Five At A Time #2: A Vague Anxiety
#6 Son of Saul
This movie is kind of a self-appointed nemesis to Holocaust films like Life is Beautiful and Schindler’s List: the notion is that you strip away every vestige of sentiment except the ones that are absolutely necessary to communicate a story. There’s almost no music and even the cinematography can best be described as anonymous, muted and unbeckoning except for when the viewer’s eye must be lead where it is needed. The result, in theory, is a product that is more honest and truer to the horror of the concentration camps.
The problem is that in telling the story this way Son of Saul makes its minimalism into an object unto itself; its lack of ornamentation becomes its own type of distraction from the film’s content. The scenes that work best seem to be going against the grain of its overall philosophy: a Nazi officer jeering at the protagonist with bombastic, childlike cruelty, a female prisoner reaching for a man’s hand even though such a simple act will get her killed. It seems possible to me that deadpan narrative reportage is not sufficient for telling a story set in this kind of situation; the human spirit yearns for a vessel in which to process these nightmares.
I will also say that I have an intution that this movie will speak louder to a Jewish audience; this is not to say that one needs to be Jewish to understand the magnitude of the Holocaust but that in many cases the movie seems to be talking past the gentile viewer and assuming a familiarity with Hebrew traditions and what their various negations and practices mean. I’m also not necessarily holding this against Son of Saul; it may simply be a movie that I’m not equipped to appreciate in its intended state. That’s fine.
#7 Freeway: Crack In The System
Oh, Jesus. So the thing that this documentary gets very right is its understanding and depiction of the crack epidemic in a sprawling geopolitical context. It explains the Iran-Contra scandal better and more concisely than anything else I’ve seen, and it does justice to the bedrock source for much of its information, that being the reportage of the tragically fated Gary Webb. It’s worth watching for that alone. If you don’t know much about the origins of the drug war, or have gaps in your knowledge, Freeway is an essential and deeply informative document.
The problem comes in its depiction of its title star, Freeway Rick Ross. The movie tries to sell him as an avuncular go-getter who happened to pick an irresponsible path to fame and fortune, and it doesn’t wash. Early in the film he’s being interviewed by a professor who tells him that while he understands he had few opportunities in life and had to do whatever he could to climb out of poverty, he also, as someone who grew up in south central Los Angeles during the 1980s, can’t forgive him for introducing crack to the streets and precipitating a drug pandemic that would end up costing the lives of millions of people. Ross’s response is basically “yeah, I feel bad about that too,” and then the movie doesn’t really come back to it. The screencap I used is a picture of Ross going to a high school to tell kids to stay out of gangs, wearing a T-shirt from his own brand, which is a brand that only exists because of the crack empire he built decades ago, that he is now trying to convince the youth to stay away from. The cognitive dissonance is never noticed or addressed by the filmmakers.
Like…Rick Ross is not a good person. He’s a person that likes money. He can’t make money selling crack, so he tries to sue the rapper Rick Ross for appropriating his name on the grounds that the artist became famous by building himself off the original’s brand. This would be kind of like if Al Pacino went broke and tried to sue the rapper Scarface for building his brand off the film he starred in. It doesn’t work — it obviously doesn’t work — and he ends up with almost half a million dollars in legal fees. But it’s OK! He starts a t-shirt business! And then the movie ends.
It’s not responsible filmmaking. There’s no reasonable expectation that DIY shirt production is going to get Ross out of the financial hole he’s in. The first time he got paroled in the ’90s he was sent back to prison after being relatively easily coaxed back into drug distribution; will this temptation strike again? The movie doesn’t even ask this very obvious, troubling question. Its interest in Ross as a victim of a system supercedes its ability to depict him as a human being, within as well as outside of the context of that same system. It widens a gulch of unanswered questions by buttressing it with unasked questions. That’s essentially the opposite of what a documentary is supposed to accomplish.
#8 Faces
Cassavetes is sort of like Larry McMurtry in that even at his most paternalistic he has this way of jigsawing human solvents and reagants together in such an organic and beautiful way that you don’t really stop to look at their compounds, or rather it becomes apparent as to what those things actually are — compounds, creating a whole but not wholes in and of themselves. He’s the ideal modernist filmmaker and while that doesn’t mean much anymore it should.
Anyway. Faces. Good ass movie. It’s kind of like one long symphonic conversation; there’s this thing it does where it uses songs and schtick and tongue twisters and jokes in really grating and awkward ways and they end up being kind of dissonant motifs, loud clanging percussion to break up the silences and sorrows, oftentimes to break up the words, which themselves are silent and sorrowful. Cassavetes loves people but he hates the way that they think they have to behave. Inside every one of us is an archive of emotions and when we keep the door to this archive locked for too long we forget which of these feelings are which even when we decide to pull them out. The puzzle of discernment has a different solution for every soul.
That’s basically what Faces is about. It’s springwater. Watch it.
#9 Training Day
This is one of the more interesting takes on the Faustian Pact trope that I’ve had the pleasure of taking in; the tension comes not from the question of whether the hero will succumb to the Devil or not but rather that the Devil in question is not actually all that great at what he does and is essentially in a nonstop uphill battle with someone he mistook for an easy target.
Seriously, Lonzo fucking sucks. The only times he’s able to make his authority stick in any serious way is when he beats up a crackhead rapist who’s already handcuffed, or when he’s forcing Snoop Dogg to puke. He’s openly afraid of the Russian mob, he gets his own shotgun turned on him, his own neighborhood doesn’t like or respect him enough to back him up when a white cop kicks the shit out of him. A middle aged woman who asks to see a warrant during a search almost gets him killed in a hail of gunfire. Not a single one of his plans ends up working. He says he’s gotten like a million manhours worth of sentencings with his arrests but that’s probably a lie, because he seems extraordinarily easy to manipulate and fuck with and get the jump on.
So you have this guy who’s not a badass and not even all that good at faking being a badass trying to give the reacharound to someone who is not all that bright or experienced but has a level of intuition that tells him that this person’s a stupid dick and to not get terribly involved with anything he might suggest is the right thing to do. Pretty much every other person in Los Angeles seems to have this same intuition but the difference in Jake’s case is that he’s sitting right next to him for the whole day and has many opportunities to fuck Lonzo right back whenever he oversteps.
The movie is basically a tug of war between someone who started out smart and has turned into a dipshit out of having taken his power for granted for so long versus someone who starts out naive but wises up very, very quickly. It’s a surprisingly elegant way of framing the duality of good vs evil; the grey area is less in the morality of the acts and more in the intelligence of the operants. I like it a lot. Beautifully shot too, which I wasn’t really expecting for some reason.
#10 Dead or Alive 2: Birds
This is probably the most accessible Takashi Miike movie I’ve seen thus far, and by “accessible” I mean there’s only one scene depicting necrophilia and when a dwarf gets shot in the head by a trio of gunmen it turns his bone structure polygonal and shows an HP bar draining instead of blood and instead of his body falling to the ground you see YOU DIED scroll across the screen.
Miike’s films are uniformly perverse, not in the sense of being sexually grotesque (well, not exclusively in that sense, I should say) but by the term’s literal dictionary definiton: “willfully determined or disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired; contrary.” You don’t make 100 movies in 25 years by giving a fuck. Birds takes place under the shadow of an apocalypse that never comes to pass; there’s no closure for these characters or the world they inhabit. At one early point a character pulls a cinder block from behind his back like Bugs Bunny summoning a mallet from the ether and wallops a Yakuza over the head with it. There’s a great joke about a Polaroid much later.
The problem with writing about Miike movies is that they come with a bit of a “dancing about architecture” conundrum; it’s tempting to just list a bunch of things that happen in them because that seems like the best way to get across what the movie’s about, since the mental splash of those events is going to be the main thing the viewer takes away from his movies. But this doesn’t do justice to Birds’ central question: when indissolubly ensconced in wickedness, how then does one do good? The viewer is left to answer this for themselves. It’s hardly the first time such a query has been posed but the way Miike positions it, between innocence and depravity, the organic endpoint of a childhood that never ceases, deserves recognition for its sympathy and its wit.
I have a theory that Miike makes “ambient” movies much like Kiarostami or Tarkovsky, except that his technique, rather than to leave open spaces for the viewer’s mind to drift through, is to fill his movies with so many objects at such a frantic pace and of such bizarre qualities that the audience is cajoled into latching onto 2 or 3 of them and forced to make sense of it for themselves since no overt reason is going to present itself. A Merzbow ambience as opposed to a Steve Reich type, I guess you could say. Birds is a little bit different because it has genuine quiet time, long open valleys of bucolic serenity between all the vulgar mayhem. The pieces fit together better than one might think. It’s a very good movie.
