foot tossed around for years.  It is that reputable performance that really put him on the map, and given with how impressed I was with his performance as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood I thought I'd check it out.

For those of you who have not seen it, My Left Foot is the story of Christy Brown, the real-life Irish painter/writer, who stricken with cerebral palsy, overcame his severe adversities to become something of an international sensation.  After a brief opening, with Day-Lewis as the adult Christy Brown attending a banquet in his honor, we are thrown back into Christy’s childhood.  Born into an immense family, in his early years he is regarded as an invalid by his working-class father and siblings.  It is his mother alone who, perhaps through maternal instincts, can recognize that Christy can think and feel just as well as the other children.  His body, with the exception of his left foot, is palsied, and his face is in a constant state of flux as it twitches spasmodically. For the film’s span of the early years of Brown’s life, young Christy Brown is played convincingly by Hugh O’Conor.  It is during this period that Christy learns to manipulate his left foot to first allow him with great effort to write, and then to paint.  There is a particularly poignant scene in which Christy writes his first discernable word on the floor with a piece of chalk.  It is the word “Mother”.  It’s a tearjerker of a scene, because Hugh O’Conor does such a great job of letting us feel Christy’s frustrations.  But it is also compounded by the fact that the audience is shown that Christy is indeed a mentally able person long before other characters in the film learn that it.  There is a particular cruelty in this, because a few of the other characters do so maliciously.  I refer an earlier scene where Christy’s parturient mother falls down a flight of stairs, knocking herself unconscious.  Christy uses his good foot to fling himself down the stairs after her, and proceeds to pound on the front door to get the neighbors attention.  When they arrive they think that she fell down the stairs while carrying Christy, and curse him has being a blight on her and the family.  After Christy writes his first word, however, it becomes clear to all that he is anything but an invalid.  His father goes so far even to carry him off to local pub, proclaiming his son to be a genius.

At age 17, Day-Lewis takes over as Christy, who by this time is an already accomplished painter.  He soon gains the attention of a woman doctor who specializes in patients suffering from cerebral palsy.  She brings Christy to her school, where she teaches him to speak.  It’s something of a shock when we see Day-Lewis play the adolescent Christy.  He looks about ten years older than the actors who play his siblings, many of who are supposed to be years older than him.  Day-Lewis, unlike Hugh O’Conor, is familiar enough to where we know there’s an acting job going on here.  Unlike the brief opening scene, where Day-Lewis as the adult Christy has his facial expressions much more under control, as the adolescent Christy his facial expressions have a wild, yet contrived series of movements to them.  They simply aren’t as believable as they were with O’Conor playing young Christy.  This is understandably very difficult to do, as there is always a certain level of empathy an actor must employ when approaching a role.  But with a horrible condition such as cerebral palsy is, anything else, especially by an actor as well known as Day-Lewis, will only be referential.  I’m being horribly nitpicky, yes, because my own perceptions aside, this is undoubtedly a bravura performance.  Day-Lewis, like O’Conor before him, really lets us feel Christy’s frustrations with great sympathy.  Christy is really just a normal boy, who loves to play football with his friends, and is driven by the same hormones that makes him lust for women.  It is inspiring to see Christy play football as the goalie, blocking the ball with his head, and delivering a precise penalty kick with that remarkable foot of his that sends the other team’s goalie jumping out of the way in fear.  But it is also painful to see him rejected by women whom he sends beautiful watercolors he has painted.  Christy also develops an attraction to the doctor who teaches him to speak, but this ends in heartbreak as well.

By his late teens Christy becomes a voracious drinker.  It is soon after then that he abandons painting and takes to writing, typing each letter with meticulous stabs with his toe.  The banquet we see Christy attending at the beginning of the film is in recognition for his contributions as a writer.  All throughout, the film vacillates between his conversation with his future wife, Mary Carr, at that banquet and his childhood story.  And by the end, we are shown that Christy had overcome his adversities and succeeded in creating a fruitful existence for himself. 

It is difficult to be critical of a film that deals with inspiring and uplifting material such as Christy Brown’s story is.  There is a certain danger, which luckily this film managed to avoid, of being overly sentimental.  No one scene in this film is in any way sugar coated, and Christy’s story is attenuated in such a fashion that the viewer feels he/she is only given the essentials needed to grasp why Christy Brown was such a significant human being.  A film’s musical score can be particularly precarious in films like this, as they are often gushing with treacle.  Elmer Bernstein’s score thankfully has none of that, but it is almost so utilitarian that it often goes unnoticed.

This film really rests upon the performances of the character of Christy Brown.  It’s a huge undertaking, because so much sensitivity is required.  Day-Lewis, despite my minor critiques, really delivers here, as does Hugh O’Conor.  It really something of a spectacle to see such an adversity-stricken individual conquer the same obstacles that we all must face, and even gaining fame in mediums difficult for the most brilliant of people to achieve.  Christy Brown’s story is indeed one that will inspire, and the performances in My Left Foot are ones that you will be moved by with a sense of awe.  

The Hitcher (1986)

The Hitcher (1986), dir. Robert Harmon

*1/2

The first ten minutes of The Hitcher account for some of the most intense and terrifying moments I can recollect having seen in film.  They involve a young man, who in an effort to ward off exhaustion, picks up a hitchhiker caught in a sudden downpour in the Arizona desert.  The hitcher, played by Rutger Hauer, who was equally as unnerving as the replicant, Roy Batty in Blade Runner, plays a similar sort here.  Hauer possesses cool, chiseled features—complete with searing blue eyes, and an impishly sinister grin, all of which lend themselves all to well to the requisites of an effective villain.  Almost immediately after the hitcher is picked up, it becomes evident to the young man, Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) that he had made a grave error in electing to pull over.  What happens next I won’t divulge, but it should be enough to make even the burliest of truck drivers wince the next time they see a lone hitchhiker on the side of the road.  Much of the effectiveness of this early scene is due to its simple plausibility.  Those of us with wild imaginations have probably conceived of the possibility of the frightening interplay that occurs between the hitcher and Jim here.  Watching this scene only solidified it for me—I would never even consider giving anyone a lift again.  However, and much to my dismay, by the end of the film I became much more open to the idea and would probably just think twice before doing so.

          Following the intense opening scene, which showed so much promise, the film quickly plunges itself into a ludicrous series of a rapid encounters with the hitcher, further terrifying his victim, followed by one of the most fantastic frame-ups imaginable, culminating in his own pre-conceived death.  I noted Hauer’s performance in Blade Runner, in which his character was endowed with superhuman strength.  Somehow that attribute happened to traverse this film, with this character of the hitcher, whose name we learn is John Ryder.  He is also endowed with supernatural powers—something akin to David Bowie’s as the Goblin King in Labyrinth, who has an all-seeing eye, can anticipate the other person’s every move, and present himself at will at just the right moment.  As mentioned, he uses these absurd qualities to frame Jim for the other murders he has committed, and twice botches Jim’s own efforts to turn himself in as the framed mass murderer.  During this sequence of events Jim encounters a young girl, Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who works at a restaurant who is ready to believe him.  She rescues him from the police, who are at this point acting as vigilantes to take the killer down (whom they think is Jim), and then follows him on the road.  The film is now notorious for the manner in which she dies: the hitcher ties her between two semi-trucks and to everyone’s disbelief actually does depress the gas pedal.  It’s a cruel scene, and it demonstrates a lot of perversity on the filmmaker’s behalf.  Nash is killed in such a ridiculous fashion simply because it plays against the audience’s expectations.  ‘There’s no way he’s going to do it,’ we all think, but he actually does, and no one is laughing, except for maybe the producers of the film.  This is not really a violent film, however.  There is a lot of violence implied in the film, but very little of it is actually shown on camera.  There are indeed a few gruesome scenes; one involving a dog licking the blood off of its brutally murdered owner, and another of Jim finding a severed finger in his French fries.  The film ends with Jim shooting the hitcher dead, but we feel little satisfaction in this because it’s obvious that that’s what Ryder had planned all along.

Back in the opening scene, Jim asks the hitcher, “What do you want?”  To this, he laughs sardonically and replies, “That’s what the last guy asked,” before he killed him.  Jim wants to know, the last guy wanted to know, and we sure as hell want to know, too.  John Ryder kills without any clear motive, and he does so generously.  He also spares Jim Halsey, ostensibly to achieve his own death, but even this is not certain.  To account for the actions of a crazed murderer in films by simply saying ‘he is psychotic’ without any hint as to why is a cop-out.  It also says that the film is much more interested in being simply sadistic for the sake of being so, in order to satisfy the perversities of a given audience, and there is a large audience that exists sated by material like this.  Violence is the key element these audiences seek, and I have very little in the way of objection with the use of violence in films, but it has to be blended with other well-conceived elements to fully justify it.                

John Ryder is unfortunately a one-dimensional character, and that is one reason why this film is so dissatisfying.  Its absurd storyline is the other.  If we knew a little more about John Ryder and why it is he does the detestable things he does it would have made for a deeper picture.  But that’s only one element.  A few slasher films come to mind in which the filmmakers attempted to account for the actions of its psychotic killer, be it an abused childhood or a traumatic experience, but the film was still a stinker.  In the case of The Hitcher, the audience is also not given much in the way to approach how to relate to the film's protagonist.  There’s no exposition in this picture; we’re flung into the action at the very beginning of film, and have little reason to care for Jim.  Especially when after his initial escape, he reacts by releasing a string of obscenities in a childish tone, just moments after being fully emasculated by the hitcher.  It has junior high school written all over it.  The film’s greatest flaw, however, is its election to have Jim chased and manipulated in the most unbelievable fashion following that great opening scene.  I feel that had they elected to have the hitcher remain in the car with Jim for the duration of the picture, thus enabling him to manipulate Jim even more closely, it would have aided in retaining the intensity that was so firmly established in the opening minutes, also granting us a greater peek into the minds and personas of its principle characters, and frankly, would have opened up more creative possibilities along the way.  What you have instead is an at times laughable thriller, whose sickness and perversity are shamelessly exploited, leaving the viewer without an iota of substance to latch onto.