Is it possible to not love a movie, but love that it got made? If I was a critic that anybody read (insert sounds of crickets as Martin shakes the internet tree for a comment or two...) I would score this movie up, just to hope that more people see it.
The issues it has lay, I think, in Chris Eyre's direction. That is to say, I think he's done a fine job, but after three or more movies under his belt, I wish I saw a bit more polish on the final product. There were still moments that hung just a bit too long, the film looked faded on the DVD transfer, and some of the acting is just off enough that you notice it--just off enough that with a few more takes he might have gotten it perfect.
But maybe that's just low budget for you. And despite these complaints, I found the movie extremely moving. Graham Greene gives a truly stellar performance as the drunk Mogie--a character just doused in sadness, regret and booze. But, you just can't hate the guy. He doesn't drink to flip you off, he drinks to settle his sharp brain. This is high-caliber, naturalistic acting, and is worth the rental alone to witness it. As he said in the special features, he's just glad to be in a movie where he gets to stretch his muscles instead of stand there and, as one director told him, look stoic.
The social awareness parts of the movie were also well placed and quite moving--that much was very smart to include--to see such despicable living conditions within the borders of the US is atrocious--especially since the modern reckoning of the US Government's culpability in deliberately destroying their cultures is not quite done. Good for Eyre for turning a bright light on issues that not only should be confronting all of us, but particularly holding Indian communities feet to the fire as well. I also liked the ending quite a bit--part ode to Hitchcock, part well-done moving statement.
I'm still arguing that somebody--preferably a Native director--should take some of the Raven or trickster stories from the Northwest Coast Indians from a time period before the white man, and make a special fx laden picture based on some of those amazing stories. Maybe Robert Rodriguez could show you how to make it cheap, and some of the casino's could pitch in for the budget. Tom Robbins once said something to the effect that the best anti-war painting shows a flower. Showing a version of what life might have been like a thousand years ago in America, even a fantastical version, might be the one of the best ways of showing people what was taken away. Understanding first, after all.
Fascinating to me--but then, I get that feeling of discovering a band that is so cool that you can't help but share it. At times in my life, I've prided myself on my in-depth music knowledge. Such pride is always knocked flat by some other asshole who actually does know more than me, and usually in one way or another they are like Rodney Bingenheimer. Except, of course, Rodney has street cred like no one I know. He trumps us all.
My earliest musical influences, apart from 70's pop radio, were forged in the schoolyard. There was this guy, Christian, who was wiry and tough. He had a gang, although a pretty pathetic group by today's high-shooting standards. Then it was an excuse for some dudes to hang out and act tough. I was an honorary member of the gang--on the outside because I wasn't considered tough enough, but on the inside because all of the guys in Christian's gang liked me. One of the tenets of the gang was that you had to like Kiss. I liked Kiss. Kiss rocked. When I was all of 9 or so, listening to KISS ALIVE! and Paul Stanley is crying to the crowd--asking them if they like "al-key-haul?" I thought they were talking about rubbing alcohol, and couldn't quite figure out why the hell people would scream about it. But I would play my tennis racket like a guitar, and sing along.
So, Kiss it was for a number of years. My first album bought with my own money was Meet the Knack, pretty standard fare for a kid growing up in the 70s. And here's where it could have gone terribly wrong. What if I had never been exposed to new stuff? I mean, I had honed my appreciation for great 70s rock (and I even had a discriminating palette at that age), but what if I had never branched out?
Well, I did. Thanks to my sisters--especially my eldest one who had friends with their ears to the ground. When I was 12 we moved from Los Angeles to Bellingham, Washington, and two things were my saviors: Elvis Costello's Armed Forces, and the Surf Punks My Beach (you can guess which one I still listen to today). It opened my eyes to music that was very different than anything I'd ever heard--angry, obnoxious, direct.
Within a few years of moving to Bellingham I had sold my comics collection and started spending all my money on LPs. I would hang out in Cellophane Square--the local used record store--and cherry pick cool disks. You could listen to them before you bought, so I would approach the stand with 10 or so in hand, and spin a few tracks. For five bucks, you could walk home with two or three interesting, but slightly beat up, used records if you were careful. They'd wrap them in old newspaper, seal them with tape and away you'd go with your package of instant street-cred.
I met friends with similar tastes, listened to anything I could get my hands on--punk, rock, some wavey stuff, although I have a guitar-based heart. I got a radio show at KUGS, pulling the 2-4 am slot on Friday nights--my parents weren't happy, but since I was under 18 the station had to protect themselves from litigation if I did anything nasty. I would run the warning that profane comment might happen in the next half hour every half hour on the half hour just to cover myself, and then put on a mix of raw punk from MMR comps, Television and NY City shit, local weirdness, and experimental stuff I'd pull from the library like Tupelo Chain Sex and Throbbing Gristle. The goal was always pure eclecticism and knowledge. I hated--I mean hated--it when somebody asked me about a band and I didn't at least know what they were about--have some sort of sense of them.
Of course, there were plenty of mix tapes for friends, the idea I got from my friends Rob & Carl, whose older sisters were even more cool and extreme then my sister. One of them made a great tape I still have to this day. The mix tape became an artform that had to do as much with the segues between the songs as the songs themselves. Songs would collide with songs, interrupt weird comedy bits, radio squawking and any other sonic textures I could find. I had this perfect tape deck that would pause on a dime. I could splice tape right there without a blade, making insane mixes of micro-seconds of noise mixed into a legible mood.
So--anyway--parts of Rodney I totally relate to. That love of the music and wanting to spread it--although were different in that I never really wanted to meet my idols. I didn't mind loving the music and leaving it at that. I have to concede, of course, that when it comes to knowledge, I'm a rank amateur next to him. That's okay--it used to be that you'd discover music through trusted sources and pockets. Now, with the internet, it's much different. Less mystical, more programmed and easier. When I listened to, say, Joy Division, I felt like I was the only guy in the world who got them--even though this is a ridiculous feeling, it made me relate to the music in a much more personal way. Now, you type in your band name du jour in Google, and you have 20 fan sites waiting to tell you their latest move. You no longer have to buy small edition privately published short-run biographies, now you have blogs trading trackbacks.
But fuck it--I'm not so stuck in my ways that I'm going to say that it's worse now, just different. Some things are better--hopping on the newsgroups with thousands of MP3s, listening to a few that I like--downloading them if I really like them, buying the album if I listen to it more than once or twice. This is a great way to get music, and as soon as the record companies get taken down somehow, the future has the potential to be great. I remember being on Napster, trading music I hadn't seen in 15 years--the rarest of the rare--all those tracks I remember from the KUGS library, or seeing the vinyl at Cellophane Square and never having the money to pop for them. A lot of them are out of print--and even worse, in the case of the band Slow from Vancouver, stolen from me. But, there they were--music that nobody can control any more. Music that won't make anybody much money anymore, but music that could be freely traded amongst those that love it, if only our copyright law were more geared to consumers.
With this film, it was strongest when it capitalized on people who love the music, and the musicians who love them. More than one person commented on this odd relationship. The film was weakest when the director imposed his questions about fame on the famous. He may have been getting at something about Rodney--famous for just being known--but he didn't wrap it up well. Wish him love, long life, a new bigger-than-life band to come and tear this shit apart.
Sam Raimi is great. On the interviews disk he talks about why super hero movies are important. He says--as Aunt May also says in the film--that super-heroes are important to young boys, and they should be good examples. Peter Parker arguing with himself about moral issues is important as an example to youngsters on the moral issues they will face themselves.
While much of our modern society, with its airs of danger, its feelings of uncertainty, its media-hyped mega-heroes (often assigned such value because of either political agenda, or proximity to tragedy), I like that he has something simple to say about the hero myth and idea. Kids love super-heroes for a reason, and for that very reason Raimi takes his job very seriously. Good for him.
It shows in the film, and that's one of the things that gives the Spider-man films the heart that is missing from other adaptations. Not to mention that any guy who shows up in a suit to work on a film every day as a show of respect to Alfred Hitchcock, but mostly to his crew has to be admired.
My favorite moment is still the hospital room blood-bath, on which second viewing I realized was devoid of blood. The fingernails of the nurse digging into the floor were enough to get the spine chilled, though.
Also, it's nice to see a female protagonist stand up on her own, and basically say "if you're not with me, I'm going on with my life." and then saying "It's not up to you to protect me, it's up to myself to decide if I expose myself to that danger." I'll be curious to see how they play that in SM3.
Props again to the inestimable Alfred Molina, for making Doc Oct such a tragic character. I hope he climbs his way out of the river for a return appearance. Props also to the SFX team for making the fights so explosive. They felt animated, but they also felt right. And exciting--I'm sure I'd be happy to watch them again.
What I used to dislike about Spider-Man as a kid (his teenager/young adult pathos--I preferred the X-Men melodrama) I love about him as an adult, and fits well with movie story telling. Let's hope Raimi pulls off the trifecta, and the 2000s will be the era were filmmakers can make three good films in a row (on our side: LOTR. Against us: Matrix & Star Wars).
Ah, the con. In Argentina. El Con. What can I say? Plenty, I'm sure.
Warning here that spoilers may follow--I'm not sure yet, since I haven't written them, but I'm feeling the need for unbridled writing. The kind of writing that uses words like unbridled, for instance.
So--here we are in Argentina with some small time operators. The first half we're covering the angles, and as a viewer of many con movies--a viewer and appreciator of con movies--I cover them pretty well. I tick every plot point off in my head, seeing what each character reveals. I take note of which order things happen in. The twists in con movies always fall on the unexpected points--the throw away exposition in other movies--and if you remember them, the bread crumbs lead you all the way through the forest back home.
Problem with most con films is that they rely on audience ignorance. Either they have couched the film in terms of another genre to throw off suspicion, or they dangle blindingly obvious red herring to throw you off the scent of the true, obscured plot. The assumption being that the audience won't follow the twists.
This is a film, however, that is very smart about its audience. It knows that the people who watch it will be taking names and plot points, building the twist up in their brain. So, it lays the cards on the table, in a game of cinematic 3-card monty. At first, you think wisely, that the film is pretty standard stuff--show a few short cons, and put two con men together. Of course, we don't know who they really are, but they give each other a song and dance about who they are.
But this film gets more and more complicated. It anticipates, and at parts mocks, the audience members like me who are trying to tie the plot up into neat packages. As the plot devolves, and events take place that alter the outcome, you're forced to reconsider everything that came before, and how this new event could play into your theories about the movie.
After all, with a movie about two con men who meet--with any con movie--there are three basic possibilities: 1) Guy one is conning guy two. 2) Guy two is conning guy one. 3) they are conning each other. The fourth possibility--that nobody is conning each other is a nice thought, but it's honor only among thieves. Among confidence artists, they can only show respect for those who outcon them. To not have the cons conning would mean that they're not really a con man, and thus the movie is not a con movie, but another genre masquerading.
As for this con movie, the ending didn't throw me for a loop, but it was a satisfying reveal--especially pulling a global perspective in. Actually, what I felt was the real ending would have been very satisfying in a way that would have been a little fuck-you to other con movies.
And here's where the spoiler comes in...
If at the end it had turned out that the con men were actually being honest with each other--and therefore not really con men--and the bank closing had left them both screwed, the statement would have been that they--that all of us--are small timers compared to the powerful people and banks that control our culture. The idea of almost every world currency is buoyed on layers and layers of tradition and crafty bookwork, but not at all on stockpiles of gold**. Wealth is virtual, and the greatest con is on our culture--or specifically on Argentineans when the banks closed and fled the country. Given what we've learned about the ethics of many American C.E.O.'s over the past four years, would you trust them to do the right thing and lose everything, or to maybe get out of dodge with the money bags?
But, the second ending spoils that reading, and I'm not sure it's for the best. Sure, it's neater--sure, it's a "happy" ending, but the other one tells us that there are things bigger than our petty concerns, but they are controlled by people with concerns as petty as ours.
Anyway--good movie, good characterization, and it was squeezed from an Argentinean version of Project Greenlight. All the cooler!
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**for an interesting discussion of these issues, I recommend browsing Boggs: A Comedy of Values by Lawrence Weschler. A biography of J.S.G. Boggs, the artist who draws money and asks for people to honor its face value as a purchase of art.
Could have been a better movie if the damn camera had stopped moving, and if it had gotten over its film-school-cool-effect identity and just told the story. As it is, it's a bit whimsical and so maintains this distance between the viewer and characters, which I think is supposed to echo the ebbs and flows of the primary relationship, but really is too affected to allow the viewer to fully relate.
There were some genuinely funny moments, and those moments made me want more more more more moments like that. It's like a band putting out an album with two amazing songs. Why not wait an extra six months and write 6 more amazing songs? I had very little reason to care about either of these characters in the grand scheme--and it didn't help that the movie kept pushing me out of their emotional lives with its precious, clever editing.
Which of course raises the famous Ebert qutoe: "A movie isn't about what it's about; it's about how it's about it." What would this story have been like with a more traditional narrative and editing? Would it have strengthened the story at all? Is the reverse thing doing a good job in giving us an emotional tie to D'onofrio? Do the freeze-and-zoom shots give us any sense of time, or temporal feelings? I say no, for me. It left me a bit cold, and there were only a few times I emotionally connected. Since that is my metric, I can say that I intellectually liked it more than emotionally liked it, and for that reason I should have just read the damn thing.
D'onofrio is a scene chewer, and I love that about him. He is fearless and heads straight into the characters without reserving himself. Tomei is good, and she plays the frantic girl well. Here's one thing that I can say positively, that I believed the characters were real. By this I mean that they struck me as more real than written, with the exception of the ex-files thing, which seemed a bit quaint for its own good.
Some of the time-travel conundrums and photography reminded me in abstract ways of things that Kent and I attempted with YELLOW. If someone is interested in those things, it might be worth a rent just to see how other people dealt with them. I'm not sure, frankly, they dealt with them any better or worse than we did, but its always good to be informed.
Finally, as an aside, I would just like to say that we picked this up at the Seattle Public Library, whose collection is never what you'd expect and always surprising. We don't even reserve things there anymore, we just let our local (Queen Anne) branch, the uncoordinated motions of many people, and synchronicity guide our hand. We've found some damn good movies there.
Despite having no affinity for Catholic dogma in the real world, I kinda love monster movies based on it. Such as The Prophecy, and our dear new Constantine. I mean, if we're going to believe that a) There is a god, and b) there is a devil and c) they're in a battle royale for our souls, then movies like this are as much a natural extension of those beliefs as is the Tim Lehay novels about the rapture (whenever I think of the word "rapture" I think of the Frank Nelson character on the Simpsons, in a prophet's robe saying "Rapture? Raaaaptuuuuure!"). Of course, Lehay is about as catholic as a modern reformed grizzly bear, but even though the evangelical literalist movement has the language, they're missing the thousands of years of imagery and terminology that makes the Catholics so appealing. Plus, they have those devotees that renounce sex, which is perfect since most 20th century film is a metaphor for sex (sometimes even the ones that are literally about sex).
Smart casting K.R. in the lead, in the sense that this really is another Matrix film. It certainly is couched in the same video-game styling, but what I mean is that it's another film that shows the real world beyond the known world that some people can see and control in certain ways, but most people are oblivious to despite their involvement in it. To my mind Reeves affected a Hugo Weaving deliberateness in his speaking. Personally, I like Reeves. He doesn't bother me, since he plays the blank look very well that allows people to impose their own feelings about the characters.
Okay--now, I have to ask a question. I often find myself reading the writings of the religious right. I'm kind of fascinated with their belief system, having been raised in a christian household that is diametrically opposed to their imposing lessons (anybody who believes that liberal christians is a contradiction of terms has a very shallow understanding of christians, I dare say). One thing I'm often warned of in these writings--sometimes in dire language with many exclamations!--is that the devil is very wily and fools people with falsehoods in the New Age movement like yoga, meditation and self-actualization. So, my question is this: would a smart devil, out to reap souls for his burgeoning hell industry, pose as a seemingly harmless, but supposedly un-christlike New Ager, or would the devil--the sneakiest and cruelest of all the angels--pose as a Christian that distorts the word of Christ into a message that supports violence throughout the world for the selfish possibility at being floated up to heaven? Wouldn't the devil use FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) as his tools to keep the righteous (and boy can we strain the right part of that word) in line?
Of course, I don't believe in the devil, so such things are easy for me to imagine. If I believed in the devil, it would be very convenient to know that I hadn't been duped by him into believing things, but all the other guys have been. Please don't listen to somebody like me, though, I'm not only a secular humanist, but a post-modernist, liberal and believer in science. Oops! Guess I'm not going to be raptured.
Anyway--back to the movie. Or, was I talking about the movie? Tilda Swinton was wonderful, but isn't she always? I wish she had larger roles in more films. if we can just make a movie that has Christopher Walken battling Tilda Swinton over who is the baddest Gabriel. "I would like you to simply blow my trumpet, strumpet," he would say.
"You know fuck-all about divinity. Bite my arch-ass, overactor." she might retort. Then, guessing from the characters that they have played, they would have sex, and god (never pictured beyond a white light) and satan (who would either be 1) horror film creepy or 2) young and ironically funny) would get together and shake pinkies on banishing both of them to earthly suffering. Oh, and the movie would probably be banned because depictions of the angel Gabriel having sex with him/herself would definitely push buttons with them-that-like-to-picket. I, for one, welcome the debate from my Catholic neighbors. I will need some correcting, but am very curious about angels, their sexuality, and how such things could be represented properly.
There's always the risk, writing about a movie based on real tragic events, that by giving the movie poor marks you are in someway denying the event it portrayed. Case in point would be Fahrenheit 9/11, in which every reviewer despite claims to the contrary gave it high or low marks based on their politics. It's a disconcerting thing, I was thinking. How could I give Hotel Rwanda low marks successfully while still maintaining my disgust at the events it portrayed?
Okay, this happens to be purely an academic question because I liked the movie very much. It also seems like a flip concern given the strength of the material. But what I would like to report most about this film is that it sticks with you. It shares many similarities with Schindler's List, in that both Schindler and Rusesabagina were insiders who worked to keep as many condemned alive in creative ways as possible. The difference is that Hotel Rwanda had Rusesabagina for an advisor, and he claims the film is 90% accurate. The things that aren't accurate? In one interview he says that the love scene on the roof with his wife never happened--he didn't have time. Another telling difference between the Hollywood version and the movie is that the reality was actually much worse. Rusesabagina's wife was badly beaten by the Hutu hordes in a scene where in the movie she escapes (saying this is not revealing any spoilers---there are many such situations in the movie where she is endangered). She was so badly beaten that she laid in bed for two week and couldn't move her head, according to Rusesbagina.
There are other ways we can compare the Holocaust and Rwanda, as sickening as it is. For instance, both raise the question of how do you measure the human losses in such hellish situations? The Holocaust was much larger, measured by counting bodies, although Rwanda has the sickening distinction of more people dying a day (around 8000), and many of those dead cruelly hacked by machetes. But the Holocaust is well documented, now. It's part of our experience and knowledge of the world, and it is, after all, the reason that we have the United Nations definition of genocide. So that, as the saying goes, it would never happen again.
But it did happen again--and in this way, Rwanda (and Cambodia, and Darfur currently) are so heartbreaking and frustrating. These deaths could have been prevented, if not militarily, then by easing tensions between groups before it exploded into violence.
Between groups. These divisions that separate the people are largely arbitrary, but always following the rule of class. This is why it is so insulting that reactionary righteous Republicans in the states accuse speakers, whenever somebody talks about welfare or government assistance, of class warfare. No, class warfare is Cambodia, Rwanda, Viet Nam. Class warfare is when your the Khmer Rouge lines you up, and inspects your hands for signs of callous. If you have them, you're a worker and get the privilege of working 14 hour days in the rice fields. If your hands are smooth (Et Tu, Ann Coulter? Manicured much?*) they kill you on the spot because you're an academic.
Class warfare is somebody hacking your legs with a machete, leaving to eat dinner, and then returning an hour later to kill you with the same blade. Okay, okay, I'm being a little self-indulgent here. Let us just say that claims of class warfare in America are insulting because of the very real people who died in nightmarish ways for that idea of class.
But just saying class is such a radically simplified thing to say. It's class combined with awareness of class and the education that this is not the way things should be. Every country with a class revolution, including America, does so with an implied moral code. The US code was that all men (and eventually women and non-white men) were created equal and should have equal opportunity to education, wealth and happiness. The Khmer Rouge code was distorted Marxism filtered through Mao--the code that all people are equal and there are no distinctions between people, so all people should do the same work. Ostensibly there is some reward for merit, but really the reward is for party loyalty and sociological acuity.
I'm not arguing capitalism vs. communism here--that's a game left best to fools and academics (the latter I support, and the former I sadly belong to all too often), you have no truly successful pure communist states to argue with (although the same can be capitalist states, come to think of it). What I'm arguing is that class is the progenitor to this kind of genocide.
And in Rwanda, for what? Jealousy of implied priveledge? Because the Belgians defined one group and then another? They helped one group over the other? The ruling class made up of one group, that intermarried another. That you couldn't tell apart without their papers to tell you who they are?
Rusesabagina helped make his story into a movie so that awareness of situations like this might be raised in the western world. So that the questions could be posed--do we ignore them because they are poor, black countries? Well, we ignored Bosnia for a long time, but we did go in, didn't we? He says we should stand up and immediately act on Darfur. we can't let these things happen. It's goddamned inhumane to live our privileged Western lives with the ability to, without much sacrifice at all, help keep the innocent people of these regions safe. But, we don't.
I say it's our responsibility. We helped make this mess with colonialism. It's the very least we can do to help straighten it out. But, even if we hadn't made it (and by "we" I mean all countries who benefitted from the 400 year exploitation** of Africa and her peoples), then our position of privilege in the world means that because we have the capability to help, our lack of assistance means that we ourselves have a hand in the murders. We could have helped stop them.
Don Cheadle lives up to his reputation here. I've always loved the man and his acting, and his instincts were just right here. He played the role down, leaning towards more quiet contemplation than melodrama. A lesser actor would have blown it, but he was very good.
Interesting interview with Rusesabagina
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*Okay, a cheap shot here that I want to explain. I don't hate Ann Coulter because she's "conservative"--and by that I mean that she makes the John Birch society look like comrades, I hate Ann Coulter because she's an inflammatory opportunist who makes her living by her self-indulgent and consciously outrageous writings. I think she has carved a nice little niche of wealth, because her claims are so incendiary that she knows she's going to piss a lot of people off. In that way, it's theater. But, she's obviously smart enough to do that, she's just made the choice to sell out and go for the gold rather than use her considerable intelligence to add to the world. She's noise, and everybody who writes about her (myself included) is falling for the trap she gleefully set. All the way to the bank, she goes, riding on our disbelief. Guess she ripped a page from the punk rock playbook and made away with it before we realized she was in our camp. The blonde we love to hate, but I hate her because of her moral vacuity more than her ideas. Her ideas are popcorn, and they'll burn up when the current witch hunt flames itself out.
**What do I mean by exploitation? I don't mean the use of natural resources. I mean the practices such as kidnapping women in a village and then telling the men that they had one week to raise their quota of rubber if they wanted to see their women again. I mean kidnapping people for forced slavery. I mean the monopolies of diamonds, coal, rubber and other goods that the European masters forced onto an indigenous people through brute strength. I mean exploitation, not use.