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

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

Harsh Times

Harsh Times (2005) by writer/director David Ayer stars Christian Bale as Jim Luther Davis, a former Ranger hourably discharged after six years of service. He is currently living in Los Angeles and wants a career in law enforcement. His best friend Mike Alonzo, played by Freddy Rodriguez, just wants a job so his wife Sylvia (Eva Longoria) will get off his back.

Jim has a girlfriend in Mexico, Martha (Tammy Trull) that he wants to marry and bring across the border. That is why he’s so desperate for work.

This is extremely fast paced, skillfully cut and very rough.  It gives an excellent impression of things spinning out of control, which they do for Jim.

While waiting to see if he’s been accepted into the LAPD Jim goes about his business,  which largely consists of petty crime, drinking, smoking pot, waving his gun around and getting his friend Mike into trouble.  Jim has the kind of bad dreams that you wake up from shaking, sweating and screaming, but insists that he’s fine.

Whatever his experiences were in the war they have certainly left him with a bad case of  post traumatic stress but judging from what his friends say about him he’s always been a little wild and this merely seems to add to that.

In comparison to the life Jim’s living in LA, the girlfriend Martha’s place in Mexico is very much a paradise. Low tech, few people, poor, but hopeful.

Watching Bale I am again amazed at how good he really is at this kind of thing. The Spanish is perfect, his accent never slips. He can portray a guy that goes crashing through five emotions in thirty seconds and lands at violence with diabolical accuracy. Jim loses control over small things, but remains disturbingly calm in the face of guns and violence, of which there is plenty.

His friend Mike only wants to get a job and make his wife happy, but you can see how he gets swept up in Jim’s wake. Rodriguez does a good job as well as the “straight man”, not that that’s a completely correct term here. But watching his reactions to Jim you can see how close to the whirlwind he’s standing and how it affects him. He comes close to losing his wife and everything he’s worked for as  a consequence of this friendship.

Right from the get go you get the sense that this is a downward spiral, spinning hard. Jim can’t wait to selfdestruct and the only question is how many he will take with him and that makes it painful to watch.

The brief respite Jim and Mike get in Mexico is as close to idyllic as anything can get, right up to the point where Jim’s demons take over. At that point he has been offered a job by the Feds as a “contact” in Colombia and he refers to himself as “a soldier of the apocalypse”. He has been adviced that he shouldn’t marry, so he’s going to have to forsake the only good thing in his life, Martha, in order to get a job.

His friends tell him that he’s making the wrong choice. It’s obvious to anyone that he’s making the wrong choice.

At the same time there is no way he’s going to be able to hold on to the normal life he thought he wanted, too badly damaged already. He makes the choice most likely to get him killed and even then it can’t seem to happen fast enough.When Martha tells him she’s pregnant, he snaps.

In the end Jim never even makes it to the training facility in Georgia, circumstance eat him alive before then. And it has some very bad ramifications for Mike as well.

All in all, this is a movie for those who don’t have a problem with violence and moral ambiguity, or a lead character who is actually not very likable. The dialogue is rife with derogatory comments on any- and everything, up to and including the law enforcement, which is not portrayed in a very favourable light here.

To me this movie stands and falls with Bale and Rodriguez. Had it not been for these two actors this could have been a total dud.

Mule

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) is written and directed by Rebecca Miller and stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Jack and Camilla Belle as Rose.

The basic premise is that father and daughter live in an old hippie commune as the last remnants of a former era. Rose is kind of a naive flower and Jack is her loving father, watching his girl grow up albeit with some trepidation. Amongst other things the couple have to contend with a developer Marty Rance (Beau Bridges) who wants to exploit the land, Jack’s girlfriend Kathleen (Catherine Keener) and her sons Rodney (Ryan McDonald) and Thaddius (Paul Dano) who come to live with the two outcasts once it’s been made clear that Jack isn’t doing well.

Actually the little idyll that the viewer first gets introduced to is besieged from all directions by outside and inside forces. The relationship between father and daughter is on a dangerous path, becoming almost too close, and the illness that has taken hold of Jack threatens their balance even further. Jack’s girlfriend Kathleen and her two sons seem loud and brash and disruptive in their intrusion and Rose rebels by cutting off her hair and making attempts at freeing herself, or making her father jealous, it’s a very fine line.

This is, to my mind, one of the finest performances I’ve seen from Daniel Day-Lewis. Much of the bluster of There Will Be Blood (2007) is missing and this is a much closer set piece, and his portrait of a man who knows his time is coming to an end is worthy of close study. Camilla Belle as young Rose manages to tread that fine line of cruelty and naiveté that a sixteen year old girl is capable of without making it cringe worthy. Paul Dano as Thaddius was a surprise to me personally, because the last role I saw him perform was Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and there he is somewhat oafish, whereas he is definitely the snake in the paradise in this particular movie.

The movies subject matter, the subtext and some of the more overt themes are bound to bother some viewers, but I think its beautifully played, a thorough piece of craftsmanship on all parts. The writing is excellent, the performances are authentic and the setting is well used and cleverly developed.

Just the opening scene where the soundtrack intones “I Put a Spell on You” with Creedence Clearwater Revival shows where this is going and where it has been. The music is just there, pointing to the hippie era and then there are these two last lost survivors, father and daughter in a beautiful, but isolated landscape, in their own little world which is about to be rent asunder.

I really enjoyed this and think it should have gotten much more attention than it did.

MULE

Primal Fear

Directed by Gregory Hoblit this 1996 court room drama stars Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Edward Norton and Frances McDormand.

Gere’s attorney Martin Vail is a vain bastard, that much is obvious right from the get go. He embodies all the characteristics of a lawyer when at the top of his game and obviously his goal here is to defend the innocent, or not so innocent, and look good whilst doing it. He has a conscience somewhere, but he is still basically an ambulance chaser.

When the news of a gory murder hits, Vail is first through the gate to get to defend the young suspect Aaron Stempler. Aaron comes across as sweet, shy and misguided. A young drifter who has been taken in by the local church and then subjected to Archbishop Rushman’s (Stanley Anderson) dubious attention. It turns out that the Archbishop has some interesting habits involving the young people supposedly in the church’s care.

So the altar boy murders a priest and then hides shivering and covered in blood by the railway tracks. The lawyer who normally meets events as a cynical tactician is blindsided by the suspect. Aaron seems to have a mean man in him called Roy. Aaron goes from sweet, stuttering and mild tempered confusion to alpha male in two seconds flat. Roy, the other personality, is the one who takes care of business. He protects Aaron. He killed the priest.

So the defense now switches from “there was a third man in the room” to “there was a third man in the room, but he lives in Aaron’s head”, which is a tricky thing to try and pull off.

This movie has been around for a while and I actually saw it back then and now happened to revisit it. This is Norton’s first big performance and he does pull it off in a way which with the twenty-twenty vision provided by hindsight you can say foreshadows his later performances. It is not particularily memorable movie for any other reason, though, more a basic staple of court room drama, and there has been quite a lot of that.

Strong, solid chracter performances, but not much else. Still very enjoyable in it’s basic bread and butter way.

Mule

Shadowboxer

Director Lee Daniels has done some interesting things in this 2005 movie starring Helen Mirren (Rose), Cuba Gooding Jr (Mikey), Vanessa Ferlito (Vicki) and Stephen Dorff (Clayton).

First things first – Helen Mirren is an acompished actress in her own right. She has had a long and varied career already with a wide variety of roles that include everything from Super Intendent Jane Tennison to the Queen to Shakespear and well,  everything in between.  Here she playes a hit woman with an interesting background, and the odd thing is – the role is perfect for her.

Rose is struggling with cancer and the notion that there is a definite end in sight. She has killed indiscriminantely, or so it seems, for most of her life and is hardened to it in a way that’s down right uncanny. At her side she has Mikey, the son of a man she used to “go with” and whom she sort of inherited when his father was killed. Mikey is the Shadowboxer the title refers to.

On what is supposed to be Rose´s last job the duo is sent to dispatch of a local gansters cheating wife and when Rose is actually pointing her gun at the woman, Vicki, she gets out of bed revealling a very prominant belly – and Rose, the perfect predator professional, can’t kill her. The scene might still have ended bloody if it wasn’t for the fact that Vicki’s water breaks and she goes in to labour right there.

Rose decides to take mother and child with her and Mikey simply obeys, because that’s the way things are.

Okay, so this is far fetched and clearly not an easily classified movie. Whoever came up with the casting suggestion of Helen Mirren has definitely made it a much better movie than it could have been. Cuba Gooding Jr also gives a very good performance, unlike what I’ve seen before. He plays Mikey very quietly, not overly expressive, or ganster tough. The relationship between Rose and Mikey is obviously a very complicated one, made more interesting by the fact that she is dying.

Vicki (Vanessa Ferlito) sort of inherits Mikey and his dubious protection, which turns out to be a bit of a double edged sword. Vicki’s ganster husband who put a contract out on her is played by Stephen Dorff. Ferlito is mostly just a damsel in distress, which is somehow made more obvious by the fact that every scene she has with Rose displays the difference between a strong, competent, grown up woman and a pretty face.

Dorff is one of those actors who has given some spectacular performances (Backbeat, for instance) but mostly I feel he’s been stuck with the bad boy psycho wild card roles. He does that here too, and does it unusually well, but it is not by any means a surprise to see him acting out. Although we do get to see a bit more of him than we bargained for…

On that note, by the way, there seems to be a undercurrent of worship of the male form, which becomes noticable in the slow motion camera panning over Cuba Gooding Jr in the shower, or his strip tease seduction scene.

Estetically this movie borrows soft lens shots from the tritest of romances and a looming, dark atmosphere from introspective film noir and somehow makes it work. It is very pleasing to the eye and you get the feeling there is a definite thought behind every shot, not only in terms of story telling, but also when it comes to the visual aspect.

There is also a philosphical aspect, it deals with how violence is inherited and perhaps inate and with what that can do to people, but it is not dealt with as if it were a moral tale, luckily. You cannot condemn and glorify at the same time without it leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the spectator, and this does not do that.

One point of critiscism could be that it tries to do a little too much, that it is a little too ambitious, but it still works. If you want straight up action this is probably not the best movie to choose. So it is one of those movies easily classified by all the things it is not.

Well worth watching none the less. I mean Helen Mirren sneaking in to the house of the first mark barefoot with a big gun? You have to love that.

Mule

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

Director Peter Care’s 2002 movie the Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is described as an coming of age movie, which I find a little interesting.It is based on the novel by the same name by author Chris Fuhrman, who sadly died from cancer before even finishing this project.

The story focuses on Francis Doyle (Emile Hirsch) and his friends Tim Sullivan (Kieran Culkin), Wade (jake Richardson) and Joey (Tyler Long).

Francis and the others go to Catholic school where they are taught by Sister Assumpta (Jodie Foster) and Father Casey (Vincent D’Onofrio). Jena Malone plays Maggie Flynn, Francis’s girlfriend.

There are a couple of different things going on here. First and foremost we see the four boys interacting in that rather interesting way that young gentlemen do, somewhat reminiscent of Stand by Me (1986), only updated and more sordid. One of the things that feature heavily is the comic book that these four try to put together. One of the interesting features is that this comic book actually comes to life in sequences that are full on comics. The rather inept drawings made by the boys are brought to life on screen as meta text. I think this is bound to put some people off if you don’t like that sort of thing. It works, and I like it, even if it is a bit surreal. Or perhaps of that.

Secondly we have the storyline of the boys after school activities. There is a lot going on here as well. Drinking, drugs, pranks, sex and violence. To say that this is a coming of age story is a bit iffy. Not all of us had friends like Tim with an interesting way of approaching life as one big game. He goes looking for trouble rather than being bored, which means that he is the ring leader when it comes to little things – like being the editor of the comic and much bigger things – like stealing a cougar from a nearby zoo. The cougar prays on his mind a lot and becomes a motor for the action and I will not give away the ending except for saying that if you mess with cougars there is a distinct risk of getting bit.

Francis meets Maggie in school and there’s a lot more going on there than the typical awkward puppy love crush. Maggie is  a girl with some interesting secrets, to say the least. I find it absolutely fascinating that the realtionship that develops between them is marked by a complete lack of innocence. And Francis has some incredible lines when it comes to Maggie. He really knows what to say at an age where most boys tend to lose all verbal faculties in a five mile radius of any girl, specially one that they have a romantic interest in.

Aside from that we have the relationship between the boys and the head nun, Sister Assumpta, who has a wooden leg and that deep devotion that always comes across as a little dangerous and a little naive. It could have been a simple and vicious character if not for Jodie Foster’s brilliant portrayal. I am a big fan of Foster, always have been. I love her intelligence and ability to give depth even to the something like this. I am an equally big fan of Vincent D’Onofrio for pretty much the same reasons. He plays the chain smoking Father Casey with the same verve. Again this is one of those bit parts that could have just melted into the wall paper if he hadn’t been able to imbue it with what can only be described as back story. His occasional amusement and the fact that you can see him thinking about stuff gives it that extra depth needed.

I will say this though, had it not been for Emile Hirsch, Jena Malone  and surprisingly enough Kieran Culkin, this could have been a complete disaster. Hirsch is definitely someone to keep an eye on, and I find it a little amusing that I happened tos tumble on this movie after just having seen Into the Wild, where both Hirsch and Malone feature.

The movie in general does a lot of things at the same time and I suspect that this can give the viewer a feeling that it’s a little unfocused in its intent. For me this actually works. I think it is pretty typical of how a lot of stuff gets dumped in your lap in your early teens that you are not equiped to handle and there is never any linear and simple way of dealing with questions of morality, life, death, sex and all the rest of it. It’s not like you are given a weekly lesson. It tends to get dumped on your head all at once. I believe that is the intention of the novel and the movie as well. And you are not likely to get any simple answers to any of these things in this movie. Though you might be a little curious as to who the target audience is supposed to be.

It’s well worth watching and quite different from anything else in this vein. To me that makes it worth it.

MULE