“The Aristocrats” – Dissecting the joke and breaking the beep-machine

The Aristocrats (2005) directed by Paul Provenza is actually a documentary of sorts.

There’s a joke. It’s an old Vaudevillian joke that starts with the line “A man walks into a talent agency…” The man himself then proceeds to show the act he’s offering. In the basic premise of the joke the act is a family – mom, dad a couple of kids and a dog. The punch line is “What do you call yourselves? – The Aristocrats”.

It’s a fairly simple joke – but the thing about it is all in the middle. You can tell this joke for about half an hour. The dirtier and nastier it gets, the better. The middle part, the act itself, can be as scatological and as insane as you like. Actually, the worse it gets, the better the joke. Add incest, bestiality and violence and your golden.

So in this documentary we’ve got some of the best known comedians in the business telling versions of this joke and talking about when they heard it first and how it goes and what they’ve done with it and so on and so forth. It gets really, really nasty. Namedropping is almost impossible here, but we’ve got Jason Alexander, Hank Azaria, George Carlin, Billy Connolly, Carrie Fisher, Whoopi Goldberg, Eric Idle, Eddie Izzard, Bill Maheer, Penn & Teller, Paul Resier, Robin Williams, Drew Carey, Bob Saget and so on and so forth. Did I mention the mime and the ventriloquist? No? well, there are those too.

This is a comedians’ joke. It’s a very in-house thing, like a mental exercise, a meta-joke, if you like.

Me, personally? I understand what it is all about in that slightly twisted intellectual way that is not really conducive to laughter, but that gets you something else when it comes to the nature of things.

Comedy is hard. Being funny in a way that actually manages to make people laugh is not something that should be taken lightly. This is not a funny joke because it is a funny joke, it is like jazz music, a variation on a theme that lets you see the what the artist has to bring to the table. And you have to understand something about the context of all this – the censorship in movies and television have a lot to do with why all these comedians get a little giddy in the telling of this extremely blue joke.

Some of the renditions in this documentary are pretty sickening. Like many documentaries you should probably not have dinner while watching it if you’re sensitive. It’s also the kind of thing that startles a laugh out of you, because you don’t know what else to do with it. It’s about boundaries and limits and how far you can take it, and of course that’s going to be off-putting.

I tend to view a lot of supposed comedy with that automatic distance that you get when you can put stuff together before it happens. Sitcoms spare me the trouble of laughing myself with the canned laughter they supply and most comedies just make me shake my head. I come from a long line of sarcastic snide verbal joking and that means I lean towards the absurd anyway.

For me this documentary serves the purpose of dissecting where the taboo boundaries lie today. In a world of censorship and polite and cute comedy like Friends, or Full House this joke and the telling of it is clearly cathartic, at least for the comedians.

I actually think watching this documentary is a good idea. You learn something about the nature of comedy, censorship – both internalized and societal – and about what makes you laugh as a pure defence mechanism. Then again, I like it when things get complicated, so if you’re looking for just “funny” you should probably stay away from this one.

Mule

Rounders – poker and morality

Rounders (1998) directed by John Dalh stars Matt Damon as Mike McDermott, Edward Norton as Worm, John Turturro as Joey Knish, Famke Janssen (Petra), John Malkovich (Teddy KGB), Martin Landau (Abe Petrovsky), Gretchen Mol (Jo).

This is ostensibly a story about playing cards, but more than that it is a morality play, weirdly enough. It all starts with a huge big loss. Mike sits down to play with Teddy KGB and loses everything he owns in one fell swoop. He decides that he’s done, he’s getting out. That means forsaking his dream of winning the world series of poker. He is studying law at the same time and now he’s reduced to driving a delivery truck on the night shift to get by instead.

Mike is a likeable guy. He’s got a pretty girlfriend, Jo, and a judge who really likes him, Abe Petrovsky, and friends who wish him well. He has a set of principles when it comes to playing cards that imply he can beat pretty much anyone by skill and he thinks he is going to be a lawyer. All that gets thrown out the window when his old friend Worm (Edward Norton) gets out of prison.

The second Worm walks out the prison gates all bets are off. Worm is a mechanic, which means he cheats any way he can, including dealing from the bottom of the deck. Mike is adamant about not playing anymore, but Worm sucks him back into the game with hardly any effort at all.

See, here’s the thing – Mike actually has it all. He has a pretty girl, good friends, a good career ahead of him, he has a sponsor/mentor and he has a clear path cut out. All of this means he won’t play poker anymore, but that is the price he is going to have to pay. Slowly, but surely, all that gets torn down through the machinations of his best friend Worm, who is basically a manipulative loser at best. Worm has none of those thing and judging from the voiceover he never has had them.

The voiceover (Matt Damon) works seamlessly in this setting. You don’t even question it, which I think is in part because the whole movie has a forties Noir feel to it. The style and the theme is perfect for it, as well as the general feel of the whole movie.

But, here’s the thing – at the end of the movie Mike has lost his girl, his potential career, his best friend and his money. He’s been beaten and mauled. And all this is a win in his book because he has the money to get in at the ground level of the poker world series with a theoretical chance of winning a million dollars. He insists that poker is about skill, not luck. He believes it is what he was “meant to do” and the advice given to him in convoluted form by Judge Abe Petrovsky seems to second that notion.

There are a lot of good things about this movie, like the stylishness of it, which is economical and spare, and the cast, which is solid and stellar. Norton is excellent as the weasel Worm and Malkovich goes bananas with the Russian accent. Landau plays the old hand like the old hand he is and Turturro is so calm and laid back that you want to poke him with a cattle prod just to see him twitch. Matt Damon is very strong as the all American guy with a huge brain. There are no interesting female characters in this, neither the overly sexualised Petra (Famke Jenssen) or the bland Jo (Gretchen Mol) make any kind of difference.

It has faults to mar its strong points too. Worm is the catalyst for Mike when it comes to getting him back in the game, but Worm’s own storyline has a very unsatisfactory resolution, which is to say no resolution at all. And Mike sort of rides off into the sunset, which is fine and in keeping with the narrative, but it seems to say that no matter how bright your future might seem you still have to follow your … well, I don’t think “heart” is the right word.

This guy, Mike, chooses a life of instability and loneliness and may very well end up like one of those pathetic losers that populate a movie like Ironweed or Barfly, and still manages to make it sound like the perfect happy ending. So, it’s a murky morals movie. I’m starting to feel that should be a genre all it’s own.

Mule

Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation (2009) directed by McG stars Christian Bale as John Connor, Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright, Moon Bloodgood as Blair Williams, Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese and Helena Bonham Carter as Dr. Serena Kogan.

Let me just start by saying that the first Terminator movie was a pretty big piece of the puzzle for me as a younger animal. It was one of the first times I started thinking about the structure of movies and not just their ability to entertain me. I honestly don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but it was lots. So I have no intention of pretending that I am in any way impartial in my opinions – not that I ever am, but still.

It was always about two things for me – the apocalyptic future, and I like a good dystopia – and the relationship between man and machine. So – for me the first movie might still have been better if they had cast Lance Henriksen as the terminator, like they considered at the time. He would have played it like a praying mantis, which would have been wicked awesome, but we have Arnold, and that’s another take on it.

T2 had lots of things going for it. Linda Hamilton’s portrayal of a woman with a badly fractured psyche and a young Edward Furlong caught in what may very well just be his mother’s psychosis. I had a hard time forgiving the last two or three minutes – the thumbs up thing just made me cringe.

We will not speak of T3. The less said about that embarrassment, the better. Sorry.

All the previous movies have given us the events in sequence, but there has always been a liquid quality to the passage of time in this narrative and there’s been lots of discussion about that. So this feels like a prequel as well as a sequel, which is actually kind of cool if you think about it. Here we get into the narrative before John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time. Kyle is in his teens and in danger and if he doesn’t make it then the future is reset again and you really can break you brain thinking about stuff like that.

Bale plays John Connor as a soldier and a good one at that. He still has people to answer to and the chain of command goes all the way up to General Ashdown (Michael Ironside). He is spare and intense and not pleasant, but that is what can be expected.

The story does not start with him, though. It starts with Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) being executed for murder and giving his body to science. When he wakes up a long way off from where he fell asleep, he is unaware that he has been rebuilt anew. They’ve let him keep his mind and his heart, though, and that alone is enough for the academic body to hit the ground running on the old Descartian dichotomy of the head and the heart, emotions and rationality. I won’t though, because I am trying to keep this reasonably short.

Marcus teems up with the young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) and again, this is a good casting choice. He is a grey hound in a world where machines are out to kill people in general and him in particular. He’s got survivor written all over him and still there is a heart there. He keeps company with a young mute, Star (Jadagrace),  so we get a glimpse of his care-taking qualities.

I have to say, that is one of the things I liked about this version of the future. We get a populous that actually represents the young and the old as well, not only the strongest survive, but those most fitted to their environment.

The machines – they are the real stars here – to my mind. We get to see a variety of model T’s – and they show the typical development, they start out clunky and heavy and grow lighter and more efficient as the model develops. That is very clever of the writers, I think.

We also have the big HKs and the smaller modo-terminators, a motorcycle variety, and a hydrobot. We also have the huge, big enormous destroyers and the smaller spies. All of these machines have various insect-like qualities, many mandibles and arms and a carapace.

Skynet was always clever enough to work its way around mankind and you have to think of the plot like you’d approach playing chess against a computer. It will sacrifice and it knows every variable, every play ever made and you will find fighting it a lesson in humility. The basic plot is that Skynet is laying a trap for the scraps of human Resistance still out there.

The Marcus character does signal what it is right from the get go, if you know what to look for, like the ability to make anything mechanical run, and just the speed and stance and the beatings he survives.

So all in all, I like the premises of the movie, I like the blasted desert version of the future. I think the key figures, John Connor and Kyle Reese are well represented. I think they could have done a better job on following up the tradition of a strong female character, because the female fighter pilot falls into some of the typical traps of the action genre. It’s not enough to make her a soldier, that does not a warrior make, as we all well know. And the token cute kid is mostly just there for form as far as I can see.

Worse, maybe just because I don’t like the delivery, is the “take my heart” moment towards the end. For those of you who have not yet seen it I won’t spoiler the thing, but it rivals the “thumbs up” in pure cliché to my mind.

As far as the actual action is concerned I have less than no complaints, actually. These guys can blow stuff up with the best of them. McG has also made sure to reference the other movies in stylish shots, settings and a thousand other things (including the Gun’n'Roses song “You could be mine”) that makes my fan-ish side grin with glee. I happen to think the industrial site fights and the visual references (ah, the crushing of a human skull under a steel Terminator foot) work very well. It’s not lack of imagination, as some critics have suggested, it is homage. Homage is allowed, even if it is just an action movie, you know.

My overall impression is that this is the movie I wanted after T2. I might actually have wanted it after the first movie, come to think of it… That would have done interesting things to the ideas of time and narrative. But as things stand, it is a good movie, it is entertaining and thoughtprovoking, if you are of that bent and it is more true to the original concept than I had expected.

Also – there are explosions. Did I mention the explosions?

Mule

The Painted Veil – China and Orientalism

The Painted Veil (2006) directed by John Curran is based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel. It stars Edward Norton as the ambitious doctor Walter Fane, Naomi Watts as the socialite Kitty Fane, Liev Schreiber as Charlie Townsend, Toby Jones as Waddington and assorted other actors of Asian decent in various minor parts. I will explain why I put it like that in a little while, so stay with me here.

Now, I’m a fan of Edward Norton. I think he’s done some really first-rate work in his career, and that’s why I will let him get away with the slightly shady English accent here. Naomi Watts, same thing, really, she does a good job – the accent thing shouldn’t pose much of a problem for her. And then we’ve got the show-stealer Tony Jones who is really brilliant in the role of Waddington and the unusually suave performance of Liev Schreiber who I last saw as Sabretooth – so that at least shows that he’s got range.

Maugham’s stories are often quite subtle, they teeter between fine sarcasm and what can loosely be termed romance, though it’s never as simple as that. It’s also about class and appearances and what that does to the human heart. So here we have the passionate and taciturn doctor Fane who falls for a bored socialite and manages to get her to marry him. It’s obviously an infatuation on his part and a social necessity on hers. He takes her to Shanghai where she promptly has an affair with the cad Townsend. She gets caught out and is given an option – which is really no option at all. If she gets Townsend to agree to divorcing his wife and marrying her instead Fane won’t cause a scandal by citing adultery as the cause for the divorce. Townsend has never had any intention of divorcing his wife. Kitty is trapped and caught and forced to accompany her husband to a provincial Chinese town infested with cholera.

So far so good. All this is what you can expect in terms of keeping up appearances, holding on to archaic values and so on and so forth. Walter punishes Kitty by being cold, disinterested and in general acting like a jilted husband. The fact that they are deep into a foreign county surrounded by the dead and dying makes this little chamber drama more acute.

The scenery is stunning. The shooting locations are actually in Shanghai and the Chinese countryside – spectacular, fantastic, beautiful beyond belief. It’s all … awesome, in the original meaning of the word.

The Fanes are forced back on themselves in this desperate and desolate time and finally they break through to some kind of intimacy and Kitty realises she has to do something with herself – make herself useful in some way, so she involves herself with a local convent run by a hardcore old nun played masterfully by Dame Diana Rigg.

So – Where is the sting in all this honey?
Orientalism, in the good old-fashioned intellectual tradition of Edward Said. This is 1920s China, we’re talking communism, the Cultural Revolution. It strikes me as particularly clumsy that this movie makes no concessions, but sticks to the Maugham view – which is fine for Maugham, but not so much for 2006.

The sundry Chinese characters are treated pretty much like scenery – cute little singing orphans and the occasional mildly threatening young man in the street, the contentious, but obviously a bit stupid guard, the Chinese mistress and Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) and all in all they’re really not given much space.

Colonel Yu get at least a few good lines in like “I think China belongs to the Chinese people, but the rest of the world seems to disagree.” Which does a little something, but it really does not go even a third of the way on how much richer the story would have been had we been given even a something more than just the British doctor and his ditzy wife swooping in to save the day when the whole cholera epidemic is the fault of the ignorant Chinese peasants burying their dead too close to the main water source and also superstitiously keeping their dead on lit de parade for three days instead of doing the wholesome thing and dumping their bodies at once.

I want to like this movie. I just can’t, despite the scenery, the acting and the pretty of it.

Mule

The Dead Girl

The Dead Girl (2007) directed by Karen Moncrieff stars Toni Collette as Arden, Piper Laurie as Arden’s mother, Giovanni Ribisi (Rudy), Rose Byrne (Leah), James Franco (Derek), Bruce Davidson (Leah’s father), Mary Steenburgen (Leah’s mother), Brittany Murphy (Krista) Josh Brolin (Tarlow), Kerry Washington (Rosetta), Marcia Gay Harden (Melora).

This is a very complicated and carefully told story that unfolds in five chapters. It starts when Arden finds the body of a dead girl in a field in the rural landscape where she lives with her mother. Arden tells the police and becomes a local celebrity which leads to her being asked out on a date by Rudy who works in a grocery store. Arden is played beautifully as someone who is caught in a stifling and cruel relationship with her ailing mother. She breaks free from that and leaves with Rudy.

The next chapter shows Leah, the morgue attendant who is living with the pain of a missing sister, and the effects of that. The story here is about how the various family members are trying to deal with having had the older daughter gone missing without any resolution. They don’t know if she is alive or dead and they don’t know what happened to her. Leah, who is deeply depressed, just wants it all to be over. Through a series of circumstance she believes the dead girl is her sister and that almost frees her until she finds out she was wrong.

The third chapter deals with a woman whose husband goes away on long road trips and the infected, seriously twisted relationship between husband (Nick Searcy) eventually leads to the wife discovering a storage locker where her absentee husband keeps trophies in the form of bloody clothes and jewellery and things of that nature. The wife (Mary Beth Hurt) understands that her husband is a killer and she has to deal with that knowledge somehow.

The fourth chapter shows the mother of the dead girl, Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) trying to understand what happened to her daughter, finding out where she lived, that she worked as a prostitute and that she has a daughter. She works through all this and decides to take care of her granddaughter.

The last chapter shows the dead girl herself, Krista, and her last day. She comes across as a damaged soul in a lot of ways, but she is also stronger than you would think at a first glance, and the viewer gets to see some of that too.

It’s so rare to see a film that actually features women in this way. We’re talking beautiful talent, skilled work and honed dialogue showing actual women as opposed to Barbie dolls, with hard choices to make portrayed with all the depth and fullness that these wonderful ladies are capable of. That alone makes this worth watching. In some ways they are all victims and they all rise above, change their lives and move through the world as best they can.

It’s told in inverted order and without sentimentalism. It’s absolutely fascinating and gut-clenching to watch a performance like Mary Beth Hurts and seeing her make the wrong choice, seeing how poisoned her thinking is from what must be a long and deeply infected relationship. It is a movie about human interaction and all the ways in which women can get caught in bad circumstance just as much as it is a movie about a murder.

Complex, intelligent and completely engrossing without any kind of moral soapbox action this movie gives the manifold leading ladies a chance to show their skills.

How did this movie not win more awards?

Mule

My Blueberry Nights by Wong Kar Wai

Directed by Wong Kar Wai (2007).
Stars Jude Law as Jeremy, Norah Jones as Elizabeth, David Strathairn as Officer Arnie Copeland, Rachel Weisz as Sue Lynne Copeland, Natalie Portman as Leslie the hardcore poker player.

I sometimes forget why I chose a movie. I mean, I am not much for romantic movies in general so I sat through the first couple of minutes of this with my head tilted and my face scrunched up ever so slightly. I thought I could see it all … the tragically predictable way it would play out. I was wrong.

Elizabeth’s boyfriend cheats on her and she takes refuge at a café run by Jeremy. I thought to myself “oh, no”. You know why. Girl meets boy. I won’t even bother running through the rest of the cliché that goes with that.

Thing is just when you think you know what you’re in for this movie does a sharp turn and goes off in another direction. Elizabeth leaves town. She heads out and finds work at a bar at night and a diner during the day. She meets Officer Arnie, a troubled soul who is in the middle of a bad divorce. His wife Sue Lynn has left him.

Again the story in itself is such a cliché that I think I’ve heard that particular country and western song a few too many times.

The reason why all this works has to do with pacing and distance and cinematography. Wong Kar Wai’s style puts you in mind of soft, improvisational jazz. It drifts around certain themes, comes back to them, goes at them from a couple of different angles, but always with the same basic emotional chords as a foundation.

The story with Arnie and Sue Lynn ends badly. There really is no other way for it to end.

Elizabeth moves on and winds up in Nevada where she works as a waitress in a casino. She runs in to Leslie, a professional poker player, who tricks Elisabeth into taking a road trip with her. Leslie has a strange relationship with her father, and this particular segment of the story is mostly about that.

The way the story is dealt with is mostly Elisabeth as a spectator getting involved in peoples lives by somehow landing smack in the middle of them. She grows up in the process, changing and acquiring the distance she needs to be able to go back to New York and meet up with Jeremy again.

It’s all a terrible cliché. It is. But the way it’s handled is beautiful and so well shot, so well acted, that you see beyond that. Sometimes things are a cliché because they are universal, because they do happen and because they are somehow part of the great narratives.

That’s what you get out of this if you go along for the ride. That, and a really great soundtrack.

Mule

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Directed by Guillermo del Toro (2008) and starring Ron Perlman as Hellboy, Selma Blair as Liz and Doug Jones as Abe Sapien.
Okay. So. I have issues with the whole comic-turned-movie thing. I willingly admit it. It’s not just the fact that these movies have a tendency to get really silly… As you pretty much can expect from the idea of grown men putting their underwear on outside their stretchy tights. It’s more that they either do nothing with the characters or they don’t spend as dime on the script in order to blow their wad on the effects, or they don’t give a rat’s behind about the story in order to delve into the characterization of characters that have… uhm, very little depth.
So it’s surprisingly rare that you get a movie like this one that manages to do a good job of the visual as well as the story and use the characters in a clever way.
Hellboy is fantastic to say the least and it could have been blatantly cheesy and silly, but it somehow manages to tread that fine line and come out smelling like roses. Ron Perlman is all padded up, but he manages to carry the armour without becoming two dimensional and watching Hellboy and Abe get drunk on beer and sing Barry Manolow’s “Can’t smile without you” while musing on their respective love lives is just funny as all get out, seeing as how they manage to look about seventeen years old both of them.
The visuals are stunning. That’s really the only word for it. They’re right on the verge of heavy unreality the whole time, but somehow manage to seem credible as an alternate reality coexisting with ours. It’s less glossy than other similar alternative worlds I’ve seen, which is a bonus. There are a couple of things I personally could have done without, but I’m not going to gripe about that when the overall is so spectacular.
Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) is a surprisingly soft-spoken bad guy despite his sword wielding and actually comes off as someone with an agenda that isn’t as far fetched or foaming at the mouth as some villains. It makes the plot better that he has cause to be doing what he’s doing. His twin sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) gets caught in an impossible situation and again, this actually gives depth to the storyline.
This is all good fun in the best possible way. The bad guys are really good and the good guys are bad ass. It’s visually imaginative and down right pretty at times. Hellboy is funny and sarcastic and still just a guy, despite the skin tone and the filed down horns. There’s no dead time and you don’t find yourself looking at your watch or yawning.
As long as you take that Coleridgean leap of faith and submit to the willing suspension of disbelief you’ll have a good time.
You can’t really ask for more than that.

Mule

The Libertine – London, the Earl of Rochester

The Libertine (2004) directed by Laurence Dunmore has an incredible cast consisting of Johnny Depp as the Earl of Rochester, John Malkovich as Charles II, Stanley Townsend as Keown, Rosamund Pike as Elizabeth Malet, Tom Hollander as Ethrege, Richard Coyle as Alock and Samantha Morton as Elizabeth Barry and so on and so forth…

The story takes place in an extremely mucky, dirty and smoky 17th century England where John Wilmot, the second earl of Rochester drinks and fornicates his way through a series of women while writing extremely bawdy poetry and hanging around in taverns with this friends and cronies. He is a poet, good friends with the king (when he’s not being banished for his raunchy mouth) and he lives a life of privilege and powdered wigs.

Rochester is a historical figure and he is portrayed here with as a complete and utter scoundrel, which he no doubt was. He died of syphilis and alcoholism at the age of thirty three, something the movie takes it upon itself to show in horrid detail.

Now, Johnny Depp is one of those actors who can scowl with the best of them and he manages to convey Rochesters utter disdain for life with the merest quirk of his brow. The dialogue is witty, fast and true enough to the language of the times. ‘

The movie opens on a prologue in with Rochester says “allow me to be frank at the commencement. You will not like me. The gentlemen will be envious and the ladies will be repelled. You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on.” It is the born cynics way of giving the whole world fair warning. The prologue ends with Rochester proclaiming “I am John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester and I do not want you to like me”.

That’s a lie, of course. The story is an unending seduction in which the viewer is shown again and again, that yes, Rochester is a cad, but he has other qualities. You come away from it thinking there was a man with so much talent and so many opportunities who did nothing good with all the gifts he was given. Of course you get seduced. It’s inevitable. And you may not like Rochester in the end, but he won’t leave you unaffected.

The movie is shot with a very loose and mobile camera and the environment is non stop mud, rain, dog shit and smoke. It has plenty of nudity and sex and … dildos. But… that being said, it also has tenderness, love and brilliant dialogue, philosophy and politics. You can’t help sympathizing with Malkovich’s portrayal of king Charles II who is beleaguered from all sides by political and financial concerns, which he expresses with lines like “I’m being pissed on from half-a-dozen directions at once and it don’t accord with my majestic dignity”, and still manages to care about his friend Rochester and mourn him.

The acting is of stellar quality throughout, no matter what the subject matter is. The emotional value of some of the interactions between Rochester and his theatre prodigy Lizzy Barry is down right chilling.

There is so much in this movie, so many themes and tropes that I can’t do them all justice in a paltry review like this one. I’ve never had any patience with the Ivory Merchant/Jane Austen type films. This is the diametrically opposite version of the costume drama, so of course it’s going to appeal to me. If you want poetry and roses, don’t even think about this one. If you want extremely high quality acting, good dialogue, dirt, soot, fornication, drunken revels and heart stopping cynicisms… this is the movie.

Mule

La Haine

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz this 1995 movie centers around three young men, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé) and Said (Said Taghmaoui).

The action takes place in a French suburb where the three gentlemen have grown up. We enter the story just as a riot has been playing out and there are police in the streets, burning cars and violence all around. The film is shot in black and white which lends a stylized quality to the action and elevates it to something more generally applicable. But the environment is definitely the suburban sprawl of a major city, the “ghetto” landscape with all its huge towering buildings completely dwarfing the actors. It’s not a friendly landscape to live in and you do get the sense that it’s not really meant for people.

During the riots one of the guy’s friends is shot by the police and one of the police has dropped his gun – uh oh. Oops? Well, Vinz is the one who found the gun and in some misguided attempt to even the score between himself and society at large he decides that if his friend dies he’s going to shoot a cop.

It’s stupid and it’s ridiculous and of course it’s not going to help or work or do the least bit of difference or good.

There’s a beautiful line in there somewhere where Hubert tells the story of the man who falls from the fiftieth floor and to calm himself he keeps repeating “so far, so good” for every level he passes. It’s not the fall you have to worry about, it’s the landing.

And that is the overall metaphor for the entire sequence of events.

The frustration and pointlessness of their lives is evident in the way ot all plays out around them, the way the police and reporters and outsiders are seen as a threat, and there’s some pride in “their part of town”, but at the same time they hate it there. Vinz calls himself a street-kid and means it. School never did him any good and he won’t get out of there. Hubert desperately wants to get out, but during the riots the gym where he boxes has been burnt down and that seems to symbolize his hopes of getting away being destroyed. Said’s big brother is something of a leader in the gang-culture we’ve landed in, but Said is mostly a fuck-up and a petty criminal who doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

There is of course significance in the fact that the three are friends, despite them being one jew, one arab and a black kid, they have more in common in being outcast and disenfranchised than what separates them. That’s not the way these things usually look, but it still makes a point.

Vinz keeps saying he will shot a cop and Hubert keeps trying to tell him how foolish that is, but they never seem to get to the crux of the thing until very, very late in the game when Vinz actually realizes he can’t pull the trigger.

That doesn’t mean there is a happy ending here. Of course there isn’t.

It doesn’t mean there are any clear back and white answers to who is the good guys and who is a bad guy either. The police are not always particularly nice and the fires started in the ghetto actually only target the ghettos own inhabitants, like a rabbit gnawing its own foot while caught in a trap. The pointlessness in hitting out at someone doesn’t really help.

Sadly, there’s a real life tangent here. I stumbled into a documentary about urban city kids and there’s not a lot of distinction between that and this movie. Some of the arguments felt the same, sounded the same, which means this is close enough to realism for it to be of weight. What struck me as particularly poignant was the way media treats anything that happens in this kind of environment. The kids in the documentary and the kids in La Haine said pretty much the same thing – media makes a chicken out of a feather when something happens, they give all the negative aspects a lot of time and room, but never mention any of the many positive things that actually happen too.  It’s that whole art/life thing.

Well worth the time, is what I would say about this one.  Tragic, gritty and actually quite funny along the way.

MULE

Albino Alligator

Albino Alligator (1996) is actually directed by Kevin Spacey.

It stars Matt Dillon as Dova, Gary Sinise as his brother Milo, William Fitchner as Law. These three guys are trying to burglar a warehouse of some description, but trip the alarm. As they try to get away their car is mistaken for another criminal’s and they end up taking refuge in a bar – one that does not have a backdoor.

The botched burglary quickly turns into a siege situation when the police surrounds it.

The few people in the bar are Janet Boudreau played by Faye Dunaway, Danny (Skeet Ulrich), Jack (John Spencer), Guy Foucard (Viggo Mortensen and Dino (M. Emmet Walsh).

This is basically a set-piece. One we’re in the bar, Dino’s, we’re not getting out. It takes place in New Orleans, but we don’t really get to see much of the city, which is too bad, but there you go.

One of the reasons why I mention the cast so specifically is that this is a set piece. It might as well have been played out on stage. It’s got that close and intense ensemble focus. And it is character driven to an extent that really takes a solid cast to pull off. And they do. Oh, boy, do they ever.

I’m not surprised that the material is treated this way at all. You’ve got an actor turned director at work here which means the focus is going to be on the performances and I really like that.

This is not a big action splash, though there is plenty of violence and blood. But the main focus is on the dynamic between the characters and this is one of those things that takes so many twists and loops and doubles back on itself so you can’t really not get sucked into it. The pacing is spectacular. It’s like a tightening fist that eases off a little only to get a better grip to squeaze all the harder.

There’s not a single moment of dull transport anywhere in any of this. Every moment is a moment unto itself and there’s a sense of generosity among the actors where they help build each other up instead of trying to outstage each other.

Fitchner’s portrayal of Law as a sociaopath Lizard-king sprawled and lazy one moment, violent and unpredictable the next it down right chilling. Fay Dunaway’s Janet is the tough cookie who has seen a few things and will do whatever it takes to get herself and her boy out alive. Right from the first get-go when the three outlaws come through the door and wave a gun at her she takes it all in her stride, and it’s no accident that she is smart-mouthing Dillion’s character while framed by a Humprey Bogart poster. She’s got moxy.

The interaction between an increasingly weakened Milo (Sinise) and an increasingly boxed-in and scared Dova (Dillon) is also extremely well played. And they’re starting from a bad place, trapped and growing more desperate by the moment. Now, as brothers they’re obviously different, but they’ve also got that slightly twisted loyalty that means Dova can promise never,  never to hurt his brother in one moment and then point a gun at his head the next. And Milo is the voice of reason the whole way through. Obviously intelligent and with a very clear line between what he will and will not do. He emphatically does not want to kill anyone. Dova is more of a pragmatic moralist and Law, well, he plainly doesn’t give a fuck. He only wants to be sure that he is not going back to prison.

Guy (Viggo Mortensen) is sat in a corner for much of the action, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there, a sly tilt to his eyes occasionally until you get the next piece of information on his character that sparks the action off in a new direction.

You know right from the get go that this is not going to end well.

That being said you really have to hold on, because there’s really no way of predicting the many spectacular ways in which it will end badly for all involved. You keep oscillating back and forth on who will be left standing, if anyone at all.

Every character has his/her own story and their own back-story which plays into the action in integral ways. Little things that seem like off hand comments about coffee or shooting pool turn into something bigger later down the line with the kind of icy precision you’re used to from Hitchcock. It makes it necessary for the viewer to pay attention. Again, I like that.

Visually, the camera glides around in a overtly scenic way in the opening sequence, but again, once we get inside the bar it pretty much stays out of the way… close-ups are used in a way that focuses on the emotional state of the characters, but it actually keeps to the old rules of decorum, carefully averting it’s eyes from the bloodier scenes. Just as you might suspect, that makes it all worse. It’s stylish and smart and handled with a great deal of intelligence, but for some reason I totally expected that from Spacey.

I like the overall impression and I like the way the subject matter is treated and the actors all do a very good job. I hate to be so damned agreeable about it all, but yeah, it is that good. And then some actually.

Watch it. You kind of have to.

Mule