Three Films Make A Post: For justice. For loyalty. For friendship.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005): I am really rather fond of the handful of films Tommy Lee Jones directed. While also centred around Jones as an actor, these films are prime examples of a quiet and collected post-New Hollywood filmmaking style, never stylistically showy, but always shot in such a way as to help keep actors and their characters at the centre. This one also recommends itself through a really peculiar sense of humour, the willingness to leave questions unanswered, as well as a what feels like a the conviction to meet characters on their own terms, and follow the lines of inquiry that leads to. Curiously enough, given how Jones is supposed to be on set, these lines tend to lead to compassion (not an uncritical one, mind you) and understanding, not the kitschy idea of these concepts, but the sort of thing that’s actual work for everyone involved.

Alone on the Pacific aka Taiheiyô hitoribotchi (1963): Kenichie (Yujiro Ishihara) makes it his young life’s goal to cross the Pacific to the USA in a one person sailboat. For much of its running time, the film cuts between our hero’s misadventures at sea and his growing up disaffected, eventually planning his trip. Director Kon Ichikawa doesn’t really lean into the adventure elements of the tale too hard – though he is perfectly willing and able to portray some of Kenichie’s troubles at sea, he is more interested in a meticulous portrayal of the state of mind a body at the borders of its endurance can reach, touching the surreal and the stylistically theatrical because these seem to be closest to the state of mind Kenichie gets into. There’s also quite a bit of social commentary towards post war Japan and the way it treats its youth, but I’m not terribly sure I’m the right audience for that part of the film.

At Close Range (1986): James Foley’s version of a true crime story is a deeply frustrating movie. The cast, with a young Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris Penn and so on is brilliant. Foley even seems to realize this and provides them with a lot of big scenes to do big actor things in. The problem is that most of these scenes are utterly wrong-headed, never giving the actors the material to be people instead of characters in a movie built out of clichés from other movies. The script (by Elliott Lewitt and Nicholas Kazan) makes the impression of being written by people who have never met one of the small town and rural poor before, portraying people, their motivations and actions in ways that never feel anything but wrong. On the direction side, Foley polishes everything to a sheen that often works against the story he is trying to tell, making poverty and the world rural noir tales are made of look like an overdirected 80s ad, making it impossible to believe in these characters and the places they are supposed to inhabit.

Shoot the Sun Down (1978)

Going by a mention of the Alamo late in the movie, I think this is supposed to take place in 1836. Variations on various Western stock characters converge in Santa Fe. At this point in time the town still belongs to Mexico but in the practice of the film takes a kind of liminal place between the US and Mexico. It’s a classical melting pot in the American style, where people of many cultures attempt to kill and rob each other. Our main characters are a guy calling himself Rainbow (Christopher Walken), a conscientious deserter from some massacres or other committed on the Native American population, but still a highly competent killer when that ability is needed; a Scalphunter (Geoffrey Lewis) and his gang of cutthroats; a former sea Captain (Bo Brundin) who supposedly wants to open a trading post in the desert and travels with a woman (Margot Kidder) who says she’s a British upper-class daughter but is actually a former maidservant to the upper-class the Captain has bought (rented?) for five years; and the Navajo warrior Sunbearer (A Martinez), soon to be in a debt of honour to Rainbow when the gunman helps out in a gambling incident.

Eventually, it will become clear that the Captain has a line on a gold treasure. Rainbow’s initially not interested at all but will be drawn into the affair nonetheless, particularly thanks to the Woman; the Scalphunter is very much interested but is not the kind of man anyone will want to trust, yet he is also inescapable; Sunbearer is going to get drawn into the mess too. As you can imagine, the characters will play through versions of the old trust and betrayal game, Rainbow eventually showing the character of a classic western hero, but not exactly the talent for anything but killing the classic western hero does usually have.

Shoot the Sun Down is the only film directed (as well a written and produced) by one David Leeds. It’s a western influenced by the Italians, ideas from the revisionist western and perhaps the more conventional moments of Jodorowsky, but is not as good at fusing these elements as it could be. The film certainly demonstrates a tendency towards abstraction and the abstract, shaving off character names here, scenes that would be exciting and adventurous there. The problem with this approach is that the film doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to do with the elements it has left after it has removed much what people expect of a western. It clearly wants to say something about America, but it is exactly its abstraction that makes it rather difficult to say what its ideas about America are, exactly, beyond the very obvious territory mined better by the Italians and the revisionists.

The problem with abstraction in genre movies is of course that it tends to deny an audience the joys of the genre it has come to see. It’s not the political assumptions underlying these joys - those you can change as much as you want if you know what you are doing – but the plot tropes that constitute a genre.

The film, for example, lacks the classical shoot-out in the finale, but it seems to do so for no good reason but for Leeds wanting to make it difficult for his audience; one imagines the director standing in a corner grumbling “I don’t wanna!”, while not putting much thought into what he actually wants to do to replace the tropes he clearly doesn’t like with. Just leaving them out, it turns out, really doesn’t lead him anywhere.

In visual style and mood, this really does its best to be poetic (there are some very fine shots of the moon, and the frozen desert in the end is very moody but not as metaphorical as the film seems to assume), mildly trippy and very, very slow, but the slowness only seems to have an actual function about half of the time. The rest of the movie, the slowness seems to keep with the film’s motto of denying the audience genre joys without wanting to come up with anything useful to replace them.

The cast, on the other hand, is pretty brilliant, with Christopher Walken, Geoffrey Lewis, A Martinez and Margot Kidder all lending the film what it otherwise lacks completely in its love for abstracting things away: personality.

In short: Man on Fire (2004)

Creasy (Denzel Washington), an alcoholic ex-CIA killer with the mandatory traumatic past (therefore the alcohol) is hired to protect Lupita (Dakota Fanning), the child of US company exec Samuel (Marc Anthony) and his wife Lisa (Radha Mitchell). Despite there having been a rash of kidnappings of the children of executives of US companies in Mexico like Samuel, he really hires Creasy because he comes cheaply, and because Creasy’s old murder buddy Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken) pushes the guy recommending people to Samuel a bit in Creasy’s direction.

After a bit of the expected “PTSD suffering guy can’t let anyone into his heart anymore” shenanigans, Creasy falls in replacement father love with Lupita (who, as played by Fanning, really is a particularly nice kid), so when she is kidnapped and apparently killed, he does of course go on a murderous rampage, killing his way up the long, long totem pole to the people responsible for her death.

At first, Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, written by Brian Helgeland, is a surprisingly effective retelling of the ole tale of a shut-off man of violence reminded of his humanity by a child, and then falling back into his old ways again to protect/save her. After some minutes of the kind of noisy visual bullshit typical of late period Scott, even the director seems to calm down a little about the whole thing, giving his excellent performers enough space to breathe life into the very clichéd set-up and even – gasp – using his love for all kinds of annoying technical tricks to enhance instead of destroy what the actors are trying to do. Why, for once in a Tony Scott movie, I even felt emotions coming on.

Alas, once the film gets going with Creasy murdering his way through the supporting cast, all of this stops. Scott loses himself, Washington’s performance and my attention through the use of all the phony visual nonsense he so dearly loved in this part of his career. So there’s an incessant barrage of whoosh-cutting, pointless superimposition of Washington’s face over Washington’s face (honestly, I have no idea why), a camera that randomly jitters and jerks, jumpy editing, micro-zooms, stutter and all imaginable kinds of pointless visual graft, all, I assume in service of keeping the audience awake through way too many scenes of Creasy torturing and murdering characters in various ways. As my imaginary readers know, I’m not exactly bothered by tasteless violence, but rather by the directorial assumption that this sort of thing used as much as in this film will somehow shock a viewer.


In fact, having a murder machine murder their way through personality-less goons can only keep one’s interest up when it is either very well staged (which is impossible with all actual action buried under all of Scott’s tacky direction ticks), carries some interesting resonance, or actually does something else needed for the film. In Man on Fire’s case, all the killing ever does is make the film way too long, until what should be a tight little 90 minute thriller becomes tedious two and a half hours of nothing but Scott editing into your face, which isn’t just an unpleasant time, but also time of your life you won’t ever get back.

In short: McBain (1991)

I don’t believe James Glickenhaus actually knew about irony, not to speak of anything with the post prefix, so he presents this patently goofy transferral of his typical New York vigilante shtick into a Colombia just waiting to be freed from tyranny by some Vietnam vets under the leadership of Christopher Walken(!) as the titular McBain – also including Michael Ironside as their arms dealer frenemie who really needs to feel alive by shooting a lot of people again as well as Steve James for all your action movie needs - and the worst rebel army ever as sort of spearheaded by a Maria Chonchita Alonso who commits to her role with total earnestness. Every cheesy bit of revolutionary kitsch his script comes up with, every dubious speech about the very real horrors of dictatorship and the domination of one Simon Escobar (cough) is done with total conviction, as if the stuff these people spouted had any actual emotional impact.

For a Glickenhaus film, the whole affair is surprisingly awkwardly paced, partly because the film does want to tell an epic tale of Vietnam flashbacks, the death of a friend and the following revolution but only has 107 minutes time for it all instead of the three hours it would probably need to get serious. More curious, even a couple of the action sequences fall flat, perhaps because so little of the film takes place in the grimy New York of the director’s best films. Instead, most of it was shot in the Philippines which do of course stand in for Colombia as well as take on their more typical role as Vietnam for a low budget production.

However, even though the whole thing doesn’t hang together too well, at least Walken, Ironside, James, Alonso and the merry rest of the cast are usually fun to watch, the film’s freewheeling moments of craziness can be pretty great, and from time to time, Glickenhaus comes up with the sort of thing I have by now learned to love him for. Take the scene where our heroes are in dire need of money to buy guns from Ironside, and shoot through a bunch of drug dealers, only to be taught the class politics of the drug war by the lone survivor (Luis Guzmán!), after which they rather steal from a banker (while pretending to be Mossad agents, because why not, right?). That’s not the sort of thing you’ll encounter in many vigilante and mercenary movies, and it is this kind of curveball that makes slogging through the slow bits perfectly worthwhile.


Do I need mention that Glickenhaus’s politics are certainly rather more complicated than those of the filmmakers of your typical flag-waving US action movie?

In short: The Anderson Tapes (1971)

aka The Anderson Clan

Professional thief Duke Anderson (Sean Connery) is being released from prison after a ten-year-stint that has left him wanting to make one last big score so he can finally retire. Duke finds a place to rob quickly enough: he wants to plunder every single apartment in the luxury building his former and now again girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) lives in. Duke gets together a merry band of thieves consisting of old friends like the gay antique show owner Tommy Haskins (Martin Balsam), as well as a prison acquaintance only known as The Kid (a young Christopher Walken in his first major cinema role), and some fresh professionals. He does, however, need money and organisational help for the job, so Duke also puts his old mobster contacts into play. The help of bipolar mafioso Angelo (Alan King) has its price beyond the monetary, though, and Duke has to grudgingly agree to take a certain Socks (Ralph Meeker) - a guy too violent even for the tastes of organized crime - on and kill him when the heist is done. Of course, the heist always goes wrong anyway.

Despite my general dislike for that sort of thing, I think the best films by Sidney Lumet are those with a clear and consequent thesis holding the director's disparate impulses in check. The Anderson Tapes lacks that kind of throughline - I'm quite sure it's meant as some kind of comment on the ubiquitousness of surveillance and/or the vagaries of technology, but this aspect of the film seems vague and underdeveloped. The film shows a lot of scenes of Anderson being secretly filmed while crossing the paths of people government organizations are actually interested in, but that aspect is neither actually explored nor used in the plot beyond a last minute plot development that has nothing whatsoever to do with government surveillance, so it really feels like a wasted chance at actually taking a look at what permanent surveillance might mean.

What's left is a rather disparate film whose tone permanently meanders between hard-nosed realism, unfunny humour, and Lumet's customary sense for the absurd without ever either deciding on a tone or managing to make its tonal shifts feel organic. Consequently, The Anderson Tapes feels a bit disjointed and episodic, as if we were actually watching scenes from three or four different movies that just happen to share an acting ensemble and a basic plot. Viewed on their own, many of these scenes are actually as effective as one would expect from Lumet, full of small telling gestures, straight-faced weirdness, and fine acting that completely lacks showiness. However, these separate moments of accomplishment and interest never come together to build an actual whole, leaving The Anderson Tapes as a series of scenes which surely are worth seeing, but not as an effective movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sidney lumet,crime,sean connery,christopher walken

Three Films Make A Post: Jet-hot action! Jet-hot suspense! Jet-hot thrills!

The Expatriate (2012): Philipp Stölzl's film about a former CIA operative (Aaron Eckhart) getting into trouble with an international conspiracy that includes his former handler (Olga Kurylenko) and threatens to cost the life of his daughter (Liana Liberato) is a neat example of the modern international (producing countries are the USA, Canada, Belgium and the UK, the director is German, and the actors are coming from everywhere) spy thriller. It's not a film that hits many surprising beats but it tells its story well, with the proper amount of violence and one of the more convincing variations on the "daughter and father come together through the father's talent for lethal violence" theme. Plus, the acting's more than decent and in the Europe of this film - quite unlike in that of Europa Corps. movies - brown people aren't automatically evil.

Killer Joe (2011): This is one of those cases where I absolutely understand the wave of approval a film and its director (in this case a William Friedkin absolutely not willing to coast on previous achievements or attempt to copy them) are met with, see the artistic value and the plain effort in every shot, yet still, when it comes down to it, can't get excited about the film in the slightest, and even feel rather annoyed by it. Large part of the reason for that might be an ending that works wonderfully on a subtextual level, less so as the tour de force where blackest comedy and violence meet I think it's supposed to be, and makes little sense when you try and see the characters as people. And here comes the other, much heavier, problem I have with Killer Joe into play - I have my doubts it sees the uneducated Southern poor it concerns itself with as actual people instead of as objects it can slyly look down on as so stupid and alien they deserve whatever shit is coming to them; at the very least, the film lacks any kind of sympathy with its characters, and without that sympathy, I don't really see a reason to care about a film be it as artful as it may.

Seven Psychopaths (2012): Yet another movie I'm not as in love with as I'm probably supposed to, even though it is full of things I love in my movies: Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, meta, the subversion of genre standards, an excellent taste in music, shaggy dog stories and direction that thrives on details. Problem is, I like my subversion of genre tropes rather more subtle, or at least less self-congratulatory. Martin McDonagh's film loudly points out that it's subverting tropes right now about every ten minutes, instead of just doing it and trusting in the audience to understand what it's doing. There's something self-congratulatory and smug about this approach that rubs me the wrong way and really doesn't fit the actual charm and intelligence that the film's script shows when it's not patting itself on the back. Of course, this is also a film that loves to stop its critique halfway, pointing out the absence and uselessness of women in action etc. cinema but then not doing any better by its own female characters, so maybe I'm just expecting too much of it.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,canadian movies,american movies,belgian movies,spies,thriller,noir,comedy,philip stölzl,aaron eckhart,olga kurylenko,liana liberato,william friedkin,martin mcdonagh,christopher walken,sam rockwell