Repo Men – Because you owe it to yourself…and your family

Article first published as Movie Review Repo Men Because you owe it to yourself … and your family on Blogcritics.

In a not too distant future you can buy yourself a new artificial organ from The Union if you have the funds. And if you don’t then you can make a payment plan. Sounds like a good idea, and like the salesman Frank (Liev Schreiber) tells you “you owe it to yourself… and to your family”. The downside is that if you can’t make your payments your artificial heart, liver, pancreas or what have you, will be repossessed if you fall behind more than three months. The repo men are required to ask if you would like to have an ambulance standing by but, honestly, that’s merely for forms sake. More often than not they don’t seem to bother asking until the client is already unconscious.

Remy (Jude Law) is one of the most successful repo men at Union. He and his pal Jake (Forest Whitaker) are very good at what they do. Remy and Jake are cheerfully sociopathic about their jobs. They have a shared background that goes all the way back to school, and then through their military careers onto their work for The Union. They seem to be two peas in a pod, which gives us some motivation for Jake’s actions. Remy balances this very down-and-dirty job with a reasonably normal home life with his wife Carol (Carice van Houten) and their son Peter (Chandler Canterbury). It quite quickly becomes obvious that Remy’s job is a point of contention between him and his wife and she demands that he make a choice between his job and his family. He chooses work. Remy and Jake have this reoccurring line between them “a job is a job”. One point you can make here, just as Remy eventually does, is that a job is not just a job.

On a routine repo Remy goes after T-Bone (RZA), a musician he admires, to get back a heart. When he goes to use the de fibrillation pads the wires are faulty and he shorts himself out by mistake. When he next wakes up he has been given a replacement heart and winds up in debt to The Union. It is one of those “I owe my soul to the company store”-kind of deals. With his new artificial heart he also gets a quickening of his conscience, which creates problems. He can no longer make the move into sales, like he has planned in order to win his wife and son back, and he can’t really repo anymore. He is actually less heartless with an artificial heart than he was with his organic heart. There’s some irony there. Before Remy knows it he is on the run from his former employee and all his former colleagues.

Repo Men has a lot going on. There are themes of familial obligation as opposed to work, friendship, trust and betrayal, love and money.
Forest Whitaker always surprises me as an action star, though why I can really say. Something about his body language says “gentle giant” until he starts actually fighting, but when he does close hand-to-hand combat I find him fully believable.

There’s a level of futuristic architecture reminiscent of Blade Runner, and I now that parallel is easy to make with pretty much any futuristic cityscape, but here it is more motivated than usual when you see the advertisement blimps propounding various messages floating around neon bedecked skyscrapers. There is also a very distinct difference between the moneyed clean suburbs and the slums where people running from the repo men live in squalor.

The love story between Remy and the urchin drug addict Beth (Alice Braga) feels odd, for a lot of different reasons. Beth is more bionic than real flesh and she reels off the names of her artificial limbs as a kind of calling card. She still fights like a professional, which I find incongruous, and she is street smart enough to know how to find what she needs on the black market – because of course there is one. This movie also has one of the most uncomfortable love scenes I have ever seen, and I mean “uncomfortable” in the truest sense of the word. Remy and Beth can only be free of the Union by repo-ing their various artificial limbs and they cut themselves open to do it, which is bloody and visceral and tempered by kisses and caresses, which really only serves to make it more cringe-worthy.

Right around the middle of the movie we take a sharp left from the realm of believability, which is a little rocky to begin with in this kind of narrative. There is a twist, of course. It relies pretty heavily on your involvement in the plot itself and a kind of meta-narrative awareness, but if you’re not having the kind of day when you’re not keeping your eye on the meta-narrative ball you are more likely to wind up thinking that this is just ridiculous long before we get to the twist. It’s not that the ride is not interesting, it is. The effects are cool and well executed, the overall themes are interesting enough and the fact that all characters are played with complete sincerity helps. This kind of story has to take itself seriously or it wouldn’t make it out the gate.

That being said, there is still something lacking. It’s stylish, I will give it that. The use of music is interesting. Overall it lacks a certain gritty authenticity, though, if that term can be allowed in this kind of dystopic health care sci-fi. It could have made a bid for being more of a social satire in the vein of Fight Club.
The problem with being clever is that you sometimes out-wit yourself, and that’s something to keep in mind here.

Repo Men (2010) directed by Miguel Sapochnik stars Jude Law (Remy), Forest Whitaker (Jake), Alice Braga (Beth), Liev Schreiber (Frank), Carice van Houten (Carol), Chandler Canterbury (Peter) and RZA (T-Bone).

Mule

And on The Topic of the End of the World…

T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.

There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.

The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.

“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.

In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.

The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.

Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.

Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.

We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.

Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Mule

The 2403rd Star – Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) passed away the other day. He made it to 74, who would have thought?

The thing about Hopper for me has always been his ability to hook your attention – even when the quality of the movie might not be … well, you know – stellar.

Hopper’s career was chequered, to say the least. You got the feeling that occasionally he just needed to pay the rent, and I can respect that. There’s no shame in working.

When he was good, on the other hand, he was really good. Some performances stand out by a country mile: Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986) being the ones that pretty much everybody remembers.

But there’s also the very young and clean-faced Goon in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the surprisingly funny Huey Walker in Flashback (1990) opposite Kiefer Sutherland. Hopper’s performance as the father in Rumble Fish (1983) is one of my personal favourites, it seems so effortless. Then again there’s the scene between Hopper and Christopher Walken where they discuss the heredity of being Sicilian in True Romance (1993) which still gives me a big happy. Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of those performances that makes perfect sense too, the crazed gleam in Hopper’s eyes probably not all the way an act.

There’s also Hoosiers (1985), The Indian Runner (1991), Paris Trout (1991), The Osterman Weekend (1983), The American Friend (1977) and Basquiat (1996).

Then, on the other hand … Waterworld (1995), Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002) aren’t exactly shining moments for anyone involved. Like I say – sometimes you just got to pay the rent.

Hopper also directed. Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) – which was a spectacular failure. Out of the Blue (1980), Colors (1988), Catchfire (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), Chasers (1994) and the short Homeless (2000).

If you look at his career as an actor, he worked with some of the very best directors, and if you look at what he did as a director he worked with some spectacular actors. Directors include Sam Peckingpah, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Ray, George Romero and Wim Wenders. That’s a whole hell of a lot of talent all around.

Hopper also collected modern art and exhibited his own photography and painting.

Squandered talent always kind of angers me and Hopper was lucky in a way that he didn’t fall from grace completely, succumbing to substance abuse early in his career. He did abuse his fare share of substances there for a while, though, and got a sharp awakening and cleaned up his act.

Some actors have this ability to tap into a real dark streak, mainlining something close to evil, and Hopper is one of them. He has been the good guy too, the tough cop, all that, but he is just more in command of the stage when the darkness bleeds through.

Like with most creative souls there’s a restlessness, a sense that there is never world enough, or time. A feeling that you have to rage against the dying of the light. In his best moments Hopper gave the viewer all that and a feeling that there was an active intelligence at work behind it.

I asked around amongst my less film enthusiastic acquaintances about Hopper when the news of his death became public. I asked what they remembered seeing him in, what they thought of him, and the funny thing to me was that no one seemed to like him much. I just went “huh?” because, man I didn’t get that. I guess it makes sense that you don’t like him if all you’ve seen is Blue Velvet, because Booth is not a very likeable guy. Hopper played bad guys, like Booth or Paris Trout, with so much fire and honesty, that it makes sense.

In Apocalypse Now the Photojournalist dances about like a mad monkey on speed, lost in the jungle in so many ways and he delivers the following lines about Kurtz to Marlow: “What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans, man? That he had wisdom? Bullshit, man!”

And there it is.

There was more to him, though.

Hopper’s character Father in Rumble Fish has this lovely dialogue with Rusty James;

-Every now and then, a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person. It doesn’t make them crazy. I mean… an acute perception, man… that doesn’t, that doesn’t make you crazy.
-Could you talk normal?
-However sometimes… it can drive you crazy, acute perception.
-I wish you’d talk normal ’cause I don’t understand half the garbage you’re saying. You know? You know what I mean?
-No, your mother… is not crazy. And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy. He’s merely miscast in a play. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river… with the ability to be able to do anything that he wants to do and finding nothing that he wants to do. I mean nothing.

That is one of my favourite pieces of dialogue for whatever strange and intangible reason. It has to do with the setting, the pitch of Hoppers voice and the earnestness, the slight exasperation and the honesty with which he delivers it. Hopper’s character’s rumpled suit, his greasy hair, the stubble and the signs of neglect, all of it tells the story of a man with a sharp intelligence who has fallen from grace and lost his footing due to heartache and heavy drinking.

Hopper doesn’t so much sell a performance as live it.
And that’s how I will remember him.

Mule

Kathryn Who?

Kathryn who?

Back in the day, when I was a younger brute, I wrote a academic essay about Kathryn Bigelow.

It was preceded by a couple of papers, mostly dealing with dystopic themes in Strange Days, female action directors and things of that nature.

The huge, big essay was all about the nature of the vampire myth in Near Dark. It also dealt with concepts found in Bigelow’s work, such as genre, gender, conventions thereof and stylistic traits.

Oh, yeah, I went through all that.

Mostly though, I remember people saying “Kathryn who?” when I told them what I was working on. Bigelow, I would say. Bi-ge-low. Strange Days? No? Blue Steel? Point Break? And usually at Point Break people would say “oh, that Keanu Reeves movie, with the surfing and stuff?”

Yes, that movie. That movie with Keanu Reeves in a wetsuit, yes. And then people would say something along the lines of her movies being bad, or they would comment on the fact that she was a female action director and why would a woman want to do the same thing as a male director anyway – and right about there is where I would start feeling my aneurism tick a countdown right up to the big ka-boom.

It’s true that her movies have this unsettling quality, something along the lines of those murky morals I like so much. Yes, there is always a precedent for everything. And yes, there is more to her movies than big guns and Keanu Reeves in a wetsuit.

The most subtle wranglers of genre convention leave the viewer with that slightly askew feeling that there was something going on there that they didn’t really catch. Bigelow does that. She will give you bad guys so interesting that they themselves forget to be bad. She will give you good guys with enough blood on their hands and such objectionable habits that they could easily cross the line.

The casting choices are always just as interesting. The way she cherry picked the vampires in Near Dark from the crew of Aliens, for instance. Or, Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero in Strange Days. It’s just… yeah, interesting.

Personally I think K-19: The Widowmaker is not the most successful movie she’s directed, but looking at the controversy surrounding it, I can see that unsettled feeling was at work there too. For all the things said about it, it was still an American movie about a Russian submarine. As a result directors and producers of K-19 were allowed inside the Russian naval base at the Kola Peninsula as the first Western civilians ever. You can’t tell me that’s not something. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. And it’s a skilfully directed movie about submarine warfare. Directed by a woman.

Strong female characters always abound in Bigelow’s movies, whether it is Vita (Louise LeCavalier) kicking Lenny Nero’s ass, or Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) wearing a lacy bra under her crisply ironed police uniform. The women are not victims, unless they are victims of their circumstance, like the Christenson’s in The Weight of Water. There is really no need to debate that strength, it seems to be pretty much a given, and that’s not something you can say lightly, especially in the action genre.

And now there’s The Hurt Locker. And a whole lot of controversy – is it or isn’t it like that? War? Is it supposed to be like that, look like that? I seem to recall that line of thinking and questioning around another war movie, Apocalypse Now. And there’s controversy on weather the movie should have won at all with Avatar out there. The Oscars aren’t just a popularity contest, people. It’s not just about how many tickets you’ve sold and how much money you’ve made.

Not that that’s not a part of it, sure.

But there is more to it. Thankfully.

So – 6 Oscars, 72 wins and 46 nominations.

Forgive my smirk, I can’t help but feeling a little vindicated.
Where have you been? Is all I can say.
And now I won’t have to answer that “Kathryn who?” anymore.
And it’s Ms. Bigelow to you heathens if you’re only just now joining the party.

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