I have had a couple days at home alone, after taking Kris and Max to Omaha. I’d scurry about during the day to do all this end-of-year crap I need to get done, then come home and see stuff I normally wouldn’t have the time or space to see–maybe things a bit more violent than Kris would ever want to watch (and by “bit more” I of course mean “excessively, ridiculously, extravagantly more”). I can turn up the volume, go nuts.
What follows are a couple of strong recommendations and others just to be recorded. There’s a loose running issue in my responses about the ways they depict violence. But mostly it’s just a quick set of recs:
Uno Bianca was a television crime drama from Italy, directed by the Argento acolyte Michele Soavi (who did the superb Resurrection Man). It revolves around a true crime spree, with a particularly nasty gang of thieves driving the signature white Bianca to every event. The film focuses on the driven detectives–particularly the absurdly pretty Kim Rossi Stuart, who suffers as so many really pretty people do from seeming absolutely emotionless, more a surface to be admired than a depth to be interpreted. (I guess I’ve glad to have a really hermeneutic face, eh?) The thing is 3 hours long and unless you love crime dramas probably not worth your time–it suffers from some stock television conventions and the necessary restrictions on violence of television censorship, cheesy Euro-synth soundtrack, and an overstuffed length. But it does have some excellent tense scenes.
As a true-crime drama it opens up some interesting problems about exploitation–namely, the sensational thrills of watching brutal crimes re-enacted. But like many true-crime stories, it covers up the titillation with lots of obvious moralizing. The good are angelic, in looks and action; the bad, flitting beady eyes all about, cue us how to understand them long before they get actually accused. As the bad guys [SPOIILER] were a gang of rogue cops, and as the good investigator has to infiltrate them and bend the rules to catch them, there are the standard moral “dilemmas” about crime and its allure for its custodians, but… ain’t nothing new.
While (I think) patently made-up, the Australian “revisionist” Western The Proposition ostensibly rejects any such moralizing, instead exposing how thuggish custodial civilizing powers are not so very different from the thuggish brutes they hunt down. But, as you might guess, that revisionist approach wasn’t exactly breaking new ground when The Searchers got filmed, and this film in its first hour seemed absolutely certain of its own philosophical import, oblivious to the antiquity of its conceits. (The script by Nick Cave is also at times abysmally conceited, full of the kind of inane self-indulgent chatter you find in bad comic books. Even when John Hurt swaggers about and drunkenly slurs the lines to great effect, actually listening to him prattle about Darwin and a racist dismissal of aboriginals and the irish while his teeth are really crooked and dirty and, see, he’s DRUNK, plus a bounty hunter, the prick! … well, that’s the kind of irony that gives irony a bad name.) The neat flipside of the moral rectitude of the cop drama, in other words: even though everyone was bad, and everything was bad, and Existence was bad, you know exactly how you’re supposed to judge these moral dilemmas, too. In a nutshell, there is no “proposition” in this film–it is all assumption; it doesn’t invite your engagement, it hammers home its sermon.
I will admit: the second hour, once ‘bad’ brother Danny Huston comes onscreen, the film picks up some weird brutal energy. And I’ll give it props: it sets up in its excruciatingly-dull first hour a constantly-hammered home premise that civilization is structured on the most vicious forms of violence. The second hour, then, works through that logic with a rigor and determinedly-excruciating aggression that can be quite staggering. There’s a long sequence where mousy city-wife Emily Watson is forced to sit at a table with a gang member, as we hear in the other room Danny Huston beating the bejesus out of her husband Ray Winstone; the scene lasts seemingly hours, and it is painful, and suspensful, and startling. We know she will suffer, and she does, but the film lingers and lingers and lingers, as if to evade the punishment in inflicts upon all of its characters. I wish the whole movie had been that good.
The next two flicks, however, fuck with these too-neat narratives of violence and morality. Chopper is another true-crime tale, about an Australian braggadacio who may (or may not) have killed up to 19 other criminals, who swaggers about laughing like the goofiest knucklehead right up until the moment he sets his mouth and sticks a shiv in someone’s face seven fast times, before backing off and then–with all sincerity–apologizing and asking what he can do to make up. The film is something fine to look at, and it maneuvers a tone–never shocked, never shocking or sensationalizing, often bleakly funny but also never mocking–that is quite an achievement. But what do we make of this? Mark “Chopper” Read was (is?) a national folk hero, and his memoir was/is a major besteller. The film was sanctioned by him–and he even does a commentary track, which set up these odd meta-narrative sinkholes as I watched. We get a story framed by Chopper watching as his story is told on a national news show, and I’m listening to the real Chopper repeat the jokes he liked the most and comment on how star Eric Bana is a “great character actor.” The film gets a little repetitive–it so studiously avoids falling into a particular narrative and a particular judgment on the events and their central agent that it almost plays like anti-narrative. Just this happened, then this happened, then this. I appreciated that I walked away unable to position its moral stance, disconcerted by the violence even as I was both horrified and seduced by Chopper.
But what makes the movie riveting is Bana. He’s unrecognizable–both chunkier and bulkier than I’d seen him previously, but also re-shaping his whole stance and demeanor. And he’s fucking mesmerizing–again, not as some kind of seductive Brando-ish brute; instead, like Gandolfini as Tony or McShane/Swearingen, there is an ability to peel away the contradictions or complexities of action into a singular focus that is striking. While most of us might, at the moment of an action, be aboil with three or four dissonant motives and feelings, watching Bana as Chopper is like seeing a person who can only experience–who only feels, and only is–ONE thing at a time. You absolutely buy that he can be laughing, then wholly consumed in homicidal intent, then sincerely appalled by his actions and apologetically offering to take the victim to the hospital. At each moment, he is as if another person entirely.
Finally, a major shout for Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Park Chan-wook’s latest revenge … well, they ain’t–or at least this isn’t–so much “thriller” as complex, often thrilling meditations on revenge. I need to think a lot more about what’s going on with this film, and his work generally. Obviously, revenge is a returning motif; there’s also some fascinating stuff about family, about parents and kidnapping and desire, yet again. I was never less then enthralled by this–in the sense of being in thrall, of being lost and confused and frightened and excited. It’s perhaps less cohesive than Oldboy, but I think it is far more ambitious and far-reaching in its technique and its foci. More on it when I return from Omaha.
hey mike, omaha’s not that far away from denver/boulder. why don’t you drive down here for a day?
? It’s over eight hours!
well, it’s closer than new york.
8 hours? really? no wonder no one goes to nebraska.
what exactly is keeping you guys from having this conversation on email? not that we’re not fascinated, mind you.
gio is banned from the blog.
By the way Arnab – My real computer is in the shop – and with it your email address. So, it was good hanging out with you Sun Hee last week – too bad about the Clippers
arnab, i don’t live very far from boulder, either. is it okay if one of these days simon and i drive down to see you guys?
(don’t worry, i have unresolved issues with authority too. it’s fine. it really is).
no, it is not okay. we have a “no italians” rule.
what team are you supporting? seriously.
you know i always root for the underdog. so, brazil. the european team i always root for is holland, but by all accounts this dutch team plays more like a german team. and, of course, i always root against the americans. as tim gustafson used to say, there should be at least one arena where the u.s is inferior to the likes of guatemala and the ivory coast.
since the world cup is on tv–indeed is the major global television event–it should of course be discussed on this blog in great detail….
yes!
since you are asking:
brazil can kiss my italian ass, world cup thieves the lot of them. holland has always attracted me, both because their play is fun and because there’s a very interesting (and somewhat unexpected) mix of races in the team. but if they play like germany… and it’s hard for me not to root for the USA, to my great dismay.
honestly (don’t tell anyone i said this), i think that, with all the bribing and fixing scandal that’s been going on, italy should either withdraw from the world cup or assemble a brand new team chosen only on the base of skill, with a new coach of course, and let it play honest soccer, come what may. this team is a national disgrace.
now: GO ITALYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!
addressing mike’s post:
you mean a “signature white Uno:” Uno is the Fiat model; bianca is the color (white). Kim Rossi Stuart is in the excellent The House Keys, where he also manages to be extremely pretty and quite expressionless. Did you get this film on Netflix? If so, is Netflix the only way to get all the cool stuff you guys discuss in this blog? I am trying very hard to stick to brick and mortar, but it is proving difficult and frustrating.
The length if probably due to the fact that the drama was broadcast on italian tv over three or more installments. These multiple-installment films are now very fashionable in Italy, where they are called, quite inexplicably, “fiction” (Italians do not use the plural of English words: one fiction, two fiction; one goal, two goal).
no wonder the italians have a tough time scoring more than one goal. they’re undone by language.
i served you that on a silver platter, barney.
Hmm – I just watched The Proposition and I liked it signifcantly more than Reynolds. I didn’t think the first hour was dull – but I agree the uneasiness was ratcheted up when Danny Huston showed up.
Well, maybe that’s not even right. The whole damn thing was uneasy. Huston’s character was the only calm one in it. Granted his psycho-buddha thing was far-fetched, but after spending so many scenes with the others, Winstone, his men, Pearce, Watson and David Wenham’s Feltcher – any of whom seemed barely able to stave off complete mental breakdown at any moment – well, the crazy brother was a relief after them.
Reynolds wrote: “abysmally conceited, full of the kind of inane self-indulgent chatter you find in bad comic books.” Compared to what? Other Westerns? Tarantino-type genre shlock? I’d say 90% of American movies with a big dose of violence are more comic-book sounding than this.
I don’t think it’s great dialogue – or an excellent plot – but I thought it served its purpose well.
And the critical opinion was pretty strongly in favor of it as well. http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/proposition?q=The%20Proposition
I”m surprised you didn’t like this more. I only saw it a couple of days ago, and it hasn’t stuck with me particularly, but I think it’s one of the better films I’ve seen in a while.
Well–I’m rougher on Prop than I would be on lots of other genre schlock, precisely because this film seems not particularly good as schlock and, further, and I don’t think I’m stretching here, it aims toward a different peer group. I see it trying to keep pace with Peckinpah (but far more in love with extravagant philosophickal dialoguing than Bunch, for instance), or even more with Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps that’s unfair–but I think the movie’s asking for it.
Admittedly, I’m not really much of a fan of McCarthy; after his brilliant Child of God, I get kind of bored by all that meaningful meaninglessness. (I like my tough guys just to disembowel one another, not to wax rhapsodic about it.) And what would I rather see? Well, see above: Chopper is admittedly very different, and yet its take on violence and its social contexts/causes and its consequences and its philosophy is far more difficult to pin down, and a helluva lot more entertaining.
It’s beating a dead horse, but since that’s in keeping with the film’s sensibilities I’ll return to Hurt’s speech and set-up: the dialogue and visuals are the rough equivalent of ALL CAPS AND EMOTICONS, sturm und drang and “dramatic irony” which worked damn well in _Heart of Darkness_ but seems worn out and all too familiar here. Hell, I *like* Hurt’s drunken overacting in most films. Despite a few key visuals/scenes (particularly the final Christmas dinner) and the named exception of Danny Huston, I was completely and I admit ungenerously unwilling to take any of the pretensions lightly, let alone seriously. When I wasn’t bored, I was feeling more pissed off than anything else. I’d rather see the indulgences of unselfconscious schlock than the self-indulgence of self-conscious quasi-shlock.
I thought Hurt was the weakest thing in the picture and I don’t feel the problems with his character carry over to the rest of the cast.
Cave/Hillcoat/Winstone are working on another movie now. Something about a sex-addicted travelling salesman and his daughter go on the road together. So Nick Cave’s re-write of Paper Moon I guess.
i don’t really want to start a new topic for dog bite dog, which i watched last night courtesy mike’s illegal asian film import service. this is a brutal movie. the first 20 minutes or so are pretty good, and shocking in a bracing kind of way–the violence is ugly, visceral, not stylized at all. it stays this way for the next hour and a half but after a point it began to wear on me, as did the brown and yellow filters that seemed to have been used for the entire film.
i’m not sure what relationship the film bears to unleashed, the ludicrous jet li vehicle from a couple of years ago (whose european title was, i believe, danny the dog. the premises are similar to some degree–children bred on violence grow up to be amoral killers. the differences are crucial: in addition to the differences in the presentation of violence, there is no sentimentality here, no magic negro, some semblance of social critique (though what exactly the film is saying about people on the margins, i can’t say). but the film didn’t add up for me to very much more than unleashed, and so i mostly just missed bob hoskins’ scenery chewing.
Wow Arnab, thanks for reviving this thread.
I just read this line
and thought it was very funny. Then I saw I wrote it a year ago! Yea for me.
I finally got around to watching The Proposition. I think I’m in agreement with Mauer on this one; I thought it served its purpose well. It was however a bit too Aussie/new-agey for my tastes–Poetic with a capital P–and its revisionist impulses felt a bit too studied. The film is aiming at a different peer group than the genre-schlock crowd and that’s probably its main problem. Still, I was compelled to see it through. Can’t really disagree with Reynolds, though I lack his passionate distaste. By the way, where the hell do you find a fly wrangler. That’s what I kept asking myself.
Wow
ArnabJeff, thanks for reviving this thread.I just read this line
and thought it was very funny. Then I saw I wrote it
a yeartwo years ago! Yea for me.Jeff, if you’re having trouble with your fly, try velcro, or just wear sweatpants.