Halloween II (2009)

Artwork by Rob Zombie

Rob Zombie is one gracious motherfucker. Many directors, from John Ford to Robert Altman to Christopher Guest, are known for gathering to themselves a stock company, typically a dozen or so players with familial chemistry; Zombie seems determined to assemble the largest stock company on record. His casting credo could be "No role too big or too small" for to be filled by his ponderous mental Rolodex of befriended B- and Z-list celebrities. I don't think Roger Corman is as well-connected. (I imagine Zombie to be the bugbear that haunts the staff at Fangoria and Bloody Disgusting with feelings of fanboy inadequacy.) In a Zombie movie everybody is somebody you swear you've seen somewhere before; you can't even assume the teen meat are fresh faces: Playing Laurie Strode's friend Annie is none other than Danielle Harris — that's right, the seven-year-old girl from Halloweens 4 and 5 all grown up (and how). Zombie you magnificent bastard howdoyoudoit!?

I must relate that at one point during his audio commentary on the Halloween DVD Zombie's grumblings about how this-or-that particular day of shooting was plagued by faulty squibs and errant palm trees (he repeats a variation on this anecdote of woe for every scene, making perfectly clear that filmmaking is a monumental pain in the ass) are interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone, "Sorry, it's Malcolm McDowell..."

What's most remarkable about Zombie's growing troupe is that, unlike those of Corman, Ford etc, these actors have not been mentored and brought up by Zombie; just the opposite. The Astro Creep is above all a fan-turned-promoter. This guy doesn't even come from the film industry; he's been the frontman of a highly visible metal band for over twenty years. But to examine his career in the music biz as producer, recording artist and director of music videos is to realize that Zombie has always been an effective champion of his idols and influences. Case in point: the Zombie-produced Ramones tribute album, We're a Happy Family — take a gander at the list of artists that Zombie assembled, and note also that he got Stephen King to write the liner notes.

Now, in feature films, this Renaissance subhuman has synthesized his interests and expanded his audience as center-ring purveyor of Perdition, American Style. Zombie furnishes his pics with loving showcases of vintage rock/punk tunes and imagery and acts as a steadfast supporter (that is, employer) of the legions of forgotten, underappreciated and otherwise minor figures who have manned the trenches of cult film and television. Every time someone like P.J. Soles or — holy shit! the teacher from Head of the Class! — pops up in a Zombie cameo, if only long enough to be stabbed in the face, a rare thing is somehow conveyed: the sense that this actor is a person who is grateful to be remembered. Zombie gives each a moment of glory, a tasty line or the rare chance to play against type, and on screen they seem to be having fun. The performances are uniformly solid; these are workhorse actors, after all.

Zombie's movies are flawed. (Except Devil's Rejects...that one might be perfect.) He loves his cast and his reverent homages a bit too much, at the expense of structure and overall coherence. Halloween II is a big improvement over the first, but many of the kills still lack rhythm. Suspense is not his strong suit, but then I don't think suspense has ever been the strong suit of American pictures. Hitchcock was British of course, and what he brought to Hollywood will always be more or less an imported good. Zombie works in the tradition of Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre, my candidate for the most American movie of all time: big and punchy and messy and wickedly fun.

Texas chain saw massa-cree
They took my baby away from me
But she'll never get out of there
She'll never get out of there
I don't care, whoa oh oh

— The Ramones

My photos of the Johnny Ramone cenotaph and detail,
Hollywood Forever Cemetary

Inglourious Basterds, Part I

Normally herein, when writing on a movie, I try to refrain from merely rattling off a list of the pop culture references astutely identified by yours truly. After all, that's what those discouraged trivia sections on Wikipedia are for. But I'll make an exception if I smell a potential film series. So, on the grounds that Tarantino wishes us to be informed on interwar cinema, and on the condition that we therefore restrict to cultural items of the 20s and 30s (that means no ticking off the various spaghetti westerns and military espionage flicks of the 60s that inspired QT's soundtrack and plot), I offer this splendid little program: a primer to enhance one's enjoyment of the finer points of Inglourious Basterds, in twelve parts.


1. Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (1929), aka The White Hell of Pitz Palu, is the feature presentation on German night at Shosanna's cinema, Le Gamaar. An early draft of the Inglourious Basterds script includes this bit of voiceover narration:

To operate a cinema in Paris during the occupation, one had two choices. Either you could show new German propaganda films, produced under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels. Or...you could have a German night in your weekly schedule, and show allowed German classic films. Their German night was Thursday.

Evidently Goebbels approved of this Bergfilm (a genre of mountaineering adventures popular in Germany in the 20s for their kraut-conquers-nature iconography) co-directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Arnold Fanck (pioneer of the Bergfilm) and starring the statuesque Leni Riefenstahl. Pabst is a pet topic of conversation throughout IB, even getting a nod of respect from our French-Jewish heroine, which embarrasses me as I know nothing of his work. My knowledge of Weimar cinema is mostly limited to Expressionism, whereas Pabst led filmmaking into the counter-movement known as New Objectivity (see Part X below). Riefenstahl began her infamous career as an actress — the epitome of the perfect German female, according to Hitler — and graduated to become the Führer's most favored director of propaganda (see Part VIII).


Addendum: White Hell turns out to be a stupendous adventure film — the most dramatic location photography I've seen in the silent era...flickers of Herzog.

Inglourious Basterds, Part II

2. Le Corbeau (1943), aka The Raven, advertised on Shosanna's marquee, is some kind of indictment, maybe, about someone or other, perhaps, in contemporary Vichy France. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot apparently managed to simultaneously piss off the stalinist Resistance, the Catholic Church and his fascist underwriters, which makes him sound like my hero. I can attest that his later thrillers (Wages of Fear, Diabolique — made after the French government consented to restore his legal right to operate a camera in 1947) are beautifully bleak.

Inglourious Basterds, Part III

3. Glückskinder (1936), aka Lucky Kids, the film Goebbels chooses to screen privately at Le Gamaar, was one of the Reichsminister's own productions as de facto head of Ufa, Germany's principal film studio. From the early draft of the IB script, Goebbels speaking:

Ahhh, "Lucky Kids", "Lucky Kids", "Lucky Kids". When all is said and done, my most purely enjoyable production. Not only that, I wouldn't be surprised, if sixty years from now, it's "Lucky Kids" that I'm the most remembered for. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but mark my words.

This screwball Frank Capra-knockoff features Lilian Harvey, one of the biggest stars of early German talkies — dubbed the "sweetest girl in the world". But Lilian was no Leni. Following her return to Germany in 1935 after a stint in Hollywood, Harvey's ties to Jewish theatre landed her under observation by the Gestapo. Indeed, while continuing to star in hits for Ufa, she secretly aided the escape of several Jewish contacts and herself fled to France, then the US, in 1940. Goebbels, in his fury, revoked her citizenship.

Inglourious Basterds, Part IV

4. Seven Years Bad Luck (1921) is the best known of the few feature films of Max Linder, to whom Shosanna devotes a film festival. A predecessor to Charlie Chaplin in many respects, the French-Jewish Linder was writer/director/star of hundreds of slapstick shorts in the 1910s, appearing always as his dapper character Max. Failing to achieve comparable success in Hollywood after a traumatic tour of duty in WWI, Linder and his wife committed suicide in Paris on Halloween, 1925.

Inglourious Basterds, Part V

5. The Kid (1921) is the one where Chaplin is bought as a plaything for a wealthy brat and the whole time he wears Spider-Man pajamas. I think. Private Zoller prefers Linder, but remarks that Linder never made a movie as good as The Kid.

Inglourious Basterds, Part VI

6. Sergeant York (1941) is the American propaganda film starring Gary Cooper to which Zoller's Stolz der Nation is intended as counterpart. Directed by the normally dependable Howard Hawks, the Hollywood legend to whom Tarantino is often compared (by me), this treacly biopic on the most decorated American soldier of WWI, Sgt Alvin York, was shamelessly released on Fourth of July weekend to gobble up the box office in a year that should have belonged to Citizen Kane.* To hell with Gary Cooper. Everyone loves that guy for his tall handsomeness and supposed integrity, but to me he always comes off like a sullen twat with a chip on his shoulder.

* Think Rocky upstaging Taxi Driver in 1976.

Inglourious Basterds, Part VII

7. King Kong (1933) is doubly represented in the La Louisiane tavern card game, both by the titular ape and its nominal co-creator, Edgar Wallace, a prolific English writer of crime fiction whose popularity in the UK was second only to Dickens. Today Wallace is best remembered for his monkey tale, although it is held that he actually contributed nothing of significance to the Kong screenplay, having voyaged to the US in 1931 to try his hand at lucrative Hollywood screenwriting only to suddenly drop dead in Beverly Hills from a bout of explosive diabetes.

Lt Hicox reports to Gen Mike Myers and PM Churchill that Goebbels, in his capacity as suzerain over Ufa, views his Jewish Hollywood counterpart to be the archetypally-meddling producer David O. Selznick, as opposed to figurehead MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer. Inasmuch as Selznick, the executive producer on King Kong for RKO Radio Pictures, was the most powerful and successful producer in Hollywood during the golden era of the studio system, and was celebrated/reviled for actively steering the creative process toward profitability, the analogy is accurate. Goebbels was a great admirer of Selznick's Gone With the Wind (1939), you know.

Inglourious Basterds, Part VIII

8. Triumph des Willens (1935), aka Triumph of the Will, is mandatory viewing for students of history and film...especially if you hate the Jew! Seriously folks, this is probably the evilest thing ever. And who but the lovely and adorably misguided Leni Riefenstahl could have been handpicked by der Führer to document the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, that all the Teutonic world should share in the happy ascent of totalitarian fuckism? The unrepentant Frau Riefenstahl was honored In Memoriam at the 2004 Academy Awards ceremony, which drew, shall we say, a mixed response.

Inglourious Basterds, Part IX

9. Der blaue Engel (1930), aka The Blue Angel, marks the entry of German cinema into the sound era as well as the introduction of megastar Marlene Dietrich, whom Austrian-American auteur Josef von Sternberg paired with the already-internationally renowned Emil Jannings. The drunken daddy Wilhelm proclaims that Dietrich is surpassed by Bridget von Hammersmark, but we know better. Sultry and hard-edged, Dietrich is the peerless matron of Weimar cabaret (Orson Welles wishes it was her chili he's getting fat on), and with her as inspiration von Sternberg established his legacy in film aesthetics: the very same sumptuous, evocative photographic techniques that Tarantino employs to lavish attention upon Shosanna and von Hammersmark.

The sausagey Emil Jannings appears in person at the Nazi film premiere as Ufa's top celebrity guest — indeed, bearing the Goebbels-bestowed title Staatsschauspieler (Artist of the State). His fine career was very definitely over subsequent to the fall of his patron Reich, but prior to becoming a fascist Jannings had starred in successful films on both sides of the Pond and had, in fact, received the first ever Academy Award for Best Actor, in 1929.

Inglourious Basterds, Part X

10. Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), aka Pandora's Box, is the most highly regarded of the films of G.W. Pabst and exemplary of the influence of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) on German cinema from the mid-20s to the fall of the Weimar Republic. What I've gleaned is that Pabst moved away from the subjective, wildly distorted realities of Expressionism (which were well suited to the polarized ideology of the Nazi Party and its manipulative ends) toward frank and realistic depiction of social concerns and sexual taboos — roll call: drugs, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality — that prevailing conservative rhetoric preferred to demonize and blame on the Israelite. Pabst later decamped from such "decadent" material to weather the Third Reich making Nazi-approved films.

Prickly American actress Louise Brooks stormed out of the Hollywood social scene in a huff in 1928, expatriating to Germany where, in a two-year span, she made the three greatest films of her career in collaboration with Pabst. In Pandora's Box she delivers a remarkably naturalistic performance for the time period, makes a compelling case for the erotic potential of the close-up, suggests lesbianism, an arguable first in movie history, and of course wears the Dutch Boy bob-haircut popularized by Colleen Moore and herself (later revived by Mrs Mia Wallace).

Inglourious Basterds, Part XI

11. Mata Hari (1931) is the sensational and lurid true! tale of the notorious Dutch courtesan and spy who made famous that place in France where the naked ladies dance and where she herself was later executed for treason. The appearance of her name on a card in La Louisiane undoubtedly refers to the Greta Garbo picture — her most commercially successful, if not best. I haven't gotten around to Garbo's catalogue yet, but I can reveal that she and Marlene Dietrich were rivals and she and Louise Brooks lovers...ooh! Otherwise I defer to Bette Davis's estimation of the taciturn Swede:

Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera.

Inglourious Basterds, Part XII

12. Sumurun (1920), aka One Arabian Night, is a prime selection from the resume of Hollywood's first exotic import, Pola Negri (a Pole!), co-starring and helmed by her best director, Ernst Lubitsch — the Cadillac of directors. What a thrill to spot the name of Pola Negri in La Louisiane, little remembered as she is today. In conveying something of this creature's legend I can hardly do better than to quote a paragraph from the book "Silent Stars" by film scholar Jeanine Basinger:

When Negri finally arrived in Hollywood, she knocked 'em dead. She bought herself a white Rolls-Royce upholstered in white velvet and equipped with ivory door handles and dashboard. When she went for a ride, she placed an enormous white fur rug across her lap, and took along her two white Russian wolfhounds, one sitting on each side of her. Her chauffeur was dressed in an all-white uniform — unless it was raining, and then he wore black. She wrapped herself in ermine and chinchilla and mink and sat up straight in the back, staring stonily ahead, drawing all eyes. (She also kept a pet tiger on a leash, and frequently paraded down Sunset Boulevard with him.) She had her dressing room decorated exclusively with Chinese furnishings, and insisted the floor be strewn daily with fresh orchid petals. Her wardrobe was dramatic, either black silk, black velvet, or sable, or the opposite — white silk, white chiffon, and ermine. She started the fad for toenails painted fire-engine red. Furthermore, she had the guts to chase a man, and once she caught him, she knew how to conduct a torrid love affair twenties-style, worthy of the plots of her movies. Both Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino became her lovers. Chaplin couldn't take the heat and begged out as soon as he could, but Valentino could match her style, having had considerable training with other women who knew how to get attention. (For years, everyone assumed that the famous "woman in black" who showed up annually at Valentino's grave was Pola Negri. Who else, they figured, would think up a dramatic scenario like that, and who else would have the nerve to pull it off, year after year? However, it wasn't really her.) Among Negri's other lovers was rumored to be Adolf Hitler, but this idea was put to rest by Negri's wardrobe mistress, who scoffed, "Miss Negri is herself a dictator. She would never take orders from Hitler." (It made sense.) And when it came to marriage she was no slouch, either. She married and divorced three times — two counts and one prince. Pola Negri never went second-class.

To that I simply add that Negri's public feud with Gloria Swanson may have been all hype, but we still want to believe it.

Before moving on, a word on Negri's other Sumurun co-star, German actor/director Paul Wegener. I had thought Wegener a fine fellow, having enjoyed the surviving part of his Golem trilogy (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920), an early Expressionist work about the folkloric clay-formed brute, animated by rabbinical magic to defend the Jews of Prague against Imperial pogrom. Imagine then my surprise to discover Wegener's name on a list of Goebbels' honored Artists of the State, alongside Emil Jannings. What's more, I learned that Wegener had starred in Kolberg (1945), Goebbels' presumed masterpiece — the Nazi "Gone With the Wind". A reappraisal of his career opened my eyes to the fact that his Golem movies are not in celebration of Jewish heritage but rather a warning about wild and dangerous Semitic occultism. (I know, it seems obvious in retrospect.) There is a direct line of Judeophobia that runs from Der Golem through Wegener's mid-20s Aleister Crowley obsession to his fervent support of the Third Reich and active participation in Nazi propaganda. What a dick.

Inglourious Basterds, Part XIII

13. Metropolis (1927) we all know is the crown jewel of Expressionist Weimar cinema, the mother of all sci-fi movies and one of the, say, top ten most historically significant films of all time. But we're not here to fellate Fritz Lang (today) but to lasciviously paw at Brigitte Helm, she who is immortalized in the dual role that, immoderate though it be, most accurately portrays the vagaries of woman: the saintly Maria and the demoniac False Maria. Of the biography of this German thesp (our final card game character) I know little — aside from the crucial fact that she was no Nazi — and for once I don't care to. There is just no way to reconcile that freaky anarchobot dance with a real person.


Okay, so I listed thirteen movies. That's because none of Lilian Harvey's work has seen a DVD release, so you'll have to get creative to find a copy of Lucky Kids. Happily, Netflix tends to stock the other twelve. Enjoy them with me!

District 9

Remember Mos Espa? What a fucking joke. You might recall some scenes that were set in Mos Espa, but you don't recall the place because, by failure of production design, it never existed. Not the way Mos Eisley exists: a fully realized and distinct locale, living as vividly in my memory as any place I've actually visited. That wretched hive of so-and-so is a character, and now an aesthetically-mindful South African/Kiwi enterprise has made for it a sister.

The alien refugee camp and surrounding slums of District 9 would be right at home on the outskirts of the Dune Sea, where the future crash landed into the Third World. The invaluable wreckage is a carcass thrown to wild dogs, a grisly tug-of-war between the desperate untouchables, tribal warlords, the imperial garrison, and a rogue's gallery of smugglers, mercenaries and covetous bureaucrats. What fun!

The movie works because it is built on a foundation of visual authenticity. The CGI elements are judiciously integrated into a grimily real environment — lovingly littered with tangible junk, reminding me of how the tireless model builders glued together zillions of assorted airplane model parts to create the cobbled-industrial surface of the Death Star. All the disparate visual elements, from the abundance of skinless cow heads to the holographic ship controls to the hard plastic MNU body armor, from the office desk interviews to the badass mech warrior to the prawns themselves — their nauseous hatchery shacks and improvised derelicte fashions — seamlessly coexist on screen, equally matter-of-fact.

La planète sauvage

Whaddid I say about French sci-fi movies? Uggh. A frog can't tell a spaceship from his own pointy ass.

But this was not always so. It must be admitted that Jules Verne was an eater of snails, and of course Georges Méliès is the very inventor of science fiction cinema. And I note that, at least in South Africa (see District 9), the old influence of French Calvinism does not completely erode one's capacity for the genre. So what the heck happened in République française? Was it under the rule of Vichy stooges that the French began to mistake their own colon for outer space? Perhaps Tarantino will shed some light when I see Inglourious Basterds this evening.

Shock you like electric eel

Trailer for Avatar just released. Looks like an MGMT music video.

Funny People

They say that comedy is the hardest thing to do as an actor, and we nod because we know it's hard to make people laugh. But it must be even harder as an actor to laugh, with convincing spontaneity, at someone telling the same joke in take after take. Maybe that's why most movie comedy consists of characters being funny to the audience, not funny to the other characters.

Watching Seinfeld as a kid I especially enjoyed those occasions when Jerry would slip into a bit or try out a new joke — I liked seeing him try to make his friends laugh, because my friends and I were always trying to make each other laugh. Sometimes Jerry or Kramer* would get a giggle out of Elaine, which I loved, but more often the show's writers preferred to let Jerry's jokes fall flat — in which case we laughed at Jerry's failure, but that was more cynical than the joyful experience of giggling along with Miss Benes. The shared appreciation of humor is uplifting.

Two of my favorite working stand-ups are Patton Oswalt and Zach Galifianakis, whose Comedians of Comedy tour was documented by Comedy Central in an excellent series (and feature film) that shows us these entertainers shooting the shit backstage, on the tour bus etc. They talk about comedy, about its function for them personally and in society. They trade stories, riff on one another and craft new material. Always there is expression of admiration and appreciation for their fellow artisans — for their idols and for the rising talent that excites them. Oswalt argues that we ought to follow our favorite stand-ups the way we follow our favorite musicians, observing how they progress and hone their skills over time.

If the Comedians of Comedy is a single case study in stand-up culture, then The Aristocrats is a national convention. More like jamboree. Produced by the righteous Penn Jillette — assiduous advocate for atheism, I add — this encyclopedic documentary uses the world's dirtiest joke as a conceit around which to gather conversation between every living comedian since Lenny Bruce about what we think is funny. A powerful impression I take away is that the participants, although frequently competitive and not always amicable, view the mission to bring laughter as a cooperative enterprise.

Funny People is astonishingly original in that the humor comes primarily from the characters making each other laugh. The situational aspects of the script — the traditional bread and butter of movie and TV comedy — are not funny or blackly funny but sad. It is true to the depression that many comedians admit to suffering, and to the fact that the world does not concoct wacky scenarios to lighten our days; dedicated and hard-working humorists write our every joke. Credit where credit is due.


* You better vote the way we want you to... [whipcrack]

Belles and Whistles

OLD TYME STRIP SHOW
Starring Michelle L'amour and the Chicago Starlets

Saw a live burlesque show Friday night, midnight. A menagerie of molls revive the classic art of striptease, with an orchestra-backed vaudevillian troupe (sporting gloves sans fingertips, yes) providing mimed comic interludes. Favorite act: redhead wearing leopard skin pillbox hat undresses to Bob Dylan's Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat. I don't expect to ever see that again. Revue included two male performers; somehow only they got away with full frontal nudity. Which was hilarious. Also tremendous was this vintage routine: strip-duel between a petite brunette and a twice-her-size blonde. My kind of town.

Paranoid Park

Boyfriend skates up to cheerleader, steps off his board. She's happy to see him. Camera holds on cheerleader as the audio cuts out, replaced by an amorous string composition (borrowed from Fellini). We can tell that he dumps her. For the next few breathless moments the young actress gets to be a silent movie starlet, quivering and snarling. We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!

It is the rarest pleasure to be reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky, who believed cinema to be the art of sculpting time; his understanding of the medium was among the most sophisticated of the twentieth century masters. Gus Van Sant sometimes works in the popular mode (Milk) but here we get Van Sant the sculptor, creating new structures. His techniques evoke the Russian while keeping to a more everyday concern: Whereas Tarkovsky tends to drift off into ontology (faith and reality, the end of the world, alien sentience) Van Sant instead anchors to material as tangible and warm as the boys skateboarding outside. His best film.

This article discusses the arresting soundscapes of Paranoid Park.

Korea IV. Woo-suk Kang

The Jerry Bruckheimer Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Woo-suk "You suck" Kang.

"Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt."

Californication, Season 1

The esteemed David of Hamburg once referred to this program as the "spiritual successor" to The OC. Poppycock , I say. Such an equation is a gross insult to a series aggressively literate and spiritually alive; for all its fucking and punching Californication is the far more sexually and socially responsible of the two.

The founding assumption of The OC is that Newport Beach is your wet dream and mine. Ryan takes to it like a lungfish to shallow water and, the fact that the Cohens return to Berkeley in the end notwithstanding, the glamorized society lifestyle is never presented as less than paramount. The bile rises in my throat even now.

Entourage and 30 Rock have also succeeded under the false pretense that we are all as much in love with the entertainment industry as it is with itself. As an unaspiring melodrama I can more easily forgive The OC, but people actually seem to think that Entourage and 30 Rock are clever. It is possible that Entourage has the worst writing in the history of HBO — the four hopeless principals are unable to sell a single line of dialogue — and all the tittering cameos and all the Piven in Port Chester University can't hide that.

Too much has been made of Tina Fey's modest writing talents, I suppose because the media likes her as a role model for girls. (Sarah Silverman has far deadlier comic instincts.) I think my ambivalence toward Fey is based on this: She seems preoccupied with the belief that she is too much of a dork to ever be one of the cool girls, and so timidly relies on one-note ham. To some that may be endearing but it isn't funny. And as for her costar Tracy Morgan...he has never once been even remotely funny. Not in stand-up, not on SNL, not ever. Unless you are amused by a capering pickaninny.

From afar Californication might seem no different in the glorification of all things E! But the true premise behind Hank Moody's escapades is just the opposite: Hank hates the shit out of Los Angeles and the ruin it has made of his life; he hates himself even more for indulging in its hollow pleasures and squandering his abilities. Please no more California songs.

After a while there was a faint smell of ocean. Not very much, but as if they had kept this much just to remind people this had once been a clean open beach where the waves came in and creamed and the wind blew and you could smell something besides hot fat and cold sweat.

— Raymond Chandler

Korea III. Je-gyu Kang

I'd like to prove to myself that most Korean action movies are as bad as most Hollywood action movies. (Let us hold no monopoly on philistines.) To that end, I expect to be satisfied after surveying the blockbuster shoot 'em ups of the two Kangs: Je-gyu and Woo-suk. They appear to be the top contenders for the Michael Bay Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.

When subjecting myself to such experiences I always regret not having used those special parts to make some robot friends.

First up is Shiri, which no fewer than two Loyal Readers advised me to avoid. Oh, had I heeded the warnings! But given its historical significance it had to be seen. The new wave of Korean cinema, underway since the early nineties when economic growth made possible the first productions financed in toto by South Korea's private sector, entered its present blockbuster phase with Shiri in 1999. As an industry watershed the film is comparable to Jaws, the major difference being that Jaws is one of the best movies ever and Shiri is godawful crap.

But it looks slick. Writer-director Je-gyu Kang has reverse-engineered Hollywood polish so effectively that one only just barely notices that it's being used to buff the basic works of Steven Seagal.

Kang stamps out more boilerplate melodrama is his follow-up, Taegukgi*, which is nevertheless so technically accomplished that's it's allllmost a good movie. The surehanded camera work, editing and pyrotechnics combine into an audiovisual dead ringer for Saving Private Ryan, which is to say as brutally and convincingly realized as a war picture can be. Given that this was done on a budget about one-fifth that of Ryan's, and that I did enjoy seeing the Korean War from a perspective other than that of Capt Hawkeye (just this once), I must give a slight tip of the hat.

In fact, I was sufficiently impressed to become curious about Kang's 1996 debut feature, Eunhaengnamoo chimdae (DVD sadly out of print), which purports to be a spook story about haunted furniture.


* the official name of the flag of South Korea, I learn

Notorious (2009)

The two major music legend biopics of recent years were rightly skewered by Dewey Cox for laboring and laboring under the tired Behind the Music formula. There's more than one mold into which you can cast a person's life (even the life of a recording artist). The Biggie Smalls picture is engrossing because even though we know how it ends, and even though Biggie famously seemed to presage an imminent demise, the events of his life do not tidily arc toward that doom. He was not a man undone by vice, nor was he trapped in the familiar gears of poverty-violence. Basically he lead a blessed life, loved and protected by everyone in the extended family he gathered around him, and he was gifted with a talent and generous nature that enriched those lives. He philandered and we sense he would have tried to be better had he not suddenly been murdered.

The picture gracefully sets the record straight, portraying a nonexistent feud sparked by misunderstanding and fanned by secondary parties that perceive advantage in chaos. (Here, the media in general and the vilified Suge Knight in particular.) No one seems more bewildered by the escalation than Biggie.

The role of Tupac is managed well: Regarded by Biggie with great esteem and perhaps secret awe, there is deep regret and lingering confusion but no hint of malice. Tupac himself is depicted as an enigmatic Mercutio, brilliantly charismatic, cursing Biggie after a perceived betrayal and remaining woefully opaque to the end.

Indeed the sensitive, sympathetic treatment of Tupac, Lil' Kim, Faith Evans and the other supporting players is the film's strongest suit. Biggie did hurt people along his way — especially women — and a keen awareness of their pain prevents this loving tribute from foundering on sentimentality.

Korea II. Joon-ho Bong

I hesitate to conclude that anything about Ki-duk Kim is representative of Korean cinema.

Joon-ho Bong, on the other hand, gave American audiences a crash course with The Host in 2007, a bucking and bizarrely hybrid Godzilla update that made us wonder at the general disrespect for genre boundaries outside of the West. (I don't know if I'll ever be ready to handle Bollywood.)

More interesting than this stylistic trend is the way Bong spins traditional subject matter — monster attack in The Host, police procedural in Memories of Murder — to engage concerns of his former study, sociology. Prominently there is a frustration, sometimes resentment, over Korea's backwardness and dependence on the US. Memories of Murder, a true story set in 1986, relates the bungled investigation of the country's first serial killer and the trauma endured by a public already strained by perennial Cold War. The film is a cousin to Fritz Lang's M and Spike Lee's Summer of Sam.

I called it a procedural, but in fact the drama revolves around the nonexistence of standard homicide procedures and up-to-date forensics in Korea at the time. Instead the detectives improvise (often tragicomically); they coerce, assault, fabricate, speculate and augur, getting nowhere. When finally they catch a break and obtain a DNA sample it has to be mailed to the States for proper lab analysis...weeks later the results come back inconclusive. The detectives, having hung their last hope overseas, are devastated. Note a pointed alteration Bong has made to the facts of the case: In reality the lab work was done in Japan, not the US.

Bong is among many South Korean directors, I gather, who are also expressing a cultural concern over the status of the family unit in a country divided and militarized, where massive and violent demonstrations have become a national pastime. (Imagine the cultural upheaval of the American 1960s contemporaneous with civil war.) To native audiences this theme would be among the most salient features of The Host (top record holder at the Korean box office), although I admit it went over my head on first viewing.

For his contribution to Tokyo! (2008), a triptych of fucking insane short films by non-Japanese directors, Bong hones in on the social phenomenon of hikikomori — extreme shut-ins — imagining a not too distant future in which virtually all urban Japanese have withdrawn to isolated abodes. The premise is better than the execution, but it reinforces my impression of Bong as an entertainer and commentator.

John Hughes

You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I'm an easy target. Yeah, you're right, I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you, but I don't like to hurt people's feelings. Well, you think what you want about me. I'm not changing. I like...I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. 'Cause I'm the real article. What you see is what you get.

— Del Griffiith

Twilight

Edward Cullen: Ow! My skin!

Bella: We look SO GOOD!

Edward Cullen: w00t.

IT'S OVER!!