The Commitments (1991)

Note, in the front row: baby Glen Hansard!

Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) is obsessed with music. Two of his friends ask him to whip their band into shape, and he responds by taking it apart and putting together a new one: The Commitments. This soul cover band has a wise old veteran trumpeter, an egotistical dick of a lead singer, three talented female backups (who could easily have replaced insufferable frontman Deco), and five young nerds on guitar, bass, sax, piano, and drums. Will the band succeed, or will it be destroyed by too much infighting and not enough money?

Early on, one bandmember suggests that they may be too white to play soul music. Jimmy responds that the music fits them because "the Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud." This sort of sentiment, well-intentioned though it may be, makes me really uncomfortable. First of all, it seems to render actual black people invisible? There are black people in Europe--and, indeed, Ireland--and if white Irish are "the blacks," then who are black Europeans? Also the blacks? Different blacks? Now, Jimmy's trying to draw a parallel between Britain's historical treatment of the Irish and America's historical treatment of black people. I get that. But that is itself problematic: you can't reduce "blackness" to just the experience of oppression or to a romanticized picture of musical "character" born of suffering. Not to be (even more) obvious (than usual), but it's a bit dehumanizing to treat people as metaphors instead of as, um, people.

This same sort of presumption manifests later in the movie, when club walls are papered with the band's posters proclaiming them the "Saviours of Soul." I'm sure Roddy Doyle, Alan Parker, et al. didn't mean anything by it, but saviors from what? I don't know. Maybe this isn't as bad as it seemed to me. I do this; I make a big deal over practically nothing. What do you guys think?

Race stuff aside, the movie seemed to me to have some structural weaknesses. The Commitments is based on a novel, and it felt like it would work better as a book. I haven't read the book, but I'm going to speculate wildly that there's probably more substantial character development there than in the movie. Plus, I think novels can get away with having less conflict than films.* There's a lot of conflict in the movie, but it isn't explored in a plottish way; it just erupts and subsides and erupts again, unhandled and probably unhandleable. (These are all official critical terms. Pauline Kael will back me up.) Anyway, to me, the movie felt a little thin on plot and on character.

Still, it's not thin on charm. I enjoyed watching it. I rooted for the band. I loved the dialogue between Jimmy and Joey "The Lips" Fagan at the end. Couldn't ask for a line much better than "That would have been predictable. This way it's poetry." Overall, though, I expected to like the movie more than I did, and I expected there to be more there there. (Not unlike my feelings on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)

Maybe I should just be happy I got through it. In the last couple days, I have tried to watch Diabolique and Return of the Secaucus 7 and gotten bored with both. I think I'll go back to them. They're probably very good. Maybe my attention span is just shot. Maybe I'm having post-Moon malaise, as I predicted I would. Maybe, right now, I only have eyes for The Wire.

*It is possible that I'm full of shit.

- Liked It

NOPE.

Netflix appears to be under the impression that "romantic" means "has sex in it." That is not what it means.

Actual review up tonight.

Moon (2009)

This is a great week for everyone but me being right. For years, my friends, colleagues, and frenemies have been telling me I should watch The Wire, and I have said, "I will watch The Wire when I watch The Wire." Now I am watching The Wire, and you all were right, and I was stupid. Similarly, last year, while everyone I knew flipped out about Moon, I said, "Yeah, I'll get around to it." WELL, I HAVE GOTTEN AROUND TO IT, AND IT IS GREAT.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) works for a company called Lunar Industries, mining helium-3, which humanity has adopted as its primary energy source. Sam is the only human part of the operation, there to inspect and maintain the automated harvesters. He's been alone on the moon for almost three years. When the movie opens, he's two weeks away from returning home, which is good, because the isolation is driving him crazy. He's started hallucinating, and one vision distracts him as he's driving out to a harvester, leading to a nasty collision. In the aftermath of the accident, he starts uncovering his employer's sinister secrets. (Ooh! Sinister! [Very sinister.])

Here are some things that Moon has:
-Sam Rockwell
-A robot
-Outer space
-Feelings
-Great production design/art direction


Moon looks better and is better (smarter, more interesting, more emotionally compelling, etc.) than almost everything that was nominated for an Oscar last year, blah blah, arts awards are bunk. And it is more original than everything else I saw last year, with the possible exception of Logorama. People who know how fond I am of In the Loop and A Serious Man will understand how much it pains me to say that any movie exceeded them at anything, but it's true.

Watching movies like Moon is wonderful, of course, but it's also a little bit awful: it makes average movies look really bad. For a few weeks after I saw Hunger, other movies and TV shows felt mechanical and unchallenging. I'm sure that Moon will also make me bridle at the next movie I try to watch.

Moon is energetic. That's what it is. It has the scrappy intensity of a very ambitious movie made on a small budget, a fuck-you-itiveness. It says, We will show you humanity and corruption and sadness and hope. We will do it on the moon. For $5 million. And it will look goddamned fantastic.

- Loved It

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

"Bitterness is a paralytic. Love is a much more vicious motivator."

Okay, so Poirot doesn't actually say that. That's Sherlock Holmes in the new miniseries Sherlock, which everyone should be watching. (More generally, everyone should be watching everything Steven Moffat touches right now. He is at the top of his game.) My original point: Poirot easily could say that thing about bitterness and love. It's true of the criminal motive in Murder on the Orient Express.

Fifteen people board a sleeping car of the Orient Express in Istanbul. One of them is murdered, one of them is famous detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), and the remaining baker's dozen are suspects. Over the rest of the movie, Poirot collects clues and talks to the passengers, then assembles them all in the dining car to expose the guilty.

The big reveal scene follows that age-old screenwriting adage: "Show, and also tell." This scene is so long! Lumet is a brilliant director, but I don't understand some of the choices he made in this movie--for example, why he chose to include Poirot's detailed description of the crime and lengthy flashbacks. There might have been room for both of those things, but not for so much of each of them.

One of the film's strong points, on the other hand, is its music. This movie has an honest-to-God overture! I love overtures, I love when movies have them, and this is a great one. Listen to this fucking overture:



Now are you stoked to see a movie, or WHAT? The whole score of Murder on the Orient Express (composed by Richard Rodney Bennett) is fantastic--the best thing about the movie, no question.

Overall, I thought the film's pedigree outshone the film itself. I imagined that Lumet, Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, and John Gielgud would, together, make a great movie, but Murder on the Orient Express is just pretty good. It's fun. And strangely heartwarming.

- Liked It

Banlieue 13 (District B13) (2004)

"This is actually the best part of my day so far."

In the near future, violence has skyrocketed in the impoverished outskirts of Paris, which are now ruled by sadistic drug lords and their private armies. The French government has either responded to this phenomenon or caused it by walling off the most dangerous "districts," like the eponymous B13. Leïto (David Belle) lives inside B13. He is a vigilante (?) and landlord (??) who has stolen a lot of heroin, in a public service kind of way. When enforcers come to recover the drugs, Leïto destroys the stash and leads them on a merry chase across the rooftops. B13's kingpin, Taha (Bibi Naceri), retaliates by kidnapping Leïto's little sister, Lola (Dany Verissimo). Leïto almost rescues her, but the cops double-cross him, he goes to jail, and Lola is enslaved by Taha. (We'll come back to that.)

Meanwhile, in a more respectable part of Paris, we meet Capt. Damien Tomasso (Cyril Raffaelli), a cop who's infiltrated a criminal Spanish roulette operation? I don't know; something like that. Something gambling-related. Damien arrests the head Spaniard and, um, kills like twenty guys? Because that is a correct end to an undercover operation. Once Damien's bad-ass cred is established, the movie partners him with Leïto; the two of them are sent to B13 to disarm a bomb that Taha has stolen from the French government.

This movie is not that great. The plot is generally thin and yet still sometimes confusing. The characters and stakes are established in ways that ensured I would not care about them. The acting ranges from workmanlike to atrocious (I'm looking at you, Marc Andréoni). But--and this is a big "but"--there is PARKOUR. If, somehow, in this day and age, you do not know what parkour is, look it up on YouTube. You're welcome. Also, cancel all your plans; you will be watching parkour videos for the next week or so.

Raffaelli's stuntwork as Damien is good, and I enjoyed the set piece that introduces his character, but the real star of the action (and thus of the movie) is Belle. His chase scene at the beginning of the movie is so great. Sorry to wimp out on describing it, but if I say, "He leaps out a high-rise window onto a rope," it is not nearly as cool as when you see him leaping out a high-rise window onto a rope. I wish B13 were all parkour chase scenes, strung together with the bare minimum of dialogue. Parkour porn, in short.

But it is not that. Instead, it tries to be a real movie with, among other things, a real lady storyline. Bad decision. Listen: you cannot have your one and only female character spend the majority of the film being drugged and raped. I don't mean the only female character of note. I mean, truly, the only female non-extra onscreen. This movie is very much like Tennessee Williams, in that it hates women and is totally gay. Leïto and Damien spend their acquaintance 1) fighting in order to form an emotional bond, 2) handcuffing each other to things, and 3) basically doing it. I approve of all of that, but I wish action movies could be super gay without driving women into the cave of rape and irrelevance. If you will it, Luc Besson, it is no dream.

While we're on the subject of "me complaining about this movie's problems," B13 also has a slight case of Iron Man-itis. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I do not want action movies preaching to me about nonviolence or the democratic process. It draws me out of the world of flying people and whizzing bullets and back into the world where high body counts are horrifying, not entertaining. The scene in which Damien speechifies at the defense minister is B13's equivalent of the press conference where Tony Stark declares he has "more to offer this world than just making things that blow up." First of all, no, you don't. Second, shut up. Don't burden me with an excursus on your highly selective morality; it ruins the amoral fun of the movie.

My "liked it" rating may be confusing in light of the preceding paragraphs, but, in the wise words of my roommate Mary, "Parkour always deserves seven stars."

- 3 stars

Sè, Jiè (Lust, Caution) (2007)

I keep seeing movies about women enduring unimaginable pain--Frozen River, Winter's Bone, and now Lust, Caution. Next up: Lars Von Trier's entire catalogue! (Haha, just kidding. I will never watch Antichrist. Just so we're clear, if you would like coverage of Antichrist, this blog will disappoint you. May I recommend the MDCC Media Center instead?)

Okay, well, that turned into a pretty weird lars von tangent. Back to the movie at hand.

Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) is a college student in Hong Kong in 1938. A hunky dude named Kuang (Wang Leehom) recruits her and four other students to perform a patriotic play (in order to drum up pro-China, anti-Japan feelings). The audience eats it up, and the six students, giddy with success, decide to take the logical next step: assassinating a collaborator. Chia Chi poses as Mrs. Mak, wife to a conveniently rich and even more conveniently absent businessman; her job is to act sexy and draw the target, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), into the students' house, where her co-conspirators will kill him. She almost pulls it off, but Yee is too cautious and insufficiently lustful, and he leaves.

Mrs. Mak doesn't get another chance to seduce Mr. Yee; he moves back to Shanghai. The students are demoralized, but wait--it gets worse! Yee's bodyguard shows up, catches the defeated would-be assassins packing up “Mr. and Mrs. Mak’s house,” and threatens to expose them. They murder him. How do they murder him? Why, very slowly and brutally and inexpertly. Chia Chi runs away, horrified, and that's the end of the first half of the movie.

Three years later, Kuang finds her in Shanghai. He is now a member of the grown-up resistance, and he asks Chia Chi to reprise her role--Yee is now head of the secret police, and the resistance does not like him at all. Mrs. Mak and Mr. Yee start fucking. I found the sex scenes disturbing, stressful, and fraught with uncertainty. That's how one is supposed to react, I think, so great job, Ang Lee et al., but YEESH. Anyway, the uncertainty: the uncertainty is key. Does Yee love Mrs. Mak? How does she feel about him? Will he get assassinated? Will she get caught?

I refer to the main character alternately as Wong Chia Chi and as Mrs. Mak because, over the course of the movie, I found myself forgetting that there was ever a Chia Chi. She's completely divorced from her life, transformed from college student into high society wife. On a bus in Hong Kong, Chia Chi tries her first cigarette because her friend tells her "Artists have to smoke." A few years later, in Shanghai, she stares longingly at every cigarette she sees. She becomes a smoker, because that's how smoking works. Likewise, Wong Chia Chi becomes--to what extent is debatable--Mrs. Mak, because that’s what happens (or can happen) if you pretend to be someone every day. I’m hedging because the character of Wong Chia Chi/Mrs. Mak is pretty opaque. I'm not sure who she ends up being or what she ends up feeling.

When does she enjoy having sex with Yee? Never? Always? Sometimes? It's necessary for Mrs. Mak to want him, but Chia Chi really seems to, too. And that may be why sex is such a powerful centerpiece for this dangerous relationship. Everything else is a lie, but their feral sex seems like it must be honest. It is the most compelling, most emotional thing we see Wong and Yee doing together, so my interpretation of their relationship is largely an interpretation of their sex.

Also, side issue: Chia Chi loses her virginity in a singularly unsentimental fashion. During the Hong Kong plot, the students decide she needs sexual experience before seducing Mr. Yee, so one of her friends, an awkward, sexually bland young man, helps her practice. The tediousness of Chia Chi's first sexual experiences were, for me, a silent specter over her relationship with Yee--whatever he is, he's not boring in bed. I wondered if she would have been as deeply affected if she'd had intense sex before. "With whom?" you ask? (Thank you for asking.) With Kuang! They totally crush on each other. I really wanted those crazy kids to make it work.

It’s funny: I thought the strongest and weakest elements of Lust, Caution were the same as in another Ang Lee movie: Brokeback Mountain. In both, I loved the characters. I loved seeing superb actors create these absorbing (and super sad) relationships. But in both movies, I was less enamored than I would have been, had the pacing been quicker. Sorry for being a dumb clod or whatever, but I think these movies are TOO SLOW.

This might be a weird comparison, but watching Lust, Caution was sort of like reading Perdido Street Station: I read Perdido in little 2-5 page bites for a WHILE, but at a certain point, I felt a kick (no incepto), and I read the rest in one sitting. The second half of Lust, Caution has what I wanted from all of Lust, Caution: a slow pace that's tense and engrossing. That's a different sort of slowness than in the first half, which felt a little lethargic. I think I would have loved the movie if it had been more ruthlessly edited. (Like this blog post, am I right, fellas?)

Okay, now there are things I need to make sense of in this movie, and so I have created some DISCUSSION TOPICS. They are posted after the break, and they contain spoilers. Please do comment on these Very Important Issues if you've 1) made it this far and 2) seen the movie.

We interrupt your test pattern to bring you the following:

Sorry for not posting for a while. I am working on a review but have been unusually (for homebody me) busy. Also, Google Docs failed to save the paragraph in which I summarized the second half of the film. Fair enough, Google Docs. It was not a very good paragraph.

Review up tomorrow!*

*Barring acts of God, aliens, Google, or my personal life