Author: Chris

This is a simple but powerful documentary about an evangelical summer camp for children in Missouri. There is nothing fancy here. The camera picks out three children, two of them extremely articulate, to follow through the camp, and it watches as their parents talk about homeschooling, and the camp pastor explains that evangelicals have to imitate muslims in getting children to commit to a brand of religion when they are very young. The counterpoint is provided by a radio talk show host (one of the pair that does the ‘Ring of Fire’ program on Air America) who talks of the perversion of religion that emanates from the religious right. For most of the documentary, the evangelicals speak for themselves without commentary.
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Bill Murray comedies. Like many others, I’m a big fan of the rebirth of Bill Murray in Rushmore, Broken Flowers and the great Lost in Translation (not so much Life Aquatic). But a word of praise here about some of his earlier comedies. In the 48 hours leading up to New Year’s my kids and I had a Bill Murray festival, watching Ghostbusters I and II, Groundhog Day and Quick Change. These could all have been sappy, crappy comedies, and in fact they often are. But all are ultimately saved by Murray. The comic timing, the deadpan delivery, the smarminess honed on SNL, and the simple glances that signify to the audience that he is the only sane person in the room always make Murray’s scenes enjoyable for me, even when the rest of the movie fails.
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‘Brothers’ is a Danish film, directed by Suzanne Bier, that was apparently some kind of hit at Sundance. It is very good, though frequently painful to watch, and it is that pain that makes the movie so powerful. The setup is pretty simple. There is Michael, the good brother, who is a soldier and a good husband and parent, and Jannik, the bad brother, who is a fuck up, released from prison as the movie begins. Michael goes with Danish/NATO forces to Afghanistan, and on his first day there, the helicopter he is in is blown out of the sky, and everyone believes, and his family is told, that he is dead. In fact (and this is no spoiler because the movie is quick to tell us), he survives and is kept captive by some Afghan military group. Meanwhile, Jannik rapidly shapes up as he helps Michael’s wife, Sarah, and kids get over their grief, and he becomes dependable and perhaps a little in love with Sarah. Michael is forced to commit an atrocity, and then is rescued. But when he returns home, his rage, guilt and bitterness overwhelm him and he spirals downhill. Thus, a little too neatly, the good and the bad brother trade places.

Despite the too-pat storyline, this is a beautifully acted and subtle portrait of a family torn apart and trying to put pull itself together. All the leads are excellent, and Connie Nielsen, as Sarah, is astounding. She manages grief at the same time as she knows she has to protect her two young daughters from the pain of losing their father. The camera lingers on her face (which is, after all, incredibly beautiful) and a whole range of different emotions will pass across it in the space of a few seconds. Almost all the scenes are interiors, mostly of pretty cramped houses, and Suzanne Bier gets to use low lighting and shadows to accentuate the way the emotions register on the faces of her characters. Enjoyable would be the wrong word, but this is well worth seeing.

This is a film by Laurent Cantet who directed the superb ‘Time Out’ and the not bad ‘Human Resources’, both films about the alienation of work and the struggles and personal demons that follow. ‘Heading South’, by contrast is about sex tourism. Set in the late 1970s in Haiti, the film depicts a group of middle-aged white women who stay at a small hotel in Haiti in order to surround themselves and have sex with young Haitian men. In fact they are little more than boys. There is a mock documentary style as every so often, one of the lead characters speaks straight to the camera and tells his or her back story. And the whole film takes place against the backdrop of grinding poverty and the Duvalier dictatorship.

It is about sex tourism, but the use of power for sex pervades the entire film from the opening scene when a Haitian mother tries to give her 15 year old daughter to an older Haitian man at the airport, to depictions of the Haitian power elite forcing young girls to become their mistresses. The ability of middle class white women (one is a college professor at Wellesley, another works in a warehouse in Montreal) to buy sex with gifts, food and pocket money is just the most direct example of the relatively powerful using their power for sex.
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Just a few words of praise for this samurai movie. It takes place at end of the samurai era, when infantry and rifles are replacing swords, and the code and culture of the samurai. It is above all else a quiet, contemplative movie, with almost no action, as the lead, played by Masatoshi Nagase, tries to chart a personal route as all around him changes. The male acting is superb (the female lead is given a pretty thankless role), the pacing manages to be relaxed without feeling like it drags, the scenery is wonderful, and the entire movie seems fresh despite the fact that every samurai movie is ultimately about the conflict between traditional codes (imagined in a utopian fashion) and the challenges of modernity. Political intrigue swirls around the movie, but it never loses its focus as the story of one man trying to do the right thing (in love and in politics). Highly recommended.

So has anyone seen this apart from Reynolds? Sun hee? It is very strong indeed, and departs in a couple of ways from Chan-wook Park’s approach to the first two movies in the trilogy. I should say right away that I found ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’ far weaker than ‘Oldboy’ and I was prepared to feel that ‘Lady Vengeance’ was more like the former than the latter. ‘Oldboy’ seemed to move well beyond revenge as a motivation, and the central performance was so strong it carried the movie. Anyway, as one would expect, the cinematography is superb with great use of color (flame red eye shadow, a drop of blood on flour, snow swirling overhead), and some wonderfully composed shots. Park just sets the camera up and has his characters walk around, in and out of the frame. It captures interaction – or rather the way in which characters simply talk past each other – better than having the camera shift from one character to the other (there is probably some technical name for this approach but I don’t know what it is). In one remarkable scene a couple eat dinner silently. The man gets up, brutally pushes the woman onto the table and rapes her. Then he returns to his side of the table and they both begin eating again.
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I am venturing into Reynolds territory, so I’ll keep this brief and hope he brings some clarity to the role that comedy plays in rendering certain kinds of social relationship visible. A few years ago I went with a few friends to see ‘Jackass’ and it generated a discussion of the difference between being a jackass and being an asshole. That first ‘Jackass’ movie, for all the incredibly stupid stunts, did a good job of illustrating the difference. There was a scene in which the crew race golf carts, and they are jackasses, while the golfers are clearly assholes. Several of the bits were also just hilariously funny.

So the same group of friends went to see ‘Jackass 2’ last night and — surprise! — they are now mostly assholes. There are still some mind-blowingly funny sequences, of which the penis sock puppet and the snake, drinking horse semen, and “the gauntlet” are the best. But the real joy of the stunts has been replaced with a mildly sadistic desire to hurt each other. The key line in the movie is: “was the dick hair really necessary?” It addresses what, ultimately, makes a stunt funny. In that case, the dick hair was actually necessary.

From next week I’m going to spend almost a month in Sweden doing some research. Any recommendations for Swedish films (especially more contemporary than Bergman), novels, music?